Note A — Chapter VI

Note—The following extract is from the "History of the American Civil War" by Professor Draper, a Northern Union man, which shows the nature of Virginia's sacrifices: "At the time of the Declaration of Independence, Virginia was the most powerful of the colonies; she occupied a central position and had in Norfolk one of the best harbors on the Atlantic. She had a vast western territory, an imposing commerce, and in the production and export of tobacco not only a source of wealth, but from the mercantile connections it gave her in Europe, a means of refinement. It was through this circumstance that so many of her young men were educated abroad. When the epoch of separation from the mother country had come, and the question of Confederation arose, she might have asserted her colonial supremacy; she might have been the central power. Many of her ablest men subsequently thought that in her voluntary equalization with the feeblest colonies, the spontaneous surrender of her vast domain, the self-abnegation with which she sacrificed all her privileges on the altar of the Union, she had made a fatal mistake. In her action there was something very noble."