Edward Alfred Pollard, The lost cause; a new Southern history of the War of the Confederates ... Drawn from official sources and approved by the most distinguished Confederate leaders.

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[116] attack on Sumter, he made the most pacific protests to the Virginia Commissioners, who were then visiting him;--the President then threatening no other retaliation for the capture of Sumter than the withdrawal of the mails from the seceded States. But Virginia was not to be easily deluded. Two days after the interview of her Commissioners with President Lincoln, her people were reading his call for a land force of seventy-five thousand men; and almost instantly thereafter, the proud and thrilling news was flashed over the South that Virginia had redeemed the pledges she had given against coercion, and was no longer a member of the Federal Union, but in a new, heart-to-heart, defiant union with the Confederate States of the South.

The ordinance of secession on the part of Virginia was met by signs of discontent in some thirty or forty counties in the western part of the State. But despite this distraction, her example was not without its influence and fruit. North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas followed the leadership of Virginia, in what may be called the second secessionary movement of the States-which, made as it was, in the immediate presence of war, and led by Virginia in the face of the most imposing, actual, and imminent dangers to herself, showed a courage and devotion of a degree not permitted to be exhibited by the first movement of the Cotton States. History will not allow the real leadership of Virginia in the glory of the movement for freedom to be disputed by South Carolina. Where all are confessed brave, and where opportunities only have differed for exhibitions of devotion, it is only in the historical spirit, and not in that of invidiousness, that the fact is claimed for Virginia of a supreme manifestation of devoted courage and leadership.

The people of Virginia had not long to wait to see verified the interpretation that that State had given to Mr. Lincoln's policy, as one of coercion and subjugation of the South, and of unauthorized war upon its citizens. He increased his levies by repeated proclamations, until more than two hundred thousand men in the North were put under arms. He exchanged his former pretext for calling out troops to repossess the Southern forts. He induced his new forces to believe that they were only intended for the defence of his capital. He did not hesitate, however, to occupy Maryland with troops, to increase the garrison and subsidiary