(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 On 23 May, Virginia voters approved the Ordinance of Secession, which repealed Virginia’s 1788 ratification of the Constitution of the United States and its subsequent amendments.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

Editor’s Note: Guest contributor Brent Tarter offers the following post, pointing out some interesting finds made by the creators of the Library of Virginia’s Union or Secession exhibition.

During Virginia’s secession crisis in the winter and spring of 1860-1861, men and women across the state wrote to Governor John Letcher to comment on public affairs. They wrote to tell the governor what to do, to ask for help, to offer advice and assistance, or to get something off their chests. While researching in preparation for the Library of Virginia’s exhibition, Union or Secession: Virginians Decide , we spent time looking through the letters received by Governor Letcher. Like the records of every Virginia governor since 1776, the letters are preserved in Record Group 3 of the state’s archives in the Library of Virginia. The Governor’s Office records are an extremely rich source for the beliefs and words of ordinary Virginians.

During 1860 and 1861 the governor received letters from men and women in every part of the state who expressed every possible opinion and political allegiance. “I would like to Know from you what is to prevent me from Voting for Lincoln,” Giles County resident John M. Smith asked Governor Letcher in September 1860. “As he is the man I prefer. the reason of this letter is that there is a great deal of threatning on the part of Slave holders in regard to poor men excerciseng the elective franchise.” It is unlikely that Smith was able to vote for Abraham Lincoln on election day, 6 November 1860. Although 1,929 Virginia men voted for Lincoln (most of them in the northwestern counties and in the upper Potomac River Valley), there is no record of any of those votes being cast in Giles County.

At the beginning of the crisis, most men and women in Virginia opposed secession, and it was not until April 1861 when the people of the state had to decide whether to fight with or against the United States that a majority favored secession.  In April 1861, Sarah A. Logan, of Goochland County, asked the governor to “Accept my services for my State. I have no son old enough, and my husband is one of the ‘homeguard’ so I wish with the assistance of my daughters to do something—anything. Hearing that red flannel shirts or jackets are needed, I will make as many as you can send me the materials for,— say five hundred or a thousand.” Probably referring to the more than fifty enslaved laborers on her family’s plantation, she assured the governor that “I can do it, as I have a large force at my command.”

The words of enslaved Virginians appear in court records that are preserved in the governor’s papers, too. Many enslaved people correctly foresaw that war would offer them new opportunities for freedom. According to testimony in a Mecklenburg County case, a slave named Sam made statements around his neighborhood that “from what I can find out, Old Lincoln is coming down the Mississippi river and will free every thing as he goes, and I think if we be pretty keen we will get our freedom too.” In May 1861, the county court convicted Sam of conspiring to make insurrection and sentenced him to be sold out of state, which the governor later commuted to forced labor on the public works, which likely meant Confederate defensive fortifications.

Virginia’s secession and the outbreak of war led to the creation of the new, free state of West Virginia. In May 1861, Robert Johnston, from Clarksburg, asked the governor to provide for the defense of politically divided western Virginia, explaining that in the west, “our intercourse is almost entirely with the West and the North, we have none with the Central and eastern portions of Virginia. We are not Slaveholders, many of us are of Northern birth, We read almost exclusively Northern newspapers and books, and listen to Northern preachers.”

Like a majority of Virginians, Governor Letcher (read his biography here) opposed secession until the middle of April 1861, and like most white Virginians in the east supported the Confederacy during the Civil War. His mail can be an invaluable resource for anyone interested in this period of Virginia’s history.  Learn more about this collection at the Library of Virginia in the Guide to the Executive Papers of Governor John Letcher, 1859-1863 (Accession 36787). 

 -Brent Tarter, founding editor of the Dictionary of Virginia Biography

Have you ever wondered how fragile or damaged documents are repaired or preserved?  Check out this behind-the-scenes look at preservation efforts undertaken to conserve one of the documents used in the new “Union or Secession: Virginians Decide” exhibition at The Library of Virginia (LVA). Visit the innovative online classroom to see more about the people, events, and documents that were a part of this crucial time in Virginia history. The exhibition is open now until October 29, 2011. For more video created by LVA staff, see our YouTube channel.