The History of the Confederate War, Its Causes and Its Conduct, Volume 1 (of 2) / A Narrative and Critical History

by George Cary Eggleston

But while they held these doctrines to be absolutely indisputable, the Virginians resolutely rejected secession as a policy. They saw nothing in Mr. Lincoln's election to justify a resort to so extreme a remedy, and they refused their assent to that method of procedure. It is important to bear in mind the distinction between the Virginian conception of states' rights and the Virginian conception of policy in the conditions created by Mr. Lincoln's election, because upon that distinction hung the issue of peace or war in the Republic. For nothing could be more certain than that without Virginia's pith and substance, and without the assistance of the states that waited for Virginia's decision before rendering their own, the cotton states would not have undertaken, seriously, a war of independence, or if they had done so, would not have been able to maintain their struggle against the Federal power for any considerable time.

Everything hinged upon Virginia's course and Virginia resolutely repudiated the policy of secession, denying that Mr. Lincoln's election afforded any just occasion or any sufficient excuse for a resort to that extreme remedy.

Accordingly all the forces of secession were brought to bear upon Virginia. All the hotheads in the state and many from other states, were set to make speeches. Most of the newspapers were purchased and placed in control of intemperate radicals who could be depended upon to make life not worth living for any man who hesitated to precipitate war. John M. Daniel, a gifted man of extreme views and highly intemperate prejudices, came home from his consular mission abroad and resumed control of his newspaper, the Richmond Examiner, only to make of its columns a daily terror to every man in the convention or out of it who ventured to hope for peace and the perpetuity of the Union, through the efforts of John J. Crittenden's peace conference or through any other conceivable agency of compromise or reconciliation. Commodore, and afterwards Admiral, Farragut—himself a Southerner, and a resident at that time of Virginia,—said that Virginia was "dragooned out of the Union." The phrase is not quite accurately descriptive of what happened, but at any rate it correctly describes the attempts made to compel Virginia's secession and to secure with it the addition of all the strength of all the border states to the newly formed Confederacy.

The dragooning was attempted, but Virginia refused to yield. Her convention, undoubtedly representing with accuracy the will of her people, held out in opposition to every suggestion of the state's withdrawal from the Union.

Virginia stood thus as a bulwark against civil war for more than two moons, and there is little doubt that her influence and her attitude would have been effectual in preventing the war if only a technicality had been put aside in order that Virginia might not be forced to array herself against that Union of which she was largely the author and to which she still clung with loyal allegiance.

When in the middle of April, 1861, after the bombardment of Fort Sumter, Mr. Lincoln issued a call for 75,000 men to form an army with which to coerce the seceding states into submission, and included Virginia in that call, the Virginians felt themselves bound to choose between a secession for which they saw no possible occasion, on the one hand, and the lending of Virginia's power on the other to a program of coercion for which they recognized no constitutional warrant and no moral right. In making such a choice they saw but one honorable course open to them. A convention which had stood out against secession in face of vituperation, contumely and every other force that could be brought to bear in that behalf, voted for secession at the last as an alternative to injustice and dishonor.

This act—which the wisely diplomatic omission of Virginia from the call for troops would have averted—made the war not only possible but a fact.

But this is getting well ahead of the story. Let us go back.

Mr. Lincoln was elected on the sixth of November, 1860. He could not take his seat until the fourth of March, 1861. In the meantime the Government must remain in the hands of the peculiarly irresolute administration of James Buchanan, whose sole concern seemed to be to postpone the outbreak of actual hostilities until the expiration of his own term of office.

Commissioners were sent to him from the seceding states to arrange for the peaceful dissolution of the Union. He had no constitutional power to negotiate with them and he very properly refused to receive them in their official capacity. But on the other hand he did absolutely nothing to prevent or to check or in any way to interfere with the organization of the seceding states as a power in open resistance to the Union. It is a fact now apparent to all students of history that but for Virginia's refusal to join the secession movement, carrying with it as it did the refusal of the other border states, there would have been an organized power ready, upon Mr. Lincoln's accession to office, to assert and maintain the independence of the Southern states against any force that the North could have brought to bear against them.