There are many noteworthy and valuable documents among the over 1,000 petitions currently digitized.  Accomack County alone includes several appeals of freed slaves for permission to remain in the state following their emancipation as required by law.   Similarly, there are petitions of slave owners petitioning the Assembly for leave to bring their slaves into the county from neighboring Maryland.  Accomack County’s close proximity to the Chesapeake Bay produced petitions concerning changes to the oyster laws especially as they relate to dredging.  Several citizens also petitioned the Assembly to establish ferries or packets between Accomack and the ports of Norfolk, Portsmouth, and Hampton.  One of the most interesting petitions within Accomack County consists of a printed address of E. P. Pitts to the “People of Accomac [sic] and Northampton Counties.”  Pitts, a judge and former state senator, voted against the secession candidate in the Convention and writes defending his decision to relocate his family to Howard County, Maryland, for health reasons during the war.

This is the first of an on-going series of Out of the Box posts highlighting the Legislative Petitions collection.  Future posts will announce when new localities become available.

-Craig S. Moore, State Records Appraisal Archivist

On 13 November 1860, J.S. Moore of Indiana wrote a letter to his Virginia relative Doctor Thomas Moore. Much of the letter has to do with health matters and the vibrant Indiana economy. The “Indiana Moore” then turned his attention to the recent 1860 presidential election. He provides “Virginia Moore” his thoughts on Abraham Lincoln, the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, and who was responsible for the secession crisis pervading the nation at the time.

“I suppose Lincoln is elected President and report says the result has created a consternation in the South and an effort is being made to adopt a plan for secession. It does appear to me that it is folly and madness on their part to attempt resistance at all events until Lincoln or his party is guilty of an overt act that would justify such a procedure if justifiable it could be. I know that Mr. Lincoln holds today principles that you and I use to battle for under the leadership of Henry Clay.

And I do say when the Republican Party is assailed the assault is not made on their principles but a misrepresentation of those principles and I hold the Democratic Party responsible for the ill feeling engendered both North and South. They persist in saying here at home that the Republican Party proposes to make war on the Institutions of the South. In a word that it is the fixed purpose of Lincoln to abolish slavery in the States when they know he stands pledged against any thing of the kind and would frown down such a movement let it come from whatever source it may. The Democratic Party has depended for success on lieing [sic] and misrepresentation for the last Twenty years and their lies and slanders have recoiled on their own heads. And they can now have the melancholy pleasure of reviewing their past course and see the ‘Rock upon which they Split.’

If the Negroes of the South looked for assistance from the North simultaneously with the election of Lincoln they gathered it from the speeches and movements of such men as Keit, Rhett, Gist, Yancy, Wigfall, and your own citizen Henry A. Wise. And those men will live to see that they by given credence and utterance to slanders started in the North have done more to excite servile insurrection among the Slaves than any other set of published articles purporting to have been copied from the New York tribune & Cincinnati Gazette that were pronounced by these papers base slanders and forgeries and I knew them to be such as I am a somewhat careful reader of those papers.

I think the conservative men both North & South should counsel moderation and thereby allay the bitter strife that has convulsd [sic] the country the last six years. I will go ‘Old Abes’ security that he will do right  and I hope he will make those corrupt officials ‘scamper’ like the money changers of old for they have almost perverted the Government. Enough on this subject.”

The letter continued as J.S. Moore proceeded to get Dr. Moore up to date on various Moore family members and his upcoming marriage.

The J.S. Moore to Dr. Thomas Moore letter, along with other Civil War era correspondence found in the Rockbridge County court records, is available at the Library of Virginia.

-Greg Crawford, Local Records Coordinator

(Note: Guest contributor Mari Julienne joins us this week with some timely background information on a pivotal document in the state’s history.  Virginia’s signed Ordinance of Secession will be on display at the Library of Virginia on Saturday, 16 April 2011. See our schedule for other events related to the Library’s exhibition, Union or Secession: Virginians Decide.)

17 April 1861. While meeting in secret session, the Virginia Convention took a vote on whether to secede from the United States. Two weeks earlier, on 4 April, the convention delegates rejected a resolution to secede by a vote of 90 to 45. The convention, which was called to consider Virginia’s response to the secession crisis, had been meeting in Richmond since 13 February. The delegates had spent many weeks debating whether secession was legal, wise, or in the state’s best interest. Following the surrender of Fort Sumter on 13 April and President Abraham Lincoln’s call for troops on 15 April, the question facing the delegates became which side to take: to fight with or against the new Confederate States of America. Late in the afternoon on 17 April, the convention chose the Confederacy and voted 88 to 55 to submit an ordinance of secession to the voters in a referendum. On 23 May, Virginia voters approved the Ordinance of Secession, which repealed Virginia’s 1788 ratification of the Constitution of the United States and its subsequent amendments.

While working on the Library’s Union or Secession exhibition (on display in our gallery until 29 October 2011), I learned that not one, but three parchments of the Ordinance of Secession were created after the 17 April vote. The most well known is the parchment elegantly penned by William Flegenheimer in May 1861. It has been in the Library’s records of the 1861 Convention since 1929, when it was returned to the state archives after having been taken from the Virginia capitol in April 1865 by a Union soldier. On 14 June 1861, during the convention’s second session, delegates began signing the parchment created by Flegenheimer. Delegates continued to sign the document until December 1861, when the convention’s third and final session ended. A total of 142 delegates, including former United States president John Tyler, signed the Ordinance. Some of the signers, however, had not been members of the convention at the time of the 17 April vote since they had arrived later to replace delegates who had resigned, died, or been expelled after the first session. The convention authorized lithographic copies of Flegenheimer’s ceremonial version to be made for the convention members, and some of these lithographs still survive today.

The Library of Virginia also has a second parchment in its collections. The enrolled version is the formal, legal text of the Ordinance. It was also inscribed on parchment, along with the other ordinances passed by the convention during its three sessions. During the June 1861 session, this document was signed by the convention’s president to make it official. In the margin are also the signatures of two members of a committee appointed by the convention to verify the text of the ordinance. Both of these documents are part of LVA’s state records collection, in the Virginia Convention (1861: Richmond), Records, 1861–1961, Acc. 40586.

Another parchment version of the Ordinance of Secession was created in the days immediately following the vote on 17 April. It was signed by 92 members of the convention between 24 April and 1 May, when the first session ended, but before the Ordinance was ratified by Virginia’s voters. Some of the signatures are squeezed between columns and in the margin, which may have led to the convention’s decision to commission Flegenheimer to produce his more elaborate ceremonial version. This earlier document was also taken from Richmond in April 1865.  It ended up in the possession of the State Department and is now at the National Archives.

All three versions of Virginia’s Ordinance of Secession can now be examined together in our extensive online resource, Union or Secession: Virginians Decide.

-Mari Julienne, Assistant Editor, Dictionary of Virginia Biography

“The indecision and the absence of energy in the convention of Virginia which does not dare proclaim itself either for or against secession have ended by making the situation intolerable for everyone,” wrote Alfred Paul, the French consul in Richmond, in March 1861.  “This lack of spontaneity after the inauguration of the new administration destroys the sympathies of the two sections, North and South, toward Virginia.”  Paul closed his report of 9 March thusly:  “all that the convention has done up to the present can be summed up in three words or in a single word: nothing, nothing, nothing.”

This year marks the 150^th anniversary of the secession crisis and the commencement of the Civil War.  Among The Library of Virginia’s many collections concerning secession and the war is the Alfred Paul Reports, 8 December 1860-9 March 1861 (Accession 22992).  Paul proved to be a keen observer of events in Virginia during the Winter of 1860-1861, providing the French government with valuable analysis of the state’s actions during the secession crisis.  [Note: The original reports are written in French; English translations are provided by the Library.]

Southerners, Paul stated, “want secession.”  South Carolina seized on the election of Abraham Lincoln to leave the Union, even though Lincoln had been “called to the presidency of the United States…in a general election, regular, legal, constitutional, in which the South has taken part, whose results are incontestably valid, acceptable, and unassailable.”  He pointed to slavery as the cause of the breakup.  “[S]upporters of slavery, over excited…by the steady success of the Republican Party in the last elections,” were determined to shatter “all which makes up (in the eyes of Americans) the perfection of a model government…because the new and next administration considers not to destroy slavery there where it exists, but to prevent its extension.”  In Paul’s opinion, Southern states believed they would create a slaveholding utopia, but they did “not see that the question of slavery will always be what it is.  [They surmise] that all will be well then, that the slaves will be submissive and satisfied, that the abolitionists will stop, that the Republican Party will have no other reason for existing and will disappear to reappear no longer.”

Secession, Paul predicted, would result in civil war.  “And the end of this civil war certainly can not be foreseen by anyone when the first cannon blow will be understood as the signal of a catastrophe intended by this stronge [sic] people, ready to commit suicide amidst a prosperity without precedent, but a uniquely material prosperity, which has not been accompanied in its very rapid advance by moral progress[.]”  And Virginia, which could have perhaps prevented this outcome had she acted “with energy and prudence,” was led into “the whirlwind of events [that] seems to be obliged to hurry along this state in the whirlpool like all other slave states.”

Paul remained in Richmond for the rest of the war, serving as the French government’s representative to the Confederacy.  Originally believing that the South could win, by 1863 he was informing Paris that the South could not achieve success by military means.  While the Library’s collection of Paul’s reports ends in 1861, he continued to make detailed accounts even as Richmond fell.  His observations of the evacuation of Richmond by the Confederacy, and its subsequent occupation by the Union Army, are examined in an April 1965 journal article. (See Warren F. Spencer, “A French View of the Fall of Richmond: Alfred Paul’s Report to Drouyn De Lhuys, April 11, 1865,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography vol. 73, no. 2 ).

-Trenton Hizer, Senior Finding Aids Archivist

For more on the Library of Virginia’s collections of Civil War material, see:

www.virginiamemory.com/va1861

http://www.virginiamemory.com/collections/cw150

and

http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/guides/Civil-War/

As you may have heard from this blog and other sources, the CW 150 Legacy Project: Document Digitization and Access  is an effort to locate Civil War-era materials held by private citizens, digitize them, and place them online.  It is a joint project between the Library of Virginia (LVA) and the Virginia Sesquicentennial of the American Civil War Commission.

Now that the project is underway, the motto “Have Scanner, Will Travel” aptly applies to my colleague Renee Savits and me. We are the CW 150 Legacy Project archivists, often seen in the LVA building rolling large plastic travel boxes containing our scanners, loading up our vehicle for the latest event. Renee is responsible for the project’s Eastern Region, and I am responsible for the Western Region.

In September, Renee and I hit the road, beginning what will be nearly two years of traveling across the commonwealth in search of these materials. We knew people would be interested in the project, but the level of interest we are encountering is beyond our expectations. At most of our events, all appointment slots are filled. We meet wonderful people who are excited to have the opportunity to share their items with us.  A story about the project in the Washington Post in November generated even more interest.

A typical scanning event is scheduled through a given locality’s Civil War Sesquicentennial Committee, which is responsible for securing the location for the event, publicizing the event, and setting appointments. On the day of the event, Renee or I will arrive with another member of the LVA staff to set up the equipment, prepare the necessary paperwork, meet with people, and begin the scanning process. The amount of time we spend in a locality varies, from one to two days, depending on what the local committee feels is appropriate based on the level of local community response.

Once we are back at the LVA, we perform basic editing of the images (adjusting contrast, etc.) to ensure a uniform level of quality. We catalog each item and load it into our digital asset management system, DigiTool. At that point, it is available on the Virginia Memory Web site, on a page dedicated to the Project: www.virginiamemory.com/cw150.

We found some wonderful items in the six scanning events held so far.  For example, the following is one of several letters that John Keefer of Franklin, Pennsylvania, wrote to his family back home while traveling to the various encampments where his son, Union soldier George Keefer, was stationed. (You can obtain a transcript of the letter, provided by the letter’s owner, by contacting the blog editors).

Another example of a great find was a letter from Linton Perkins to “Brother and Sister.”

In this letter, Perkins is writing from Fort Worth, Texas, describing preparations for the secession vote in Texas and inquiring about the vote in Virginia. Perkins later writes about his experiences in Texas and compares life there to life in Virginia. You can read a transcript here: Perkins transcript.

To see materials contributed to the CW 150 Legacy Project, please visit our Virginia Memory page to search the collection. The cataloging process is ongoing; please check back frequently as the online collection is continuously updated. If you have materials you would like to contribute to the CW 150 Legacy Project, please visit the Project’s Web site to learn about how you can participate.

We have more than 40 additional events scheduled so far through June 2012, and dates are added on a regular basis. Renee and I will be blogging more about the CW 150 Legacy Project as we continue our travels, so stay tuned!

-Laura Drake Davis, CW 150 Legacy Project – Western Region