The secession of Virginia.
by J. Wm. Jones.
[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.] [360]
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 [361] 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 [362] 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 [363] 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 [364] 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.
