Part 22

Fourteen days later, the President made a verbal request to his Cabinet for an additional expression of their views upon the same subject. Seward and Smith adhered to their former opinions. Chase and Blair were joined by Welles. Bates was noncommittal, and no reply was made by Cameron, so far as the records show.

RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE COLLISION

In the light of the facts and arguments presented by the members of the President's Cabinet, men, not a few, will conclude that, if the explosion occurred at Fort Sumter, the mine was laid at Washington.

Footnote 391:

_Abraham Lincoln, Speeches, Letters and State Papers_, N. & H., Vol. II, p. 11.

Footnote 392:

_Idem_, pp. 11 and 14.

Footnote 393:

_Idem_, p. 17.

Footnote 394:

_Abraham Lincoln, Speeches, Letters and State Papers_, N. & H., Vol. II, p. 18.

Footnote 395:

_Idem_, pp. 19 and 20.

Footnote 396:

_Idem_, p. 22.

Footnote 397:

_Idem_, p. 21.

Footnote 398:

_Abraham Lincoln, Speeches, Letters and State Papers_, N. & H., Vol. II, pp. 14 and 15.

XLII

THE ATTEMPT TO COERCE THE COTTON STATES IMPELS VIRGINIA'S SECESSION

James Ford Rhodes in his history of the United States, referring to the eventful year of 1861, says:

"There were at this time in the Border States of Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri unconditional Secessionists and unconditional Union men; but the great body of the people, although believing that the wrongs of the South were grievous and cried for redress, deemed secession inexpedient.... All denied either the right or the feasibility of coercion."[399]

What was the pith and potency of this anti-coercion sentiment among the people of Virginia?

ANTI-COERCION SENTIMENT IN VIRGINIA

There were two distinct schools of thought and yet both denied the right of the Federal Government to coerce the people of the Cotton States.

One school believed in the constitutional right of a state to secede: the Union was formed by the constitution—which was a compact between independent sovereignties; the powers of the Union were those and only those delegated to it by the states; the states never surrendered their sovereignty, nor their right to withdraw from the Union for what they deemed sufficient cause. This, in brief, was the position of the school which maintained the constitutional right of a state to secede.

The other school while denying the constitutionality of secession, yet held that the Federal Government could not reduce to submission a people as numerous as those of the Cotton States, without doing violence to the principles, ethical and political, upon which the Union was founded. This in brief was the position of those who maintained the revolutionary right of the people of the seceded states to fix their own form of government unawed by any outside power.

It is not within the purview of our allotted task to vindicate or even investigate the constitutional right of a state, or of the Cotton States, to secede from the Union, or to accomplish the same end through the right of revolution as inherent in their people. Our discussion is here limited to a consideration of the strong anti-coercion sentiments among the Virginia people, and how these convictions ultimately controlled their action on the question of the secession of their state. It will suffice to say that whether regarded as a constitutional or a revolutionary right, or both combined, the people of Virginia held that the Cotton States, having deliberately and with almost unexampled unanimity, decided to dissolve the political relations which formerly existed between them and their sister commonwealths, that with respect to the legal and ethical character of this action there was no competent court of review this side of the judgment seat of Heaven. The wisdom of their secession might be denied, the morality of their action might be questioned, the disastrous consequences to the Union might be admitted, but still no right existed in any body of men to invade their country and defeat their aspirations by the sword.

Had not a people as numerous and united as those of the Cotton States the inherent right, in the language of the Declaration of Independence, "To assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of Nature and Nature's God entitled them?" Were the just powers of governments derived from the consent of the governed? To the Virginians of 1861 it was a solecism to accord to one body of people a right, and yet acknowledge in another the equal right to defeat its exercise. It was an anachronism to talk in America, after the Declaration of Independence and the war with Great Britain, about the right of self-government in three millions of people as being dependent upon force. This was acknowledged before Samuel Adams and Thomas Jefferson were born, and before the Patriots had made good their great avowals by their heroic struggles from Concord to Yorktown. Force, Virginia insisted, was not the method of holding great masses of American freemen in unwilling association with their fellows; nor the implements of war, the legitimate means for determining great questions of legal and ethical right.

DAVIS ON RIGHT OF REVOLUTION

Jefferson Davis, in his farewell address to the United States Senate, expressed the sentiments of Virginia upon this point when he said:

"Now, sir, we are confusing language very much. Men speak of revolution; and when they say revolution, they mean blood. Our fathers meant nothing of the sort. When they spoke of revolution, they meant an inalienable right. When they declared as an inalienable right, the power of the people to abrogate and modify their form of government whenever it did not answer the ends for which it was established, they did not mean that they were to sustain that by brute force.... Are we, in this age of civilization and political progress ... are we to roll back the whole current of human thought and again to return to the mere brute force which prevails between beasts of prey as the only method of settling questions between men?...

"Is it to be supposed that the men who fought the battles of the Revolution for community independence, terminated their great efforts by transmitting posterity to a condition in which they could only gain those rights by force? If so, the blood of the Revolution was shed in vain; no great principles were established; for force was the law of nature before the battles of the Revolution were fought."[400]

ANTI-COERCION VIEWS OF VIRGINIANS

Such was the attitude of the great body of the Virginia people. That no new principle was asserted to meet the exigencies of the hour, all acquainted with the history of the state will readily appreciate. Even men who denied the constitutional right of secession, joined with those who believed in that right in opposing coercion.

Robert E. Lee, writing on the 23d of January, 1861, said:

"Secession is nothing but revolution. The framers of our constitution never exhausted so much labor, wisdom and forbearance in its formation and surrounded it with so many guards and securities if it was intended to be broken by every member of the Confederacy at will....

"Still a Union that can only be maintained by swords and bayonets and in which strife and civil war are to take the place of brotherly love and kindness, has no charm for me. If the Union is dissolved and the Government disrupted I shall return to my native state and share the miseries of my people—and save in defense will draw my sword on none."[401]

William C. Rives, speaking on the 19th of February, 1861, in the Peace Conference at Washington, as one of the Commissioners from Virginia, said:

"I condemn the secession of states, I am not here to justify it. I detest it, but the fact is still before us. Seven states have gone out from among us and a President is actually inaugurated to govern the new Confederacy.... Force will never bring them together. Coercion is not a word to be used in this connection."[402]

George Baylor, speaking on the 1st of March 1861, in the Virginia Convention, said:

"I have said, Mr. President, that I did not believe in the right of secession. But whilst I make that assertion, I also say that I am opposed to coercion on the part of the Federal Government with the view of bringing the seceded states back into the Union.... I am opposed to it first because I can find no authority in the Constitution of the United States delegating that power to the Federal Government, and second because if the Federal Government had the power it would be wrong to use it."[403]

The foregoing sentiments were not confined to the Virginia people, either of the Revolutionary or Civil War periods. A few deliverances by men of international reputation made during the three decades preceding the Civil War will serve to illustrate the truth of this suggestion:

M. de Tocqueville, in his work, _Democracy in America_, discussing the subject, says:

"However strong a government may be, it cannot easily escape from the consequences of a principle which it has once admitted as the foundation of its constitution. The Union was formed by the voluntary agreement of the states; and in uniting together they have never forfeited their nationality nor have they been reduced to the condition of one and the same people. If one of the states chose to withdraw its name from the contract, it would be difficult to disprove its right of doing so; and the Federal Government would have no means of maintaining its claims directly, either by force or by right."[404]

FOUNDATION OF AMERICAN INSTITUTIONS

Lord Brougham in his _Political Philosophy_, alluding to the unique character of the government created by the constitution of the United States, writes:

"There is not, as with us, a government only and its subjects to be regarded; but a number of governments, of states, having each a separate and substantive, and even independent existence, originally thirteen now six and twenty, and each having a Legislature of its own with laws differing from those of the other states. It is plainly impossible to consider the constitution which professes to govern this whole Union, this federacy of states, as anything other than a treaty."[405]

John Quincy Adams, speaking before the New York Historical Society in 1839, on the fiftieth anniversary of Washington's inauguration as President of the United States, said:

"To the people alone there is reserved as well the dissolving as the constituent power and that power can be exercised by them only under the tie of conscience binding them to the retributive justice of Heaven.

"With these qualifications we may admit the right as vested in the people of every state of the Union with reference to the General Government which was exercised by the people of the United Colonies with reference to the supreme head of the British Empire of which they formed a part and under these limitations have the people of each state of the Union a right to secede from the Confederated Union itself."[406]

CONSENT NOT FORCE

Mr. Lincoln, speaking on the 12th of January, 1848, in Congress, said:

"Any people anywhere being inclined and having the power have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, most sacred right, a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can may revolutionize and make their own any or so much of the territory as they inhabit."[407]

Probably Mr. Gladstone expressed in the briefest possible compass the general consensus of the Virginia people, when on the 24th of April, 1862, in his Manchester speech, referring to the attitude of the Federal Government and the Northern people, he said: "We have no faith in the propagation of free institutions at the point of the sword."[408]

VIEWS OF PROMINENT AMERICANS

Scarcely less pronounced were the sentiments of many prominent Americans expressed just before the outbreak of the Civil War with reference to the moral or political right of the Federal Government or the Northern people to coerce the Southern States.

Horace Greeley, in the issue of the _New York Tribune_ of November 9th, 1860, discussing the contemplated secession of the Cotton States, wrote:

"If the Cotton States shall decide that they can do better out of the Union than in it, we insist on letting them go in peace. The right to secede may be a revolutionary one but it exists nevertheless; and we do not see how one party can have a right to do what another party has a right to prevent."[409]

Again he wrote:

"If it (the Declaration of Independence) justified the secession from the British Empire of three millions of colonists in 1776, we do not see why it would not justify the secession of five millions of Southerners from the Federal Union in 1861. If we are mistaken on this point why does not some one attempt to show wherein and why(?)"[410]

On the 23d of February, 1861, he wrote:

"We have repeatedly said and we once more insist that the great principle embodied by Jefferson in the Declaration of American Independence that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed is sound and just; and that if the Slave States, the Cotton States, or the Gulf States only, choose to form an independent nation they have a clear moral right to do so."[411]

President Buchanan, in his message to Congress on the 3d of December, 1860, said:

"The fact is that our Union rests upon public opinion and can never be cemented by the blood of its citizens shed in civil war. If it cannot live in the affections of the people it must one day perish. Congress possesses many means of preserving it by conciliation; but the sword was not placed in their hands to preserve it by force."

Edward Everett, writing on the 2d of February, 1861, to the Union Meeting called to assemble at Faneuil Hall, said:

"To expect to hold fifteen states in the Union by force is preposterous. The idea of a civil war, accompanied, as it would be, by a servile insurrection, is too monstrous to be entertained for a moment. If our sister states must leave us, in the name of Heaven, let them go in peace."[412]

Wendell Phillips, speaking at New Bedford, Mass., on the 9th of April, 1861, said:

"But I am sorry that a gun should be fired at Fort Sumter or that a gun should be fired from it for this reason: The administration at Washington does not know its time. Here are a series of states girding the Gulf who think that their peculiar institutions require that they should have a separate government. They have a right to decide that question without appealing to you or me. A large body of people, sufficient to make a nation, have come to the conclusion that they will have a government of a certain form. Who denies them the right? Standing with the principles of '76 behind us, who can deny them the right?"[413]

Abraham Lincoln, speaking on the 15th of November, 1860, said:

"My own impression is, leaving myself room to modify the opinion, if, upon further investigation, I should see fit to do so, that this Government possesses both the authority and the power to maintain its own integrity. That, however, is not the ugly point of this matter. The ugly point is the necessity of keeping the Government together by force as ours should be a Government of fraternity."[414]

On the 10th of April, 1861, only five days previous to the call for seventy-five thousand soldiers, Mr. Seward, as Secretary of State, in an official communication to the American Minister to Great Britain, wrote:

"For these reasons he (the President) would not be disposed to reject a cardinal dogma of theirs (the Secessionists), namely, that the Federal Government could not reduce the seceding states to obedience by conquest, even though he were disposed to question that proposition. But, in fact, the President willingly accepts it as true. Only an imperial or despotic government could subjugate thoroughly disaffected and insurrectionary members of the state. This Federal Republican system of ours of all forms of government is the very one which is most unfitted for such labor."[415]

VIRGINIA ADHERES TO HER PRINCIPLES

Such were some of the deliverances of prominent Americans in the days immediately preceding the Civil War. They expressed the sentiments of leading Virginians of the time and explained and vindicated their position in resisting the policy of coercion adopted by the Federal Government. Why was it that in the supreme hour Greeley and Seward and Lincoln, and all their notable compatriots, parted company with Virginia?

Charles Francis Adams says:

"Virginia, as I have said, made state sovereignty an article—a cardinal article—of its political creed. So logically and consistently it took the position that though it might be unwise for a state to secede, a state which did secede could not and should not be coerced.

"To us now this position seems worse than illogical. It is impossible. So events proved it then. Yet, after all, it is based on the fundamental principle of the consent of the governed; and in the days immediately preceding the Civil War something very like it was accepted as an article of correct political faith by men afterwards as strenuous in support of a Union re-established by force as Charles Sumner, Abraham Lincoln, William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, and Horace Greeley. The difference was that confronted by the overwhelming tide of events, Virginia adhered to it; they, in presence of that tide, tacitly abandoned it."[416]

Footnote 399:

_History of the United States_, Rhodes, Vol. III, p. 214.

Footnote 400:

_Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government_, Vol. I, p. 617.

Footnote 401:

_Memoirs of Robert E. Lee_, Long, p. 88.

Footnote 402:

_Proceedings of Peace Convention_, Crittenden, p. 136.

Footnote 403:

See _Richmond Enquirer_, March 2d, 1908.

Footnote 404:

_Democracy in America_, de Tocqueville, Vol. II, p. 257.

Footnote 405:

_Political Philosophy_, Brougham, 1849, part 3, p. 336.

Footnote 406:

_Buchanan's Administration_, Buchanan, p. 98.

Footnote 407:

_Abraham Lincoln, Speeches, Letters and State Papers_, N. & H., Vol. I, p. 105.

Footnote 408:

_History of the United States_, Rhodes, Vol. IV, p. 80.

Footnote 409:

_History of the United States_, Rhodes, Vol. III, p. 140.

Footnote 410:

_Life of James Buchanan_, Curtis, Vol. II, p. 430.

Footnote 411:

_Idem._

Footnote 412:

_Origin of the Late War_, Lunt, 1816, p. 431.

Footnote 413:

_History of Massachusetts in Civil War_, Schouler, Vol. I, p. 45.

Footnote 414:

_Abraham Lincoln, A History_, N. & H., Vol. III, p. 247.

Footnote 415:

_Diplomatic Correspondence_, 1861, p. 58.

Footnote 416:

_Lee at Appomattox and Other Papers_, C. F. Adams, 1902, p. 403-4.

XLIII

CONCLUSION

The crisis arose and thus was precipitated Virginia's secession. To many of her people it came as a long hoped for event. They rejoiced that Virginia was now to enter upon a more inspiring career untrammelled by associates divergent in sentiments and hostile in interests. They hailed the rise of the Southern Confederacy as a new nation born into the world, and with eager hearts looked forward to a future which should bring to the people of Virginia and the South a measure of self-government, peace and prosperity they had never known before.

To the majority, however, of the Virginia people the event came as one long dreaded and much to be deplored. They met it with a firm adherence to the principles so often declared, but with profound regret that the occasion had arisen which rendered their assertion imperative.

The pathos no less than the determination which marked the hour may be read in the contemporary utterances of her foremost men.

VIRGINIANS DEPLORE DISUNION

Her Governor, John Letcher, in his message to the General Assembly, January 1861, said:

"Surely no people have been blessed as we have been, and it is melancholy to think that all is now about to be sacrificed on the Altar of Passion. If the judgments of men were consulted, if the admonitions of their consciences were respected, the Union would yet be saved from overthrow."

Three months later, however, in response to the call for Virginia's quota of troops, he wrote to the authorities at Washington: "You have chosen to inaugurate civil war; and, having done so, we will meet you in a spirit as determined as the Administration has exhibited toward the South."

Robert E. Lee, anticipating the event, in January, 1861, wrote:

"I shall mourn for my country and for the welfare and progress of mankind. If the Union is dissolved and the Government disrupted, I shall return to my native state and share the miseries of my people, and, save in defense, will draw my sword on none."[417]

Three months later, in accepting the command of Virginia's army of defense, he said: "Trusting in Almighty God, an approving conscience and the aid of my fellow-citizens, I devote myself to the service of my native state."

Equally significant were the sentiments of the wife of this great Virginian. Writing to General Winfield Scott, May 5th, 1861, Mary Custis Lee said: "No honors can reconcile us to this fratricidal war which we would have laid down our lives freely to avert ... Oh! that you could command peace to our distracted country. Yours in sorrow and sadness."[418]

John Janney, on accepting the Presidency of the Virginia Convention, February 13th, 1861, said:

"Gentlemen, there is a flag ... which now floats over this Capitol on which there is a star representing this ancient commonwealth and my earnest prayer, in which I know every member of this body will cordially unite, is that it may remain there forever, provided always that its lustre is untarnished."

On the 23d of April, 1861, in notifying Robert E. Lee of his appointment as chief in command of Virginia's militia, he said:

"Virginia having taken her position, as far as the power of this Convention extends, we stand, animated by one impulse, governed by one desire and one determination—and that is, that she shall be defended; and that no spot of her soil shall be polluted by the foot of an invader."[419]

Matthew F. Maury writing on the 11th of May, 1861, said: "I grant them (certain of his Northern friends) sincere, but I cannot but lament in the depths of my heart and in excruciating agony that their delusion is such as to have already allowed the establishment of a military despotism."

Again he wrote: "All of us are of one mind, very cool, very determined, no desire for a conflict. We are on the defensive."[420]

John B. Baldwin, when asked after President Lincoln's proclamation what would be the position of the Union men in Virginia, wrote:

"We have no Union men in Virginia now. But those who were Union men will stand to their guns, and make a fight that will shine out on the page of history as an example of what a brave people can do after exhausting every means of pacification."[421]

RACIAL CHARACTERISTICS OF VIRGINIANS