to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition." Seven slave States had gone out, but eight remained, and the anxiety of the secessionists was to secure these at once, or most of them, before the excitement cooled. The great prize was Virginia, both because of her own power and resources, and because her accession to the Confederacy would necessarily bring North Carolina also. Her governor, John Letcher, professed to be a Unionist; but his conduct after the ordinance of secession had been passed appears to prove that this profession was insincere. In electing delegates to a convention to consider the question of secession, the Unionists cast a majority of sixty thousand votes; and on the 4th of April, when President Lincoln had been in office a month, that convention refused, by a vote of eighty-nine to forty-five, to pass an ordinance of secession. The leading revolutionists of the cotton States were becoming uneasy. Said Mr. Gilchrist, of Alabama, to the Confederate Secretary of War: "You must sprinkle blood in the faces of the people! If you delay two months, Alabama stays in the Union!" Hence the attack on Fort Sumter, out of which the garrison were in peril of being driven by starvation. This certainly had a great popular effect in the South as well as in the North; but Virginia's choice appears to have been determined by a measure that was less spectacular and more coldly significant. The Confederate Constitution provided that Congress should have the power to "prohibit the introduction of slaves from any State not a member of, or Territory not belonging to, this Confederacy," and at the time when Virginia's fate was in the balance it was reported that such an act had been passed by the Congress at Montgomery.1 When Virginia heard this, 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 had enormously increased the demand. The greatest part of this business (sometimes estimated as high as 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. President Dew, of William and Mary College, in his celebrated pamphlet, wrote: "Virginia is, in fact, a negro-raising State for other States." The New York Journal of Commerce of October 12, 1835, contained a letter from a Virginian (vouched for by the editor) in which it was asserted that twenty thousand slaves had been driven south from that State that year. In 1836 the Wheeling (Va.) Times estimated the number of slaves exported from that State during the preceding year at forty thousand, valued at twenty-four million dollars. The Baltimore Register in 1846 said: "Dealing in slaves has become a large business; establishments are made in several places in Maryland and Virginia, at which they are sold like cattle." The Richmond Examiner, before the war, said: "Upon an inside estimate, they [the slaves of Virginia] yield in gross surplus produce, from sales of negroes to go south, ten million dollars." In the United States Senate, just before the war, Hon. Alfred Iverson, of Georgia, replying to Mr. Powell, of Virginia, said Virginia was deeply interested in secession: for if the cotton States seceded, Virginia would find no market for her slaves, without which that State would be ruined.
1 It is now impossible to prove positively that such a law was actually passed; for the officially printed volume of "Statutes at Large of the Provisional Government of the Confederate States of America" (Richmond, 1861) was evidently mutilated before being placed in the hands of the compositor. The Acts are numbered, but here and there numbers are missing, and in some of the later Acts there are allusions to previous Acts that cannot be found in the book. It is known that on the 6th of March, 1861, the Judiciary Committee was instructed to inquire into the expediency of such prohibition, and it seems a fair conjecture that one of the missing numbers was an Act of this character. In a later edition (1864) the numbering is made consecutive, but the missing matter is not restored.
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| THE SIXTH MASSACHUSETTS REGIMENT ATTACKED IN THE STREETS OF BALTIMORE, APRIL 19, 1861. |
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| ON PICKET. (Showing photographer's outfit.) |
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 17) and passed it in secret session by a vote of eighty-eight to fifty-five. It was not to take effect till approved by the people; but the day fixed for their voting upon it was six weeks distant, the last Thursday in May. Long before that date, Governor Letcher, without waiting for the verdict of the people, turned over the entire military force and equipment of the State to the Confederate authorities, and the seat of the Confederate Government was removed from Montgomery to Richmond. David G. Farragut, afterwards the famous admiral, who was in Norfolk, Virginia, at the time, anxiously watching the course of events, declared that the State "had been dragooned out of the Union," and he refused to be dragooned with her. But Robert E. Lee and other prominent Virginians resigned their commissions in the United States service to enter that of their States or of the Confederacy, and the soil of Virginia was overrun by soldiers from the cotton States. Any other result than a vote for secession was therefore impossible. Arkansas followed with a similar ordinance on the 6th of May, and North Carolina on the 21st, neither being submitted to a popular vote. Kentucky refused to secede. For Tennessee and Missouri there was a prolonged struggle.
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When Fort Sumter was surrendered, the Confederates had already acquired possession of Castle Pinckney and Fort Moultrie in Charleston Harbor, Fort Pulaski at Savannah, Fort Morgan at the entrance of Mobile Bay, Forts Jackson and St. Philip below New Orleans, the navy-yard and Forts McRae and Barrancas at Pensacola, the arsenals at Mount Vernon, Ala., and Little Rock, Ark., and the New Orleans Mint. The largest force of United States regulars was that in Texas, under command of Gen. David E. Twiggs, who surrendered it in February, and turned over to the insurgents one million two hundred and fifty thousand dollars' worth of military property.
On the day when Sumter fell, President Lincoln penned a proclamation, issued the next day (Monday, April 15), which declared "that the laws of the United States have been for some time past, and now are, opposed, and the execution thereof obstructed, in the States of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings or by the powers vested in the marshals by law," and called for militia from the several States of the Union to the number of seventy-five thousand. It also called a special session of Congress, to convene on July 4. He appealed "to all loyal citizens to favor, facilitate, and aid this effort to maintain the honor, the integrity, and existence of our National Union, and the perpetuity of popular government, and to redress wrongs already long enough endured."
With regard to the reception of this celebrated proclamation in the South, Alexander H. Stephens writes as follows, in his History of the war: "The effect of this upon the public mind of the Southern States cannot be described or even estimated. Up to this time, a majority, I think, of even those who favored the policy of secession had done so under the belief and conviction that it was the surest way of securing a redress of grievances, and of bringing the Federal Government back to Constitutional principles. This proclamation dispelled all such hopes. It showed that the party in power intended nothing short of complete centralization. The principles actuating the Washington authorities were those aiming