DrewGator
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ORIGINAL: Twotribes
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ORIGINAL: bountyhunter
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ORIGINAL: Twotribes
As to maryland it was not "Constitutional" to secede but more to the point, as I recall the State voted and voted to remain IN the Union.
Correct, but only after half of the state government was "imprisoned."
The counties that broke away were eventually considered the legitimate government of Virginia (eventhough they didn't represent even half of the state). What of the Virginia government in "exile" in Alexandria?
There is an article out there by a Minnesota law professor but I can't get access to the whole article... just the abstract.
Abstract:
When the Commonwealth of Virginia announced it was seceding from the Union, the northwestern corner of Virginia formed a rump government-in-exile, declared itself the lawful government of Virginia, and gave "Virginia's" consent to the creation of a new State of West Virginia consisting of essentially the same northwestern corner of old Virginia. Congress and the Lincoln administration recognized the northwestern rump as the legitimate government of Virginia, and voted to admit West Virginia as a State.
Could they do that? This article takes on the odd but amazingly complicated (and occasionally interesting) constitutional question of whether West Virginia is legitimately a State of the Union or is instead an illegal, breakaway province of Virginia. While scarcely a burning legal issue in the twenty-first century, the question of West Virginia's constitutionality turns out to be more than of just quaint historical interest, but also to say a great deal about textualism and formalism as legitimate modes of constitutional interpretation today.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=371340
It was clearly ( in my opinion) Unconstitutional.
First, here's a great article that is well footnoted about the question of West Virginia Statehood. It is remarkably frank and balanced despite the fact that it is on the West Virginia Division of Culture (no, really) and History's official website.
Second, I'm not a lawyer ("but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night") but it seems to me that the question of whether or not West Virginia's statehood is constitutional boils down to whether or not the "Restored Government of Virginia" was the legitimate government of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Clearly it did not represent the entire population of Virginia - but the Virginia legislature had voted to secede from the Union - a action which the Federal government denied they had the right to do. It seems that the Union chose to accept it as legitimate and thus accept the plebiscite to separate the western counties of Virginia from the commonwealth - though not without a good deal of debate among the Union senators and in Lincoln's cabinet. Even Lincoln was quoted as saying "I believe the admission of West Virginia into the union is expedient."
I find something rather amusing about the whole debate. The article linked above quotes Jefferson Davis' memoirs where he describes the "organization of the state of West Virginia and its separation from the state of Virginia were acts of secession". So the leader of the CSA bemoans the right of counties to secede from a state while supporting the right of states to secede from the Union. But to make it even more amusing is that by essentially recognizing the right of the western counties of Virginia to secede from the rest of the state did the United States not then also recognize the right of the states to secede from the Union?
DrewGator
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