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
In addition to all the considerations set forth in the foregoing pages, the student of history must, if he would fully appreciate the forces which controlled their action with respect to secession and the Civil War, take into account the racial characteristics of the Virginia people. A full portrayal of these characteristics, strongly marked and persisting from generation to generation, must be the work of some other pen. Suffice it here to say that as a people they exalted honor and courage—both in the individual and in the clan; they exhibited the strength of the idealist, combined, on the part of many, with the limitations of the doctrinaire; they decided questions by the standards of abstract right rather than in their relation to the duties and interests of other peoples and other times; they were self-reliant, content to justify the integrity of their conduct to their own consciences rather than to the world; they were tenacious of their rights and regarded a threatened invasion as not only justifying but compelling resistance if the ideals and conditions which make men patriots and freemen were to find an abiding place in their state.
VIRGINIA'S STAND PREDETERMINED
"We are not contending," wrote Washington in 1774, "against paying the duty of three pence per pound on tea as burdensome, no, it is the right only that we have all along disputed."[[422]]
"It is the principle," wrote Lee in 1861, "I contend for, not individual or private benefit."[[423]]
Such were some of the predominant characteristics of the people whom President Lincoln's proclamation called to war. In the conflict thus joined between the Federal Government and the Southern Confederacy, the people of Virginia took a stand, predetermined by the beliefs and avowals of successive generations, and impelled by an unswerving idealism found their supreme incentive to action in their determination to maintain the integrity of principle.
| [417] | Memoirs of Robert E. Lee, Long, p. 88. |