It is a misconception to explain this feeling—­for in most cases it was feeling rather than reasoned conviction—­by Calhoun’s teaching.  It resulted from geography and history, and, these factors working as they did, would have been what it was had Calhoun never lived.

With reflecting Southerners Calhoun’s message no doubt had some confirmatory effect, because, historically and also in a certain legal aspect, Calhoun’s view was very impressive.  That the overwhelming majority of the early Americans who voted to ratify the national Constitution supposed it to be simply a compact between the States cannot be questioned, nor could ratification ever have been effected had any considerable number believed otherwise.  The view that a State wishing to withdraw from the Union might for good cause do so was the prevalent one till long after the War of 1812, yielding, thereafter, at the North, less to Webster’s logic than to the social and economic development just mentioned.

At the South it did not thus give way.  There the propriety of secession was never aught but a question of sufficient grievance, to be settled by each State for itself, speaking through a majority of its voters.  When the Secession ordinances actually passed, many individual voters in each State opposed on the ground that the occasion was insufficient; but such opponents, of whom Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia was one, nearly to a man felt bound, as good citizens, to acquiesce in the decision of their States and even to uphold this in arms.

Whether voting secession or accepting it on State mandate, Southern men naturally resented being called traitors or rebels.  By the Websterian conception of the nature of our government they were so, but by Calhoun’s they were simply acting out the Constitution in the best of faith.  No recognized arbiter or criterion existed to determine between the two views.  Massachusetts denounced seceding South Carolina as a traitor:  South Carolina berated Massachusetts, seeking to impose the Union on the South against its will, as a criminal aggressor.  An intelligent referee with no bias for either must have pronounced the judgments equally just.

These considerations explain how Colonel Lee, certainly one of the most conscientious men who ever lived, felt bound in duty and honor to side with seceding Virginia, though he doubted the wisdom of her course.

Lee was from the first Virginia’s military hero and hope, but he did not at once become such to the Confederacy at large.  He did not immediately take the field.  Till after Bull Run he remained in Richmond, President Jefferson Davis’s adviser and right hand man in organizing the forces incessantly arriving and pushing to the front.