page_title: Virginia Conventions
section_title: Wheeling (Virginia) Convention of 1861
hierarchical_section_title: Virginia Conventions / Wheeling (Virginia) Convention of 1861
caption_attribution_description: English: Wheeling, West Virginia Independence Hall
context_page_description: The Virginia Conventions have been the assemblies of delegates elected for the purpose of establishing constitutions of fundamental law for the Commonwealth of Virginia superior to General Assembly legislation. Their constitutions and subsequent amendments span four centuries across the territory of modern-day Virginia, West Virginia and Kentucky.
  The first Virginia Conventions replaced the British colonial government on the authority of "the people" until the initiation of state government under the 1776 Constitution. Subsequent to joining the union of the United States in 1788, Virginia's five unlimited state constitutional conventions took place in 1829–30, 1850, around the time of the Civil War in 1864, 1868, and finally in 1902. These early conventions without restrictions on their jurisdiction were primarily concerned with voting rights and representation in the General Assembly. The Conventions of 1861 on the eve of the American Civil War were called in Richmond for secession and in Wheeling for government loyal to the U.S. Constitution.
context_section_description: Virginia's second Convention of 1861 was a Unionist response to the secessionist movement in Virginia. The First Wheeling Convention meeting at Wheeling, Virginia (now West Virginia), sat on May 13–15. It called for elections to another meeting if Virginia's Ordinance of Secession were to pass referendum. After the vote was taken on May 23, the First Session of the Second Wheeling Convention met from June 11 June 25 to establish the Restored Government of Virginia, electing Arthur I. Boreman its presiding officer. The Second Session of the Second Wheeling Convention met from August 6 to August 21 to call for a new state from the territory of Virginia to be named Kanawha.
  The Second Wheeling Convention included 32 western counties, Alexandria and Fairfax County. Twenty-nine of the convention delegates were members of the Virginia General Assembly as state Delegates or state Senators, such as John J.Davis of Harrison County and Lewis Ruffner of Kanawha County.
  John S. Carlile who had represented transmontane Harrison County as an Unconditional Unionist at the Richmond Secession Convention, was the floor leader at the Second Wheeling Convention who shepherded in the creation of the Restored Virginia Government. On June 14 he expanded on his view of state and federal relations, " the people of Virginia in establishing government for themselves deemed it best to create two agents. The Federal Government is one, and the State Government is the other ..."  Referencing Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, Carlile observed, "Any act done or performed by the State agent in conflict with the powers conferred upon the Federal agent is to be null and void ... [the Constitution] provides for its own alteration, amendment or change ... But [the right of secession] was never intended ..."
  On June 17, Carlile attacked the rebellion as treason, he then accounted events at the Richmond Secession Convention in which he had been an Unconditional Unionist. "For several days before the Convention passed the Ordinance of Secession, it was absolutely besieged; members were threatened with being hung to the lamp posts; their lives were jeopardized; the mob was marching up and down the streets, and surrounding the Capitol, and everything was terror and dismay." Carlile continued to impeach the legitimacy of Virginia's referendum on secession.
  Republican Francis H. Pierpont of Marion County was elected by the Convention as Governor of the Restored Government of Virginia which was recognized by the Lincoln Administration. Unlike in Kentucky and Missouri, the Union armies were unable to reclaim most of the eastern Virginia counties for incorporation into the Restored Government by 1863, and West Virginia was made into its own state.
caption: Independence Hall, Wheeling VA. Wheeling Conventions met here.
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