Benson J. Lossing, Pictorial Field Book of the Civil War. Volume 1.

[489] also resolved to elect a representative in the National Congress. Similar sentiments were expressed at other meetings, especially in a mass Convention held at Wheeling on the 5th of May, where it was resolved to repudiate all connection with the conspirators at Richmond. A similar meeting was held at Wheeling on the 11th, when the multitude were addressed by Mr. Carlile and Francis H. Pierpont.

the Convention of delegates met at Wheeling on the 13th. A large number of counties were represented by almost four hundred Unionists. The inhabitants of Wheeling were mostly loyal; and when the National flag was unfurled over the Custom House there, in token of that loyalty, with public ceremonies, it was greeted with loud acclamations of the people, and the flinging out, in response, of the flag of the Union over all of the principal buildings in the City.

the chief topic discussed in the Convention was the division of the State and the formation of a new one, composed of the forty or fifty counties of the mountain region, whose inhabitants owned very few slaves and were enterprising and thrifty. A division of the State had been desired by them for many years. The Slave Oligarchy eastward of the mountains and in all the tide-water counties wielded the political power of the State, and used it for the promotion of their great interest, in the levying of taxes and the lightening of their own burdens, at the expense of the labor and thrift of the citizens of West Virginia. These considerations, and their innate love for the Union, produced a unanimity of sentiment at this crisis that made the efforts of secret emissaries of the conspirators, and open recruiting officers of the military power arrayed against the Government, almost fruitless. This unanimity was remarkable in the Wheeling Convention, which, too informal to take definite action on the momentous question of the dismemberment of the State, contented itself with passing resolutions condemnatory of the Secession Ordinance, and calling a Provisional Convention to assemble at the same place on the 11th day of June following, if the obnoxious Ordinance should be ratified by the voice of the people, to be given on the 23d of May. A Central Committee was appointed,¹ who, on the 22d of May, issued an argumentative address to the people of Northwestern Virginia.

these proceedings thoroughly alarmed the conspirators, who expected a revolt and an appeal to arms in Western Virginia, under the auspices of the National Government; and on the 25th of May, Governor Letcher wrote a letter to Colonel Porterfield, who was in command of some State troops at Grafton, at the junction of the Baltimore and Ohio and the Northwestern Railway, ordering him to “take the train some night, run up to Wheeling, and seize and carry away the arms recently sent to that place by Cameron, the United States Secretary of War, and use them in arming such men” as might “rally to his camp.” he told him that it was “advisable to cut off telegraphic communication between Wheeling and Washington, so that the disaffected at the former place could not communicate with their allies at Headquarters.” “establish a perfect control over the telegraph, if kept up,” he said, “so that no dispatch can pass without your knowledge and inspection ”