"Virginia’s New Secession Crisis" Topic

"The American story is a story of secession, or better still secessions. The first permanent settlements of Europeans in North America were the result of a series of secessions from primarily the British Isles. Religious motive, political persecution, economic distress all play their part in impelling movement from the homeland into a new world, and it does so with a mix and jumble of motives. Assorted adventurers from a variety of classes will make up the first exploratory wave of settlement to North America, the losers follow. Puritans and Catholics on the losing end of Great Britain's religious conflicts, distressed Cavaliers who find the religious and political tables turned upon them during the Puritan ascendancy, Quakers who seemed puzzled that their penchant for flaunting social and political norms is not well received by the rest of British society, Africans of various classes who had the triple misfortune of being on the losing side of West African wars of expansion, enslaved, and then sold to European slave traders, and the Scots-Irish who have had enough of Anglican political and religious repression. Subsequent waves of migration are made up of similar groups of people who find themselves on the losing end of things and leave for America.

The two great central events of American history were secession movements. The American War of Independence was in its totality both a conservative and radical event. Conservative in that the patriots were protesting British political innovations that undercut decades of American local governance, radical in that once the revolution genie escapes the bottle, he is loath to go back. The American War for Independence is thus transformed by modern ideologues into a revolution, in the radical sense of the word, meaning an attempt to effect regime change. As a result of these differing perspectives, we continue to fight over the meaning of the American War for Independence to this day. As for the late unpleasantness, there can be no doubt that the war was about secession. As to what sparked secession is a tougher nut to crack. In our day, the consensus has settled upon slavery. At the risk of engaging in what the social critic James Kunstler calls historical obfuscation, it is not so cut and dried to assume that the war, or merely secession, was only and abstractly about slavery. To be sure, there was a white-hot argument about slavery in the territories and slavery in general between Northerners and Southerners and among Northerners and Southerners at the time. In the debates over slavery various positions and stances on the subject emerged, it was not merely a case of a solid block of proslavery partisans versus antislavery partisans each with their own monolithic and static positions on the subject. And there are those pesky questions. If having slavery in the territories was so crucial to Southern slaveholders, why were so few moving into Kansas or Nebraska? If the maintenance of slavery was such a defining issue for Southerners, why did Southern politicians reject the Corwin Amendment, which President Abraham Lincoln supported, that would guarantee the constitutionality of slave labor in those states where it existed? These are the sorts of troublesome questions that need careful research to answer; such questions as these (and there are more) also challenge the confirmation of current biases of many regarding the secession and the late unpleasantness…"
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Amicalement
Armand

Yes, unity versus diversity. Federalism is the answer, but far from a perfect one.

This article isn't about Virginia in the AWI or ACW. It is about modern Virginia politics. West Virginia may be hoping to lure away parts of the Old Dominion today. However from the time it was formed in 1863 there have been movements in different parts of the Mountain State to return to Virginia.

This is pretty close to Blue Fez territory.