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 at Harpers Ferry and the navy-yard at Gosport, near Norfolk.  They received—­perhaps invited—­into their State large bodies of troops, with their warlike appointments, from the so-called seceded States.  They formally entered into a treaty of temporary alliance and cooperation with the so-called “Confederate States,” and sent members to their congress at Montgomery; and, finally, they permitted the insurrectionary government to be transferred to their capital at Richmond.

The people of Virginia have thus allowed this giant insurrection to make its nest within her borders, and this Government has no choice left but to deal with it where it finds it; and it has the less regret, as the loyal citizens have in due form claimed its protection.  Those loyal citizens this Government is bound to recognize and protect, as being Virginia.