The Long Roll
Confederacy and enjoying its benefits cannot, by any mode of
procedure, withdraw its citizens from the obligation to obey the
Constitution and the laws passed in pursuance thereof.
But when a State does secede, the Constitution and laws of the
United States cease to operate therein. No power is conferred on
Congress to enforce them. Such authority was denied to the Congress
in the convention which framed the Constitution, because it would be
an act of war of nation against nation--not the exercise of the
legitimate power of a government to enforce its laws on those
subject to its jurisdiction.
The assumption of such a power would be the assertion of a
prerogative claimed by the British Government to legislate for the
Colonies in all cases whatever; it would constitute of itself a
dangerous attack on the rights of the States, and should be promptly
repelled._
There was a great thunder of assent. "That is our doctrine--bred in the
bone--dyed in the weaving! Jefferson, Madison, Marshall, Washington,
Henry--further back yet, further back--back to Magna Charta!"
_These principles, resulting from the nature of our system of
confederate States, cannot admit of question in Virginia.
In 1788 our people in convention, by their act of ratification,
declared and made known that the powers granted under the
Constitution, being derived from the people of the United States,
may be resumed by them whenever they shall be perverted to their
injury and oppression.
From what people were these powers derived? Confessedly from the
people of each State, acting for themselves. By whom were they to be
resumed or taken back? By the people of the State who were then
granting them away. Who were to determine whether the powers granted
had been perverted to their injury or oppression? Not the whole
people of the United States, for there could be no oppression of the
whole with their own consent; and it could not have entered into the
conception of the Convention that the powers granted could not be
resumed until the oppressor himself united in such resumption.
They asserted the right to resume in order to guard the people of
Virginia, for whom alone the Convention could act, against the
oppression of an irresponsible and sectional majority, the worst
form of oppression with which an angry Providence has ever afflicted
humanity.
Whilst therefore we regret that any State should, in a matter of
common grievance, have determined to act for herself without
consulting with her sister States equally aggrieved, we are
nevertheless constrained to say that the occasion justifies and
loudly calls for action of some kind....
In view therefore of the present condition of our country, and the
causes of it, we declare almost in the words of our fathers,
contained in an address of the freeholders of Botetourt, in
February, 1775, to the delegates from Virginia to the Continental
Congress, "That we desire no change in our government whilst left to
the free enjoyment of our equal privileges secured by the
CONSTITUTION; but that should a tyrannical SECTIONAL MAJORITY, under
the sanction of the forms of the CONSTITUTION, persist in acts of
injustice and violence toward us, they only must be answerable for
the consequences."
That liberty is so strongly impressed upon our hearts that we cannot
think of parting with it but with our lives; that our duty to God,
our country, ourselves and our posterity forbid it; we stand,
therefore, prepared for every contingency._
RESOLVED THEREFORE, _That in view of the facts set out in the
foregoing preamble, it is the opinion of this meeting that a
convention of the people should be called forthwith; that the State
in its sovereign character should consult with the other Southern
States, and agree upon such guarantees as in their opinion will
secure their equality, tranquillity and rights_ WITHIN THE UNION.
The applause shook the air. "Yes, yes! within the Union! They're not
quite mad--not even the black Republicans! We'll save the Union!--We
made it, and we'll save it!--Unless the North takes leave of its
senses.--Go on!"
_And in the event of a failure to obtain such guarantees, to adopt
in concert with the other Southern States_, OR ALONE, _such measures
as may seem most expedient to protect the rights and ensure the
safety of the people of Virginia_.
The reader made an end, and stood with dignity. Silence, then a
beginning of sound, like the beginning of wind in the forest. It grew,
it became deep and surrounding as the atmosphere, it increased into the
general voice of the county, and the voice passed the Botetourt
Resolutions.
CHAPTER II
THE HILLTOP
On the court house portico sat the prominent men of the county, lawyers
and planters, men of name and place, moulders of thought and leaders in
action. Out of these came the speakers. One by one, they stepped into
the clear space between the pillars. Such a man was cool and weighty,
such a man was impassioned and persuasive. Now the tense crowd
listened, hardly breathing, now it broke into wild applause. The
speakers dealt with an approaching tempest, and with a gesture they
checked off the storm clouds. "_Protection for the manufacturing North
at the expense of the agricultural South_--an old storm centre!
_Territorial Rights_--once a speck in the west, not so large as a man's
hand, and now beneath it, the wrangling and darkened land! _The Bondage
of the African Race_--a heavy cloud! Our English fathers raised it; our
northern brethren dwelled with it; the currents of the air fixed it in
the South. At no far day we will pass from under it. In the mean time we
would not have it _burst_. In that case underneath it would lie ruined
fields and wrecked homes, and out of its elements would come a fearful
pestilence! _The Triumph of the Republican Party_--no slight darkening
of the air is that, no drifting mist of the morning! It is the triumph
of that party which proclaims the Constitution a covenant with death and
an agreement with hell!--of that party which tolled the bells, and fired
the minute guns, and draped its churches with black, and all-hailed as
saint and martyr the instigator of a bloody and servile insurrection in
a sister State, the felon and murderer, John Brown! The Radical, the
Black Republican, faction, sectional rule, fanaticism, violation of the
Constitution, aggression, tyranny, and wrong--all these are in the bosom
of that cloud!--_The Sovereignty of the State._ Where is the tempest
which threatens here? _Not_ here, Virginians! but in the pleasing
assertion of the North, 'There is no sovereignty of the State!' 'A State
is merely to the Union what a county is to a State.' O shades of John
Randolph of Roanoke, of Patrick Henry, of Mason and Madison, of
Washington and Jefferson! O shade of John Marshall even, whom we used to
think too Federal! The Union! We thought of the Union as a golden
thread--at the most we thought of it as a strong servant we had made
between us, we thirteen artificers--a beautiful Talus to walk our coasts
and cry 'All's well!' We thought so--by the gods, we think so yet! That
_is_ our Union--the golden thread, the faithful servant; not the monster
that Frankenstein made, not this Minotaur swallowing States! _The
Sovereignty of the State!_ Virginia fought seven years for the
sovereignty of Virginia, wrung it, eighty years ago, from Great Britain,
and has not since resigned it! Being different in most things, possibly
the North is different also in this. It may be that those States have
renounced the liberty they fought for. Possibly Massachusetts--the years
1803, 1811, and 1844 to the contrary--does regard herself as a county.
Possibly Connecticut--for all that there was a Hartford
Convention!--sees herself in the same light. Possibly. 'Brutus saith 't
is so, and Brutus is an honourable man!' But Virginia has not renounced!
Eighty years ago she wrote a certain motto on her shield. To-day the
letters burn bright! Unterrified then she entered this league from which
we hoped so much. Unterrified to-morrow, should a slurring hand be laid
upon that shield, will she leave it!"
Allan Gold, from the schoolhouse on Thunder Run, listened with a
swelling heart, then, amid the applause which followed the last speaker,
edged his way along the crowded old brick pavement to where, not far
from the portico, he made out the broad shoulders, the waving dark hair,
and the slouch hat of a young man with whom he was used to discuss these
questions. Hairston Breckinridge glanced down at the pressure upon his
arm, recognized the hand, and pursued, half aloud, the current of his
thought. "I don't believe I'll go back to the university. I don't
believe any of us will go back to the university.--Hello, Allan!"
"I'm for the preservation of the Union," said Allan. "I can't help it.
We made it, and we've loved it."
"I'm for it, too," answered the other, "in reason. I'm not for it out of
reason. In these affairs out of reason is out of honour. There's nothing
sacred in the word _Union_ that men should bow down and worship it! It's
the thing behind the word that counts--and whoever says that
Massachusetts and Virginia, and Illinois and Texas are united just now
is a fool or a liar!--Who's this Colonel Anderson is bringing forward?
Ah, we'll have the Union now!"
"Who is it?"
"Albemarle man, staying at Lauderdale.--Major in the army, home on
furlough.--Old-line Whig. I've been at his brother's place, near
Charlottesville--"
From the portico came a voice. "I am sure that few in Botetourt need an
introduction here. We, no more than others, are free from vanity, and we
think we know a hero by intuition. Men of Botetourt, we have the honour
to listen to Major Fauquier Cary, who carried the flag up Chapultepec!"
Amid applause a man of perhaps forty years, spare, bronzed, and
soldierly, entered the clear space between the pillars, threw out his
arm with an authoritative gesture, and began to speak in an odd, dry,
attractive voice. "You are too good!" he said clearly. "I'm afraid you
don't know Fauquier Cary very well, after all. He's no hero--worse luck!
He's only a Virginian, trying to do the right as he sees it, out yonder
on the plains with the Apaches and the Comanches and the sage brush and
the desert--"
There was an interruption. "How about Chapultepec?"--"And the Rio
Grande?"--"Didn't we hear something about a fight in Texas?"
The speaker laughed. "A fight in Texas? Folk, folk, if you knew how many
fights there are in Texas--and how meritorious it is to keep out of
them! No; I'm only a Virginian out there." He regarded the throng with
his magnetic smile, his slight and fine air of gaiety in storm. "As you
know, I am by no means the only Virginian, and they are heroes, the
others, if you like!--real, old-line heroes, brave as the warriors in
Homer, and a long sight better men! I am happy to report to his kinsmen
here that General Joseph E. Johnston is in health--still loving
astronomy, still reading du Guesclin, still studying the Art of War.
He's a soldier's soldier, and that, in its way, is as fine a thing as a
poet's poet! I see men before me who are of the blood of the Lees. Out
there by the Rio Grande is a Colonel Robert E. Lee, of whom Virginia may
well be proud! There are few heights in those western deserts, but he
carries his height with him. He's marked for greatness. And there are
'Beauty' Stuart, and Dabney Maury, the best of fellows, and Edward
Dillon, and Walker and George Thomas, and many another good man and