A Tale of Two States

When I first got to NYU, I was waiting in line to get my NYU ID Card. Also in line with me were a young man and a young woman chatting about where they were born. And I heard the young man say, “I was born in West Virginia or East Virginia. Whichever one of those is a state.”

I’m thinking, “You don’t know what state you were born in? You are an incoming freshman at a university, meaning you presumably made it through high school, and you don’t know whether or not the U.S. has a state called West Virginia or East Virginia?” I sometimes wonder what happened to that young man, if he made it through college, if he knows his address or if he lists it as being in North Connecticut or Old Hampshire or Rhode Isthmus.

I happen to know which of those two is a state. In fact, I happen to be in West Virginia right now. Today, Alrica and I visited Charles Town, WV (not to be confused with Charleston, WV. Unlike West Virginia and East Virginia, both of those exist.) Charles Town was founded by Charles Washington, younger brother of George Washington. And one of the sites we saw in Charles Town was the Jefferson County Courthouse.

The Jefferson County Courthouse

 

This courthouse has an interesting claim to fame. It is the only county courthouse in America which has been the site of two different treason trials against two different states. How is this possible?

Before the Revolutionary War, the colony of Virginia included both present day Virginia and present day West Virginia. When the Constitution was ratified, this entire area became the state of Virginia. At some point after this, the counties of Virginia in the Shenandoah River Valley and further west wanted to form their own state, to be separate from Virginia. They didn’t feel that Richmond represented their interests. But this was a non-starter. The U.S.Constitution didn’t allow new states to be formed from old states unless the old state said, sure, you can leave. And naturally Virginia wasn’t keen to let this northwest part go.

Enter John Brown. Brown was an avid abolitionist. He believed slavery was an offense against God. On the other hand, he was okay with murder if the people he were murdering were slavers or pro-slavery. Brown came to Harpers Ferry, Virginia with a plan. He gathered men together to complete his plan. And then one October night in 1859, he and his 21 men attacked the U.S. Armory in Harpers Ferry.

They captured the Armory, killed a couple people, freed slaves, and then abducted Armory employees when they arrived to work the next day. The townspeople didn’t take too kindly to this. They began firing on Brown and his raiders inside the Armory. Deaths ensue, but the townspeople managed to oust Brown from the main armory. He and some of his remaining raiders took refuge in an engine house.

The next day, a party of U.S. Marines arrived in Harpers Ferry. They raided the engine house. One marine was killed, but they prevailed. Brown was terribly wounded, but alive. And interestingly, who led that party of marines? General Robert E. Lee.

This leads to the first treason trial at the Jefferson County Courthouse. John Brown and his raiders were convicted of treason against Virginia and they were hanged. And yet, many Americans felt that Brown was right (not necessarily to kill people, but to rebel against a government that allows slavery.)

Of course you know what happens just a few years later: The Civil War. But this has an important implication for the people in the northwest counties of Virginia.

In 1861, Virginia held a Secession Convention and decided to secede from the Union. This was overwhelmingly popular in Virginia as a whole, but not as popular in the northwest part of the state. Lawmakers there held a convention in Wheeling. They stated that the Virginia Declaration of Rights said that any substantial change in the government of the state had to be approved by the people, not just the legislature. This was certainly a substantial change. So the Wheeling Convention said that the lawmakers of Virginia had broken Virginia Law by seceding without making sure it was the will of the people. So the people in Wheeling established the “Restored Government of Virginia”. They elected their own governor and other officers.

Now there were two different governments claiming to represent Virginia, one in Richmond which had seceded and one in Wheeling which said, “We do not secede!” The federal government chose to recognize the “Restored Government”. And one of the first acts of this restored government was to grant permission for the northwest counties to form their own state separate from Virginia.

Originally this new state was going to be named Kanawha, named for the Kanawha River. But there was already a county named Kanawha County. Many lawmakers were worried there would be confusion if there was a county in a state with the same name as the state. Besides, most people in this new state considered themselves Virginians by birth. So the name West Virginia was chosen instead. It became the first of two states to be admitted to the United States during the Civil War. (I bet my friends in Reno know what the other one was.)

What about the other treason trial? In 1921, a group of coal miners in West Virginia wanted to unionize. The coal mine owners didn’t want to allow them to do so. The owners hired strikebreakers and were also backed by law enforcement. The miners armed themselves and confronted the strikebreakers. The ensuing melee is called the Battle of Blair Mountain.

The Battle of Blair Mountain is the largest labor uprising in the history of the United States. It is also the largest armed uprising that has occurred in America since the Civil War. The miners had numbers, but the strikebreakers had better arms. Eventually the miners lost, but many people were killed in the process.

Though the fighting had occurred in southwestern West Virginia, the leaders of the labor movement were put on trial in northeastern West Virginia. Guess where? The Jefferson County Courthouse. It was another trial for treason, but this time it was treason against West Virginia. One of the miners’ leaders, Bill Blizzard was acquitted of the charge of treason. He was tried first as the state thought it had the best chance of convicting him.

In the end, one miner, Walter Allen, was convicted of treason and three other men were convicted of second-degree murder.

It’s an interesting distinction for a courthouse that didn’t move but still changed states. And unlike the young man at NYU, it knows which state it was born in and which state it is in now.