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 of secession, yet
held that the Federal Government could not reduce to submission a people
as numerous as those of the Cotton States, without doing violence to the
principles, ethical and political, upon which the Union was founded.
This in brief was the position of those who maintained the revolutionary
right of the people of the seceded states to fix their own form of
government unawed by any outside power.
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 Declaration of Independence,
"To assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station
to which the laws of Nature and Nature's God entitled them?" Were the
just powers of governments derived from the consent of the governed? To
the Virginians of 1861 it was a solecism to accord to one body of people
a right, and yet acknowledge in another the equal right to defeat its
exercise. It was an anachronism to talk in America, after the
Declaration of Independence and the war with Great Britain, about the
right of self-government in three millions of people as being dependent
upon force. This was acknowledged before Samuel Adams and Thomas
Jefferson were born, and before the Patriots had made good their great
avowals by their heroic struggles from Concord to Yorktown. Force,
Virginia insisted, was not the method of holding great masses of
American freemen in unwilling association with their fellows; nor the
implements of war, the legitimate means for determining great questions
of legal and ethical right.