We discussed in another thread whether sovereignty is dependent on recognition, and the fact that the United States waged war for something like two or three years after the Declaration before attracting anything like diplomatic recognition and, what was more valuable, French help.
The Confederacy was in the same status diplomatically, but with this crucial difference: the Confederate States had their grants of sovereignty from George III and, in the case of the States admitted later, the United States (Texas, as usual, was different: she won her sovereignty at San Jacinto, and her international recognition afterward). All the States admitted to the Union after 1791 got sovereignty from the United States (except for Texas and maybe Hawaii), but by the writ of Article IV it was the same sovereignty that the original thirteen had won on the battlefield at Yorktown and on the table in Paris.
It was this original sovereignty, its powers resumed, that the Southern States took with them as their patrimony, out of the Union.
If the confederacy was a sovereign nation, as you claim, then what part of the confederate constitution did the people of western Virginia violate? What made them traitors?
They were traitors, those of them who bore arms in Union service, against their native State of Virginia. Their relationship to the Confederacy during the war would have been the same that they'd had to the Union before secession.
It was a little less than a year before France agreed to recognize the United States as a sovereign nation.
The Confederacy was in the same status diplomatically, but with this crucial difference: the Confederate States had their grants of sovereignty from George III and, in the case of the States admitted later, the United States (Texas, as usual, was different: she won her sovereignty at San Jacinto, and her international recognition afterward). All the States admitted to the Union after 1791 got sovereignty from the United States (except for Texas and maybe Hawaii), but by the writ of Article IV it was the same sovereignty that the original thirteen had won on the battlefield at Yorktown and on the table in Paris.
Your claim to recognition is the word of a foreign king long dead? Nonsense.
They were traitors, those of them who bore arms in Union service, against their native State of Virginia. Their relationship to the Confederacy during the war would have been the same that they'd had to the Union before secession.
But again, assuming that the confederacy was a sovereign nation as you claim, the people of western Virginia were no longer part of Virginia. They had seceded and joined the U.S. How can they be traitors to a state and country that they no longer were a part of? What part of the confederate constitution prevented that?