expedient? This, in my general view, is more a question CHAP. XIV. for Congress, than for the Executive. Still I do not evade it. More than on anything else, it depends on whether the admission or rejection of the new State would, under all the circumstances, tend the more strongly to the restoration of the national authority throughout the Union. That which helps most in this direction is the most expedient at this time. Doubtless those in remaining Virginia would return to the Union, so to speak, less reluctantly without the division of the old State than with it, but I think we could not save as much in this quarter by rejecting the new State, as we should lose by it in West Virginia. We can scarcely dispense with the aid of West Virginia in this struggle; much less can we afford to have her against us, in Congress and in the field. Her brave and good men regard her admission into the Union as a matter of life and death. They have been true to the Union under very severe trials. We have so acted as to justify their hopes, and we cannot fully retain their confidence, and coöperation, if we seem to break faith with them. In fact, they could not do so much for us, if they would. Again, the admission of the new State turns that much slave soil to free; and thus, is a certain and irrevocable encroachment upon the cause of the rebellion. The division of a State is dreaded as a precedent. But a measure made expedient by a war is no precedent for times of peace. It is said that the admission of West Virginia is secession, and tolerated only because it is our secession. Well, if we call it by that name, there is still difference enough between secession against the Constitution, and secession in favor of the Constitution. I believe the admission of West Virginia 1862. MS. into the Union is expedient.

Accordingly, on the 31st of December, 1862, President Lincoln signed the "Act for the Admission of the State of West Virginia into the Union," which thereby became a law. Nothing now remained to be done except a compliance by the new State with the condition precedent which Congress had imposed. The constitutional Convention was,

Lincoln, Opinion, Dec. 31,

CHAP. XIV. therefore, again convened on the 12th of February, 1863, and the change duly adopted by it providing for gradual emancipation in the language which Congress had prescribed. The Convention also published an address to the voters warmly recommending it; and, at an election held on the 26th of March, the amended constitution was adopted by a majority of about seventeen thousand. In conformity with the act of Congress, President Lincoln thereupon issued his proclamation dated April 20, 1863, declaring that the act of admission should take force and effect sixty days from that date. At a supplementary election, the officers to form a new State government had been chosen, and on the 20th of June, 1863, it was formally inaugurated and West Virginia became one of the United States. The number of its counties had been increased to forty-eight; embracing an area of 23,000 square miles of territory, and containing a white population (according to the census of 1860) of 333,000, and about 12,000 slaves.

The system of gradual emancipation, imposed by the act of Congress and accepted by the State, left slavery in existence in the State until it should gradually disappear by the death of those over the age of twenty-five, by the arrival at the age of twenty-five of a second class, and at the age of twenty-one of a third class. But public opinion on this subject in West Virginia was swept along by the same causes which brought the institution to an early termination in other States of the Union. On the 9th of December, 1863, the Legislature passed an act permitting owners to emancipate their slaves, and also prohibiting the bringing of

slaves into the State and declaring them, if brought CHAP. XIV. in, free after six months. No laws on the subject were passed during the year 1864, but when the great constitutional amendment came up for action in Congress in the winter of 1864–65, West Virginia obeyed the common impulse, and on January 23, 1865, her Legislature raised a joint committee of five from the House and three from the Senate to consider the subject of immediately abolishing slavery in that State. The members appear to have been ripe for a prompt decision, for on the 3d of February, 1865, three days after the Thirteenth Amendment had been adopted by Congress, an act was passed declaring: "1. All persons held to service or labor as slaves in this State are hereby declared free. 2. There shall hereafter be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in this State, except in punishment for crime whereof the party 1865, p. 6. shall have been duly convicted."

The organization and admission of the new State still left in existence the restored government of Virginia, of which Governor Peirpoint was the executive head. He had meanwhile removed his seat of government to Alexandria, where his authority and administration, still recognized by the President and Congress as being loyal and legal, were exercised over such portions of the remaining territory of the Old Dominion as came under the permanent control of the Union armies until the end of the Rebellion.

Session

Laws of

West Virginia,

CHAPTER XV

CHAP. XV.

IN

LINCOLN AND THE CHURCHES

N a conflict which was founded upon the quickened moral sense of the people it was not strange that the Government received the most earnest support from the Churches. From one end of the loyal States to the other, all the religious organizations, with few exceptions, moved by the twin forces of patriotism and religion, ranged themselves upon the side of the Government against the Rebellion. A large number of pulpits in the North had already taken their places as tribunes for the defense of popular freedom, and it was from them that, at the menace of war, the first cries of danger and of defiance rang out. Those ministers who had for years been denouncing the encroachments of slavery did not wait for any organized action on the part of their colleagues, but proclaimed at once in a thousand varying tones that peace was "a blessing worth fighting for." The more conservative Churches were but little in rear of the more advanced. Those who had counseled moderation and patience with the South, on account of the divided responsibility for slavery which rested on both halves of the nation, speedily felt the sense of release from the obligations of

brotherhood when the South had repudiated and CHAP. XV. renounced them, and rallied to the support of the insulted flag with an earnestness not less ardent, and more steadily trustworthy, than that of the original antislavery clergy. As the war went on, and as every stage of it gave a clearer presage of the coming destruction of slavery, the deliverances of the Churches became every day more and more decided in favor of the national cause and the downfall of human bondage. To detail the thousand ways in which the Churches testified their support of the national cause, to give even an abstract of the countless expressions of loyalty which came from the different religious bodies of the country, would occupy many volumes; we can only refer briefly to a few of the more important utterances of some of the great religious societies.

In all the Church conventions which met after the President's preliminary proclamation of the 22d of September, 1862, that act of liberation was greeted with the heartiest expressions of approval and support. The Baptist Convention of New York declared that "While we see with the profoundest sorrow thousands of husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons falling on the battlefield, considering the interests to be preserved and transmitted to future generations we cannot regard the sacrifice of treasure and of life too much for the object to be secured." They denounced "human slavery as the procuring cause of the rebellion now raging among us"; they declared that "the spirit of the age, the safety of the country, and the laws of God require its entire removal." The American Baptist Misionary Union had, in the spring of 1862, adopted