Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 2.djvu/218

12 it, and by the exercise of despotic power, is endeavoring to coerce our people to abject submission to their authority. Virginia has asserted her independence. She will maintain it at every hazard." He also pointed out that the new constitution had removed the previous inequality of taxation between the east and west, and he closed an eloquent appeal for unity in the commonwealth by the words: "The troops are posted at Huttonsville. Come with your own good weapons and meet them as brothers."

On June 20th, the convention at Wheeling elected a provisional governor, Francis H. Pierpont, other State officers and an executive council of five. The convention purported to represent the whole State of Virginia, and Pierpont declared that it was not the object of the convention to set up any new government in the State, other than the one under which they had always lived. A legislature was elected, which met at Wheeling, July 2d, and was called the legislature of the restored government of Virginia. This body elected two senators for Virginia, who took the seats in the United States Senate vacated by Mason and Hunter. By authority of the legislature, $27,000 in specie deposited in the Exchange bank at Weston was seized and taken to Wheeling. A resolution favoring the division of the State of Virginia was at first voted down in the Senate. The proposition to form a new State, to bear the name of Kanawha, was, however, already very strong, and a convention was called to carry out this plan. Attorney-General Bates, of Lincoln's cabinet, in a letter to a member of the convention, strongly opposed it, declaring that "the formation of a new State out of western Virginia is an original, independent act of revolution. Any attempt to carry it out involves a plain breach of both the constitutions, of Virginia and of the nation." He contended that the plan under which the Unionist Virginians should act, should be one purporting to preserve the old State government, "claiming to be the very State which has been