At the beginning of the War between the States, forty western counties of Virginia preferred not to secede from the Union. Consequently, when Virginia joined the Confederacy, a majority of the residents of the western counties voted to secede from Confederate Virginia at a special Wheeling convention. They formed a separate Unionist Virginia government and selected Francis H. Pierpont as their Governor. They had already chosen two United States Representatives from their Virginia government and they proceeded to elect two United States Senators. State officers of the Unionist Virginia government were required to take an oath of allegiance to the federal government. This Pierpont government was accepted by the President of the United States and Congress as the official government of Virginia. Three months later, at a second Wheeling convention, the strong desire on the part of many residents of this area to become a separate state in the Union resulted in Pierpont's calling together his legislature which gave the necessary consent for the creation of an independent state from within the original state of Virginia government boundaries. The new area was first called "Kanawha" but later the name was changed to West Virginia. On June 20, 1863, West Virginia was admitted as the thirty-fifth state to the Union. Although this procedure was apparently illegal and unconstitutional because the United States Constitution provides that no new state can be formed within the jurisdiction of any other state without the consent of the state legislature so involved, President Lincoln and the United States Congress overlooked this technicality because of a need for military and political expediency in wartime. Governor Pierpont and his Unionist government in August 1863 changed the location of his "restored" or "reorganized" government from Wheeling to Alexandria, which he termed the West Virginia capital city at that time. Alexandria maintained this West Virginia capital city status until the end of the war and the residents of Alexandria were forced to live under the provisions of a Pierpont-drafted "state" constitution. Later, Berkeley County and Jefferson County were annexed to West Virginia by November 1863 and became an official part of the state of West Virginia. Eventually, Virginia lost fifty counties altogether to West Virginia, approximately one-third of its total land area, with their human and natural resources as well as their financial support.