names and most
benign prospects. Chief-Justice Marshall aptly described to an English
traveller this sad and fatal transition:

'He said he had seen Virginia the leading State for half his life;
he had seen her become the second, and sink to be the fifth. Worse
than this, there was no arresting her decline if her citizens did
not put an end to slavery; and he saw no signs of any intention to
do so, east of the mountains at least. He had seen whole groups of
estates, populous in his time, lapse into waste. He had seen
agriculture exchanged for human stock breeding; and he keenly felt
the degradation. The forest was returning over the fine old
estates, and the wild creatures which had not been seen for
generations were reappearing; numbers and wealth were declining,
and education and manners were degenerating. It would not have
surprised him to be told that on that soil would the main battles
be fought when the critical day should come which he foresaw.'

That day it is our lot to behold. Forced at the point of the bayonet to
arrogate to herself the illegal claims she had vainly sought to
establish by popular suffrage, as reserved rights, in 1787, and the
resolutions of 1798, the Secession Ordinance was nominally passed and
summarily enforced, despite the protests of the citizens and the
withdrawal of the western counties; and thus the traitors of the Cotton
States made Virginia the battle field between slaveocracy and
constitutional government. As early as 1632 a fierce controversy for
territorial rights occurred on the Chesapeake, when that portion of
Virginia, now Maryland, was brought into dispute by Claiborne, who began
to trade, notwithstanding the grant which Lord Baltimore had secured:
this, the first conflict between the whites, and two Indian massacres,
made desolate the region so lately devastated by the civil war. Nor was
the original enjoyment of remarkable political rights coincident with
American independence; for, while Charles the Second was an exile, and
Parliament demoralized, the fugitive king still held nominal sway in
Virginia; and when the flight of Richard Cromwell left the kingdom
without a head, that distant colony was ruled by its own assembly, and
enjoyed free suffrage and free trade: then came what is called Bacon's
rebellion--an effective protest against oppressive prohibitions. Nor did
these civil discords end with the Restor