ng 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.

In his brief West Virgin