Virginia voted to secede from the Union on April 17, 1861. The northwestern counties of the state - mountain country, lightly slaveholding, economically tied to Pittsburgh and Cincinnati rather than to Richmond - voted overwhelmingly against secession. Within weeks, Unionist Virginians began meeting in Wheeling to organize what they called the Restored Government of Virginia, claiming to be the legitimate state government in opposition to the Confederate state government in Richmond. By August 20, 1861, the Second Wheeling Convention had taken the further step of approving the geopolitical separation of the western counties into a new state entirely. The First Constitutional Convention followed in November to draft a constitution for that state. The question of what to call it could no longer be deferred.

The drafting committee proposed Kanawha for several reasons. The Kanawha River was the dominant geographic feature of the new state - it drains a basin from the highlands of southwestern Virginia to the Ohio River at Point Pleasant, passing through what is now Charleston, the eventual state capital. The name had Indigenous roots: it came from the Canawagh or Kanawha people, a band that had lived in the valley before being driven out by Iroquois expansion in the 17th century. Using an Indigenous name for a new state was uncommon but not unprecedented - many states had Indigenous names, though typically inherited from older colonial usage rather than freshly chosen. Kanawha would have placed the new state in a small category of states whose names made explicit reference to the people who had lived on the land before European settlement.

Sinsel's objection was practical: there was already a Kanawha County in the new state, and confusion between the State of Kanawha and the County of Kanawha would be inevitable. The argument was real but probably not the deciding factor - other states have lived comfortably with the same name as one of their counties. The deeper argument was about identity. Many of the convention delegates wanted to preserve their Virginian heritage in the name of the new state. They were not seceding from Virginia in the way the Confederacy claimed to be seceding from the United States; they were continuing to be Virginians, just in the geographically western part of the original commonwealth. The name West Virginia preserved that continuity. The name Kanawha did not.

The historical record of the December 1861 debate does not preserve a careful conversation about whether keeping the name of a displaced Indigenous people for a state where their descendants no longer lived was honoring or appropriating that history. That was not a question 19th-century Americans typically asked themselves. The Kanawha people had been driven out of the valley by Iroquois expansion roughly two centuries before the convention met. By 1861 they existed only in scattered records and in the names of places. The convention delegates were choosing between an Indigenous name detached from any living community and a name that emphasized their own English settler identity. They chose the latter. Whether they would have chosen differently with the perspective of another century is a question the record cannot answer.

The convention adopted West Virginia as the new state's name. The constitution was ratified by the voters of the disputed region in April 1862. President Lincoln admitted West Virginia to the Union on June 20, 1863. The state has now carried the name for more than 160 years. The Kanawha River still runs through it. Kanawha County, still with its Indigenous-derived name, is still the most populous county in the state, home to Charleston, the capital. The unrealized State of Kanawha sits in the same historical category as Westsylvania and the Republic of Franklin - real political proposals, seriously debated, that did not in the end leave their names on the political map. They survive as small puzzles in the textbooks: what almost was, and almost wasn't.