Rebels at the Gate: Lee and McClellan on the Front Line of a Nation Divided (45 page)

As McClellan dallied before Richmond, General Lee saw opportunity. Winning President Davis's distracted approval, Lee encouraged the little army of Stonewall Jackson to launch a counteroffensive from the Shenandoah Valley. Jackson's brilliantly executed “Valley Campaign” appeared to threaten Washington itself, thereby freezing forty thousand Union troops in middle Virginia who were to have joined McClellan for the deathblow at Richmond.

On May 31, a fateful wound at Seven Pines near Richmond knocked Confederate General Joe Johnston out of action and put General Lee in command. Lee promptly reorganized the Army of Northern Virginia and launched a counterattack. Seven days of brutal fighting turned the Federal advance into a humiliating retreat. McClellan's huge army soon cowered under the protection of armored gunboats on the James River. In a matter of weeks, Lee had transformed the war.
⁶⁵⁸

While Lee pressed McClellan, the Thirty-seventh Congress debated Senate Bill No. 365, “An Act for the Admission of the State of ‘West Virginia’ into the Union.” On May 29, Waitman Willey presented the formal petition for statehood in the Senate. Privately, he was not optimistic. The Border States were opposed, Senator Willey wrote, because they considered West Virginia statehood “an abolition scheme.” Likewise, he feared, “the abolitionists oppose us because they say it is a proslavery scheme.”
⁶⁵⁹

Willey defended West Virginia statehood in the well of the Senate: “It seems to be supposed that this movement for a new State has been conceived since the breaking out of the rebellion, and was a consequence of it—that it grew alone out of the abhorrence with which the loyal citizens of West Virginia regarded the traitorous proceedings of the conspirators east of the Alleghenies, and that the effort was prompted simply by a desire to dissolve the connection between the loyal and disloyal sections of the State. Not so sir. The question of dividing the State of Virginia…has been mooted for fifty years. It has frequently been agitated with such vehemence as to threaten seriously the public peace.…The animosity existing at this time between the North and South is hardly greater than what has at times distinguished the relations between East and West Virginia.”
⁶⁶⁰

The Committee on Territories, chaired by Benjamin Wade of Ohio, took up the statehood petition. Bullish and bluff in his sixty-second year, Ben Wade was a steadfast anti-slavery man—among the most trenchant of the Radical Republicans. Senator John Carlile was a member of his committee, and so West Virginia's fate appeared to be in able hands.

Nearly a month passed before Senate Bill 365 was reported. Statehood advocates were astonished by its content. The bill
added
fifteen Valley counties to West Virginia's original forty-eight, called for a new state constitutional convention, and contained a provision
for the emancipation of all slave children born after July 4, 1863. Citizens of the newly added counties, many with significant numbers of slaves, would never approve such a measure—the bill was a sham!

Angry statehood leaders descended on Washington in protest. “I never saw any question that excited a whole community with the intensity that this question does,” marveled chairman Wade. “Perhaps no question of greater importance has ever been presented to the Senate,” added Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, a leading Radical. “It concerns the whole question of slavery; it concerns also the question of States rights; it concerns also the results of this war.”

On July 14, the West Virginia statehood bill was called up again. Senator Waitman Willey offered an amendment to the bill that omitted the suspect counties and included a constitutional clause for
gradual
emancipation. The Radicals expanded this “Willey Amendment” to free children of slaves at birth after July 4, 1863, to provide a schedule of gradual emancipation for those less than twenty-one years of age, and to prohibit slaves from entering the state for permanent residence. Upon ratification of the Willey Amendment by the residents of West Virginia, President Lincoln would issue a proclamation, to be enacted sixty days later, inaugurating the new state.
⁶⁶¹

Senator Carlile now entered the fray. Angrily seizing the floor, he laid bare the skeletons of the new state movement. Carlile decried the Wheeling conventions as “bogus” affairs. “[T]he people of West Virginia,” he alleged, “not only desire an admission to the Union; but they wish to preserve their liberties under the Constitution of the United States, and I shall be mistaken if they surrender the high privilege of freemen, that of forming for themselves, free and untrammeled, their own organic law. They shall never consent that this Congress shall prescribe for them a form of government.” The author of the “Trojan Horse” bill was unmasked. John Carlile—the linchpin of West Virginia statehood—had shockingly become its “Judas!”
⁶⁶²

Carlile's theatrics stunned his colleagues in the Senate. It was the first inkling to many that West Virginia's constitutional convention had not been entirely representative. Chairman Ben Wade called Carlile's behavior “very extraordinary” and concluded there was “something wrong in the matter.”

“That there is to be a separation is a foregone conclusion,” Wade exclaimed, “and no man has urged it upon the committee more strongly than the Senator who now opposes immediate action. He, of all men in the committee, is the man who penned all these bills…. He is the man who has investigated all the precedents…. He submitted to the labor; he did it cheerfully; he did it backed by the best men of his State…. He is the gentleman who impressed their opinions upon the committee as strongly as anybody else; and what change has come over the spirit of his dream I know not. His conversion is greater than that of St. Paul.”
⁶⁶³

Senator Waitman Willey also denounced his traitorous colleague. “I stand here, where my colleague does not stand,” thundered Willey, “representing the voice of the people of [West] Virginia, who ask for freedom, who ask severance from the eastern section of the State.…The Almighty, with his own eternal hand, has marked the boundary between us.”

Despite John Carlile's “nay” ballot, the West Virginia statehood bill passed the Senate on July 14 by a vote of 23–17.
⁶⁶⁴

Carlile had fallen in with the “Copperheads,” a movement arising from Northern opposition to President Lincoln's war policy. These conservative Democrats saw the war's object as restoration of the Union. Many became alarmed as the conflict evolved into a crusade to destroy Southern institutions, namely slavery. Their slogan was “The Constitution as it is, the Union as it was, and the Negroes where they are.” Abolitionists compared them to venomous snakes, and the “Copperheads” bore that name with pride, displaying the heads of liberty on copper pennies as their badge. Their leader was a seditiously flamboyant Ohio Congressman named Clement Vallandigham. Banished to the Confederacy by
Lincoln and later ejected by Davis, he would become the “man without a country.”
⁶⁶⁵

Senator Carlile joined Copperheads in loathing the Willey Amendment's emancipation clause, assailing “congressional dictation” and “Abolition influences.” Editor Archibald Campbell, in turn, ridiculed Carlile from the pages of the
Wheeling Intelligencer
, charging the impulsive senator with “black hearted” treason.
⁶⁶⁶

Against the backdrop of this vitriol, the House of Representatives took fall recess without passing the West Virginia statehood bill. On September 22, following the costly Federal victory at Antietam, President Lincoln unveiled an Emancipation Proclamation, formally announcing his intention to free slaves in the Confederate states on New Year's Day, 1863. That act changed the war. The term “abolitionist,” confessed one moderate statehood leader a few weeks later, has lost “all its terrors to me.”
⁶⁶⁷

On December 9, the House of Representatives again took up the statehood bill. Congressman John Bingham of Ohio spoke eloquently for the bill as “an inroad…into that ancient Bastille of slavery, out of which has come this wild, horrid conflict of arms.” Yet the issue was warmly contested. Even Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, leader of Radical Republicans in the House, questioned the act's legality. “I say then that we may admit West Virginia as a new state,” Stevens declared, “not by virtue of any provision of the Constitution but under the absolute power which the laws of war give us.” One day later, the House passed the West Virginia statehood bill by a vote of 96–55.

“Glory to God in the highest!” proclaimed the
Wheeling Intelligencer
. Statehood advocates celebrated with speeches, fireworks, and torchlight parades. A formal-looking obituary for Senator John Carlile appeared in the
Intelligencer
, asserting that “the grave has closed over all there was political in this man.” All that stood between West Virginians and their long-cherished dream was President Lincoln's signature.
⁶⁶⁸

Abraham Lincoln was very troubled. His thin, sallow face reflected “pathetic sadness.” His gray eyes, sunken and deep-set, cast a faraway look. Furrowed lines of anguish framed his countenance. Lincoln was, in the words of one contemporary, a “long, tall, bony, homely, wiry, sad, gloomy man.”
⁶⁶⁹

By mid-December 1862, Lincoln had reason to be gloomy. Lee had just crushed his army at Fredericksburg, only the latest in a year of eastern battlefield setbacks. The Republicans had been embarrassed in mid-term elections. Lincoln's statesmanship was in doubt. Radicals disdained him for the limited scope of his Emancipation Proclamation; Democrats accused him of incompetence and abuse of power. Lincoln confessed he was unable to “see a ray of hope.”
⁶⁷⁰

Passage of the West Virginia statehood bill was untimely news for the forlorn president. Lincoln had viewed Virginia as a pilot state for reconstruction of the Union. The Wheeling experiment, if allowed to ferment, might encourage Unionists in other seceded states to establish loyal governments of their own. But statehood was another matter. The president thought Virginia secessionists would return to the Union “less reluctantly without the division of the old State.”
⁶⁷¹

As Lincoln pondered the issue, the White House was deluged with nervous appeals. On December 23, the troubled president sought written opinions from his six-member Cabinet on whether the West Virginia statehood act was “constitutional” and “expedient.” Secretary of State William Seward, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, and Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase favored the measure. Attorney General Edward Bates, Navy Secretary Gideon Wells, and Postmaster General Montgomery Blair opposed admission. “A President is as well off without a Cabinet as with one,” remarked Lincoln of the deadlock.
⁶⁷²

The president's signing deadline was midnight, December 31, 1862. As that deadline neared, Governor Pierpont made a last-ditch
appeal by telegram from Wheeling: “ To His Excellency—The President of the U.S.…The Union men of West Va. were not originally for the Union because of the new state. But the sentiment for the two have become identified. If one is stricken down I don't know what is [to] become of the other.”
⁶⁷³

At seven o'clock that evening, Senator Willey and West Virginia Representatives William Brown and Jacob Blair called at the White House. For the next three hours, they huddled with the president. Lincoln read the opinions of his cabinet members; the statehood advocates countered each objection. The president listened studiously but remained poker-faced, his mood undecipherable.