Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 36.djvu/76

60 many of our troubles were pointed out and foretold. Mr. Henry, during the debates asked this pertinent and pregnant question: "Suppose the people of Virginia should wish to alter their government, can a majority of them do it? No, because they are connected with other men, or in other words consolidated with other States. When the people of Virginia at a future day shall wish to alter their government, though they should be unanimous in their desire, yet they may be prevented." Again he asked: "What is to become of your country? The Virginian government is but a name." He asserted, "When you give power you know what you give." He declared, "Among ten thousand implied powers which they may assume, they may, if we be engaged in war, liberate every one of our slaves if they please! May they not pronounce all slaves free?" Did he with the discernment of a Daniel see and interpret the handwriting on the wall as embodied in Lincoln's emancipation proclamation? In the event of war he asks, "May not Congress say that every black man must fight?" Did he, with the vision of an Isaiah, look into futurity and see the war clouds on the distant horizon that swept away every semblance of sovereignty and that desolated the Southern States in the crime of 1861-65? Did he, in his mind's eye, see the black cohorts, led by our Northern brethren (?) committing, during Reconstruction days, rapine and desolation against the people of the South? Was he, indeed, endowed with the Spirit of Divination? No, I do not believe that with all of his opposition to the Constitution; with all his love for Virginia and the South, with all his distrust of the Northern people Mr. Henry ever conceived of the diabolism of arming and inciting our slaves to plunder and murder their masters. He never for one moment thought it possible that a government formed for the protection of the people would be turned into an instrument for their slavish oppression. His fervid imagination never supposed the horrors and injustice of the Civil War or the abominations of the Reconstruction period, and we are glad he did not, for his great heart would have broken and his tongue palsied in his efforts to have averted these calamities. Mr. Henry was not the only member of the Convention with a discerning mind and who was distrustful and apprehensive of the future. Grayson declared that under the