The Virginia Convention

AT this time Virginia had passed through a fiery ordeal and lay prostrate, bound hand and foot by her disloyal sons, at the feet of the Southern Confederacy. A State Convention assembled at the middle of February, and remained in session more than two months. A large majority of the members were animated by a sincere love for the Union, especially those from the mountain districts in Western Virginia; and even so late as a fortnight before its adjournment, an Ordinance of Secession was defected by a vote of eighty-nine against forty-five. Yet the conspirators persevered with hope, for they saw one after another of weak Union members converted by their sophistry.

The crisis was reached when Edmund Ruffin fired his gun at Fort Sumter. "That gun," said a telegraphic despatch from Charleston, "will do more in the cause of secession in Virginia, than volumes of stump speeches." So it did. It set bells ringing, and cannon thundering in the Virginia capital, and produced the wildest excitement in and out of the Convention." "The war has begun; what will Virginia do?" asked Governor Pickens, by telegraph. Governor Letcher replied, "The Convention will determine." That determination was speedily made. When, on Monday the 15th of April, the President's call for troops to suppress the rising rebellion was read in the Convention, that body was shaken by a fierce tempest of contending passions. Reason and judgment fled, and the stoutest Union men bent before the storm like reeds in a gale. Yet when the Convention adjourned that evening, and the question was pending, Shall Virginia secede at once? there was a strong majority in favor of Union.

The conspirators were now desperate. They perceived that the success of their grand scheme, the seizure of the National capital, depended upon the action of Virginia at that crisis. Richmond was then in the hands of an excited populace ready to do the bidding of the leading politicians, and the latter resolved to act with a high hand. They perceived that the absence of ten Union members from the Convention would give a majority for secession. Accordingly ten of them were waited upon by the conspirators on that evening, and informed that they must choose between three modes of action, namely, to vote for secession, absent themselves, or be hanged. They saw that resistance to these desperate men would be vain, and they absented themselves. These violent proceedings awed other Union men in the Convention, and on Wednesday the 17th of April, 1861, an Ordinance of Secession was adopted. Unlike the conventions of other "seceding" States, it referred the Ordinance to the people to vote on at a future day. But this show of respect for the popular will was not sincere. A despatch was immediately sent to Jefferson Davis, telling him Virginia was "out of the Union;" and within twenty-four hours after the passage of the Ordinance, and while it was yet under cover of an injunction of secrecy, Governor Letcher set in motion expeditions to capture the Arsenal at Harper's Ferry, and the Navyyard at Gosport, opposite Norfolk, preparatory to the seizure of the National capital. Davis sent his lieutenant, Alexander H. Stephens, from Montgomery to Richmond, to urge the Convention to violate its faith pledged to the people, and to formally annex Virginia to the Confederacy without their consent. This was done within a week after the passage of the Ordinance of Secession, and a month before the day appointed for the people to vote upon it.

Stephens arrived in Richmond on the evening of the 23d of April. The Convention appointed a commission, with ex-President Tyler at its head, to treat with this representative of the "Confederacy" for the annexation of Virginia to that league. The act was accomplished the next day. The "treaty" provided that "the whole military force and military operations" of Virginia, "offensive and defensive, in the impending conflict with the United States," should be under the chief control of Jefferson Davis. Then they adopted and ratified the "Provisional Constitution of the Confederacy;" appointed delegates to the "Confederate Congress;" authorized the banks of the State to suspend specie payments; made provision for the establishment of a navy for Virginia; made other provisions for waging war on the Union, and invited the "government at Montgomery" to make Richmond its future seat. All this was done in spite of the known will of the people; and when the day approached for them to express that will by the ballot, they found themselves tied hand and foot by an inexorable despotism. James M. Mason, one of the most active of the Virginia conspirators, issued a manifesto, in which he declared his State to be out of the old Union; that a rejection of the Ordinance of Secession would be a violation of a sacred pledge given to the Confederacy by the politicians; and said, concerning those who could not conscientiously vote to separate Virginia from the Union, "Honor and duty alike require that they should not vote on the question; and if they retain such opinions, they must leave the State." Submission or banishment was the alternative. Mason simply repeated the sentiments of Jefferson Davis in another form: "All who oppose us shall smell Southern powder, and feel Southern steel."