le. She was bound to furnish her tale of
troops, and thus belie her principles; or to secede at once, and
reject with a clean conscience the President's mandate. On April 17
she chose the latter, deliberately and with her eyes open, knowing
that war would be the result, and knowing the vast resources of the
North. She was followed by Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina.*
(* Kentucky and Missouri attempted to remain neutral. Maryland was
held in check by the Federal Government, and Delaware sided with the
North. The first three, however, supplied large contingents to the
Confederate armies.)

The world has long since done justice to the motives of Cromwell and
of Washington, and signs are not wanting that before many years have
passed it will do justice to the motives of the Southern people. They
were true to their interpretation of the Constitution; and if the
morality of secession may be questioned, if South Carolina acted with
undue haste and without sufficient provocation, if certain of the
Southern politicians desired emancipation for themselves that they
might continue to enslave others, it can hardly be denied that the
action of Virginia was not only fully justified, but beyond
suspicion. The wildest threats of the Black Republicans, their loudly
expressed determination, in defiance of the Constitution, to abolish
slavery, if necessary by the bullet and the sabre, shook in no degree
whatever her loyalty to the Union. Her best endeavours were exerted
to maintain the peace between the hostile sections; and not till her
liberties were menaced did she repudiate a compact which had become
intolerable. It was to preserve the freedom which her forefathers had
bequeathed her, and which she desired to hand down unsullied to
future generations, that she acquiesced in the revolution.

The North, in resolving to maintain the Union by force of arms, was
upheld by the belief that she was acting in accordance with the
Constitution. The South, in asserting her independence and resisting
coercion, found moral support in the same conviction, and the
patriotism of those who fought for the Union was neither purer nor
more ardent than the patriotism of those who fought for States'
Rights. Long ago, a parliament of that nation to which Jackson and so
many of his compatriots owed their origin made petition to the Pope
that he should require the English king "to respect the independence
of Scotland, and to mind his own affairs. So