pretense,
break up their government, and thus practically put an end to free
government upon the earth. It forces us to ask, Is there in all
republics this inherent and fatal weakness? Must a government of
necessity be too _strong_ for the liberties of its own people, or
too _weak_ to maintain its own existence?

So viewing the issue, no choice was left but to call out the war power
of the Government and so to resist force employed for its destruction
by force for its preservation.

The call was made, and the response of the country was most gratifying,
surpassing in unanimity and spirit the most sanguine expectation. Yet
none of the States commonly called slave States, except Delaware, gave a
regiment through regular State organization. A few regiments have been
organized within some others of those States by individual enterprise
and received into the Government service. Of course the seceded States,
so called (and to which Texas had been joined about the time of the
inauguration), gave no troops to the cause of the Union. The border
States, so called, were not uniform in their action, some of them being
almost _for_ the Union, while in others, as Virginia, North Carolina,
Tennessee, and Arkansas, the Union sentiment was nearly repressed and
silenced. The course taken in Virginia was the most remarkable, perhaps
the most important. A convention elected by the people of that State
to consider this very question of disrupting the Federal Union was in
session at the capital of Virginia when Fort Sumter fell. To this body
the people had chosen a large majority of _professed_ Union men. Almost
immediately after the fall of Sumter many members of that majority went
over to the original disunion minority, and with them adopted an
ordinance for withdrawing the State from the Union. Whether this change
was wrought by their great approval of the assault upon Sumter or their
great resentment at the Government's resistance to that assault is not
definitely known. Although they submitted the ordinance for ratification
to a vote of the people, to be taken on a day then somewhat more than
a month distant, the convention and the legislature (which was also in
session at the same time and place), with leading men of the State not
members of either, immediately commenced acting as if the State were
already out of the Union. They pushed military preparations vigorously
forward all over the State. They seized the United States armory
a