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C h a p t e r 4 The Loyal State Sows the Seeds of Reaction During the Civil War, West Virginia, lacking stable civil authority in some of its territory, participated fully in the national war effort. The Boreman administration and Republican legislators developed policies and procedures to extend civil order, to maintain internal security, and to cope with militant opposition within the state’s borders. As the Civil War was ending for many exhausted West Virginia Confederatesin1864andforallofthemin1865,theirreturnhomegreatly magnified what had been wartime problems of the Republican/Unionist state government. These surviving Confederates augmented the numbers of resident sympathizers, and they led them in resisting Republican policies. Many counties had a substantial minority of Confederate sympathizers, and others had a majority. Without the urgency of war and its attendant legal and constitutional expeditiousness, loyal West Virginia officials had to cope with heightened opposition, sometimes armed, in a peacetime environment. Former Confederates seemed to believe that they might immediately return to their antebellum political status so that they could reestablish pre-1861 political conditions. What they had attempted to achieve in rebellion would be speedily and conveniently forgotten. These attitudes combined with two groups of loyal people, not mutually exclusive: one disgruntled with national wartime measures and taxes and with the rise of the African American and the other that included prewar Democrats who had supported, some tepidly, the Union and the war effort, but had never supported the Lincoln administration’s domestic policies. From the beginning, Governor Arthur I. Boreman and the Republican Party, as a matter of loyalty to the United States and its fight for survival, and likewise for West Virginia, feared what an active politically disloyal minority could do. Later, after 1868, when the minority was growing into a threatening political force, patriotic concern evolved into a crass political objective of survival. The sources of policy 107 108 West Virginia’s Civil War–Era Constitution and programs originate in the constitutional revolution of West Virginia’s creation and the Republican attempts to maintain the revolution’s permanence and legacy. Before West Virginia’s first legislative session, the Constitution of 1863 had vested many wartime powers in the hands of the governor to cope with Civil War requirements. The legislature enacted statutes that augmented the chief executive’s authority to deal with disloyalty and threats to security. The legislation fell into two general enactment phases that responded to contemporary developments. The first legislative phase ran for two years, 1863 and 1864. The second comprised 1865 and the postwar period, when the statutory volume greatly increased. The West Virginia Legislature prescribed the penalties for treason as provided by the constitution. The jury that convicted persons of treason had the discretion to punish by death, confinement in the penitentiary for three to ten years, or confiscation of real or personal estate. If a person who had knowledge of treason against the state failed to inform the governor or conservator of peace, he was subject to a fine not exceeding $1,000 or by imprisonment from one to five years. The legislature partially resurrected a sedition clause that Daniel Lamb and other delegates had kept out of the constitution. Persons who attempted to justify or uphold an armed invasion of West Virginia or an organized insurrection within it by speaking, writing, publishing, or circulating any written or printed document “or in any other way whatever” while the invasion or insurrection continued was subject to a fine of up to $1,000 and a jail term up to one year.1 Loyalty oaths immediately became an essential requirement of proof of adherence to and participation in Reorganized Virginia and West Virginia governments. Reorganized Virginia proclamations and acts applied in loyal Virginia territory and the portion that became West Virginia on 20 June 1863. Six days after proclaiming “A Declaration of the People of Virginia,” the announcement of independence of 13 June 1861, the Reorganized Government of Virginia in the Second Wheeling Convention, first session, provided for loyalty oaths in its reorganization of the state. As the declaration asserted, the convention delegates were prepared “to devise such measures and take such action as the safety and welfare of the loyal citizens of Virginia may demand.” All state and local civil and military officials had to take the prescribed oath before undertaking their duties. If any refused, the office was declared vacant. The taker swore or affirmed the supremacy of the Constitution of the United States and national laws and renounced the...

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