Richmond, Virginia During the Civil War Era
Virginia voters (all men, and many of whom are Baptist) today ratify the Ordinance of Secession adopted by the Virginia Convention on April 17. Voters also amend the state constitution to remove a ceiling on the value of enslaved blacks for taxation purposes. Yet the state is divided on secession, as voters in the western mountains and Ohio River Valley – regions peopled by relatively few slaveholders – vote strongly against secession.
Reflecting the discord in Virginia, western voices calling for the formation of a new, Union-friendly state receive a greater hearing now, bearing fruition in an October 24 vote in Virginia’s western counties for the formation of West Virginia.
The controversial declaration ratified today reads in part:
The people of Virginia in their ratification of the Constitution of the United States of America, adopted by them in convention on the twenty-fifth day of June, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-eight, having declared that the powers granted under said Constitution were derived from the people of the United States and might be resumed whensoever the same should be perverted to their injury and oppression, and the Federal Government having perverted said powers not only to the injury of the people of Virginia, but to the oppression of the Southern slave-holding States,
Now, therefore, we, the people of Virginia, do declare and ordain, That the ordinance adopted by the people of this State in convention on the twenty-fifth day of June, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-eight, whereby the Constitution of the United States of America was ratified, and all acts of the General Assembly of this State ratifying and adopting amendments to said Constitution, are hereby repealed and abrogated; that the union between the State of Virginia and the other States under the Constitution aforesaid is hereby dissolved, and that the State of Virginia is in the full possession and exercise of all the rights of sovereignty which belong and appertain to a free and independent State.
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