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Debating Secession -
Discussing the Ordinance of Secession -
Recruiting for Virginia
The Ordinance Passed
David Hunter Strother, The Ordinance Passed, Charlestown, Va., Pierre Morand Memorial, Special Collections, Library of Virginia.
Artist David Hunter Strother sketched a scene in the town of Charles Town, in Jefferson County, in the Potomac River valley, when news arrived that the Virginia Convention had adopted an Ordinance of Secession on April 17, 1861. The two delegates from Jefferson County both voted against secession when a motion failed to pass on April 4. On April 17, when it passed, Alfred Madison Barbour was absent, and Logan Osborn voted against it. Barbour later stated that had he been present he would have voted for it, and Osborn later changed his vote. Both men signed the Ordinance of Secession in the summer of 1861.
Born on September 26, 1816, at Martinsburg, Virginia, David Hunter Strother was one of the best-known illustrators in the United States by the eve of the Civil War. In 1853 he achieved fame as "Porte Crayon" for a series of illustrated articles on Virginia published by Harper's New Monthly Magazine. He served in the Union army during the Civil War. His memoirs of the war were published in eleven installments in Harper's Monthly between June 1866 and April 1868. Strother died at Charles Town, Jefferson County, West Virginia, on March 8, 1888.