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Editor’s Note: This article is the second in a series on Francis H. Pierpont’s life, put forth by the Pierpont Statue Committee in an effort to raise awareness and promote donations to the statue fund in Wheeling.
By Dr. JOSEPH LAKER
For the News-Register
Following his admission to the bar in 1842, Frank Pierpont became a successful attorney and businessmen in Marion County, Va. From 1848, he worked as a legal counsel for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.
He also operated a small business selling coal, fire brick and leather goods and, in 1854, opened a coal mine. A strong advocate of free schools, he served as school commissioner of Marion County and helped found the Fairmont Male and Female Seminary (forerunner of Fairmont State University) and became chairman of its board of trustees.
On the day after Christmas in 1854, Frank married Julia Robertson, the youngest daughter of an abolitionist Protestant minister from Wisconsin. Julia had met Frank while working as a governess in the home of Judge Thomas Haymond, a neighbor and friend of the Pierpont family in Marion County. Their marriage took place in New York City and Julia tried hard to persuade Frank to move to that city, but he convinced her that his interests and destiny were tied to Virginia. Frank was 40 years old and Julia was 26 at the time of the wedding. They would eventually have four children: two daughters and two sons, but the eldest daughter died at age 4.
After graduating from college, Frank took an active interest in politics and began to give speeches, write letters to the press and participate in political campaigning in support of Whig party candidates. He generally supported the Whig party platforms that called for protective tariffs, a strong central banking system and federal financing of internal improvements such as roads, railroads and bridges. Occasionally, he broke ranks with the Whig establishment over issues such as support of the Mexican war and greatly expanding American territory at Mexico’s expense.
But, in the 1850s, two issues created divisions within Virginia that would lead to the breakup of the nation and the state. First, the future of slavery in America came into question because of the Abolitionist movement. Second, Virginians living west of the Alleghenies continued to believe that they paid more taxes and received fewer benefits from the government of Virginia than those who lived east of the mountains.
By the mid-1850s, Frank had emerged as one of the chief spokesmen of the opposition to the Democrat administration in Richmond, Virginia’s capital. He had established a reputation as a conservative lawyer and businessman who spoke his mind on the great questions of the day.
While in college in the 1830s, he was not critical of slavery, but he resented abolitionists as Northerners who were trying to force Southerners to change their institutions, mores and culture. But, his experiences teaching in Mississippi, marrying into a family of strong abolitionists and his preference for a society based on free labor as opposed to slavery grew stronger with time.
His growing criticism of slavery dovetailed with his criticism of the eastern Virginian political establishment and its treatment of the northwestern Virginians. In his view, the eastern Virginians who ruled in Richmond were manifestations of an aggressive, insidious slave power that would seek to break apart the Union following Lincoln’s election.
During the 1860 election, Frank Pierpont still hoped that some compromise could be reached and the Union preserved. He threw his support to John Bell of the Consitutional Union Party. Although Bell did well enough to win in Virginia and two other states garnering 39 electoral votes, he came in last among the four candidates in popular vote. Abraham Lincoln of the Republican Party won 39 percent of the popular vote, but 180 electoral votes (55 percent) to win the presidency. In Virginia Lincoln got less that 2,000 of the 169,000 votes cast. Nonetheless, Frank accepted the results of the election, and denounced those who urged that the slave states secede from the nation.
Pierpont was not a delegate to the special convention called by Virginia’s Gov. Letcher to vote on whether Virginia should follow states like South Carolina and secede from the Union, but he followed the debates closely. Following the convention’s vote to pass a secession ordinance to be approved by a special vote of the people on May 23 to decide the issue, Pierpont spoke at numerous huge demonstration. He argued against secession and attended the early May 1861 anti-secession convention in Wheeling which called the Secession Ordinance “unconstitutional, null and void.”
He returned to Fairmont to vote against the ordinance on May 23, but was urged by friends to flee back to Wheeling before the vote. They had heard of a plot to kidnap Pierpont because of his opposition. When questioned in Wheeling about not voting, Pierpont replied, “The time for voting is past; the time for fighting has arrived.”
When the second Wheel-ing convention met after the secession ordinance had been approved, Pierpont’s speech laid out the strategy that northwestern Virginians loyal to the Union needed to follow.
He said, “Virginia belongs to the Union. The Government of the United States is pledged by the Constitution to guarantee each state a republican government to suppress insurrection and rebellion and to repel invasion when called upon by the legislature or the governor. The governor and all state officers now in office will join the ‘Southern Confederacy’…. When the convention assembles, let it pass an ordinance declaring that the governor and all the state officers who are in office have joined a foreign state, and have abdicated the state of Virginia. … Turn out all state and county officers who are disloyal, and appoint loyal men to fill their places. Get a Union army to occupy the Monongahela Valley and the Kanawha Valley to the Allegheny Mountains … When our state is organized and recognized in Washington then we can divide. That was my program.”
Pierpont’s fellow delegates at the Wheeling Convention were impressed and unanimously elected him to serve as the governor to fill out the rest of Gov. Letcher’s term of office and to head the new “loyal” Restored Government of Virginia.