Pro-Trump Counties Vote to Secede from Illinois, Form New Red State
Seven counties voted in favor of secession, and in six of those counties, more than 70% of voters were in favor of the measure.
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The only way you can do that is if Congress signs off on it.
Every other state has an incentive not to permit that, because then that state gets two senators of its own.
Congress has only ever permitted a state to split a single time -- West Virginia from Virginia, during the American Civil War, where West Virginia was willing to side with the Union, and contained some militarily-important rail and water infrastructure.
Texas also negotiated the right to have the ability to split into five states if it wanted down the line at the time it joined, but I recall reading that it was considered to no longer be an exerciseable option after the American Civil War.
EDIT:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admission_to_the_Union
Article IV, Section 3, Clause 1:
New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.[4]
EDIT2: Correction; Kentucky was also split from Virginia and Maine from Massachusetts. The Kentucky split happened before the US Constitution was ratified. Maine was part of the Missouri Compromise, to keep slave and free states in balance when Missouri joined as a slave state.
Tennessee split from North Carolina. Georgia split off Mississippi and Alabama
Creating new states from territory that nominally belonged to an existing state (in the sense of claiming everything west of their established territory) but was actually unexplored frontier was a little different than carving a chunk out of an existing state with fully-established borders after the fact.
No doubt it's a bit different. But it was still splitting and both did have established western boundaries.
TN also almost split like VA in the civil war. They were the last to secede (doing so to protest Lincoln calling for state militia members to quell the rebellion). East TN (Knoxville region) was unionist whereas West TN (Memphis region) was rebellious. TN also supplied the most fighters to the union of any secessionist state.
They almost split because the east was mountainous and unfit for plantations, so the plantation owners that ran all the southern state legislatures shit on them endlessly, as is their wont.
East Tennessee had for long had quarrels with the rest of the state. The culture and economic differences caused great strife between the regions. But it had railroads vital to connect VA with the rest of the south without going around the mountains.
Tennessee split from North Carolina. Georgia split off Mississippi and Alabama
It's like watching fecal amoeba undergo mitosis.
Maine used to be part of Massachusetts until the Missouri compromise.
