No longer did men discuss the merits and demerits of one policy or another; there could be but one policy now, one course of action, one sentiment of devotion to Virginia, and an undying determination to maintain her honor at all hazards and at all costs.
The state of mind that was universal among Virginians at that time, has never been quite understood in other parts of the Union. These men’s traditions extended back to a time before ever the Union was thought of, before ever Virginia had invited her sister states to unite with her, in a convention at Annapolis, called for the purpose of forming that “more perfect Union,” from which, in 1861, Virginia decided to withdraw. Devotion to the Union had been, through long succeeding decades, as earnest and as passionate in Virginia as the like devotion had been in any other part of the country. Through three great wars the Virginians had faltered not nor failed when called upon to contribute of their substance or their manhood to the national defence.
The Virginians loved the Union of which their state had been so largely the instigator, and they were self-sacrificingly loyal to it. But they held their allegiance to it to be solely the result of their state’s allegiance, and when their state withdrew from it, they held themselves absolved from all their obligations respecting it. Their very loyalty to it had been a prompting of their state, and when their state elected to transfer its allegiance to another Confederacy, they regarded themselves as bound by every obligation of law, of honor, of tradition, of history and of manhood itself, to obey the mandate.
Return we now to Richmond, on that fateful seventeenth day of April, 1861. There had been extreme secessionists, and moderate ones, uncompromising Union men, and Union men under conditions of qualification. There were none such when that day was ended. Waitman T. Willey and a few others from the Panhandle region, who had served in the convention, departed quickly for their homes, to take part with the North in the impending struggle, in obedience to their convictions of right. The rest accepted the issue as determinative of Virginia’s course, and ordered their own courses accordingly. They were, before all and above all Virginians, and Virginia had decided to cast in her lot with the seceding Southern States. There was an end of controversy. There was an end of all division of sentiment. The supreme moment had come, and all men stood shoulder to shoulder to meet the consequences.
XXXVI
THE OLD DOROTHY AND THE NEW
JUST as Arthur Brent was quitting his seat in the convention on that day so pregnant of historic happenings, a page put a note into his hands. It was from Edmonia, and it read:
“We have just arrived and are at the Exchange Hotel and Ballard House. We are all perfectly well, though positively dazed by what you statesmen in the convention have done today. I can hardly think of the thing seriously—of Virginia withdrawing from the Union which her legislature first proposed to the other states, which her statesmen—Washington, Jefferson, Marshall, Madison, Mason, and the rest so largely contributed to form, and over which her Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Harrison and Tyler have presided in war and peace. And yet nothing could be more serious. It seems to me a bad dream from which we shall presently wake to find ourselves rejoicing in its untruth.
“You will come to the hotel to a six o’clock dinner, of course. I want to show you what a woman Dorothy has grown to be. Poor dear girl! She has been greatly disturbed by the hearing of her mother’s story, and she is a trifle morbid over it. However, you’ll see her for yourself this evening. We were charmingly considerate, I think in not telegraphing to announce our coming. We shall expect you to thank us properly for thus refraining from disturbing you. Come to the hotel the moment your public duties will let you.”
Arthur hastily left the convention hall and hurried across Capitol Square and on to the big, duplex hostelry. He entered on the Exchange Hotel side and learned by inquiry at the office that Edmonia’s rooms were in the Ballard House on the other side of the street. It had begun to rain and he had neither umbrella nor overcoat, having forgotten and left both in the cloak room of the convention. So he mounted the stairway, and set out to cross by the covered crystal bridge that spanned the street connecting the two great caravansaries. The bridge was full of people, gathered there to look at the pageant in the streets below, where companies of volunteer cavalry from every quarter of eastern Virginia were marching past, on their way to the newly-established camp of instruction on the Ashland race track. For Governor Letcher had so far anticipated the inevitable result of the long debate as to establish two instruction camps and to accept the tenders of service which were daily sent to him by the volunteer companies in every county.
As Arthur was making his way through the throng of sight-seers on the glass bridge some movement in the crowd brought him into contact with a gentlewoman, to whom he hastily turned with apologetic intent.