Delegates from Virginia's northwestern counties, loyal to the Union and largely free of plantation slavery, had spent two years organizing a breakaway government. Congress admitted West Virginia as a separate state, the only state to form by seceding from a Confederate state, a peculiar wartime birth that reshaped the Appalachian political map permanently.
The mountainous counties of northwestern Virginia had little in common with the slaveholding tidewater elite who dominated Richmond politics. When Virginia voted to secede from the Union in 1861, delegates from these counties instead organized the "Restored Government of Virginia" in Wheeling, declaring the secession illegal and eventually petitioning to form their own state.
Lincoln faced a constitutional puzzle: the Constitution requires a state's consent before it can be divided, and Virginia certainly hadn't consented. The administration finessed this by recognizing the Wheeling government as the legitimate government of all Virginia, which then dutifully approved its own dismemberment. Critics called it a legal fiction; Lincoln called it a military necessity.
The new state entered as a free state, though it took until 1865 to fully abolish slavery within its borders. Its birth remains the only instance in American history of a state being created by seceding from a Confederate state during the Civil War itself.
Key people: Abraham Lincoln