Civil War
Virginia began a convention about secession on February 13, 1861 after six states seceded to form the Confederate States of America on February 4. Unionist members blocked secession but, on April 15 Lincoln called for troops from all states still in the Union in response to the firing on Fort Sumter. That meant Federal troops crossing Virginia on the way south to subdue South Carolina. On April 17, 1861 the convention voted to secede. The Confederacy rewarded the state by moving the national capital from Montgomery, Alabama to Richmond in late May—a decision that exposed the Confederate capital to unrelenting attacks and made Virginia a continuous battleground. Virginians ratified the articles of secession on May 23. The following day, the Union army moved into northern Virginia and captured Alexandria without a fight, and controlled it for the remainder of the war.
The first major battle of the Civil War occurred on July 21, 1861. Union forces attempted to take control of the railroad junction at Manassas, but the Confederate Army had moved its forces by train to meet the Union. The Confederates won the First Battle of Manassas (known as "Bull Run" in Northern naming convention). Both sides mobilized for war; the year went on without another major fight.
Men from all economic and social levels, both slaveholders and nonslaveholders, as well as former Unionists, enlisted in great numbers. The only areas that sent few or no men to fight for the Confederacy had few slaves, a high percentage of poor families, and a history of opposition to secession, were located on the border with the North, and were sometimes under Union control.
Read more about this topic: History Of Virginia
Famous quotes containing the words civil war, civil and/or war:
“The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“[Rutherford B. Hayes] was a patriotic citizen, a lover of the flag and of our free institutions, an industrious and conscientious civil officer, a soldier of dauntless courage, a loyal comrade and friend, a sympathetic and helpful neighbor, and the honored head of a happy Christian home. He has steadily grown in the public esteem, and the impartial historian will not fail to recognize the conscientiousness, the manliness, and the courage that so strongly characterized his whole public career.”
—Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901)
“What would you do in my position? Would you drop the war where it is? Or, would you prosecute it in future, with elderstalk squirts, charged with rose water?”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)