e
general voice of the county, and the voice passed the Botetourt
Resolutions.

CHAPTER II

THE HILLTOP

On the court house portico sat the prominent men of the county, lawyers
and planters, men of name and place, moulders of thought and leaders in
action. Out of these came the speakers. One by one, they stepped into
the clear space between the pillars. Such a man was cool and weighty,
such a man was impassioned and persuasive. Now the tense crowd
listened, hardly breathing, now it broke into wild applause. The
speakers dealt with an approaching tempest, and with a gesture they
checked off the storm clouds. "_Protection for the manufacturing North
at the expense of the agricultural South_--an old storm centre!
_Territorial Rights_--once a speck in the west, not so large as a man's
hand, and now beneath it, the wrangling and darkened land! _The Bondage
of the African Race_--a heavy cloud! Our English fathers raised it; our
northern brethren dwelled with it; the currents of the air fixed it in
the South. At no far day we will pass from under it. In the mean time we
would not have it _burst_. In that case underneath it would lie ruined
fields and wrecked homes, and out of its elements would come a fearful
pestilence! _The Triumph of the Republican Party_--no slight darkening
of the air is that, no drifting mist of the morning! It is the triumph
of that party which proclaims the Constitution a covenant with death and
an agreement with hell!--of that party which tolled the bells, and fired
the minute guns, and draped its churches with black, and all-hailed as
saint and martyr the instigator of a bloody and servile insurrection in
a sister State, the felon and murderer, John Brown! The Radical, the
Black Republican, faction, sectional rule, fanaticism, violation of the
Constitution, aggression, tyranny, and wrong--all these are in the bosom
of that cloud!--_The Sovereignty of the State._ Where is the tempest
which threatens here? _Not_ here, Virginians! but in the pleasing
assertion of the North, 'There is no sovereignty of the State!' 'A State
is merely to the Union what a county is to a State.' O shades of John
Randolph of Roanoke, of Patrick Henry, of Mason and Madison, of
Washington and Jefferson! O shade of John Marshall even, whom we used to
think too Federal! The Union! We thought of the Union as a golden
thread--at the most we thought of it as a strong servant we had made
between us, we thirteen artificers