The Shenandoah Valley’s Delegates to the 1861 Virginia Secession Convention

I realized that I should have included this with my earlier posts about the vote for secession in the Shenandoah Valley. This is a record of the vote from Virginia’s Secession Convention. Keep in mind that these votes were made on April 4 and April 17 respectively. The public vote on secession did not come [...]

Number of voters in the Shenandoah Valley, 1856-1861

The following table specifies the number of votes cast in the three elections from 1856-1860 and the referendum vote on secession in 1861. I’ll comment more on this later. However, with a quick glance at the difference between numbers of voters in 1860 and 1861, in most cases (Rockingham and Shenandoah counties being the exception) [...]

Southern Unionist Claims for the Shenandoah Valley

While the referendum vote on secession for the different counties of the Shenandoah Valley may reflect one thing (most especially to someone who doesn’t look beyond raw numbers), deeper probing into other numbers brings about a need to investigate even further. That said, the following is submitted for consideration in combination with my post from [...]

Referendum numbers on secession in the Shenandoah Valley

Considering I brought up the use of coercion in the referendum for secession in Virginia (and more specifically in Page County in the Shenandoah Valley) in yesterday’s post, I thought it might be interesting to ride with this topic a little more. Today, I’m laying out the raw numbers on the referendum for all of [...]

Coercion and the vote for secession

I can’t help but think of that scene in Gods & Generals when it came to the vote for secession in Rockbridge County, Virginia. Some may remember it, where the actor playing William Nelson Pendleton announced the vote and that there had been only one vote against secession in the county (after which, a person [...]