Allan Pinkerton, The spy in the rebellion; being a true history of the spy system of the United States Army during the late rebellion, revealing many secrets of the war hitherto not made public, compiled from official reports prepared for President Lincoln , General McClellan and the Provost-Marshal-General .

[205] of slavery was more or less the cause of the war, here, as in other parts of the South, secession reared its most formidable front where the slave interest predominated, and treason was more alert in the centers of accumulated wealth and family pride, whose foundations were laid by the suffering and the toil of the African bondsmen. The war had been waged to defend the “Divine institution,” and it was scarcely to be expected that such a cause would be valiantly championed by men whose self-reliance and personal independence had endeared to them the rights of free and honorable manhood.

When the Convention of Virginia met to consider the question of secession, the slave-holding dignitaries were somewhat startled by the logical, but novel, declaration of one of the western members, that “the right of revolution can be exercised as well by a portion of the citizens of a State against their State government, as it can be exercised by the whole people of a State against their Federal Government.” This was followed by another, more pointed and revolutionary, “that any change in the relation Virginia now sustains to the Federal Government, against the wishes of even a respectable minority of her people, would be sufficient to justify them in changing their relation to the State government by separating themselves from that section of the State that had thus wantonly disregarded their interests and defied their will.”