Virginia S Western War

A “thoroughly researched [and] historically enlightening” account of how the Commonwealth of Virginia split in two in the midst of war (Civil War News). “West Virginia was the child of the storm.” —Mountaineer historian and Civil War veteran Maj. Theodore F. Lang As the Civil War raged, the northwestern third of the Commonwealth of Virginia finally broke away in 1863 to form the Union’s 35th state. Seceding from Secession chronicles those events in an unprecedented study of the social, legal, military, and political factors that converged to bring about the birth of West Virginia. President Abraham Lincoln, an astute lawyer in his own right, played a critical role in birthing the new state. The constitutionality of the mechanism by which the new state would be created concerned the president, and he polled every member of his cabinet before signing the bill. Seceding from Secession includes a detailed discussion of the 1871 U.S. Supreme Court decision Virginia v. West Virginia, in which former Lincoln cabinet member Salmon Chase presided as chief justice over the court that decided the constitutionality of the momentous event. Grounded in a wide variety of sources and including a foreword by Frank J. Williams, former Chief Justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court and Chairman Emeritus of the Lincoln Forum, this book is indispensable for anyone interested in American history.

Tracing a little-known period of colonial history, this book explores the lives of the brave men and women who brought their families west from Virginia to settle the rough frontier. 20 photos. 26 maps.

More Civil War battles were fought on Virginian soil than on that of any other Confederate state. No state suffered more from invasion and occupation than the Old Dominion, and none witnessed as much of the war. Virginia’s story of the Civil War stands unique among the Confederate States. Virginia at War, 1861 looks at Virginia on the eve of secession, detailing the activities of the convention that finally took the state out of the Union and explaining how Richmond became the capital of the new Confederate nation. Chapters in the book examine Virginia’s private state army and its little-known state navy, as well as the impact that secession and the first year of the war had on Virginia’s black community, both slave and free. Virginia was the only Confederate state to suffer an internal secession, and the story of that “other Virginia” that broke away and became West Virginia is explored in all its bizarre complexity. Virginia at War, 1861 is the first in a new five-volume series, edited by William C. Davis and James I. Robertson Jr. for the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies at Virginia Tech. Each volume will bring together leading Civil War historians to study one year of the Civil War in Virginia.

This is the most comprehensive compilation of West Virginia soldiers in the Revolution and other wars, containing rosters and, in many cases, service records of thousands of soldiers, with narratives on the various wars. The rosters and rolls, here collected for the first time, are drawn from both published and unpublished sources, the original records being in many cases in the Department of Archives and History of the State of West Virginia.

"Withers' Chronicles of Border Warfare, an excellent example of the genre of frontier history, was originally published in 1831. In 1895, Reuben Thwaites, editor of Wisconsin Historical Collections, prepared an annotated edition of the Withers book based on materials not available to the author, among them the extraordinary collection of primary sources assembled at the Wisconsin Historical Society by Lyman C. Draper. Clearfield Company is pleased to reprint the revised edition of Withers' Chronicles at this time. The focal point of Chronicles of Border Warfare is the American settlement throughout the northwestern portion of colonial Virginia (an area which today encompasses parts of Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, and Pennsylvania) from the French and Indian War to the Battle of Fallen Timbers, and the ensuing clashes with the indigenous population"--Publisher website (August 2007)