I’ll ignore the pig-headed comment about the radical republicans. It is obvious that they cut corners and created a new state without participation of the rest of the state. There are still some who believe that West Virginia is a fraudulent state.
However flawed in execution the formation of W. Virginia was it stands as a fascinating “story within a story”. When Virginians voted for secession the vast majority of representatives from the western part of the state voted against seceding. The passage of the secession vote left them angry and alienated from their own state. There had always been stress between the east and the west and westerners thought this “the straw that broke the camel’s back”. West Virginians had no desire to leave the union and less desire to go to war against their neighbors.
Sound familiar?
The average westerner felt like they had no say in their destiny and had been abandoned by the insurrectionists. So they decided that, if the State of Virginia could quit the union then the western part of the state could quit Virginia.
The difference in circumstance and process was that Virginians created a process (secession) out of whole cloth. West Virginians applied to Congress for admission to the United States.
The story of how they decided on the new state boundary is complex. See: Link 2
The hypocrisy of your post is lost to you. Amazing.
I just discovered some interesting material in that first link I sent you in Post 487, the link to the map of the Virginia 1861 secession vote results. There are writeups in that web site that told me things I'd never realized before. For example, back then voting in Virginia and West Virginia was done by voice vote. There was no secret ballot. Secret balloting apparently didn't start in the US until about the 1880s, meaning that before that time, voters anywhere in the US could have been intimidated by those opposing them. That intimidation could have worked in favor of a political party or candidate or issue depending on the majority opinion where you lived.
Here is an excerpt from that map web site about disfranchisement in West Virginia:
Voting in Virginia in 1861 was by voice. This way of voting meant that your neighbors knew how you felt about issues and candidates, so in times of real controversy the only means one had to protect oneself against majority opinion or intimidation was not to vote at all. While historians have been very vocal themselves about intimidation in Virginia's vote on secession on May 23, 1861, they have been singularly silent on Wheeling's voting on statehood on October 24, 1861 and their other vote initiatives.
The Wheeling government routinely enforced a mandatory oath of allegiance. Then, as now, a mandatory oath did not sit well with a number of people. Not only did you have to swear allegiance to the United States, but included in that oath was an allegiance to the Wheeling government, which many Unionists, let alone secessionists, did not support. This oath in essence was designed to weed out any opposition to Wheeling. In a debate on the ballot or voice voting methods at the Constitutional Convention on Dec. 5, 1861, Chapman J. Stuart spoke in favor of voice, saying "Suppose, sir, we had cast our vote last May, on the ordinance of secession, by ballot; we never would have known who amongst us desired to break down and destroy our government. We could not point them out if it had not been for our mode of voting." Voice was the method used for the vote on statehood and all the Wheeling voting initiatives through 1863.
The prickly question of who would be able to vote in the new state came up quickly in the Constitutional Convention. On Dec 4, 1861, Mr. Brown of Kanawha said "When this Constitution will be in operation and a man is convicted of treason, then he is within the prohibition and must be excluded from the right of suffrage. But we will find the number to exclude will be almost legion." Under wartime conditions voting was easily controlled with military assistance, but at wars' end this would not be a real option.
When Union soldiers entered Ripley, Ravenswood and Belleville in Jackson County in June 1861, mass arrests occurred and oaths of loyalty extracted. The Ripley postmaster was replaced with a Wheeling appointee.(OR, Series 1, Vol. 2, pg. 214)
Refusal to take the oath could have serious consequences, arrest, fines and bonds, or even a long prison stay. Judge George W. Thompson of Wheeling was a Unionist who did not support the Wheeling regime and refused to take their oath of office and was removed. ...
In 1863 the National Intelligencer spoke of the lack of free speech in western Virginia. Sherrard Clemens, a prominent Unionist and former delegate to the Richmond Convention, where he voted against secession, stated to the Wheeling Press that he could not address the people on the new-state question because he was threated by violence, "force and riot", by Federal soldiers and "certain officials connected with the administration or convention at Wheeling..."(Ault, Wheeling, West Virginia, During the Civil War, pg. 10)
Let's assume that I accept the factual basis of your second paragraph. It may even sound familiar, especially today when our institutions have perfected the science of absolutely ignoring the public's priorities in favor of those of the interests.
Your problem lies in your last paragraph. Facts are stubborn things. Virginia seceded from the Union based upon the tradition embodied in Jefferson's Declaration of Independence as to the justification for dissolving the bonds tying Virginia to the Union as the original thirteen colonies had dissolved their bonds with Great Britain. In doing so, Virginia was further justified by the Tenth Amendment which, since the Constitution did not delegate to the United States any power to restrain or resist or prevent the voluntary exit of any state from the Union for whatever reason that state saw fit to use as its reason for secession and therefore that the right of secession was reserved to the states respectively. Finally, I believe that Virginia approved secession by an actual referendum of the voting public.
West Virginia OTOH did petition Congress to violate the Constitution by admitting West Virginia as a state without Virginia's permission. This situation depends on whether Virginia was still regarded as a state. Lincoln claimed that none of the eleven states of the Confederacy COULD leave the Union without the Union's permission, if at al. Therefore in his and Congress's view, Virginia was still a state and, by Article IV, section 4 had to agree to its partition to truncate its territory and create West Virginia out of the part lopped off.
If Virginia was no longer a state, then Lincoln had no business claiming any right to "suppress the insurrection there." If South Carolina and Louisiana were still states, he had no right to blockade Charleston or New Orleans harbors or the Mississippi River since a nation cannot blockade its own ports. If all eleven Confederate states were still states, why did they need to be "re-admitted" after the end of the War of Northern Aggression much less with conditions attached to "re-admission?"
I spent most of my life in Connecticut. All of New England was once heavily dominated by the Congregational church and its illegitimate cousin the Unitarian church. The leadership of the region was in the hands of snooty elitists of those churches who were as absolutely convinced of their own rectitude and of the need for their opinions to be crammed down the unwilling throats of the peasants as are today's trendy leftists (their social heirs). They were insufferable and they were the breeding ground of the abolitionist movement. If you doubt that they were truly radical, read their self-righteous screeds. Consider such lunatics as John Brown (born in Torrington, CT) who was in his time Charles Manson with a "moral" edge, slaughtering with machetes peaceful Southern farmers in Kansas in their own barns. Would you agree that John Brown was a radical? If not, what WAS a radical in those days?
Abolition of slavery was historically inevitable and always a desirable goal but the devil was in the details. In 1841 in his very last days in the White House, a thoroughly spent Andrew Jackson told Sam Houston, his youngest protege, that, if he lived to see proposals to divide the Union over the question of slavery, Houston must run for POTUS (he was then president of the Republic of Texas but Jackson assumed that Texas would join the Union) and, if victorious, declare war on all of Europe before allowing a civil war. Then slavery could be allowed to die a natural economic death and leave far less in the way of a permanent rupture of the American experiment.
Jackson was far wiser than Lincoln as might be expected of an ideological heir of Jefferson vs. an ideological heir of Hamilton and Clay. Slavery flourished for a long time throughout the Americas but the worst heritage was left by British, race-based, slavery which made no provision for the ultimate freedom of the slaves or their progeny or their integration into society. This is the heritage of American slavery left us by the Brits. The slavery practiced in Spanish and Portuguese possessions encouraged intermarriage and always conceded the humanity of the slaves and the importance of their salvation. Few Mexicans, for example, are pure blooded Indians. Fewer still are pure blooded Spaniards. They just don't care about such distinctions and the US has spent 150 years since Appomatox being obsessed with race.
600,000 combatants died to feed Lincoln's id and the ids of the abolitionist pecksniff warmongers.