Reason for secession of Virginia.
What, then, was the true cause which impelled
Virginia to secede and for which her people fought?
It may be stated in a word.
Statesmen from the dawn of the
Union had declared, and her people had been educated to believe, that any State had the constitutional right to peaceably withdraw from the
Union.
When the
Cotton States adopted that course and formed the Southern Confederacy, Virginia, while deploring the event, still felt they had but exercised an undoubted right, and therefore any armed coercion on the part of the
Federal government was not warranted by the
Constitution.
Mr. Davis, in one of his first messages, thus stated the position of this new government: ‘In independence we seek no conquests, no aggrandizements, no concessions of any kind from the States with which we have lately been confederated.
All we ask is to be let alone; that those who never held power over us shall not now attempt our subjugation by arms.’
Virginia believed they had the right to make that declaration, and to take that stand; and because of this conviction, and because of its repeated declaration in the most solemn and authoritative form, both by legislative enactment and the avowals of her leaders, to have remained in the
Union and joined in the coercion of the seceding States, would have been a repudiation of her principles and an act of tyranny and dishonor.
