Secession (Tindall, 1999)

Textbook
George Brown Tindall and David E. Shi, eds., America: A Narrative History, 5th ed. (2 vols., New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1999), 1: 726-727.
In the free states and the Confederate states, Lincoln’s proclamation reinforced the patriotic fervor of the day. In the upper South it brought dismay, and another wave of secession that swept four more states into the Confederacy. Many in those states abhorred both abolitionists and secessionists, but faced with a call for troops to suppress their sister states, decided to abandon the Union. Virginia acted first. Its convention passed an Ordinance of Secession on April 17. The Confederate Congress then chose Richmond as its new capital, and the government moved there in June.

Three other states followed Virginia in little over a month: Arkansas on May 6, Tennessee on May 7, and North Carolina on May 20. All four of the holdout states, especially Tennessee and Virginia, had areas (mainly in the mountains) where both slaves and secessionists were scarce and where Union support ran strong. In Tennessee the mountain counties would supply more volunteers to the Union than to the Confederate cause. Unionists in western Virginia, bolstered by a Federal army from Ohio under General George B. McClellen, contrived a loyal government of Virginia that formed a new state. In 1863 Congress admitted West Virginia to the Union with a constitution that provided for gradual emancipation of the few slaves there. &nbsp
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