Following the Virginia Secession Convention of 1861, Sistersville and Tyler County were divided, but leaned toward the Union (s did their militia group, the "Sistersville Blues"). Nonetheless, Confederate sympathizers seized militia equipment at Sistersville, including dozens of rifles and two small cannons, and the Ohio militiamen sent to protect Parkersburg took more than a month to recover them. Judge Abraham Soper, a New York lawyer and New Jersey judge who had moved to Sisterville in 1847, became Tyler County's representative to the Wheeling Convention and the West Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1862–1863. Fellow delegates elected him their President for the reconvened session of February 1863 (because Congress required the new state's constitution to contain an antislavery provision, which President Abraham Lincoln approved in December 1862). On March 26, voters overwhelmingly ratified the new Constitution (28,321 to 572), so President Lincoln soon acknowledged the revision as adequate thus creating the state of West Virginia. When West Virginia's first legislature divided Tyler County in to districts in 1863, Sistersville was in the Lincoln District.