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15. Virginia Abstractions
- University of Virginia Press
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15 22 VIRGINIA ABSTRACTIONS The August 1955 first issue of the newsletter of the Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberties (courtesy of the Library of Virginia) announced the growth in membership of the year-old organization founded to mobilize public opinion in opposition to the Supreme Court’s orders to desegregate the state’s public schools. The organization ’s title drew on the state’s-rights rhetoric and language of individual liberty that several generations of Virginians had employed to oppose actions of the federal government of which they disapproved. The liberty that the Defenders extolled was the liberty of white Virginians through their political process to require mandatory racial segregation and to be free from federal interference with laws and social customs that denied basic liberties of American citizenship to a large portion of Virginia’s population. [44.211.24.81] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 08:02 GMT) Late in April 1861 the members of the Virginia convention that met in Richmond adopted a state flag. The delegates had just voted to sever the political connection between Virginia and the United States and taken the first steps toward creating a new political connection between Virginia and the Confederate States. Former governor Henry A. Wise and former president John Tyler wanted the convention to adopt a new design for the state flag. Tyler informed the delegates that in fact Virginia had no official state flag. Since the 1830s and without any legal authorization , the state had been using a blue flag with the state’s 1776 seal in the center. Tyler asked, “What made it the flag of Virginia?” Thomas Jefferson’s grandson George Wythe Randolph replied so persuasively that the delegates adopted an ordinance declaring that the design already in use would be the official flag of Virginia. To Tyler’s query, Randolph had replied, “Usage, sir.”1 Early in December of that year during the Virginia convention that met in Wheeling, a delegate grumbled that “Virginia abstractions are the most abstract of all abstractions.”2 William Erskine Stephenson was frustrated that other delegates were impeding the work of democratizing the government of the new West Virginia by making abstract orations about political theory rather than discussing practical operations of state and local government. The debate that day was about whether to require that all voting be by ballot rather than by public voice vote, which had been the practice since the earliest days of the colony. Delegates who wanted the change told of episodes at recent polls when advocates of secession intimidated or attacked voters or threatened to cut off their credit if they voted against secession. Political democracy, the reformers argued, required that all voters be free to vote as they desired. The men who opposed the change complained that requiring secrecy was insulting to honorable and independent gentlemen who were not afraid to announce their choices openly. They dismissed the fears as frivolous or failed to understand the vulnerability of men without substantial property and the social standing that went with it, men who could not always afford to proclaim their choices publicly. The defenders of the old way that gentlemen had engaged in politics appealed to tradition and invoked timeless values. In the process their speeches raveled off into generalities and political abstractions.3 Randolph’s pithy rely to Tyler and Stephenson’s exasperated comment point to the central importance of continuity and ideas in Virginia’s political culture, even though individual Virginians did not always revere the past or understand the ideas in the same way. Words and phrases such as “freedom,” 380 the grandees of government “liberty,” “republican government,” “representation,” “state’s rights,” “limited government,” and “the people” appeared in nearly every public discussion and in private letters and conversations about politics during the dramatic year 1861. Nineteenth-century political oratory in its Virginia setting seemed to require those familiar abstractions much as a basket requires a bottom. Indeed , the fifteenth clause in the Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776 that Patrick Henry proposed in committee stated, “That no free Government or the Blessing of Liberty can be preserved to any People but by a firm adherence to Justice Moderation Temperance Frugality and Virtue and by frequent recurrence to fundamental Principles.”4 The language of fundamental principles—state’s rights, limited government , and individual liberty—gained powerful currency during the decades between the American Revolution and the American Civil War. Midnineteenth -century Virginia men and women did not even think that...