West Virginia is Unconstitutional!

For some time I have argued the illegitimacy of West Virginia. However, my argument’s overzealousness has outpaced my legal knowledge and amounted to little more than platitudes about the Civil War and Reconstruction; that is, until yesterday.

I was reading the Constitution (yes, I read the Constitution for pleasure, offer me a couple beers at a party and I might start quoting it) and came across Article IV, Section 3.

New states may be admitted by the Congress into this union; but no new states shall be formed or erected within the jurisdiction of any other state; nor any state be formed by the junction of two or more states, or parts of states, without the consent of the legislatures of the states concerned as well as of the Congress.

The “state’ we currently know as West Virginia came into being during the Civil War. A convention of the northwest counties met in the city of Wheeling and voted to secede from Virginia at about the same time Virginia voted to secede from the United States. However, Article IV, Section 3 guarantees states the right to consent to the formation of new states from within their jurisdiction. This right to consent is vested in the state legislature- not in the populous. The Wheeling convention held to secede from Virginia was not the Virginia General Assembly and, as such, held no authority to approve of the formation of a new state.

My argument is far from novel. During the debate to admit West Virginia, Senator Powell of Kentucky realized the illegitimacy of the secession convention. “No Senator could pretend to claim that even a 3d part of the people of Virginia ever had anything to do with rendering their assent to the making of this state within the territorial limits of the ancient commonwealth”

Another Kentuckian, Senator Davis, objected to West Virginia’s Senators.

I hold that there is, legally and constitutionally no such state in existence as the state of West Virginia and consequently no senators from such a state. My object is simply to raise a question to be put upon the record, and to have my name as a Senator recorded against the recognition of West Virginia as a state of the United States. I do not believe that the Old Dominion, like a polypus, can be separated into different segments, and each segment become a living constitutional organism in this node. The present state of West Virginia as it
has been organized, and as it is seeking representation on the floor of the Senate, is a flagrant violation of the Constitution.

This argument is buttressed by Article IV, Section 4 which reads, “the United States shall guarantee to every state in this union a republican form of government.” The secession of a portion of a state by unelected officials is a betrayal of Virginia’s republican form of government. Oddly enough, the Union would be adhering to Constitutional limitations by not recognizing pro-Union factions. On January 26, 1870, when Virginia rejoined the Union, she should have received back her lost counties in full.


The merging of West Virginia into her mother state poses a conundrum. Currently, the stars on our flag form a square. I am a fan of this shape as I, like the classical Greeks, believe symmetry to be a building block of beauty. Without West Virginia’s star, there will be a hole. The obvious solution is to send filibustering campaigns into Canada to create an additional state. I am in favor of Polk’s jingo of 54-40 or Fight. Thus, I suggest seizing British Columbia and admitting it to our most sacred Union as the State of Polk.