(2) A political motive which to-day is not so generally intelligible as once it was, had great weight in 1861. This was the sense of honor in politics. Those historians who brush it aside as a figment lack historical psychology. It is possible that both Governor Pickens and the Confederate Cabinet were animated first of all by the belief that the honor of South Carolina required them to withstand the attempt of what they held to be an alien power. (3) And yet, neither of these explanations, however much either or both may have counted for in many minds, gives a convincing explanation of the agitation of Toornbs in the Cabinet council which decided to fire upon Sumter. Neither of these could well be matters of debate. Everybody had to be either for or against, and that would be an end. The Toombs of that day was a different man from the Toombs of three months earlier. Some radical change had taken place in his thought What could it have been if it was not the perception that the Virginia program had put the whole matter in a new light, that the issue had indeed been changed from slavery to sovereignty, and that to join battle on the latter issue was a far more serious matter than to join battle on the former. And if Toombs reasoned in this fearful way, it is easy to believe that the more buoyant natures in that council may well have reasoned in precisely the opposite way. Virginia had lifted the Southern cause to its highest plane. But there was danger that the Virginia compromise might prevail. If that should happen these enthusiasts for a separate Southern nationality might find all their work undone at the eleventh hour. Virginians who shared Montgomery's enthusiasms had seen this before then. That was why Roger Pryor, for example, had gone to Charleston as a volunteer missionary. In a speech to a Charleston crowd he besought them, as a way of precipitating Virginia into the lists, to strike blow. Charleston Mercury, April 11, 1861. The only way to get any clue to these diplomatic tangles is by discarding the old notion that there were but two political ideals clashing together in America in 1861. There were three. The Virginians with their devotion to the idea of a league of nations in this country were scarcely further away from Lincoln and his conception of a Federal unit than they were from those Southerners who from one cause or another were possessed with the desire to create a separate Southern nation. The Virginia program was as deadly to one as to the other of these two forces which with the upper South made up the triangle of the day. The real event of March, 1861, was the perception both by Washington and Montgomery that the Virginia program spelled ruin for its own. By the middle of April it would be difficult to say which had the better reason to desire the defeat of that program, Washington or Montgomery.