Seceding from Secession: The Civil War, Politics, and the Creation of West Virginia

Eric J. Wittenberg · Edmund A. Sargus, Jr. · Penny L. Barrick

Feb 2021 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by David Stifel

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6 hr 54 min

Unabridged

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About this audiobook

"West Virginia was the child of the storm," concluded early Mountaineer historian and Civil War veteran, Maj. Theodore F. Lang. The northwestern third of the Commonwealth of Virginia finally broke away in 1863 to form the Union's thirty-fifth state. In Seceding from Secession: The Civil War, Politics, and the Creation of West Virginia, authors Eric J. Wittenberg, Edmund A. Sargus, and Penny L. Barrick chronicle those events in an unprecedented study of the social, legal, military, and political factors that converged to bring about the birth of the West Virginia. President Abraham Lincoln, an astute lawyer in his own right, played a critical role in birthing the new state. The constitutionality of the mechanism by which the new state would be created concerned the president, and he polled every member of his entire cabinet before signing the bill. Seceding from Secession includes a detailed discussion of the 1871 US Supreme Court decision Virginia v. West Virginia, in which former Lincoln cabinet member Salmon Chase presided as chief justice over the court that decided the constitutionality of the momentous event.

About the author

Eric J. Wittenberg is an accomplished American Civil War cavalry historian and author. An attorney in Ohio, Wittenberg has authored over twenty-one books on various Civil War subjects, with particular focus on cavalry operations, as well as three dozen articles in popular magazines. Visit him at ericwittenberg.com.

Edmund A. Sargus, Jr., serves as a federal district judge in Columbus, Ohio, worked as the US Attorney heading federal prosecutions in the district from 1993 through 1996, and since 2005 has been an adjunct professor at the Moritz College of Law at the Ohio State University.

Penny L. Barrick is a senior lawyer with the US District Court for the Southern District of Ohio. She has a love of Civil War history and particularly its intersection with constitutional law.

Actor David Stifel entered the audiobook narration field in 2011, when he launched a long-term podcast of serializations of the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Today he is a multi-award-winning narrator with more than 125 titles to his credit.

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