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....