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.