The secession of Virginia.
[The following, written in the
New York Examiner, in reply to a so-called historical statement of
Mr. Rossiter Johnson, is put in our records at the request of a number of gentlemen whose opinions we respect.
It is, of course, not a full treatment of the question, but merely a
hit back at
Mr. Johnson's misrepresentations.]
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I am willing to believe that
Mr. Johnson has tried to be fair, and has presented the case as he understands it. But as a Virginian born and reared on her soil, familiar with her history, and proud of her traditions, I especially desire to enter my protest against the account he has given [see the
Examiner of November 12th] of ‘The Secession of
Virginia.’
The statement that
Virginia's Governor (
John Letcher) ‘was an ardent disunionist’ exactly contradicts the fact.
Governor Letcher, up to the issuing of
Mr. Lincoln's proclamation calling for seventy-five thousand troops to coerce the seceded States, was
an ardent ‘
Union’ man, as were a majority of the people of
Virginia.
Indeed, his attachment to the
Union was so strong—and his opposition to secession so emphatic and outspoken—that the secessionists distrusted him, and their chief organ, the Richmond
Examiner, was filled with abuse and denunciation of ‘our tortoise Governor,’ ‘the submissionist,’ ‘the betrayer of the liberties of the people,’ etc.
Governor Letcher was in fullest accord with the
Union leaders of the Virginia Convention, and refused every suggestion to call out troops to capture the navy-yard at
Portsmouth,
Fort Monroe, or
Harper's Ferry until after the
Convention had passed the ordinance of secession.
But he was, in all of his sympathies and feelings,
a Virginian, did not believe in the right of the
General Government to coerce a ‘Sovereign State,’ and promptly responded to
Mr. Lincoln's call for
Virginia's quota of the seventy-five thousand troops that no troops ‘would be furnished for any such purpose’—‘an object’ which, in his judgment, ‘was not within the purview of the
Constitution or the laws.’
‘You have,’ said he to
Mr. Lincoln, ‘chosen to inaugurate civil war.’
But the most remarkable statement in
Mr. Johnson's article is as follows:
‘
Virginia's fate appears to have been determined by a measure that was less spectacular and more coldly significant.
The Confederate Congress at
Montgomery passed an act forbidding the importation of slaves from States outside of the
Confederacy.
When
Virginia heard that, like the young man in Scripture, she went away sorrowful; for in that line of trade she had great possessions.
The cultivation of land by slave-labor had long since ceased to be profitable in the border States—or at least it was far less profitable than raising slaves for the cotton States, and the acquisition of new territory in
Texas and
Missouri had enormously increased the demand.
The greatest part of this business (sometimes estimated as high as
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one half) was
Virginia's. It was called the “vigintal crop,” as the blacks were ready for market and at their highest value about the age of twenty.
As it was an ordinary business of bargain and sale, no statistics were kept; but the lowest estimate of the annual value of the trade in the Old Dominion placed it in the tens of millions of dollars.
After
Sumter had been fired on and the Confederate Congress had forbidden this traffic to outsiders, the Virginia Convention again took up the ordinance of secession (April 17th) and passed it in secret session by a vote of 88 to 65.’
Now, I have to say in reply to this:
1. The Confederate Congress at
Montgomery passed no such act “forbidding the importation of slaves from States outside of the
Confederacy,” and absolutely nothing of this character whatever.
I have before me an official copy of The Statutes at Large of the
Confederate States of America—a book, by the way, which I respectfully commend to
Mr. Johnson for his careful study—and it contains no such act or resolution.
2. Even if such an act
had been passed, it would not have had the slightest effect upon the action of
Virginia, for it is a slander alike upon the character of her people and the motives which impelled her to secede and join the
Confederacy, to represent her as a cold, calculating, negro-trader, only influenced by the hope of gain in raising negroes for the
Southern market.
It is not true that ‘raising slaves for the cotton States’ was an ‘ordinary business of bargain and sale,’ worth annually ‘tens of millions of dollars to
Virginia.’
The truth is that the average
Virginia planter would mortgage his plantation and well nigh ruin his estate to support his negroes in comparative idleness before he would sell them; that very few negroes were ever sold except under the sternest necessity; that the negro trader was considered a disreputable member of society; and that ‘raising slaves for the market’ is a romance of Abolition invention which fully served its purpose in the bitter controversies of the slavery agitation, but which an intelligent writer should now be ashamed to drag forth again.
When
Robert E. Lee said, ‘
If the millions of slaves at the South were mine I would free them with a stroke of the pen to avert this war,’ he but voiced the sentiments of nine-tenths of the people in
Virginia.
The truth is that our grand old Commonwealth has a record on this question of which she need not be ashamed.
The first slaves introduced in
Virginia were brought and forced upon her colonists against their protests—and from that day all that were brought to her soil came in ships of Old or
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New England.
When the
Federal Constitution was adopted
Virginia favored the immediate abolition of the slave-trade, and the time for its abolition was extended twenty years on the demand of
Massachusetts and other
New England States, and when the slave-trade was abolished
Virginia voted for its abolition, while
Massachusetts voted for its continuance.
After giving with princely liberality, to the
General Government for the common domain, the
Northwest Territory, out of which the States of:
Ohio,
Indiana,
Illinois,
Michigan,
Wisconsin, and a part of
Minnesota were afterwards carved,
Virginia consented with surprising readiness to making this
free territory.
And there can be but little doubt that the sentiments of her leading statesmen would have prevailed, and
Virginia would have adopted emancipation measures, but for the fact that, after finding that slavery would not pay with them, the
Northern States (after
selling their own slaves and pocketing the money) began a system of warfare upon slavery which tended to consolidate and perpetuate the pro slavery sentiment in the
State.
3. The real reason of the secession of
Virginia was that she considered that
Mr. Lincoln's proclamation had ‘inaugurated civil war,’ and she had simply to choose whether she would
take sides with the .
North or with the South in the great conflict.
If you could give me space to go into the details I could abundantly show that in all of the bitter controversies of the past the voice of
Virginia had been on the side of the
Union—that she had been ready to make any sacrifice, save honor, to preserve the
Union which her sons had done so much to form and to perpetuate.
After other Southern States had seceded she still voted overwhelmingly against secession, called the Peace Congress which assembled at
Washington, sent her commissioners to
Mr. Lincoln after his inaugural, and on bended knee begged for peace and Union But she was equally emphatic in claiming that a State had
the right to secede— that she had
expressly reserved that right when she entered the original compact—and that the
General Government had no right to coerce a State desiring to secede.
This she had declared over and over again by the most solemn enactment, and her commissioners made her position clear to the authorities at
Washington.
Two days, therefore, after
Mr. Lincoln's call for her quota of troops to subjugate the seceded States
Virginia passed her ordinance of secession and bared her breast to receive the coming storm.
Equally untrue to the facts of history is the attempt of
Mr. Johnson to make it appear that the people of
Virginia were not then in
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favor of secession—that ‘the
Governor turned over the entire military force and equipment of the
State to the
Confederate authorities’—and that a vote against secession was ‘impossible,’ because, at the time of the popular vote, ‘the soil of
Virginia was overrun by soldiers from the cotton States.’
The Convention, and not the
Governor, formed the alliance with the
Confederate States—the election was one of the fairest ever held in
America—and while the vote stood 125,950 in favor of ratifying the ordinance of secession to 20,373 against it (most of these last being cast in
Northwest Virginia, where Federal bayonets
did influence the vote)—yet there were no soldiers at the polls, no sort of intimidation was used, and men voted freely their honest convictions.
The simple truth is, that
Mr. Lincoln's proclamation caused the immediate secession of
Virginia, and so dissipated the ‘Union’ sentiment of the people, that
Hon. John B. Baldwin (the
Union leader of the
Convention, and one of the ablest, purest men the
State ever produced) but voiced the general sentiment when he wrote a friend at the
North—who had asked him the day after the proclamation was issued: ‘What will the
Union men of
Virginia do now?’—‘
We have no Union men in Virginia now, but those who
were “Union” men will stand to their guns and make a fight which shall shine out on the page of history as an example of what a brave people can do after exhausting every means of pacification.’
Yes; old
Virginia clung to the
Union and the
Constitution with filial devotion.
The voice of her Henry had first aroused the colonies to resist British oppression.
The pen of her
Jefferson had written the
Declaration of Independence.
The sword of her
Washington had made good that Declaration.
The pen of her
Mason had written the
Constitution, and her great statesmen had expounded it. Through long, prosperous, and happy years her sons had filled the presidential chair, and her voice had been potential, in Cabinet and Congress, in shaping the destinies of the great republic to whose prosperity she had contributed so largely.
But now there had arisen ‘another king that knew not Joseph’—the very fundamental principles of the
Constitution were, in her judgment, subverted—civil war, with all of its horrors, had been inaugurated, and she must choose on which side she would fight.
She did not hesitate; but knowing full well that her soil would be the great battlefield, she took up the ‘gage of battle’ and called on her sons to rally to her defence.
From mountain-valley to the shores of her resounding seas—from
Alleghany to
Chesapeake—from the
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Potomac to the
North Carolina line—the call is heard and there rush to arms at the first tap of the drum—not Hessian or Milesian mercenaries, not a band of negro-traders coolly calculating how much they could make out of a Southern Confederacy—but the very flower of our
Virginia manhood, as true patriots as the world ever saw, worthy sons of sires of ‘76.
And they
did ‘make a fight’ which illustrates some of the brightest pages of
American history, and of which men at the
North as well as men at the
South are even now beginning to be proud.
Aye! and the day will come when the story of the partisan will rot into oblivion, and ‘the men who wore the gray,’ alike with ‘the men who wore the blue,’ will have even justice at the bar of impartial history.
