Born in Fire, The Only State the Civil War Made

Every American state has a founding story, but West Virginia's is unlike any other. It was born out of a war, carved from the body of a state that had left the Union, and admitted to the United States on June twentieth, eighteen sixty-three, while Confederate and Union armies still fought across its ridges.

When Virginia voted to secede from the Union in April of eighteen sixty-one, the counties west of the Alleghenies were divided. Many families in the mountain counties had few or no enslaved people. Their economy was tied to the Ohio River and the northern railroads, not to the Tidewater plantation world that had driven secession. A convention of Unionist delegates met in Wheeling that summer, declared the secession of Virginia illegal, formed a rival government they called the Restored Government of Virginia, and began the legal argument for separation.

The process required an act of Congress and then a Supreme Court challenge that came years later. Abraham Lincoln signed the statehood bill on December thirty-first, eighteen sixty-two. The new state took the name West Virginia and entered the Union the following June. It was the only state admitted during the Civil War, and the only state ever formed by breaking away from a Confederate state.

The constitutional justification was thin enough that it has been argued about ever since. But the mountain counties had made their choice. West Virginians served on both sides in roughly comparable numbers, historians estimate, with each side's count running somewhere between twenty thousand and thirty thousand men. Brother against cousin against neighbor. The state was barely born before it was already divided against itself.