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 long as a hundred of us are left alive,” said the signatories, “we will never in any degree be subjected to the English.  It is not for glory, or for riches, or for honour that we fight, but for liberty alone, which no good man loses but with his life.”  More than five hundred years later, for the same noble cause and in the same uncompromising spirit, the people of Virginia made appeal to the God of battles.

CHAPTER 1.5.  HARPER’S FERRY.

1861.

Immediately it became apparent that the North was bent upon re-conquest Jackson offered his sword to his native State.  He was determined to take his share in defending her rights and liberties, even if it were only as a private soldier.  Devotion to Virginia was his sole motive.  He shrank from the horrors of civil strife.  The thought that the land he loved so well was to be deluged with the blood of her own children, that the happy hearths of America were to be desecrated by the hideous image of war, stifled the promptings of professional ambition.  “If the general Government,” he said, “should persist in the measures now threatened, there must be war.  It is painful enough to discover with what unconcern they speak of war, and threaten it.  They do not know its horrors.  I have seen enough of it to make me look upon it as the sum of all evils.”