October Twentieth
Her right to it rested upon as firm a basis as the right of any other Commonwealth to her own domain, and if there was any question of the Virginia title by charter, she could assert her right by conquest. The region had been wrested from the British by a Virginian commanding Virginian troops; the people had taken “the oath of allegiance to the Commonwealth of Virginia”; and her title to the entire territory was thus indisputable....
These rights she now abandoned; and her action was the result of an enlarged patriotism and devotion to the cause of union.
John Esten Cooke
Virginia cedes to the general government the territory north of the Ohio, 1783
October Twenty-First
When social relations were resumed between the North and South—they followed slowly the resumption of business relations—what we should call the color-blindness of the other side often manifested itself in a delicate reticence on the part of our Northern friends; and as the war had by no means constituted their lives as it had constituted ours for four long years, the success in avoiding the disagreeable topic would have been considerable, if it had not been for awkward allusions on the part of the Southerners, who, having been shut out for all that time from the study of literature and art and other elegant and uncompromising subjects, could hardly keep from speaking of this and that incident of the war. Whereupon a discreet, or rather an embarrassed silence, as if a pardoned convict had playfully referred to the arson or burglary, not to say worse, that had been the cause of his seclusion.
Basil L. Gildersleeve