When they pleaded for peace, the
United States Government deceptively delayed to answer, while making
ready for war. To the calm judgment of mankind is submitted the
question, Who was responsible for the war between the States?
Virginia, whose history, from the beginning of the Revolution of 1776,
had been a long course of sacrifices for the benefit of her sister
States, and for the preservation of the Union she had mainly contributed
to establish, clung to it with the devotion of a mother. It has been
shown how her efforts to check dissolution were persisted in when the
aggrieved were hopeless and the aggressors reckless, and how her
mediations were rejected in the "Peace Congress," which on her motion
had been assembled. Sorrowing over the failure of this, her blessed
though unsuccessful attempt to preserve the Union _of the Constitution_,
she was not permitted to mourn as a neutral, but was required by the
United States Government to choose between furnishing troops to
subjugate her Southern sisters or the reclamation of the grants she had
made to the Federal Government when she became a member of the Union.
The first was a violation of the letter and the spirit of the
Constitution; the second was a reserved right. The voice of Henry called
to her from the ground; the spirits of Washington and Jefferson moved
among her people.
There was but one course consistent with her stainless reputation and
often-declared tenets, as to the liberties of her people, which she
could have adopted.
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