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he exclaimed. “There are 2,000 Minnie muskets here now; and more on the way, thank God.
     
    “Let us act; let us repudiate these monstrous usurpations; let us show our loyalty to Virginia and the Union at every hazard. It is useless to cry peace when there is no peace; and I for one will repeat what was said by one of Virginia's noblest sons and greatest statesmen, ‘Give me liberty or give me death!'” Delegates responded with thunderous cheers. 54
     
    On May 14, Carlile offered a resolution calling for the dismemberment of thirty-two Virginia counties to form a new state. His plan acknowledged Federal law regarding the creation of a new state from the territory of an existing one. A committee would be appointed to draft a constitution and form of government for “the State of New Virginia.” 55
     
    The proposal raised a firestorm of protest. Opponents warned that it lacked support from the Lincoln administration and would plunge Virginia's western counties into the midst of revolution. Carlile did not flinch. “It is represented that a proposition looking to a separate State government is revolutionary in its character,” he said. “I deny it. It is the only legal, constitutional remedy left this people if they do not approve the action of the Virginia Convention.…[I]s there a man here that needs to be told it that the Constitution of the United States provides expressly and in terms plain and unmistakable for the separation of a State and the erection of a new State?” 56
     
    A tall, raw-boned Morgantown attorney named Waitman T. Willey rose in dissent. The nearly fifty-year-old Willey bore an extensive political résumé. He had been an elector on theHarrison–Tyler ticket of 1840, a member of the Virginia constitutional convention of 1850–51, a candidate for Congress in 1852, a candidate for Lieutenant Governor in 1859, and a delegate to the Richmond convention. He was a “Wheel-horse” of the old Whig party, staunchly conservative and a slaveholder. Yet Willey was also pious and caring—a man of integrity.
     
    He was modest, even retiring, though blessed with a power of speech “rarely found in man.” It was said Willey could move an audience at will, that the sweep of his oratory was “utterly irresistible,” that an electric current seemed to dance from the ends of his long, bony fingers. 57
     
    He was perhaps the only delegate in Wheeling who could fend off John Carlile. Summoning his magnificent gift, Willey assailed the statehood proposal. He styled it “triple treason”—treason against the State of Virginia, treason against the U.S. Constitution, even treason against Virginia's alliance with the Confederacy. 58
     
    Willey maintained that the Wheeling convention had no legal authority. His discourse stretched into May 15, the convention's third and final day. Willey's “triple treason” argument was hotly debated. Some recalled his behavior at the Richmond convention and thought him a “lukewarm” Unionist at best. Spectators jeered Willey's name, but his forceful filibuster paved the way for another speaker. 59
     
    That delegate was Francis H. Pierpont. Born in a log cabin at “Forks of Cheat,” Monongalia County, Virginia, in 1814, he came from pioneer stock. The corpulent Pierpont was a rugged, self-made man. Even his surname had a robust ring, derived as it was from a medieval stone bridge. 60
     
    As a youth, Pierpont had labored on a farm. He had walked nearly one hundred eighty miles to attend Allegheny College in Pennsylvania and by 1842 gained admission to the bar. He was a life-long friend of Waitman Willey and shared his Whig politics, but decried slavery as a “social and political evil.” Pierpont once defended a free black man charged with aiding slaves on the Underground Railroad. He had endured taunts of “Abolitionist,”“Black Republican” and “the big-bellied slanderer from Fairmont!” 61
     
    Pierpont was greatly admired in Wheeling. Now he took