The Rending of Virginia: A History

When Virginia seceded from the Union in 1861, its western residents were outraged and formed a separate state two years later, introducing political upheaval into already tumultuous times. Men like Granville Davisson Hall sought to throw off the shackles of a slaveholding aristocracy and to revitalize their region’s economy in the process. Hall's account of those events, which first appeared when the birth of West Virginia was still a living memory, takes modern readers back to those turbulen…