delight: all the advantages that I enjoyed in Washington are, with a larger discretion, to be offered me in Russia.
Surely a more flattering invitation could not be uttered! Certainly it could not reach a more grateful heart. I have slept upon it. It is becoming that I should be candid, and in a few words frankly state the circumstances by which I find myself surrounded. The State of Virginia gave me birth; within her borders, among many kind friends, the nearest of kin, and troops of excellent neighbours, my children are planting their vine and fig-tree. In her green bosom are the graves of my fathers; the political whirlpool from which your kind forethought sought to rescue me has already plunged her into a fierce and bloody war.
In 1788, when this State accepted the Federal Constitution and entered the American Union, she did so with the formal declaration that she reserved to herself the right to withdraw from it for cause, and resume those powers and attributes of sovereignty which she had never ceded away, but only delegated for certain definite and specified purposes.
When the President elect commenced to set at naught the very objects of the Constitution, and without authority of law proceeded to issue his proclamation of 15th April last,[1] Virginia, in the exercise of that reserved right, decided that the time had come when her safety, her dignity, and honour required her to resume those "delegated" powers and withdraw from the Union. She did so; she then straightway called upon her sons in the Federal Service to retire therefrom and come to her aid.
This call found me in the midst of those quiet physical researches at the Observatory in Washington which I am now, with so much delicacy of thought and goodness of heart, invited to resume in Russia. Having been brought up in the school of States-rights, where we had for masters the greatest statesmen of America, and among them Mr. Madison, the wisest of them all, I could not, and did not hesitate; I recognised this call, considered it mandatory, and, formally renouncing all allegiance to the broken Union, hastened over
- ↑ Calling on Va. to furnish 76,000 troops to force South Carolina back into the Union.
