Virginia's Attitude Toward Slavery and Secession

by Beverley B. Munford

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.