With reflecting Southerners Calhoun's message no doubt had some confirmatory effect, because, historically and also in a certain legal aspect, Calhoun's view was very impressive. That the overwhelming majority of the early Americans who voted to ratify the national Constitution supposed it to be simply a compact between the States cannot be questioned, nor could ratification ever have been effected had any considerable number believed otherwise. The view that a State wishing to withdraw from the Union might for good cause do so was the prevalent one till long after the War of 1812, yielding, thereafter, at the North, less to Webster's logic than to the social and economic development just mentioned.
At the South it did not thus give way. There the propriety of secession was never aught but a question of sufficient grievance, to be settled by each State for itself, speaking through a majority of its voters. When the Secession ordinances actually passed, many individual voters in each State opposed on the ground that the occasion was insufficient; but such opponents, of whom Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia was one, nearly to a man felt bound, as good citizens, to acquiesce in the decision of their States and even to uphold this in arms.
Whether voting secession or accepting it on State mandate, Southern men naturally resented being called traitors or rebels. By the Websterian conception of the nature of our government they were so, but by Calhoun's they were simply acting out the Constitution in the best of faith. No recognized arbiter or criterion existed to determine between the two views. Massachusetts denounced seceding South Carolina as a traitor: South Carolina berated Massachusetts, seeking to impose the Union on the South against its will, as a criminal aggressor. An intelligent referee with no bias for either must have pronounced the judgments equally just.
These considerations explain how Colonel Lee, certainly one of the most conscientious men who ever lived, felt bound in duty and honor to side with seceding Virginia, though he doubted the wisdom of her course.
Lee was from the first Virginia's military hero and hope, but he did not at once become such to the Confederacy at large. He did not immediately take the field. Till after Bull Run he remained in Richmond, President Jefferson Davis's adviser and right hand man in organizing the forces incessantly arriving and pushing to the front.
In his brief West Virginia campaign, where he first came in contact with McClellan, being looked upon as an invader rather than a friend, Lee had scant success. Some therefore called him a "mere historic name," "Letcher's pet," a "West Pointer," no fighting general. He went to South Carolina to supervise the repair and building of coast fortifications there, and it was no doubt in large part owing to his engineering skill then applied that Charleston, whose sea-door the Federals incessantly pounded from the beginning, probably wasting there more powder and iron than at all other points together, was captured only at the end of the war and then from the land side. In March, 1862, General Lee again became President Davis's military adviser.
But though thus in relative obscurity, Lee was not forgotten. President Davis knew his man and knew that his hour would come. When, in May, 1862, the vast Federal army stood almost at Richmond's gates, Albert Sidney Johnston being dead and Joseph E. Johnston lying wounded, the Confederacy lifted up its voice and called Robert E. Lee to assume command upon the Chickahominy front. This he did on June 1, 1862.
The Confederates' ill-success on the second day of the Fair Oaks battle was to them a blessing in disguise. It put McClellan at his ease, giving Lee time to accomplish three extremely important ends. He could rest and recruit his army, fortify the south of Richmond with stout works, a detail which had not been attended to before, and send Stonewall Jackson down the valley of Virginia, so frightening the authorities in Washington that they dared not re-enforce McClellan.
Brilliant victory resulted. Leaving only 25,000 men between his capital and his foe, Lee, on June 26, threw the rest across the upper Chickahominy and attacked the Federal right. Fighting terribly at Mechanicsville and Gaines's Mill, A.P. Hill and Jackson, the latter having made forced marches from the Shenandoah to join in the movement, pushed back Fitz-John Porter's corps across the Chickahominy, sundering McClellan entirely from his York River base. The Union army was now nearer Richmond than the bulk of Lee's, which was beyond the Chickahominy, at that time none too easily crossed. Had McClellan been Lee or Grant or Sherman he would have made a dash for Richmond. But he was McClellan, and Lee knew perfectly well that he would attempt nothing so bold. Retreat was the Northerner's thought, and he did retreat--in good order, and hitting back venomously from White Oak Swamp and Malvern Hill--till he had reached Harrison's Landing upon the James, where gunboats sheltered and supply-ships fed his men.
Lee felt disappointed with the seven days' fighting in that he had not crushed McClellan. He had, however, forced him to raise the siege of Richmond and to retreat thirty or forty miles. The Confederacy breathed freely again, and its gallant chieftain began to be famous.