To men of high minds, holding these views, there could be but one choice in such a case. They decreed that Virginia should prefer a secession which that state overwhelmingly disapproved, to a dishonor which no Virginian could contemplate with a satisfied mind. Accordingly Virginia's strongly pro-Union convention reluctantly adopted an ordinance of secession, on the seventeenth day of April, 1861, not of choice but upon a conviction of necessity. The other border states that had waited for Virginia's decision to determine their own, became at once members of the new Southern Confederacy and the question of war or peace was finally decided in behalf of war--war to the limit of possibility, war to the utmost end of endurance, war to the point of exhaustion on the one side or the other.
A wise prophet, basing his prophecies upon the patent facts of the situation, could not have failed to foretell the outcome of such a war with precision and certainty. The utmost that the South could do--even by "robbing the cradle and the grave" as was wittily and sadly said at the time, was to put 600,000 men into the field, first and last. The North was able to enlist an aggregate of 2,778,304, or, if we reduce this to a basis of three years' service for each man, the Union enlistments for three full years numbered no less than 2,326,168--or nearly four times the total enlistments in the Confederate army from beginning to end of the war. Yet the Confederate armies included practically every white man in the South who was able to bear arms. There was in effect a levy _en masse_, including the entire white male population from early boyhood to extreme old age.
Again the Federal Government had a navy and the Confederates none. It was certain from the beginning that the Federal authorities would completely shut the South in by blockading and closely sealing every southern port. Thus the Federals--as was apparent in advance--were destined to have the whole world to draw upon for soldiers, for supplies, for ammunition, for improved arms and for everything else that contributes to military strength, while the South must rely absolutely upon itself--ill armed, and unequipped with anything except courage, devotion and heroic fortitude.