Booknotes: Virginia Secedes

New Arrival:

• Virginia Secedes: A Documentary History edited by Dwight T. Pitcaithley (U Tenn Press, 2024).

There are now three volumes in Dwight Pitcaithley's edited reference series compiling secession crisis documents by state. Published by University of Tennessee Press, the series started out west with Tennessee Secedes: A Documentary History (2021) and Kentucky and the Secession Crisis: A Documentary History (2022). This year marks a shift to the east with Virginia Secedes: A Documentary History.

Throughout the national crisis prompted by the unilateral secession of South Carolina, Virginia positioned itself as a bastion of what came to be known as Conditional Unionism. From the description: "Virginia deliberated longer and proposed more constitutional solutions to avoid secession than any other state. Only after the Confederate bombardment of Fort Sumter and President Lincoln’s request for troops to suppress the “insurrection” did Virginia turn from saving the Union to leaving it."

More: "In this annotated volume of primary source documents from Secession Winter, Dwight T. Pitcaithley presents speeches by Virginians from the United States Congress, the Washington Peace Conference which had been called by Virginia’s general assembly, and the state’s secession convention to provide readers a glimpse into Virginia’s ultimate decision to secede from the Union. In his introductory analysis of the trial confronting Virginia’s leadership, Pitcaithley demonstrates that most elected officials wanted Virginia to remain in the Union—but only if Republicans agreed to protect slavery and guarantee its future. While secessionists rightly predicted that the incoming Lincoln administration would refuse to agree to these concessions, Unionists claimed that disunion would ultimately undermine slavery and lead to abolition regardless."

After a lengthy introduction, the volume presents the Virginia-related documents in seven parts: (1) the governor's Jan 7, 1861 address to the Virginia General Assembly, and document collections related to (2) the Washington Peace Conference of February 1861, Virginia participation in the U.S. Senate (3) and (4) U.S. House of Representatives debates, (5) the Virginia State Convention of Feb-April, (6) constitutional amendments proposed between December 1860 and April 1861, and finally (7) the state's secession and alliance with the newly formed CSA. Appended to those sections is "a Secession Winter timeline, extensive bibliography, and questions for discussion." In addition to providing endnotes for the material, the editor also precedes his presentation of each document with a biographical note on its source as well as a brief contextual summary of its contents.