[256] of the reorganized government of Virginia, above mentioned, issued his proclamation calling for an election of members and the assembling of an extra session of the so-called legislature. This body assembled on May 6, 1862, and, adopting the new Federal process of assumption, it assumed to be the legislature of the state of Virginia. This body, or legislature, immediately passed an act giving its consent to the formation of a new state out of the territory of Virginia. The formal act of consent and the draft of the new constitution of West Virginia above mentioned were ordered by this so-called legislature to be sent to the Congress of the United States, then in session, with the request that ‘the said new State be admitted into the Union.’ On December 31, 1862, the President of the United States approved an act of Congress entitled ‘An act for the admission of the State of West Virginia into the Union,’ etc. The act recited as follows:
Whereas, The Legislature of Virginia, by an act passed May 13, 1862, did give its consent to the formation of a new State within the jurisdiction of the said State of Virginia, to be known by the name of West Virginia . . .Again it recites:
And whereas both the Convention and the Legislature aforesaid have requested that the new State should be admitted into the Union, and the Constitution aforesaid being republican in form, Congress doth hereby consent that the said fortyeight counties may be formed into a separate and independent State.It were well to pause for a moment and consider these proceedings in the light of fundamental republican principles. The state of Virginia was not a confederation, but a republic, or nation. Its government was instituted with the consent of the governed, and its powers, therefore, were ‘just powers.’ When the state convention at Richmond passed an ordinance of secession, which was subsequently ratified by sixty thousand majority, it was as valid an act for the people of Virginia as was ever passed by a representative body. The legally expressed decision of the majority was the true voice of the state. When, therefore, disorderly persons in the northwestern counties of the state assembled and declared the ordinance of secession ‘to be null and void,’ they rose up against the authority of the state. When they proceeded to elect delegates to a convention to resist the act of the state, and that convention assembled and organized and proceeded to action, an insurrection against the government of Virginia was begun. When the convention next declared the state offices to be vacant, and proceeded to fill them by the choice of Francis H. Pierpont for governor, and other state officers, assuming itself to be the true state convention of Virginia, it not only declared what notoriously did not exist, but it committed an act of
