  The Attempt to Coerce the Cotton States Impels Virginia's Secession James Ford Rhodes in his history of the United States, referring to the eventful year of 1861, says: "There were at this time in the Border States of Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri unconditional Secessionists and unconditional Union men; but the great body of the people, although believing that the wrongs of the South were grievous and cried for redress, deemed secession inexpedient.... All denied either the right or the feasibility of coercion." What was the pith and potency of this anti-coercion sentiment among the people of Virginia? ANTI-COERCION SENTIMENT IN VIRGINIA There were two distinct schools of thought and yet both denied the right of the Federal Government to coerce the people of the Cotton States. One school believed in the constitutional right of a state to secede: the Union was formed by the constitution—which was a compact between independent sovereignties; the powers of the Union were those and only those delegated to it by the states; the states never surrendered their sovereignty, nor their right to withdraw from the Union for what they deemed sufficient cause. This, in brief, was the position of the school which maintained the constitutional right of a state to secede. The other school while denying the constitutionality It is not within the purview of our allotted task to vindicate or even investigate the constitutional right of a state, or of the Cotton States, to secede from the Union, or to accomplish the same end through the right of revolution as inherent in their people. Our discussion is here limited to a consideration of the strong anti-coercion sentiments among the Virginia people, and how these convictions ultimately controlled their action on the question of the secession of their state. It will suffice to say that whether regarded as a constitutional or a revolutionary right, or both combined, the people of Virginia held that the Cotton States, having deliberately and with almost unexampled unanimity, decided to dissolve the political relations which formerly existed between them and their sister commonwealths, that with respect to the legal and ethical character of this action there was no competent court of review this side of the judgment seat of Heaven. The wisdom of their secession might be denied, the morality of their action might be questioned, the disastrous consequences to the Union might be admitted, but still no right existed in any body of men to invade their country and defeat their aspirations by the sword. Had not a people as numerous and united as those of the Cotton States the inherent right, in the language of the DAVIS ON RIGHT OF REVOLUTION Jefferson Davis, in his farewell address to the United States Senate, expressed the sentiments of Virginia upon this point when he said: "Now, sir, we are confusing language very much. Men speak of revolution; and when they say revolution, they mean blood. Our fathers meant nothing of the sort. When they spoke of revolution, they meant an inalienable right. When they declared as an inalienable right, the power of the people to abrogate and modify their form of government whenever it did not answer the ends for which it was established, they did not mean that they were to sustain that by brute force.... Are we, in this age of civilization and political progress ... are we to roll back the whole current of human thought and again to return to the mere brute force which prevails between "Is it to be supposed that the men who fought the battles of the Revolution for community independence, terminated their great efforts by transmitting posterity to a condition in which they could only gain those rights by force? If so, the blood of the Revolution was shed in vain; no great principles were established; for force was the law of nature before the battles of the Revolution were fought." ANTI-COERCION VIEWS OF VIRGINIANS Such was the attitude of the great body of the Virginia people. That no new principle was asserted to meet the exigencies of the hour, all acquainted with the history of the state will readily appreciate. Even men who denied the constitutional right of secession, joined with those who believed in that right in opposing coercion. Robert E. Lee, writing on the 23d of January, 1861, said: "Secession is nothing but revolution. The framers of our constitution never exhausted so much labor, wisdom and forbearance in its formation and surrounded it with so many guards and securities if it was intended to be broken by every member of the Confederacy at will.... "Still a Union that can only be maintained by swords and bayonets and in which strife and civil war are to take the place of brotherly love and kindness, has no charm for me. If the Union is dissolved and the Government disrupted I shall return to my native state and share the miseries of my people—and save in defense will draw my sword on none." William C. Rives, speaking on the 19th of February, 1861, in the Peace Conference at Washington, as one of the Commissioners from Virginia, said: George Baylor, speaking on the 1st of March 1861, in the Virginia Convention, said: "I have said, Mr. President, that I did not believe in the right of secession. But whilst I make that assertion, I also say that I am opposed to coercion on the part of the Federal Government with the view of bringing the seceded states back into the Union.... I am opposed to it first because I can find no authority in the Constitution of the United States delegating that power to the Federal Government, and second because if the Federal Government had the power it would be wrong to use it." The foregoing sentiments were not confined to the Virginia people, either of the Revolutionary or Civil War periods. A few deliverances by men of international reputation made during the three decades preceding the Civil War will serve to illustrate the truth of this suggestion: M. de Tocqueville, in his work, Democracy in America, discussing the subject, says: "However strong a government may be, it cannot easily escape from the consequences of a principle which it has once admitted as the foundation of its constitution. The Union was formed by the voluntary agreement of the states; and in uniting together they have never forfeited their nationality nor have they been reduced to the condition of one and the same people. If one of the FOUNDATION OF AMERICAN INSTITUTIONS Lord Brougham in his Political Philosophy, alluding to the unique character of the government created by the constitution of the United States, writes: "There is not, as with us, a government only and its subjects to be regarded; but a number of governments, of states, having each a separate and substantive, and even independent existence, originally thirteen now six and twenty, and each having a Legislature of its own with laws differing from those of the other states. It is plainly impossible to consider the constitution which professes to govern this whole Union, this federacy of states, as anything other than a treaty." John Quincy Adams, speaking before the New York Historical Society in 1839, on the fiftieth anniversary of Washington's inauguration as President of the United States, said: "To the people alone there is reserved as well the dissolving as the constituent power and that power can be exercised by them only under the tie of conscience binding them to the retributive justice of Heaven. "With these qualifications we may admit the right as vested in the people of every state of the Union with reference to the General Government which was exercised by the people of the United Colonies with reference to the supreme head of the British Empire of which they formed a part and under these limitations have the people of each state of the Union a right to secede from the Confederated Union itself." Mr. Lincoln, speaking on the 12th of January, 1848, in Congress, said: "Any people anywhere being inclined and having the power have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, most sacred right, a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can may revolutionize and make their own any or so much of the territory as they inhabit." Probably Mr. Gladstone expressed in the briefest possible compass the general consensus of the Virginia people, when on the 24th of April, 1862, in his Manchester speech, referring to the attitude of the Federal Government and the Northern people, he said: "We have no faith in the propagation of free institutions at the point of the sword." VIEWS OF PROMINENT AMERICANS Scarcely less pronounced were the sentiments of many prominent Americans expressed just before the outbreak of the Civil War with reference to the moral or political right of the Federal Government or the Northern people to coerce the Southern States. Horace Greeley, in the issue of the New York Tribune of November 9th, 1860, discussing the contemplated secession of the Cotton States, wrote: "If the Cotton States shall decide that they can do better out of the Union than in it, we insist on letting them go in peace. The right to secede may be a revolutionary one but it exists nevertheless; and we do not see Again he wrote: "If it (the Declaration of Independence) justified the secession from the British Empire of three millions of colonists in 1776, we do not see why it would not justify the secession of five millions of Southerners from the Federal Union in 1861. If we are mistaken on this point why does not some one attempt to show wherein and why(?)" On the 23d of February, 1861, he wrote: "We have repeatedly said and we once more insist that the great principle embodied by Jefferson in the Declaration of American Independence that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed is sound and just; and that if the Slave States, the Cotton States, or the Gulf States only, choose to form an independent nation they have a clear moral right to do so." President Buchanan, in his message to Congress on the 3d of December, 1860, said: "The fact is that our Union rests upon public opinion and can never be cemented by the blood of its citizens shed in civil war. If it cannot live in the affections of the people it must one day perish. Congress possesses many means of preserving it by conciliation; but the sword was not placed in their hands to preserve it by force." Edward Everett, writing on the 2d of February, 1861, to the Union Meeting called to assemble at Faneuil Hall, said: Wendell Phillips, speaking at New Bedford, Mass., on the 9th of April, 1861, said: "But I am sorry that a gun should be fired at Fort Sumter or that a gun should be fired from it for this reason: The administration at Washington does not know its time. Here are a series of states girding the Gulf who think that their peculiar institutions require that they should have a separate government. They have a right to decide that question without appealing to you or me. A large body of people, sufficient to make a nation, have come to the conclusion that they will have a government of a certain form. Who denies them the right? Standing with the principles of '76 behind us, who can deny them the right?" Abraham Lincoln, speaking on the 15th of November, 1860, said: "My own impression is, leaving myself room to modify the opinion, if, upon further investigation, I should see fit to do so, that this Government possesses both the authority and the power to maintain its own integrity. That, however, is not the ugly point of this matter. The ugly point is the necessity of keeping the Government together by force as ours should be a Government of fraternity." On the 10th of April, 1861, only five days previous to the call for seventy-five thousand soldiers, Mr. Seward, as "For these reasons he (the President) would not be disposed to reject a cardinal dogma of theirs (the Secessionists), namely, that the Federal Government could not reduce the seceding states to obedience by conquest, even though he were disposed to question that proposition. But, in fact, the President willingly accepts it as true. Only an imperial or despotic government could subjugate thoroughly disaffected and insurrectionary members of the state. This Federal Republican system of ours of all forms of government is the very one which is most unfitted for such labor." VIRGINIA ADHERES TO HER PRINCIPLES Such were some of the deliverances of prominent Americans in the days immediately preceding the Civil War. They expressed the sentiments of leading Virginians of the time and explained and vindicated their position in resisting the policy of coercion adopted by the Federal Government. Why was it that in the supreme hour Greeley and Seward and Lincoln, and all their notable compatriots, parted company with Virginia? Charles Francis Adams says: "Virginia, as I have said, made state sovereignty an article—a cardinal article—of its political creed. So logically and consistently it took the position that though it might be unwise for a state to secede, a state which did secede could not and should not be coerced. "To us now this position seems worse than illogical. It is impossible. So events proved it then. Yet, after all, it is based on the fundamental principle of the consent of the governed; and in the days immediately preceding the Civil War something very like it was accepted as an article of correct political faith by men afterwards as strenuous
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