Robert Lewis Dabney

“ It is high time now that the government were revolutionized and consolidated, and these irksome 'States' rights' wiped out. We need a strong government to dispense much wealth and power, to its adherents; we want permanently high tariffs, to make the South tributary to the North; and now these Southern fellows are giving us precisely the opportunity we want to do all this, and shall Seward sing his silly song of the necessity of avoiding war? War is the very thing we should hail! ”

“ They admitted that a State could not be coerced into the Union; but they held that no State really and legitimately desired to go out, or had gone out—"the great Union-loving majority in the South had been overruled by a factious secession minority, and the Union troops were only to liberate them from that violence, and enable them to declare their unabated love for the Union." No well informed man was, at first, absurd enough to speak of a State as "committing treason" against the confederation, the creature of the States ”

“ Lincoln's proclamation, a prominent Northern politician wrote Colonel Baldwin to ask: "What will the Union men of Virginia do now?" he immediately replied:"There are now no Union men in Virginia. But those who were Union men will stand to their arms, and make a fight which shall go down in history as an illustration of what a brave people can do in defence of their liberties, after having exhausted every means of pacification." ”

“ Lincoln would only adhere faithfully to the Constitution and the laws, she would support him just as faithfully as though he were the man of her choice, and would wield her whole moral force to keep the border States in the Union, and to bring back the seven seceded States. But that while much difference of opinion existed on the question, whether the right of secession was a constitutional one, all Virginians were unanimous in believing that no right existed in the Federal Government to coerce a State by force of arms, because it was expressly withheld by the Constitution ”

“ The calculated treason of Lincoln's Radical advisers is yet more glaring. When their own chosen leader, Seward, avowed that there was no need for war, they deliberately and malignantly practiced to produce war, for the purpose of overthrowing the Constitution and the Union, to rear their own greedy faction upon the ruins. This war, with all its crimes and miseries, was proximately concocted in Washington city, by Northern men, with malice prepense. ”

“ Our party interests have everything to lose by a peaceable settlement of this trouble, and everything to gain by collision. For a generation we have been 'the outs;' now at last we are 'the ins.' While in opposition, it was very well to prate of Constitution, and of rights; but now we are the government, and mean to continue so; and our interest is to have a strong and centralized government. ”

“ We see that the Radicals provoked it, not to preserve, but to destroy the Union. It demonstrates, effectually, that Virginia and the border States were acting with better faith to preserve the Union than was Lincoln's Cabinet. Colonel Baldwin showed him conclusively that it was not free-soil, evil as that was, which really endangered the Union, but coercion. He showed him that, if coercion were relinquished, Virginia and the border States stood pledged to labor with him for the restoration of Union, and would assuredly be able to effect it. ”

“ Seward, with General Scott, had advised a temporizing policy towards the Montgomery government, without violence, and Mr. Lincoln had acceded to their policy. Hence, the promises to Judge Campbell. Meantime, the radical governors came down, "having great wrath," to terrorize the administration. They spoke in this strain: "Seward cries perpetually that we must not do this, and that, for fear war should result. Seward is shortsighted. War is precisely the thing we should desire. ”

“ Our plan should be, by some artifice, to provoke them to seem to strike the first blow. Then we shall have a pretext with which to unite the now divided North, and make them fly to arms. The Southerners are a braggart, but a cowardly and effeminate set of bullies ”

“ Mr. Seward and Mr. Bates, Attorney General, also gave Mr. Stuart the same assurances of peace. The next day the commissioners returned to Richmond, and the very train on which they traveled carried Lincoln's proclamation, calling for the seventy-five thousand men to wage a war of coercion. "This proclamation," says Mr. ”