provision for the establishment of a navy for Virginia; made other provisions for waging war on the Union, and invited the "government at Montgomery" to make Richmond its future seat. All this was done in spite of the known will of the people; and when the day approached for them to express that will by the ballot, they found themselves tied hand and foot by an inexorable despotism. James M. Mason, one of the most active of the Virginia conspirators, issued a manifesto, in which he declared his State to be out of the old Union; that a rejection of the Ordinance of Secession would be a violation of a sacred pledge given to the Confederacy by the politicians; and said, concerning those who could not conscientiously vote to separate Virginia from the Union, "Honor and duty alike require that they should not vote on the question; and if they retain such opinions, they must leave the State." Submission or banishment was the alternative. Mason simply repeated the sentiments of Jefferson Davis in another form: "All who oppose us shall smell Southern powder, and feel Southern steel."
When the vote was finally taken on the 23d of May, it was in the face of bayonets. Terror reigned all over Eastern Virginia. Unionists were compelled to fly for their lives before the instruments of the civil and military power at Richmond, for the "Confederate government" was then seated there. By these means the enemies of the Union were enabled to report a majority of over one hundred thousand votes of Virginians in favor of secession, the vote being given by the voice and not by the secret ballot.
Then the governor of South Carolina, with selfish complacency, said to his people: "You may plant your seed in peace, for Old Virginia will have to bear the brunt of the battle." And so she did much of the time. Her politicians offered her back to the burden which the Gulf States had rolled from their own shoulders, and a most grievous one it was.
Prodigious efforts were now made for the seizure of the National capital. On his journey to Richmond, Alex. H. Stephens had harangued the people at various points, and everywhere raised the cry, "On to Washington!" That cry was already resounding throughout the slave-labor States. Troops were marshaling for the service, in Virginia; and already Carolina soldiers were treading its soil. The Southern press, everywhere, urged the measure with the greatest vehemence. On the day when Stephens arrived in Richmond, one of the newspapers of that city said: "There never was half the unanimity among the people before, nor a tithe of the zeal upon any subject, that is now manifested to take Washington and drive from it every Black Republican who is a dweller there. From the mountain tops and valleys to the shores of the sea, there is one wild shout of fierce resolve to capture Washington city, at all and every human hazard." Yet in the face of the universal chorus, "On to Washington!" Mr. Jefferson Davis, president of the Southern Confederacy, speaking more to Europe than to his people, said to his congress at Montgomery: "We profess solemnly, in the face of mankind, that we desire peace at any sacrifice save that of honor....In independence we seek no conquest, no aggrandizement, no cession of any kind from the States with which we have lately confederated. All we ask is to be let alone-those who never held power over us, should not now attempt our subjugation by arms."
Harper's Ferry, at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers, where their combined
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