Wheeling Daily Intelligencer, June 18, 1861

We print to-day an excellent article from the Parkersburg Gazette. The Gazette sees in the present crisis of our State and national affairs the golden opportunity of Western Virginia to rid herself of the decayed and burdensome partnership of Eastern Virginia, and thinks that instead of attempting a reconstruction of the whole State, we should go to work and lay the boundaries of New Virginia, and become a State to ourselves. We confess to a strong sympathy with the proposition of the Gazette. Our readers know how long and earnestly we have pressed the necessity of this division, and now when it seems almost within our realization we can hardly acquiesce in any of the proposed substitutes for an immediate division. But, notwithstanding this predilection which we entertain in favor of the Gazette's views, we, at this time, have made up our minds to forego it, and to choose rather the plan of a reconstruction of the whole State government. We make this choice from the necessity of the case as much as anything else, for if we were left free to have our way of it we would say, let us cut loose from Eastern Virginia just so soon as our Legislature can be assembled and the consent of Congress be obtained. But there is too much that is impracticable at this time about this course. The difficulty in ascertaining who is with us and who is against us among the counties in the valley is alone an obstacle of an almost insurmountable kind. We should desire to see the whole Valley of the State with us. Likewise we should desire to see the South Western portion with us. At present many of the counties of these sections are overrun by the secession soldiery and they are in no condition for a canvass of the question of a new State. But this view of the matter presents only one obstacle. Another is that it is undoubtedly the wish and the determination of the Government to restore every State back into the Union just as it went out, and it may well be considered doubtful whether, under the circumstances, we could obtain the necessary assent of Congress until first the whole State had been brought back into the Union. This is a difficulty scarcely inferior to the other one we have mentioned.

But there is this to be said of the Gazette's views—(the same that was said of Mr. Dorsey's resolutions)—that there is danger in passing by the present opportunity. In connection with the Southwestern section of the State, Eastern Virginia has always ruled us. And when we are returned again to the Union, she will, no doubt, attempt to resume her old sway over us.—It therefore becomes the Convention now sitting in our city, to so shape their action in the labors which are before them, so that the question of a future division, and a not distant future either, shall be kept pre-em[i]nently in view. The people of Western Virginia will never, and ought never to be satisfied with anything short of a division of the State; and that division should be put in train at once by this Convention, so that it may be secured at the earliest possible moment. We submit then, to our friends of the Gazette, if this programme will not answer the end which it has in view. We trust it will; and that we shall have no diversity of sentiment or advocacy among us on a mere question of time. The Convention, without probably a single exception, are in favor of a division of the State. Their difficulties are those which we have presented, so far as we understand them. Let us meet those difficulties now in the only way in which we can meet them. And in the meantime, however, let Mr. Dorsey, and other gentlemen of the Convention favorable to an immediate division, so arrange the action of the Convention, as it will inevitably and speedily secure such division when the rebellion in Eastern Virginia is put down.