Politics & Power Quote by John Sergeant Wise

A date is doing political heavy lifting here. Wise elevates 1858 not because it was objectively Virginia's most “patriotic” year, but because it lets him reframe a state later branded as the Confederacy’s keystone as, first and fundamentally, a loyal steward of the Union. The line is a retroactive rescue mission: if you can crown 1858 as the clearest proof of “national patriotism,” then secession becomes an aberration - a tragic break in an otherwise faithful record - rather than the logical endpoint of Virginia’s antebellum power politics.

The diction is quietly strategic. “From the formation of the federal government” stretches the timeline to claim Virginia’s founding-era credentials; “until the hour of secession” turns disunion into a sudden, almost fated moment, not a long-cultivated project. Wise’s “no year stands out more prominently” has the tone of a lawyer presenting a decisive exhibit, and that’s no accident: he’s trying to win an argument about memory, not merely report history.

Context matters. Writing in the postbellum period, Wise sits inside the world of reconciliation narratives and Lost Cause reframings, where white Southern elites sought respectability in the reunited nation without surrendering the moral architecture that upheld slavery and states’ rights. By spotlighting 1858 - on the eve of John Brown, the 1860 election, and Virginia’s eventual pivot - Wise implies that Virginia tried patriotism and was pushed, not pulled, into rupture. It’s an absolving arc: loyal past, reluctant break, dignified regret.