Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 34.djvu/319

 The Lnboden Raid and Its Effects. 311

of the State was very great. The people of those counties had long had their grievances, real or imaginary, against the people of the Eastern counties, and as has been said, there was a convention at that time then in session at the city of Wheel- ing for the purpose of dividing the State. General Jones' near approach to Wheeling was announced to the convention by a breathless messenger while the convention, in a digni- fied way, was discusing some matter of great importance. The convention immediately became a bedlam, and the members stampeded over each other in their scramble for the street, and fled in great disorder in every direction.

And now, after the raid was over, and the members came back and looked each other in the face, they felt greatly humil- iated, and to aggravate this feeling the news that all of the fine horses and cattle had been seized and taken back into the Confederacy was brought from every part of the country. So upon the reassembling of that convention it was an easy matter for it to publish to the world on the 2Oth day of June, 1863, that "West Virginia shall be and remain one of the Unit- ed States of America." The formation and admission into the Union of a new and loyal State, as well as the dismember- ment of a disloyal one, had now for two years been a pet meas- ure with Mr. Lincoln, and so anxious was he to encourage the people of Virginia west of the Alleghanies to form this new State, that when he issued his famous emancipation procla- mation on the 22d day of September, 1862, to take effect one hundred days thereafter, was careful to announce that his emancipation proclamation did not apply to the forty-eight counties that constituted West Virginia, and that these coun- ties "were left precisely as if the proclamation had not been issued."

So the negroes of West Virginia were not freed by Abraham Lincoln's emancipation proclamation.

The first and only time that we have any record of Mr. Lincoln being questioned about the legality of the formation of West Virginia was at Hampton Roads conference, in Feb- ruary, 1865, when the Confederate State Senator R. M. T. Hunter (see Stephen's History of the War Between the States,