That was the breaking point. Virginia had to choose. She must either furnish a large force of volunteers with which the Federal government might in effect coerce the seceding states into submission, or she must herself secede and cast in her lot with the cotton states. To the Virginian mind there was only one course possible. The Virginians believed firmly and without doubt or question in the right of any state to withdraw from the Union at will. They looked with unimagined horror upon every proposal that the Federal power should coerce a seceding state into submission. They regarded that as an iniquity, a crime, a proceeding unspeakably wrongful and subversive of liberty. They could have nothing to do with such an attempt without dishonor of the basest kind. Accordingly, almost before the ink was dry upon the call upon Virginia for volunteers with which to make war upon the seceding Southern States, the Virginia, pro-Union convention, adopted an ordinance of secession, and the Civil War was on. The men who had, so long and so earnestly, and in face of such contumely, labored to keep Virginia in the Union and to use all that state’s commanding influence in behalf of peace, felt themselves obliged to yield to the inevitable, and to consent to a sectional war for which they saw no necessity and recognized no occasion. They had wasted their time in a futile endeavor to bring about a reconciliation where the conflict had been all the while hopelessly “irrepressible.” There was nothing for it now but war, and Virginia, deeply deprecating war, set herself at work in earnest to prepare for the conflict. In accordance with his lifelong habit of mind, Arthur Brent in this emergency put aside all thoughts of self-interest, and looked about him to discover in what way he might render the highest service to his native land, of which he was capable. He was unanimously chosen by each of two companies of volunteers in his native county, to be their captain. In their rivalry with each other, they agreed to make him major in command of a battalion to be formed of those two companies and two others that were in process of organization.