Virginia in the American Civil War Virginia in the American Civil War The Commonwealth of Virginia became a prominent part of the Confederate States of America when it joined the Confederacy during the American Civil War. As a Southern slave-holding state, Virginia held a state convention to deal with the secession crisis, and voted against secession on April 4, 1861. Opinion shifted after April 15, when U.S. President Abraham Lincoln called for troops from all states still in the Union to put down the rebellion, following the capture of Fort Sumter, and the Virginia convention voted to declare secession from the Union. A Unionist government was
Commemoration of the American Civil War on postage stamps and during many decades thereafter, sporadic U. S. definitive issues appeared in honor of Civil War-related statesmen and military leaders—exclusively those, however, who had supported the Union cause. Their Confederate counterparts remained unrecognized on American stamps until 1937, when Lee and Jackson were included among the Civil War generals and admirals pictured in the commemorative Army-Navy issues, a series promoted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt (himself a stamp enthusiast). Even then, however, with the war some seven decades in the past, this inclusion of a stamp honoring Confederate generals proved controversial. After the issue was announced in May 1936, a