John G. Nicolay, The Outbreak of Rebellion

While the Convention of Virginia was carrying on its eccentric and fluctuating political intrigues under guise of public deliberation, one of the West Virginia members offered resolutions making a somewhat startling, but entirely germane application of the heretical theory of secession. “The right of revolution,” he wrote, “can be exercised as well by a portion of the citizens of a State against their State government, as it can be exercised by the whole people of a State against their Federal Government.” “And that any change of the relation Virginia now sustains to the Federal Government, against the wishes of even a respectable minority of her people, would be such an act of injustice perpetrated upon the rights of that minority as to justify them in changing their relation to the State Government by separating themselves from that section of the State that had thus wantonly disregarded their interests and defied their will.”

The conspirators in the convention wilfully shut their eyes to the pertinency of this logic, but among the people of West Virginia it remained a quick and pervading principle of action. The Convention at Richmond passed its secret Ordinance of Secession on April 17th; within a week popular movements were already on foot in the towns and populous counties of West Virginia, looking to a division of the State. Numerous causes contributed to this result. Political jealousy and injustice, though a powerful influence, was not everything. Geography had already ordained separation by a formidable mountain-barrier. Her people felt themselves an integral part of the Great West. They responded to the impulse of its commercial ambition, its material development, its expansive business energy. Wheeling aspired to rival Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, not Richmond. They acknowledged neither tobacco nor cotton as kings;