In addition to all the considerations set forth in the foregoing pages,
the student of history must, if he would fully appreciate the forces
which controlled their action with respect to secession and the Civil
War, take into account the racial characteristics of the Virginia
people. A full portrayal of these characteristics, strongly marked and
persisting from generation to generation, must be the work of some other
pen. Suffice it here to say that as a people they exalted honor and
courage—both in the individual and in the clan; they exhibited the
strength of the idealist, combined, on the part of many, with the
limitations of the doctrinaire; they decided questions by the standards
of abstract right rather than in their relation to the duties and
interests of other peoples and other times; they were self-reliant,
content to justify the integrity of their conduct to their own
consciences rather than to the world; they were tenacious of their
rights and regarded a threatened invasion as not only justifying but
compelling resistance if the ideals and conditions which make men
patriots and freemen were to find an abiding place in their state.