Free Rogue State by Richard H. Owens Page B

West Virginia.
    The Commonwealth of Virginia has never sought legal relief, constitutional remedy, or the return of the fifty [fifty five] separated counties.
    The rogue state of West Virginia remained in the Union.

A PPENDIX
    Documents relating to divisions and differences in Lincoln’s Cabinet over statehood for West Virginia.
    (Italics within the following documents were added by the author for emphasis).
Letter from President Abraham Lincoln to the United States Cabinet, Washington D.C., December 23, 1862.
Letter from U.S. Attorney General Edward Bates to
President Abraham Lincoln, Washington, D. C.,
December 27, 1862.
Letter from Salmon P. Chase To President Lincoln,
Washington, D.C., December 29, 1862
    1. Letter from President Abraham Lincoln to the United States Cabinet, Washington D.C., December 23, 1862.
    Executive Mansion
Washington, December 23, 1862
Gentlemen of the Cabinet
    I respectfully ask of each [of] you, an opinion in writing, on the following questions to wit:
    A bill for an Act entitled “An Act of the admission of the State of ‘West Virginia’ into the Union, and for other purposes,” has lst., Is the said Act constitutional?
    2nd.
    Is the said Act expedient? passed the House of Representatives, and the Senate, and has been duly presented to me for my action.
    Your Obt. Servt.
Abraham Lincoln
    2. Letter from U.S. Attorney General Edward Bates to President Abraham Lincoln, Washington, D. C., December 27, 1862.
    Attorney General’s Office
    December 27, 1862
    1. Is the said Act constitutional?
    2. Is the said act expedient?
    The President having before him for his approval a bill passed by both Houses of Congress, entitled an “Act for the admission of the State of West Virginia into the Union, and for other purposes,” has submitted to all members of the Cabinet, separately, the following questions, for their opinion and advice thereon.
    I am of opinion that the bill is not warranted by the Constitution. And, in examining this proposition, I think it will be the more clearly apprehended, if viewed in two aspects:
    1. In the letter of the particular provision, and
    2. In the spirit, as gathered from the letter, from the whole context, and from the known object.
    First, the letter-Art. 4, S. 3. “New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no State shall be formed or erected, within the jurisdiction of any other state, nor any state be formed by the junction of two or more States, or parts of States, without the consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned, as well as of the Congress.”
    I observe, in the first place, that the Congress can admit new States into this Union, but cannot form States: Congress has no creative power, in that respect; and cannot admit into this Union, and territory, district or other political entity, less than a State. And such State must exist, as a separate independent body politic, before it can be admitted, under the clause of the Constitution- and there is no other clause. The new State which Congress may admit, by virtue of that clause, does not owe its existence to the fact of admission, and does not begin to exist, coeval with that fact.
    For, if that be so, then Congress makes the State; for no power but Congress can admit a State to the Union. And that result, (i.e. the making of the State by Congress) would falsify the universal and fundamental principle of this country that a free American State can be made only by the people, its component members. Congress has no power to make a State.
    It is not very important to my argument whether the last clause of the sentence quoted - “without the consent of the legislatures of the States concerned, as well as of the Congress,” do nor do not apply to the case of a new State “formed or erected within the jurisdiction of any other State” as well as to the case of a new State “formed by the junction of two or more States of parts of