"Now on the verge of a bloody civil war"
Undated paragraph from a lost issue of the Charleston Kanawha Republican reprinted in the Lynchburg Daily Virginian, May 9, 1861.
The Charleston Kanawha Republican advocated unity in Virginia following the Virginia Convention's vote to secede on April 17, 1861. When Charles William Button, editor of the Lynchburg Daily Virginian, reprinted the paragraph on May 9, he described the paper as "heretofore a strong Union paper." In spite of what the editor of the Kanawha Republican wrote, Kanawha County and many of the other counties in the mountains of western Virginia were not united, and he failed to convince his readers. In the May 23, 1861, referendum on ratifying the Ordinance of Secession, fewer than one-fourth of the county's voters approved secession, with only 520 votes for secession and 1,697 against. Charleston's most distinguished citizen, George William Summers, had represented Virginia in the national Peace Conference in February 1861 and was the leader of the Unionists in the Virginia Convention, where he twice voted against secession.