US History/US History (Bureau Development Inc.)(1991).ISO/dp/0115/01159.txt

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$Pretitle{103}
$Title{The Senate - 1789-1989
Chapter 14  West Virginia is Born:  1863}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Byrd, Robert C.}
$Affiliation{US Senate}
$Subject{virginia
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$Volume{Vol. 1}
$Date{1989}
$Log{West Virginia's First Senator*0115901.scf
As Honest as Stubborn*0115902.scf
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Book:        The Senate - 1789-1989
Author:      Byrd, Robert C.
Affiliation: US Senate
Volume:      Vol. 1
Date:        1989

Chapter 14  West Virginia is Born:  1863

April 15, 1983.

     Mr. President, the United States Senate is an arena in which much of our
history has been played out.  Such was never more true than during the slavery
controversy that led to the Civil War.  That controversy built to a crescendo
in 1861.  Throughout that process, Senate debates and legislation reflected
the tensions growing elsewhere in the country over the slavery question.  The
1856 caning of Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts by Representative
Preston Brooks of South Carolina on the Senate floor was an example of the
sectional passions that were about to burst the bonds of considered debate and
reasoned discourse.

     Some critics have condemned the Senate for failing to solve the slavery
conflict before Americans, North and South, started shooting each other.  But
the Civil War was not the Senate's failure alone.  An objective look at the
Senate's antebellum record - the Missouri Compromise; the Compromise of 1850;
the careers of Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun; even the
ill-conceived Kansas-Nebraska Act - shows that senators from all sections of
our country wrestled honestly and painfully, for nearly a half century, to
resolve the slavery conflict peacefully.

     Unfortunately, emotions overrode reason, and the slavery controversy was
settled in a wider, more tragic arena than the well of the Senate.  But,
during the Civil War and its aftermath, the United States Senate - for a time
diminished in size - hammered out legislation that helped to shape modern
America; legislation that still echoes with implications even for our own
time.

     However, the weeks and months just prior to the firing on Fort Sumter
were melancholy and rending for the Senate and the Union alike.  As the crisis
grew, thousands of native-born southerners living in the North cut their ties
and headed home, and many northern natives living in the South did likewise.
One such northerner, for example - a West Point graduate and former soldier -
was serving as superintendent of an obscure military academy in Louisiana.
Impending war caused him to return North and rejoin the federal army.  His
next extended visit in the South was a major Union strategic success.  That
former military academy superintendent was William Tecumseh Sherman.

     No less significant, perhaps, were the sometimes heartbreaking departures
of southerners from the Senate.  On January 21, 1861, for instance, no less
than five senators from severed states made dramatic withdrawals from their
Senate seats - first David Yulee and Stephen Mallory of Florida, and then
Clement Clay and Benjamin Fitzpatrick of Alabama.  At last came Jefferson
Davis of Mississippi - whose desk is just two rows behind me where the
distinguished senior senator from Mississippi, Mr. Stennis, presently sits.
Davis' sincere, earnest, and regretful remarks helped in later years partially
to redeem his reputation, even after his often-criticized and condemned
performance as president of the Confederacy.

     However, as one after another of the southern senators resigned from
Congress or vanished, Virginia's senators held back.  Those two men, James M.
Mason and Robert M. T. Hunter, had been closely associated with John C.
Calhoun's fight for states' rights and the preservation of slavery.  Mason had
even delivered Calhoun's final major speech on the Senate floor a few days
before Calhoun's death in 1850.  Hunter was universally recognized as one of
the South's ablest defenders - a member of the Senate's southern triumvirate,
which also included Davis and Georgia's Robert Toombs.  Mason and Hunter were
expected to go with the aborning Confederacy; yet, both men were still
Virginia's official representatives in the United States Senate.

     Mason's and Hunter's delayed departures reflected Virginia's ambivalence
in 1861.  In the 1860 presidential election, Virginia gave a majority of votes
to pro-Union candidates Bell and Douglas over the more militant proslavery
John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky.  Virginia Governor John Letcher was known to
be opposed to secession and to be working for a compromise between the
seceding states and the rest of the Union.  Indeed, the Richmond secession
convention that eventually voted to secede convened with a solid majority of
pro-unionists and moderates who deplored secession.  That majority defeated
every secessionist move made in the Richmond assembly until, on April 12,
1861, General P. T. G. Beauregard fired on Fort Sumter, after which President
Lincoln called for troops to put down insurrection in the cotton states.
Governor Letcher curtly refused Lincoln's request for Virginia troops, and, on
April 17, by a vote of 88 to 55, the Richmond convention removed Virginia from
the federal Union.

     That vote precipitated a debate in northwestern Virginia that the United
States Congress decided in late 1862 - a decision that paved the way for one
of the permanent results of the Civil War, the creation of the state of West
Virginia.

     The western counties of Virginia were strongly pro-Union.  Union
sentiment was also strong throughout the Appalachian counties of several other
southern states - North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky, especially.
Slavery was not a major economic factor in the Appalachian region, and the
mountain folk of those states saw little advantage in fighting to maintain an
institution that many mountaineer Virginians, North Carolinians, Tennesseans,
and Kentuckians viewed as decadent and repulsive.

     But, principles aside, northwestern Virginians had much to lose in a
violent civil conflict.  Northwestern Virginia was largely surrounded by Union
territory.  The Ohio River and its Virginia tributaries offered avenging Union
raiders direct access deep into western Virginia's heartland.  Many
northwestern Virginians calculated no profit in following eastern Virginia
into a secession that might finally level cities and towns like Wheeling,
Clarksburg, and even Charleston.

     Therefore, for a variety of reasons, Virginia's secession from the Union
was almost immediately followed by a countermovement in the northwest to keep
part of Virginia loyal to the Washington government.  That pro-Union effort
was applauded by the Lincoln administration.  Had all of Virginia gone into
the Confederacy, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad would have been severed, and
Washington would have been cut off from direct rail access to the Midwest and
the western states.

     Throughout the rest of 1861 and all of 1862, then, western Virginians
took a series of steps unique in American history.  Historians and
constitutional lawyers still debate the legality of those steps; however,
Union victory on the battlefield lent those actions de facto validity, and the
Senate and House gave them a certain dejure integrity.

     First, a restored government of Virginia was organized in Wheeling under
the governorship of Francis Pierpont of Fairmont.  The Pierpont government
claimed jurisdiction over the whole state of Virginia - a position consistent
with Lincoln's own philosophy that the seceding states never did or could
really leave the Union, in spite of actions of various secession conventions.

     In quick succession, the Unionist rump of the Virginia general assembly,
including delegates from northern Virginia, met in Wheeling and constituted
itself the restored general assembly.  The general assembly then chose two
leading northwestern Virginia political figures to represent Virginia in the
United States Senate - Waitman T. Willey of Morgantown to replace James M.
Mason, and John S. Carlile of Clarksburg to supplant R. M. T. Hunter.

     On the surface, then, by the summer of 1861, loyal unionist Virginians
had reversed the actions of the Richmond Convention.  Likewise, then, on the
surface, Virginia never left the Union.  Practically, however, eastern
Virginia became the legal, economic, and political center of the new
Confederacy.  Likewise, practically, the stage was set for splitting the Old
Dominion in two - a tear guaranteed by the influx of Union forces into the
northwest, and a slash that was never mended.

     With the restored government of Virginia in place, ardent northwestern
Virginians launched the decisive effort to form a new state in trans-Allegheny
Virginia - an effort that could not have succeeded in isolation from the
extraordinary events between 1861 and 1865.  In the spring of 1862, Governor
Pierpont endorsed the West Virginia statehood movement.  The United States
Constitution provides that no state shall be formed or created within the
jurisdiction of any other state without the specific consent of that state's
legislature.  Under that rubric, on May 14, 1862, Governor Pierpont obtained
permission from the restored general assembly for West Virginia to be formed.

     The initiative now shifted to Washington.  On May 29, Senator Willey,
acting for the Virginia general assembly, presented West Virginia's
application for statehood to the United States Senate.  In a
characteristically thorough speech, Senator Willey outlined the case for West
Virginia's statehood.  The West Virginia statehood bill, however, faced an
uneasy future.

     The first problems became apparent on June 23, 1862, when Senator
Benjamin Wade of Ohio - "Bluff Ben" Wade to his friends - chairman of the
Senate Committee on Territories, presented the West Virginia bill on the
Senate floor.  Senator John Carlile was a member of Senator Wade's committee.
Carlile had long been an active Virginia politician.  He had served in the
Virginia general assembly and in the United States House of Representatives.
In the 1861 Richmond Secession Convention, Carlile had been a leading opponent
of Virginia's secession.  As a strong unionist, Carlile had also taken an
early lead in the West Virginia statehood movement.  As a senator from
Virginia, however, Carlile apparently became aware of new political realities.
In the Committee on Territories, Carlile added amendments to the West Virginia
bill to place the border of the new state on the crest of the Blue Ridge
Mountains, to require that a new constitutional convention be called in West
Virginia, and to provide that slaves be gradually emancipated in western
Virginia.  All or any of those measures would have spelled a slow death for
the statehood movement in western Virginia in the summer of 1862.  And to
enlarge the West Virginia bill's problems, Senator Charles Sumner of
Massachusetts, the Senate's archabolitionist, offered an amendment to admit
West Virginia only as a free state.

     Fortunately for West Virginia statehood, the Senate rejected both the
Carlile and Sumner amendments and supported West Virginia statehood by a vote
of 23 to 17.  Though the House of Representatives wrestle'd long with the
peculiar constitutional questions raised by West Virginia's statehood, it,
too, agreed to the new state's admission to the Union by the end of 1862.

     But that did not satisfy all the problems.  The admission of West
Virginia to the Union posed a prickly dilemma for President Lincoln.  Lincoln
fully sympathized with the northwestern Virginians; however, he wanted to use
the Virginia restored government of Francis Pierpont as a model for the future
merger of the rebellious states into normal relations with the federal Union.
The amputation of better than a third of Virginia's territory would jeopardize
Lincoln's reconstruction plans.  However, after listening to the pro-statehood
arguments of cabinet members William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, and Gideon
Welles, President Lincoln signed the West Virginia statehood bill on December
31, 1862.  In his final defense of that signing, Lincoln said:

It is said the admission of West Virginia is secession, and tolerated only
because it is our secession.  Well, if we can call it by that name, there is
still difference between secession against the Constitution, and secession in
favor of the Constitution.

     Against that background, West Virginia officially became the thirty-fifth
state in the Union on June 20, 1863.

     Now a full-fledged state, West Virginia almost immediately turned to
selecting its own first two senators.  Waitman T. Willey of Morgantown had
acquitted himself well and honorably in the United States Senate as a restored
senator from Virginia.  He had shepherded the West Virginia bill to its Senate
victory and had offered the Willey amendment to satisfy Radical Republican
concerns - a measure that initiated slave emancipation in the new state.
Willey's performance in behalf of unionist Virginia would have been sufficient
to warrant the new West Virginia legislature's choice of Willey on August 4,
1863, as one of West Virginia's first two senators.

     But Senator Willey's renown was based on more than just his temporary
service as a Virginia senator.  Willey was a native of northwestern Virginia -
a successful, self-made public citizen known throughout the state.  He had
been born in a twenty-foot-square log cabin near Fairmont, Virginia, in 1811.
In that era, life in the western Virginia hills was severe - as it still is,
to a considerable degree - and most people survived only through hard struggle
and exertion, determination and tenacity, faith and physical strength.  Like
most of his contemporaries, Willey's childhood and youth were spent largely in
dawn-to-dusk farm labor.  In fact, in his first seventeen years, young Waitman
received barely eleven months of cumulative formal schooling.

     But two months of that schooling, under a strolling teacher from
Philadelphia, opened Willey's eyes to the intoxication of knowledge.  He read
and reread the Iliad and Pilgrim's Progress and mastered Pike's Arithmetic -
the only volumes in the Willey family home besides the Bible, another book of
which young Waitman was at least a scholar, if not a master.  But his two
months with the Philadelphia teacher lit an intellectual fire in Willey's mind
that burned for the rest of his life.

     Not surprisingly, then, on Christmas Day 1827, Willey left his father's
farm to go to a small college in western Pennsylvania.  There, in just two
years, Willey became proficient in Latin and Greek, developed an excellent
skill in written and spoken English, laid a good mathematics foundation,
taught some classes part-time, and graduated at the head of his class at the
age of nineteen.  After spending three more years working on his father's
acres, Willey read law with prominent lawyers in Brooke County, Virginia.
Brooke County is in the northern panhandle of West Virginia.  Viewing the
state from the tip of the northern panhandle, it is the second county going
south.

     In 1833, he was admitted to the bar and began practicing law in
Morgantown, Virginia, his place of residence for nearly the next seventy
years.  Even today, Senator Willey's former home is one of Morgantown's most
famous and treasured showplaces - an ante-bellum house that has been carefully
maintained by Mr. and Mrs. Richard Raese.  It is a beautiful home, and I would
suggest that anyone going to Morgantown certainly should stop and see former
U.S. Senator Willey's home.  I am sure that any traveler will be warmly
welcomed by the present owners, Richard and Harriet Raese.

     From Morgantown, Willey made his influence felt in many directions.
Among other interests, Willey was an ardent and dedicated Methodist layman.
In his mature years, he addressed national meetings of the Methodist Episcopal
Church on numerous occasions.  His first love, however, was the children's
Sunday school class that he taught for many years in his Morgantown home
church. During the war years in Washington, when once asked if he made any
contributions to the war effort in Morgantown, Senator Willey answered that,
in fact, he did - that he was in charge of the light infantry - a veiled and
mischievous reference to his young Sunday school charges.

     But Willey's greatest marks were first made in Virginia Whig circles.
Willey was a Virginia elector in the 1840 Harrison-Tyler Whig presidential
victory.  As a Whig, he was elected clerk of both the county and circuit
courts of law and chancery for Monongalia County, Virginia - positions that he
held continually between 1841 and 1852.  It is the county in which West
Virginia University is now located.  But it is now West Virginia, not
Virginia.

     Unsuccessfully, Willey ran as a Whig nominee for Congress in 1852 and
for lieutenant governor of Virginia in 1859.  As a prominent Whig, he was a
delegate to the 1860 Baltimore Constitutional Union Convention that nominated
John Bell for the presidency.  In addition, in 1850, Willey had been a
delegate to the Virginia Constitutional Convention and was a natural
representative to the 1861 Richmond secession convention.

     Willey went to the Richmond convention a committed unionist and remained
so; but he had no illusions about the precariousness of Virginia's ties to the
Union or about the probable outcome of a Virginia secession effort.  In the
general southern uproar that followed Abraham Lincoln's election to the
presidency, Willey wrote:

I am for Virginia as she is and was, as our fathers created her - one and
indivisible.  I have deprecated recent manifestations of a desire for her
dismemberment.  Let her be integral forever.  But if we are to be dragged into
secession or disunion; to be made a mere outside appendage to a Southern
Confederacy, defenceless and exposed as we must be, by our geographical
position, to all the wrong and contumely that may be heaped upon us, our
oppression may become intolerable; and I for one will be ready to accept the
only alternative.

     During the Richmond Secession Convention, Willey was a vocal and visible
advocate of unionism.  As such, Willey's life was again and again threatened
by fanatical secessionists on the streets of Richmond and even at the doors of
the state capitol.  But Willey stood by his convictions.  After the convention
voted to secede, Willey returned home to ponder the ramifications of secession
for Virginia's future.

     In subsequent months of unionist counterrevolution and the growing West
Virginia statehood movement, Waitman T. Willey showed exemplary statesmanship.
He was never demagogic or rash - never waving the "bloody shirt," so to speak
- either in his words or his actions.  Willey's calm and reserve sometimes
enraged fanatical unionists, but those qualities were characteristic of
Senator Willey.  He was foremost a brilliant and able lawyer.  He thought
judiciously and judicially.  Though he soon became a Republican - even a
Radical Republican - he remained essentially a Whig.  Like his traditional
Whig compatriot across the Blue Ridge Mountains to the east, John Minor Botts
- a Virginia unionist who spent the war under Confederate house arrest to
later help forge Virginia's Republican party - Willey was devoted to the
Union, but he was at heart a conservative committed to elemental and lasting
principles - a characteristic that made him suspicious of mobocracy and untidy
political thinking, either in Richmond, Wheeling, or Washington.  That the
West Virginia statehood movement succeeded was a tribute, in no small measure,
to Waitman T. Willey's legal values, high personal ethics, and meticulous
efforts.

     After the 1863 senatorial election in the West Virginia legislature, the
United States Senate designated Senator Willey, by lot, to serve the shorter
of the two Senate terms.  Because he served so well, he was reelected for a
full six-year term in 1865.  Since the war was resolving into a crushing Union
victory, Willey and his Senate colleagues may have expected Senate business to
become less dramatic and volatile.

     President Lincoln's assassination and Andrew Johnson's temperament, on
the one hand, and the determination of Representative Thaddeus Stevens of
Pennsylvania, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, and the Radical
Republicans, on the other, made unrealistic any hopes for a quick return to
normal congressional routine, however.  In the turmoil following the Lincoln
murder, Senator Willey met with Andrew Johnson to fathom the new president's
sentiments on West Virginia's continuing status.  Initially, Willey was
satisfied with President Johnson's reassurances.  Johnson and Willey had
similar positions as Senate colleagues during the war, and Senator Willey had
strongly supported Johnson - a Democrat - for the vice-presidency.  Senator
Willey had confidence in Johnson's ability to finish the work that President
Lincoln had begun.

     However, as Johnson came into greater conflict with the Radical
Republicans, he became increasingly intemperate in his remarks and his
actions.  He even branded Representative Thaddeus Stevens, Senator Charles
Sumner, and abolitionist Wendell Phillips as traitors.  More and more,
President Johnson alarmed ardent unionists, many of whom began doubting
Johnson's own loyalty to the federal government.

     In that light, Senator Willey, too, became anxious about President
Johnson's resolve in consolidating the Union victory and in maintaining West
Virginia's statehood.  In addition, Willey's own Methodist Episcopal Church
was fervently Radical Republican.  As a result, Senator Willey usually voted
for the Radical Republican program in the Senate, convinced of the Radicals'
commitment to smothering the last sparks of rebellion in the Confederacy and
to ensuring West Virginia's independence in the Union.

     Nevertheless, Senator Willey's position in the Johnson impeachment trial
remains mysterious and ambiguous.  Willey early infuriated many of his Radical
colleagues, his Methodist brethren, and concerned unionist West Virginians
alike by insisting that the Johnson trial should be a legal proceeding, not a
political inquisition.  Senator John B. Henderson of Missouri maintained in
later years that Willey was, at heart, against voting Johnson guilty.  The
general conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church must have been of that
same impression.  During their 1868 Chicago meeting, the Methodists pointedly
called an hour-long special prayer meeting to invoke divine guidance on the
Senate's decision, an action that the press and most senators took as a direct
effort to force Waitman T. Willey to vote Andrew Johnson guilty.

     But, up to the moment of the vote, no one knew exactly where Senator
Willey really stood on the Johnson verdict.  He said little or nothing
publicly to betray his position and left nothing in his papers or journals to
suggest his thought processes on the subject of the Johnson impeachment.  In
the end, Willey voted Johnson guilty, but that was after his West Virginia
colleague, Peter Van Winkle, had already helped clinch the final decision by
voting for Johnson's acquittal.  In spite of his recorded vote, however,
Senator Willey went to his grave never clarifying where he really stood on the
Andrew Johnson issue.

     As the 1870 Senate election neared, Senator Willey realized that the
reenfranchised former Confederates in West Virginia were making a strong
political comeback.  Though Willey campaigned vigorously for the West Virginia
Republican ticket, 1870 was a political watershed year in West Virginia.
Democrats won the governorship and the legislature and held onto their
dominance for nearly a quarter century.  Senator Willey was not reelected to
the Senate.  In March 1871, he resumed his Morgantown law practice.  "Full of
years," he knew that his elected career had ended.  He continued active in
West Virginia and national Republican affairs, and was treated at home as an
honored elder statesman.  In 1900, Senator Willey died at the age of
eighty-nine.  Thus ended a life and career characterized by wisdom, maturity,
duty, foresight, patriotism, faith, and old school honor - a life and career
that won for Waitman T. Willey the respect of his Senate colleagues and his
West Virginia neighbors alike.

[See West Virginia's First Senator: West Virginia Senator Waitman T. Willey
helped achieve emancipation in the new state.]

     But Waitman T. Willey was only one senator elected by the West Virginia
legislature in August 1863.  Willey was a logical and natural choice for the
legislators to make.  But Senator John Carlile's performance as a "restored
senator" had alienated many northwestern Virginians and had puzzled even his
strongest admirers.  Carlile was clearly unpopular with the new West
Virginians, and, though he continued to represent the Pierpont restored
government of Virginia for nearly two more years, the West Virginia
legislature had no intention of asking the Clarksburg resident to become the
other senator from West Virginia.

     Instead, Peter G. Van Winkle of Parkersburg was elected to serve the
first full term as senator from West Virginia.  Van Winkle was a native of New
York City.  As a young man, he had moved to Parkersburg, Virginia, where he
studied law and was admitted to the bar.  Van Winkle took an active part in
town politics, and eventually served as Parkersburg's mayor.  His primary
vocation, however, was as a railroad executive, and he was, for a number of
years, an attorney and lobbyist for the Baltimore and Ohio line.

     Van Winkle had been a delegate to the Virginia Constitutional Convention
of 1850-1851, but he played only a minor role in its debates.  In the 1861
western Virginia unionist and West Virginia statehood movements, however, Van
Winkle jumped into prominence.  He was elected to the new West Virginia house
of delegates in 1863, and his colleagues decided that he would make a good
United States senator, as well.

     Van Winkle's Senate career is, in many ways, more interesting than
Willey's.  Though constitutionally and philosophically a moderate or
conservative, Willey moved easily and cooperatively with Washington's Radical
Republican establishment.  Van Winkle, however, was later suspected by some of
having latent Democratic leanings, for he steered an independent,
unpredictable, and, by a few interpretations, a sometimes pro-Confederate
course.  Though Van Winkle voted for the Thirteenth and Fifteenth amendments,
for instance, he opposed the Fourteenth Amendment - to the anger of the
Stevens-Sumner axis.  Van Winkle did not favor slavery, but neither did he
believe that the newly freed slaves were capable of exercising responsible
citizenship.  Ingenuous and candid, Van Winkle seldom violated his own ideals
or hesitated to explain why he voted as he did.

     But Senator Van Winkle is best remembered for his stands on two other
controversial issues:  the inclusion of Berkeley and Jefferson counties in
West Virginia, and his own vote in the Johnson impeachment trial.  Several
Virginia counties had been netted into the new state against the wishes of
their inhabitants.  Most of those counties lay in far southeastern and
southern West Virginia.  Those counties had among the largest slave
populations in the new state; had long associations with Richmond and eastern
Virginia; had, in most instances, strong secessionist tendencies; and had
supplied the Confederate army with a sizeable number of troops.  The primary
reason for including those counties in West Virginia, against their will, was
to give the Union a defensible boundary along the tops of the Allegheny
Mountains.

     But Berkeley and Jefferson counties lay at the foot of the Great Valley
of Virginia, between the Alleghenies and the Blue Ridge.  Both counties were
integral participants in ante-bellum Virginia social and economic life.
Martinsburg was the native home of the notorious Confederate spy Belle Boyd,
and Charles Town had been the scene of the execution of John Brown, to the
general satisfaction and approval of the local population.  Berkeley and
Jefferson counties were strongly pro-secessionist and pro-Confederate.

     However, the main trunk of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad ran through
those two counties as well.  Van Winkle was a patriotic unionist and strong
new-state advocate.  But Van Winkle was also a Baltimore and Ohio Railroad
employee.  He was determined to keep the B&O line entirely within West
Virginia and Maryland on its way to the District of Columbia.  Largely through
Van Winkle's steady insistence in the Senate and in West Virginia, Berkeley
and Jefferson counties were incorporated into the new state and remained so
even after war's end.

     In the Johnson impeachment proceedings, Van Winkle was one of the more
dramatic players.  Edmund G. Ross of Kansas has been singled out by some as a
paradigm of political courage for his articulate stand and his acquittal vote.
Certainly, Ross and the other six of his nominal Republican colleagues who
voted against finding Johnson guilty were flirting with political ruin.  But
several of those Republican senators switched to Democratic ranks in future
political contests and some enjoyed success in their new roles.  Ross himself
was a Kansas delegate to the 1876 Democratic National Convention, was the.
1880 Democratic candidate for governor of Kansas, and was appointed by
Democratic President Grover Cleveland as territorial governor of New Mexico in
1885 - hardly a career in oblivion.  Republican Senators Lyman Trumbull of
Illinois and Joseph Fowler of Tennessee metamorphosed as Democrats.

     But Van Winkle neither sought nor enjoyed any future political career
after his vote in the Johnson controversy.  In voting to acquit Johnson, Van
Winkle knew that he was standing directly against the tide of West Virginia
unionist sentiment.  In February 1868, the West Virginia legislature had
overwhelmingly called for Johnson's impeachment.  In 1868, the West Virginia
Democratic party was in near-mortal collapse.  Van Winkle's vote left him no
political backdoor through which to escape, courted no favor in his home
state, and won for him a subsequent 18 to 3 condemnation vote from the West
Virginia state senate.  So, Mr. Ross was not the only profile in courage of
that momentous occasion.  Van Winkle unquestionably guaranteed his own
political extinction by his vote.

     However, Van Winkle claimed no plaudits for himself in his vote on the
Johnson verdict.  His independent action was characteristic of the rest of his
one-term Senate career.  As he explained, as a lawyer, he could find no
illegalities in Johnson's actions, injudicious as those actions might have
been.  Further, Van Winkle may have believed that the continued wrangling
between Congress and the White House was injuring America's vital recovery
from one of the most devastating and wasteful wars in human history up to that
time.  He probably realized that he would never hold political office again in
West Virginia if he flew so directly in the face of his constituency.
Nevertheless, Van Winkle voted his reason and his conscience and helped
guarantee the final blow to the campaign to remove Andrew Johnson from the
presidency.  That subsequent popular opinion on the Johnson impeachment
scandal has largely reversed the judgments of 1868 is no consolation to those
who had to make the unpopular choice that year.  Largely without further
acclaim or applause, Van Winkle served out the rest of his Senate tenure and,
in failing health, retired to Parkersburg in 1869, where he died three years
later.

[See As Honest as Stubborn: Peter G. Van Winkle, mayor of Parkersburg, became
West Virginia's first full-term senator.]

     So, in this way, we shall close the opening chapter of West Virginia's
history in the Union - a chapter to which Waitman T. Willey and Peter G. Van
Winkle brought integrity and skill.  Never before or since has a state entered
the Union under such tumultuous and uncertain circumstances.  At the very
moments that Congress was debating West Virginia's statehood petition, federal
and Confederate troops and guerrillas were shooting at one another to decide
West Virginia's destiny in bloody contests far away in the mountains and far
from Capitol Hill.  But, once Congress made its decision, the efforts of
Senators Willey and Van Winkle helped guarantee West Virginia's place among
her sister states.  And, to this day, West Virginians owe Senator Willey and
Senator Van Winkle gratitude and respect for the ways and manner in which they
introduced the Mountain State into the ranks of the Union.

     I would say but one other thing in closing, and that is, I am sorry that,
even today, 230 million Americans do not all know that West Virginia is a
separate state.  They often speak of West Virginia as the western part of
Virginia.  I think more and more, however, they are realizing that Richmond is
not the capital of West Virginia, but that Charleston is.  West Virginia is a
state in its own right.  We who are West Virginians cannot help but feel some
surge of frustration and anger when people continue, even yet, to refer to
Richmond as the capital of West Virginia and to West Virginia as the western
part of Virginia.  In saying this, I cast no aspersions on the great state of
Virginia.  Virginia has been called the mother of presidents.  My wife is a
former Virginian.  But, West Virginia is no longer a part of Virginia.

     Quite often people say to me, "I have been down in your country.  I was
over at Richmond and I have visited your apple orchards."  Well, I have to
tell them that I am not the owner of the apple orchards; they are owned by the
Byrds of Virginia.  While I would be proud to claim kinship with the great
Byrd family of Virginia, I am unable to do so.

     West Virginians are proud of their heritage.  Appropriately, the state's
motto is "Mountaineers are always free."

     I suppose that if those more than a million mountains were leveled flat,
the state would reach all the way to Texas.  In any event, its boundaries
extend farther north than Pittsburgh, farther south than Richmond - the
capital of the Confederacy - as far east as Buffalo, New York, and as far west
as Columbus, Ohio.  It is the most southern of the northern and the most
northern of the southern; the most eastern of the western and the most western
of the eastern.  It is where the East says good morning to the West, and where
Yankee Doodle and Dixie kiss each other good night!  It is the state that is
"wild and wonderful" and "almost heaven," with its beautiful hills and its
law-abiding, God-fearing, and patriotic people.