Civil War
Virginia began a convention about secession on February 13, 1861 after six states seceded to form the Confederate States of America on February 4. Unionist members blocked secession but, on April 15 Lincoln called for troops from all states still in the Union in response to the firing on Fort Sumter. That meant Federal troops crossing Virginia on the way south to subdue South Carolina. On April 17, 1861 the convention voted to secede. The Confederacy rewarded the state by moving the national capital from Montgomery, Alabama to Richmond in late May—a decision that exposed the Confederate capital to unrelenting attacks and made Virginia a continuous battleground. Virginians ratified the articles of secession on May 23. The following day, the Union army moved into northern Virginia and captured Alexandria without a fight, and controlled it for the remainder of the war.
The first major battle of the Civil War occurred on July 21, 1861. Union forces attempted to take control of the railroad junction at Manassas, but the Confederate Army had moved its forces by train to meet the Union. The Confederates won the First Battle of Manassas (known as "Bull Run" in Northern naming convention). Both sides mobilized for war; the year went on without another major fight.
Men from all economic and social levels, both slaveholders and nonslaveholders, as well as former Unionists, enlisted in great numbers. The only areas that sent few or no men to fight for the Confederacy had few slaves, a high percentage of poor families, and a history of opposition to secession, were located on the border with the North, and were sometimes under Union control.
Read more about this topic: History Of Virginia
Famous quotes related to civil war:
“The principle of majority rule is the mildest form in which the force of numbers can be exercised. It is a pacific substitute for civil war in which the opposing armies are counted and the victory is awarded to the larger before any blood is shed. Except in the sacred tests of democracy and in the incantations of the orators, we hardly take the trouble to pretend that the rule of the majority is not at bottom a rule of force.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“One of the greatest difficulties in civil war is, that more art is required to know what should be concealed from our friends, than what ought to be done against our enemies.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“The utter helplessness of a conquered people is perhaps the most tragic feature of a civil war or any other sort of war.”
—Rebecca Latimer Felton (1835–1930)
“... there was the first Balkan war and the second Balkan war and then there was the first world war. It is extraordinary how having done a thing once you have to do it again, there is the pleasure of coincidence and there is the pleasure of repetition, and so there is the second world war, and in between there was the Abyssinian war and the Spanish civil war.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)