[A] Note—The following extract is from the "History of the American Civil War" by Professor Draper, a Northern Union man, which shows the nature of Virginia's sacrifices: "At the time of the Declaration of Independence, Virginia was the most powerful of the colonies; she occupied a central position and had in Norfolk one of the best harbors on the Atlantic. She had a vast western territory, an imposing commerce, and in the production and export of tobacco not only a source of wealth, but from the mercantile connections it gave her in Europe, a means of refinement. It was through this circumstance that so many of her young men were educated abroad. When the epoch of separation from the mother country had come, and the question of Confederation arose, she might have asserted her colonial supremacy; she might have been the central power. Many of her ablest men subsequently thought that in her voluntary equalization with the feeblest colonies, the spontaneous surrender of her vast domain, the self-abnegation with which she sacrificed all her privileges on the altar of the Union, she had made a fatal mistake. In her action there was something very noble."
The Union had not advanced her pecuniary or material interests, yet, in all of its trials, she had been its firmest supporter and her blood had been freely shed in all of its wars and upon all of its battlefields. It was only where that Union was to be perverted from its original designs and made the means of humiliating and degrading the Southern states, herself included, that Virginia resolved upon severing the connection.
On the other hand, New England had made no sacrifices for the Union, and had received only benefits from it. To that section the Union had been a "paying operation" in every way: its fisheries, commerce and factories had been fostered and protected by high bounties and duties until its comparatively sterile soil bloomed as a garden, while its surplus population found homes in the fertile region surrendered by Virginia. Descendants of the Puritans did not undertake to become "philanthropists" until the slave trade with the South ceased to be profitable.
Notwithstanding the benefits received by the New England states from the Union, the first proposition for its dissolution came from those states when the country was engaged in a foreign war—the war of 1812 with Great Britain—because that war was caused by a temporary suspension of their commerce. Most of these states refused to permit their militia to be marched beyond their limits for the common defence and the question of a separate peace with the public enemy was mooted, notwithstanding the fact that the war had been undertaken in defence of commercial rights in which New England was principally interested. Such was the spirit manifested in that section that the British government in declaring a blockade for the coast of the United States, for some time exempted the New England coast from that blockade and did not invade those states.
Upon the passage of an act for a general embargo in 1814, so as to put a stop to the contraband trade from New England, the Massachusetts legislature was flooded with petitions for redress and protection against the act of the Federal government in enforcing the embargo, and a committee to which the petitions were referred, made a report in which the following views, among others, were expressed:
"The sovereignty reserved to the states, was reserved to protect the citizens from acts of violence by the United States, as well as for the purposes of domestic regulation. We spurn the idea that the free, sovereign and independent State of Massachusetts is reduced to a mere municipal corporation, without the power to protect its people or to defend them from oppression from whatever quarter it comes. Whenever the national compact is violated and the citizens of this state are oppressed by cruel and unauthorized enactments, this legislature is bound to interpose its power and to wrest from the oppressor its victim."
To show the spirit animating the people of Massachusetts in the assertion of these doctrines—however true they might be in principle—when the news was received of the abdication of Buonaparte and the restoration of the Bourbons in 1814—thus leaving the British government at liberty to employ all of its forces against the United States, the people of Massachusetts as well as of all New England hailed the news with joy and exultation, "as the harbinger of peace and the renewal of commerce;" and the event was celebrated at Boston by a religious ceremony and a sermon from the celebrated Dr. Channing.
In the fall of 1814, the legislature of Massachusetts invited a convention of the New England states, which assembled in Hartford in December of that year and adopted a series of resolutions in which it was declared, among other things, that, "In cases of deliberate, dangerous and palpable violations of the Constitution, affecting the sovereignty of a state and the liberties of a people, it was not only the right but the duty also of that state, to interpose its authority for their protection, when emergencies occur, either beyond the reach of the judicial tribunal or too pressing to admit of delay incident to their forms; states which have no common umpire must be their own judges and execute their own decisions." The danger to the Union from these steps on the part of Massachusetts and the other New England states, in a time of public war, was put to an end by the unexpected arrival of the news of a treaty of peace; this perhaps prevented the former state from proceeding to assert her sovereignty and making a separate peace with Great Britain.
In fact in 1809, during the existence of the troubles growing out of the embargo passed before the close of Mr. Jefferson's administration, John Quincy Adams had communicated to the government at Washington that the object of the dominant party in Massachusetts was, and had been for several years, the establishment of a separate confederacy, as he knew from unequivocal evidence; and that in case of a civil war, the aid of Great Britain to affect that purpose would be assuredly resorted to, as it would be indispensably necessary to the design.
There was strong reason to suspect that during the war some secret arrangement existed with the enemy, by which New England withheld from the country the support of her troops and her soil was kept free from invasion. In all the measures then resorted to in order to embarrass the government, Massachusetts took the lead, yet when a war of invasion and subjugation against the Southern states was waged, Massachusetts found no constitutional difficulties, had no scruples about sending her troops into the South.