State Rebellion, State Suicide, BQR for April, 1862

STATE REBELLION, STATE SUICIDE.

[From Brownson's Quarterly Review for April, 1862]

Our highly esteemed friend of the Pittsburg Catholic, the ablest and most loyal Catholic journal at this time published in our country, takes care to tell us that, in his judgment, it is unwise to agitate the slavery question, and that in the present crisis of our national affairs only harm can come of discussing it. He will pardon us, we hope, if we tell him, in return, that we think it both wise and useful for every man who loves his country to agitate that question, and thoroughly discuss it. Slavery has produced our present national crisis. The rebellion itself is at bottom only the armed phase of the slavery question, and to suppose it possible to suppress and extinguish it without touching the question, would be like attempting to cure a man of drunkenness without touching the question of temperance. Slavery is now the question, the great question, the whole question before the American public, and it depends on the disposition we make of that question whether we are or are not to continue to be a nation. We cannot blink it, if we would. It enters vitally into the struggle of the nation for life, and we must dispose of it, so that it can never again come up, or all our efforts will be idle, and all our sacrifices of men and money will be worse than lost.

The southern confederacy, against which the United States are now hurling their armed forces, rests on slavery as its corner-stone, and derives from it its very reason of existence. Grant, if you insist upon it, that the sole object of that illegal and dangerous confederacy is not the preservation or extension of slavery, still the objects of that confederacy, the ends for which it has been formed, demand the continuance of slavery. The preservation and extension of slavery may not be the end the rebels have in view, but slavery is the indispensable means to that end. They would not seek to form a separate and independent republic, if it were to be a republic based on the free-labor system, for they are not such fools as not to know that such a republic would have fewer advantages than the present United States-- could never be so strong, never command so high a place in the world's estimation or in the world's history. The whole is, and always must be greater than a part, and a man of real ambition would always say, with the old Athenian, “I would rather be second in Athens than first in Euboea,” Even supposing, then, that the rebels had not originally, or that they have abandoned the intention of reconstructing the whole Union on the basis of the slave-labor system, they must still preserve that system as the necessary condition of the separate existence, and of the greatness and power they hope to attain to as an independent people. The abolition of slavery would take away all motive, all reason, and all desire for a separation from the Union. Being unable without slavery to attain to the objects they contemplate as a separate and independent political existence, they would naturally desire to remain in the United States, and share the greatness and glory of one united republic.

The productions on which the seceded states rely as the means of securing to them the hegemony of the commercial nations of the world they would aspire to, they believe, demand the system of slave labor. “The only reason for desiring slavery,” said to us an eminent physician of Charleston, and himself the owner of a hundred slaves, “is that in the management of large plantations the planter must be able to command labor when he wants it, and to be always able to do this, he must own it. Aside from this consideration, slave labor is less economical than free labor, Its advantage over hired labor, or your northern system of labor, is in the fact that the planter can command it at the very moment he needs it. If he depends on hired labor, he is likely to find his hands striking at the critical moment, and compelling him either to lose the proper time for planting or for gathering his crops and preparing them for market, or to pay them wages that would swallow up all his profits, and end in his ruin. What is said about the inability of the white man to perform the labor now performed by negroes is worthy of no attention. There is no climate, there is no position in which you can place the negro and the white man side by side, in which the white man will not kill the negro. Negroes are preferred, not because they are hardier or more enduring than white laborers, even in our climate; but because they can be kept in slavery, and men of the white race cannot. I know no other argument for negro slavery.” Now, as the rebels rely principally on their plantations, on growing and exporting cotton, rice, and tobacco, for their greatness and prosperity, it is clear that, in their view at least, slavery is essential to the end they have in view. Free the negroes, and they are deprived of the means to the end for which they have rebelled, and have formed their confederacy.

It is, we suppose, the object of the United States in the present civil war to break up the southern confederacy, to put down, and utterly extinguish the present rebellion, and, as far as human foresight and human ability can go, to guard against any like rebellion in future. The aim of every nation should be, first of all, self-preservation, or the maintenance of its own existence and the integrity of its territory. Our nation can do this only by rendering universal either the slave system or the free-labor system, legalizing slavery everywhere in the land or permitting it nowhere. Were we to beat, as we are beating, the armies of the confederacy, and crush its present military power, we should, so 1ong as slavery occupied its former position, at best gain only a truce for some few years, no solid or durable peace. The embers of the rebellion would still slumber, ready to break out, and burn afresh on the first opportunity. The slaveholding interest might consent again to govern and use the Union for its own ends, but it would not be extinguished, and would break out in a still more formidable rebellion, and again convulse the nation, the moment that the interest of free labor should show itself able and determined to assert its own rights and legitimacy.

It is useless to multiply words about it. There can be no permanent Union of freedom with slavery, no national unity and integrity with slavery in one half of the states and freedom in the other half. We have tried the experiment for the best half of a century, and it has failed, utterly failed. Freedom has made all conceivable sacrifices to slavery. Compromise after compromise has been consented to. We have suppressed the utterance of our noblest convictions, done all that we could to stifle the irrepressible instincts of humanity, lest by some word or deed we might endanger the safety of the Union, and the result has been contempt on the part of the South for the Union-saving North, and the present rebellion. A new trial of the experiment can succeed no better, for the people of the loyal states, if they would retain the slightest approach to self-respect, cannot possibly make greater concessions, or do more than they have already done to render practicable and permanent that union. The experiment has failed, as fail it always will and always must. It is not constitutional government, it is not republicanism, as some of our European friends pretend, that has failed; but the attempted union of freedom and slavery, of two essentially hostile and mutually repellent systems in the same state.

We cannot, then, we repeat, blink the question of slavery, if we would. It meets us on the very threshold of the controversy in which the nation is now engaged, and they who petition congress to put down the rebellion and let the negro question alone, and they who imagine that the present rebellion can be suppressed and extinguished without disposing of the slavery question at once and for ever, only show, if not their lack of loyalty, that they have thus far comprehended simply nothing of the terrible question which now involves the life or death of the nation. The advertisement of some players, that they would present on the stage on a given evening Shakespeare's Hamlet, with the part of the prince of Denmark left out by particular request, has long been referred to as a capital joke; but the joke is not half so capital as that of those worthy people who in the discussion of our present national affairs leave out, by particular request, the slave question, Why, the slavery question is the whole question, that without which there never would or could have been any question at all. To refuse to agitate the question of slavery is simply to refuse to agitate any question at all really important in the present crisis. The whole question of extinguishing the rebellion, of restoring the unity and integrity of the nation, and of sustaining our national life and securing future glory, turns on the slave question. You may, as we have said, beat the rebel armies; you may gain victories by sea and by land; you may even gain an armistice or a truce; but to suppose that you can reestablish peace and be really a nation, unless you go further and remove the cause and mainspring of the rebellion, is sheer folly, absolute fatuity. The old union of freedom with slavery under one and the same constitutional government has failed. Slavery, not freedom, has broken it, we would fain hope for ever. You cannot restore it, if you would, and you should not, if you could. No man is worthy of the name of statesman, who does not assume this as a fixed fact, and take it as his starting-point in all discussions having reference to our present difficulties and their final settlement, The slave interest, treated with the utmost tenderness, and allowed to have its own way in almost every thing from the very origin of the government, has declared its secession from the Union. It has declared its secession and separation final and irrevocable. It is for freedom to take it at its word. For ourselves, we accept the declaration, and insist that it shall be final and irrevocable. We never loved that Union, but as it had been consented to by the framers of our constitution, we have always felt it our duty to avoid doing any thing to endanger it. The dissolution has been by no act of ours, and by no act of the United States. It has been effected by the act of slavery itself, and since slavery has seen proper to secede, and to declare that it will have no further connection with freedom, we are not sorry, and are resolved on our part also, that they shall never again be united, or their union find a place ill the republic.

We have no patience with those politicians, demagogues and pettifoggers, who labor to restore the old Union of slavery and freedom, who believe, or profess to believe, in the possibility of its restoration, and who try to persuade us that on that union depend the future greatness and glory of the republic. The slave interest had always the right to secede from the Union, if it chose, and in this sense we recognize the alleged right of secession; for the United States never made slaveholding obligatory on any particular state, or on any of their citizens. The slave interest had always the right, if it chose, to go out of the Union, to cease to be an interest in or of the nation. It had the perfect right of self-destruction. But having gone out of the Union, and ceased to be an interest in the Union, we deny the obligation of the United States to force it back, or even to permit its voluntary return. It has gone out, and we say, let it stay out. But the right of slavery to secede by no means involves the right of the slaveholding states themselves to secede. Slavery might secede, but it could not carry with it any portion of the national territory, the national property, or the national population, and as the slave has no rights and no property of his own, it could carry no rights and no property with it. Its secession, therefore, leaves to the United States all the territory previously occupied by it; and the plenary right of sovereignty over that territory and the population occupying it. The secession could only dissolve the union between slavery and freedom, it could not abrogate the rights of freedom. It, by seceding, necessarily left to freedom the whole national territory, none of which could ever rightly again become slave territory. Rightly and legally considered, the question of slavery in the seceding states is not, whether it shall or shall not be abolished, but whether it shall or shall not be reestablished. By the act of secession slavery has no longer a legal status in what was the territory of the seceding states, and the population held to service are free, because there is now no law in that territory by which they can be so held. What we demand is, not an act of the government abolishing slavery, but a refusal on the part of the United States to allow the success of their arms over the rebels to be used to reestablish it, or to remand to slavery a population made free by the secession of their masters. Here is the position of the slave question today, --a position far in advance of its position yesterday.

While the slave interest or the interest created by slavery, held fast to the unnatural union of slavery and freedom, and was loyal to the federal authorities, we opposed all efforts for emancipation by the national government, and threw on the slave states themselves the whole responsibility of the infamous system they sustained. We, as citizens of the non-slaveholding states, washed our hands of that system, for we had no rights over it, and were responsible neither for its adoption, nor its continuance. The case is now altered. The slave-owners by their rebellion have unquestionably forfeited their right under the federal constitution to be protected in their slave property, or as to that matter, in any other species of property. If slavery be ever again recognized as legal, therefore, the responsibility will attach not to slave states only, but to the whole people of the United States, and we of the free states will become, clearly and decidedly, participes criminis. Here is a very grave consideration for those who insist on letting the slave question alone. If we of the free states suffer the negroes in the seceding states to be remanded to slavery, the crime and the sin will not be the crime and sin of particular states, but of the nation itself, and of the free states no less than of the slave states themselves.

Our readers are aware that we have from the outset maintained that the rebel by his rebellion forfeits his right to property, liberty, and even life, and that states by rebellion are dissolved, or cease to have any laws or usages that anybody is bound to respect. We hold with Mr. Sumner in his noble resolutions, creditable alike to him as a statesman and a lawyer, that the state by rebellion commits suicide, and lapses as a civil and political entity. All laws, customs, and usages depending for their vitality, force, or vigor on the state, are rendered null and void by its secession, and are to be treated as non avenus. Slavery exists in any country only by municipal, in no country by the jus gentium. In our political system it exists by the local law, or by the law or usage of a particular state, in distinction from a law or usage of the United States. Even Chief Justice Taney, in his opinion in the Dred-Scott case, does not pretend that slavery exists by virtue of the law of the United States, though he maintains that it has the right to exist wherever it is not forbidden by local law, assuming, it would seem, that it exists by virtue of the law of nature. But as his opinion was a mere obiter dictum, we venture to maintain, with a previous opinion of the supreme court, with the decisions of the English courts, with the general principles of law, and with common sense, that slavery being a violation of man's natural liberty, can exist only by municipal law, and in our country only by the law or usage of a particular state. Consequently it lapses when the state itself lapses. The state by the act of rebellion lapses, and consequently the rebellion of the state abrogates the only law by which negroes are held to service, either to persons loyal or to persons disloyal to the federal government; for the federal government never guaranteed to any man property in slaves after it had ceased to be property by state law. Any state may abolish slavery within its limits. Should a loyal state even see proper to emancipate its slaves without any indemnification to the owners, the owners have no claim of indemnity against the United States. Their remedy should be only against their own state.

That a state in its state capacity can, under our system, rebel, admits of no doubt, if we concede it to be, though in a subordinate sphere, a civil and political entity, or a civil and political person. It is, if a person, capable of state action, and when as a state it resists the legitimate authority of the general government, and arms its citizens against it, it rebels. If we deny the autonomy of the state, deny that it is a civil and political person, that is, in the sense a corporation is called a person, we eliminate the federal element of our political system, and make our republic not a federal, but a consolidated or centralized republic. If we take this ground, slavery nowhere on our territory has any legal existence. For it is evident there is no law of the national government authorizing it. Taking the other ground, a state can rebel and its rebellion is and must be its dissolution as a state. It ceases from the moment of its rebellion to have any legal existence. Consequently all that depends on its existence for vitality ceases to live, and nothing lives except the natural law, and the constitution and laws of the United States; but as no one has under either of them any title to slaves, slavery necessarily lapses with the state authorizing it.

That this doctrine reaches far we do not deny, we maintain that under our system a state may rebel, and that the rebellion of a state, ipso facto, dissolves it as civil and political society and consequently vacates all rights and remedies created or afforded by it. There remains after its rebellion no state law in force. Its rebellion vacates all titles held under it, dissolves all contracts, and annihilates all property created by it, and takes away all civil protection for even natural rights, save so far as that protection is given by the federal government. It abrogates all civil laws respecting marriage, all laws authorizing the transferring, devising, transmitting, or inheriting property, for these under our system are all left to the state government. The courts of law are all dissolved, and the remedies afforded by them can no longer be enforced. The rebellion, in a word, kills the whole state, and every thing dependent on it. Whether he state be revived and permitted to return to the Union depends entirely on the good pleasure of the federal authority. It cannot be claimed as a right by the population of the territory of the defunct state. As they could not take the territory out of the Union, and as they, so long as they remain on it, are within the jurisdiction of the United States, the federal government has authority to govern them, either as a territory or as a conquered province.

We trust the time will come when the defunct states will be revived, or, more strictly speaking, new states be formed with the old names and boundaries, and admitted into the Union on terms of perfect equality, although this ought not to be done till the rebels have unconditionally surrendered. When they have unconditionally surrendered, and thrown themselves on the mercy of the federal government, the United States will, no doubt, after having compelled rebel property to pay the expenses of the war, permit the people to reorganize themselves into states, and confirm all who give evidence of loyal intentions, in their former civil and political rights. It will not restore, for it has no constitutional right to restore, the relation of master and slave. It cannot deprive freemen of their liberty, except for crime. The negroes having been freed by the rebellion of the states whose laws authorized them to be held as slaves, are henceforth freemen, and the federal government must protect and govern them as freemen.

Undoubtedly there is something severe in treating the rebellion of a state as state suicide; but we have yet to learn that the way of rebellion ought to be graded, macadamized, and made easy. We see no wisdom or humanity in leaving a state free to rebel, convulse the nation, create a fearful civil war, with all its sacrifices of men and money, and be free to resume its former status the moment it ceases fighting, because fighting ceases to be of any avail. No government that has any self-respect, any consciousness of its rights and duties, any regard for justice or the public weal, can ever allow rebellion such impunity. It will make, as it ought to make, the way of the political transgressor hard. We must not forget that the states forming the southern confederacy have no legal existence and no legal authority to make war or peace. Every soldier in the national army killed in battle by their soldiers is murdered, just as much murdered as I should be, were a robber to break into my house, and kill me while defending the inviolability of my dwelling and my property. We say not that every secession soldier who kills a national soldier in battle is a murderer in foro conscientiae, but we do say the killing of such a soldier is a murder. All our brave soldiers, officers or privates, who have fallen in this civil war have been murdered, barbarously, treacherously murdered; and every man who voluntarily and knowing what he is about, has entered into the rebellion, originated, fostered, or in any way aided and abetted it, is answerable, either as principal or accessory, for their murder, and for murdering them while in the discharge of their highest and most solemn duties to their country. This is undeniable; for they act without warrant of law, and deliberate killing without warrant of law is murder, and murder in the first degree. We hope we shall not be regarded as a moral monster, if we have the harshness to say that we are not willing to pass lightly over the treacherous murder of so many fathers, husbands, sons, and brothers, guilty of no offence but that of rushing at the call of their country to the defense of law the rights of authority, and the integrity of the nation, against traitors and rebels.

We know very well what the constitution says with regard to the punishment of treason, and also what is the law of congress on the subject; but neither the special clause in, the constitution limiting the penalty of treason, nor the special statute of congress, governs the present case. A rebellion, when it rises to certain proportions, and assumes the character of a civil war, is never regarded or expected to be treated as a case of ordinary treason, which can be put down by the civil authority. Besides, the constitution and the law relate only to individual traitors, not to treason committed by a state. The rebellion of a state must be treated according to its natural and legal effects. The court in recognizing those effects to be as we have stated, violates no clause of the constitution and no law of congress. The court deprives no man of his property beyond the term of his natural life, for he has been deprived of all property which it refuses to recognize as his, by the rebellion of his state. In recognizing the suicide of the state, and leaving its citizens to the consequences of that suicide, it does not confiscate the traitor's property; it only refuses to restore to him or his children property which had lapsed by the action of his state, before the national authority took possession of it. The law makes the punishment of treason death. The principle of that law is not violated, but conformed to, by treating the rebellion of a state as state suicide. The deceased state leaves no heir, and the nation in assuming and administering its effects, preserves at least the principle of the law. All lapses to the Union, because under our system a state can have no other successor. Individuals can hold henceforth property once held under its authority only by a law of congress confirming their titles, or under patents granted by the United States. By the lapse of the state, the whole property held under its authority becomes vested in the United States, the only successor of the state. This, we apprehend, is the law in the case, and severe as it is, it inflicts no severer penalty than state treason deserves.

No doubt, the property will, in the case of loyal persons, be confirmed to the former owners, as, to some extent, will be their former property to rebels, after they have given evidence that for the future they will demean themselves as peaceable and loyal citizens. The government will be bound by justice, and the people of the loyal states will require it, to reorganize civil society in the seceded states at the earliest practicable moment, and with as little change in former possessions and social relations as a due regard for the whole people of the Union will admit. The constitution has been violated by the rebels, but nothing we demand or recommend is any violation of that sacred instrument by the federal authorities. All its provisions will remain intact, and it will be, as before, the constitution of the country.

The great danger, now to be guarded against, does not come from the avowed rebels. At the moment we are writing, our victorious armies have penetrated into Tennessee, and taken possession of its capital, and already we hear that a new state government is soon to be elected, and Tennessee is to have her full representation in both houses of congress. The press recommends to the government, that as fast as a state is reconquered, it shall recognize it as loyal, allow it to elect its state and federal officers, and resume its place in the Union. Whether the government will adopt such a policy or not, we know not, for we are not its organ, and are not in its secrets. We hope it will not, for such a policy is, in our judgment, under present circumstances, the shallowest, the maddest, and the most suicidal policy that can be proposed. That such a policy should have been entertained in the beginning of the struggle, can be excused, There was then much to be said in its favor. The administration did not know its own strength, and could not tell how far it could count on the patriotism of the people. It knew there was a strong southern and pro-slavery party in the free states, and it had reason to fear that it would prove a disunion party, and make common cause with the rebels. Besides, it was supposed that there was a strong Union party in the seceding states, whom it was necessary to secure, and who must at any cost be prevented from being irritated and estranged from the national cause. The restoration of the status quo, or the suppression of the rebellion without affecting the status of persons held prior to the rebellion to service, was all that was generally contemplated, or that, except by the very boldest, it was thought prudent to contemplate. Everybody disclaimed all intention of subjugating the rebellious states, and nearly all were prepared to allow them to return to their allegiance, and to resume their former position in the Union, very much on their own terms. But we are not where we were when President Lincoln issued his first proclamation; we are not where we were even three months ago. Events have marched, and men have marched with them. The policy which might have been prudent in the beginning would now be a shameful surrender. We are now in a position to enforce the law in the case, and to make the rebels pay the just penalty of heir treason and rebellion, and to teach state treason a lesson it will never forget.

But precisely now comes our danger, and never at any moment since the secession of South Carolina has the danger to the republic been greater or more imminent. The old pro-slavery party at the North, aided by the border states nominally in the Union, but in the Union only through fear of our battalions, rears its head, and threatens to render all our sacrifices useless, and all our victories abortive. This party is all the more dangerous, because it professedly adopts what was in the outset apparently the policy of the administration itself, and claims to approve and sustain the executive policy--a policy, the useless and dangerous character of which was first thoroughly exposed by Mr. Conway, of Kansas, in his remarkable speech in the house of representatives on the 12th of last December. Let Tennessee and one or two more of the rebellious states, or even Tennessee alone, be represented, and this party has regained its majority in congress, and the whole nation is brought again under the domination of the slave interest, represented now principally by the border states, nominally loyal, but really disloyal. Here is the danger, which will only be increased by any addition to the representation in congress of the so-called Union men in the seceding states.

We would not be unjust to the border states, but we say frankly we have no confidence in their loyalty. It is “neither fish, flesh, nor fowl, nor yet good red herring.” It is the loyalty of neutrality, like that of the affectionate wife in the battle between her husband and the bear, "Fight, husband; fight, bear; I am neutral." Missouri was for neutrality, and three times we have had to conquer her secessionists; Kentucky was neutral, that is to say, against the Union; and Maryland would have openly seceded but for the presence of the federal troops and the timely arrest and imprisonment of a part of her legislature. Both Missouri and Kentucky are represented in the rebel congress, and no doubt would have openly seceded with Virginia and Tennessee, if it had not been for the proximity of the great Northwest and a secret conviction that they would serve the cause of rebellion more effectually in the Union than out of it, or by pretended neutrality than by avowedly taking sides with the rebels. To these may be added western Virginia, treated as the old state of Virginia, and allowed her representation in congress. There are, no doubt, in the border states nominally within the Union, as well as in the seceded states themselves, individuals who are unsurpassed by any in any section, for their loyalty to the Union; individuals whom we love and honor, and in whose patriotism we would confide as unreservedly as in our own. But in general, the Union men in all the border states, as in the seceded states, are tainted with the heresy of state sovereignty, and are willing to remain in the Union only on condition of dictating its policy, and placing it under the domination of the slave interest, Kentucky never voted to sustain the Union or to discharge her duty to the Union, till the president had modified General Fremont's proclamation, freeing the slaves of rebels, and her prominent men had received assurances that the triumph of the national cause should work no detriment to the “divine and sacred institution” of negro slavery. Protect slavery, and she will be loyal; leave slavery to follow the surcease of the states that authorized it, and she will go over to the enemy. Such is her loyalty, a conditional loyalty, which we treat as disloyalty, and despise more than open treason and rebellion.

Western Virginia has demonstrated the impolicy of treating the professed Union men of a seceded state, as a state, and allowing them a congressional representation. This policy is unjustifiable, and in adopting it, the government sanctions a more fatal revolutionary principle than that asserted by the rebellion we are seeking to suppress and extinguish. Mr. Pierrepont may be a very worthy and respectable gentleman, but who thinks of him as the governor of Virginia, and what court of law would recognize as the acts of Virginia the acts of the pretended government at Wheeling? The recognition of that government of conditional and revolutionary loyalty by the administration, was worse than a fault, it was a blunder; and it will not do to repeat it. The administration might have taken, and should have taken military possession of the loyal counties of the Old Dominion, and congress might have provided for their government as a territory. But to recognize them as the state of Virginia, and give them the representation of the state in the senate, and their proportionate representation in the house of representatives, without any legitimate state action, was a blunder in policy, a blow at legitimate state rights, and an act of gross injustice to the loyal states, on whom, for the present at least, is thrown the chief burden of saving the constitution and the integrity and life of the nation.

The policy adopted in the case of western Virginia, is based on the false assumption that a state, as a state, cannot rebel, and therefore that the several seceding states, as states, are loyal, and that the loyal people of those states retain all their constitutional rights unimpaired by the act of secession. This is the grand fallacy which has embarrassed the administration and congress from the outset, and greatly impeded military operations. If the state were, as some pretend, a sovereign state, it could not, we grant, rebel, for in that case there would be no superior on earth for it to rebel against. But if the state is autonomous, a political entity, capable of acting as a political person, and yet subordinate to a superior, it call rebel as well as an individual, and does rebel when it refuses to obey, and takes up arms against the legitimate authority of that superior. The rebellion of a state carries a way all the rights, even of loyal persons, depending on their being citizens of a particular state. Such persons are citizens of the United States, indeed, but they are no longer citizens of a particular state, and necessarily fall into the condition of persons squatting on federal territory, for which no state or territorial government has as yet been organized and put into operation. They have for the present no political rights whatever, and consequently no right of representation in congress. This is the case of the loyal population even of all the seceded states. Virginia had seceded, and by her act, her whole population were deprived of all the rights of the people of Virginia, for by that act, the people of Virginia ceased to exist.

That a state by rebellion, in case it can rebel, loses its status in the Union, and therefore all its rights as a federal state, we presume will not be questioned. That a state under our political system can rebel, we think is undeniable. The generic character of our system is that of a federal republic. We are a nation, one nation, and therefore have our national sovereignty, but the government is not a centralized or consolidated government. The government is formed by the union, not league, of several individual or particular states, or civil and political communities, and in relation to one another separate and independent states. These states have each in its own sphere certain rights, which are not derived from the national government, or held as grants or concessions from it. In other words, all rights and power in the republic, though held in subordination to the legitimate authority of the national government, do not emanate from it, and are not held subject to its pleasure. The national government recognizes and protects the rights of the states, but does not create, and cannot abrogate them. The matter is best explained by regarding the several states as holding before the federal government a relation analogous to that held by individuals before civil society. Civil society derives its powers, mediante the people as individuals, from God, and hence its legitimacy. But the individual after the creation of civil society, as before its creation, has certain rights, called the rights of man, which he holds by a law antecedent to civil society, which it does not create, cannot revoke, and is bound to recognize and protect as sacred and inviolable, among which, according to the declaration of American independence, are "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." These rights I hold by the patent of my Creator, by the charter of my manhood. They are inalienable, and so long as I do not forfeit them, the civil society of which I am a member, is bound to protect me in their peaceable enjoyment. I may hold them up before the state, and say, “These are mine, touch them not.” But I may forfeit them by my misdeeds. I forfeit my right to life by murdering my fellow-man, and society may hang me. I forfeit my right to liberty by abusing it, and rendering it incompatible with the equal liberty of others. I forfeit my right to pursue my happiness, when I insist on pursuing it in a way destructive of the happiness of others, or in a manner dangerous to the existence or peace of society.

The same may be said of the several states before the federal government. The federal government derives its powers from God, through the people as states, and therefore holds them legitimately. Each state has certain rights, which it holds by a law anterior to the Union, and independent of it. But the state may forfeit its rights, and even its existence as a state, because though a state, and in its subordinate sphere a complete state, it is not a sovereign, but a subordinate state. It is subordinate, because the United States are made by the constitution the supreme government. Article VI. of the constitution says: “This constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the constitution and laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding.” No language can more clearly assert the constitutional supremacy of the United States, and therefore the subordinate character of each particular state. By making the United States the supreme government, and their constitution and constitutional acts the supreme law of the land, the American people are made one civil and political people or community--not an aggregation of peoples--a sovereign nation whose sovereignty excludes all others, for sovereignty is and must be one and indivisible. But the powers of government are, under our system, not concentrated in the same hands, but are divided and distributed among an indefinite number of autonomous though subordinate civil and political communities. These communities, so long as they keep within their sphere, are independent of the federal government, and may resist its invasion of their reserved or antecedent rights, as an individual, so long as he abuses none of his rights, may resist any encroachment on them by civil society. So far we assert state rights as an essential element in our political system, and as an element we can never consent to see eliminated. It is the grandest and noblest feature in our institutions. This has always been our doctrine on the subject, and if in some of our writings we have at times seemed to go further, we have seemed to go further than we really intended. We had accepted in early life Mr. Calhoun's theory of state rights, but we never understood this theory to mean the right of a state to secede, or that state sovereignty denied the constitutional supremacy of the federal government. Mr. Calhoun was a nullifier, but when we knew him he was not a secessionist. “You cannot,” said he to us in 1841, when authorizing us to speak officially for him,--“you cannot coerce a state, because you can never get power enough to do it. So many other states will make common cause with the state it is proposed to coerce, that the government will be compelled to desist from its attempt, and withdraw the acts that have given offence, and which the state has nullified.” Mr. Calhoun did not deny, as he explained himself to us, the right, but simply the ability of the federal government to coerce a state. The moment it should attempt to coerce the nullifying state, other states would intervene, arrest its action, and compel it to accept a compromise, as in 1832. State sovereignty, in any other sense than that the state derives none of its rights from the Union, and that all the states are independent states in their internal relations to one another, was always, in our judgment, a political heresy; and it is unquestionably this political heresy, that has justified, in the minds of the southern people, the fearful schism they have attempted, and which the federal authorities are now laboring to suppress.

Conceding that a state has autonomy, but denying its sovereignty, we can consistently maintain that a state, as well as an individual, may rebel. Any person, natural or artificial, that owes allegiance to a superior, is capable of rebellion because capable of resisting and warring against the legitimate authority of that superior. The states have a superior, since the constitutional acts of the United States are the supreme law of the land, and override their acts. That government, whose acts are the supreme law of the land, is unquestionably the supreme government of the land; and if the federal government is supreme the states can be only subordinate. If subordinate to the federal government, they owe it allegiance, and are bound to obey it in the constitutional exercise of its authority. They being autonomous, capable of self-action, are capable of resisting that authority, refusing it obedience, and taking up arms against it, and therefore are capable of rebellion. To say a state can do none of these things because they are illegal, is to overlook the reason of their illegality on the one hand, or to maintain, on the other, that an act done illegally is not done at all. Any act done by the political people called a state, acting through their state organization, and by its authority, is an act of the state in the full and proper sense of the term. The secession ordinances were passed not by the people as population, by the people outside of their state organization, and irrespective of state authority, but by the people as the state, acting through the state organization, and according to the forms of state law. They were passed by the highest authority in the state, and have been recognized, acted on, and enforced by all the authorities of the state, legislative, judicial, executive, and military. In the eyes of the state these ordinances, and the acts following them, are not illegal, but legal and valid. The individuals in arms against the federal government are not rebels to their respective states. So far as state acts can go, they are, in relation to their own states, loyal and patriotic citizens, and simply fighting at the command of authority for their country, not against it.

The illegality is not illegality in relation to state authority, but to federal authority. The acts justify the citizen in the state court, and would, in that court, be a valid plea; but they do not justify the citizen, nor can he plead them, in the federal courts. They are illegal and void, not because they are not acts of the state, but because they are acts in violation of the constitution of the United States, and acts in contravention of the supreme authority of the land, which is superior to state authority, and overrides it. They are illegal, and bind nobody, because they are in contravention of a superior authority, not in but out of the state, and to which the state is bound to conform. The citizen is not bound by them, because the allegiance of the citizen is due to the superior authority and he is bound to obedience to his state only as far as compatible with that allegiance. The allegiance that can be claimed by a state is a subordinate and conditional allegiance, and is restricted by the higher allegiance due to the national sovereign. The vassal swears to his immediate lord to be his true liegeman, saving against the lord paramount, The state acts illegally in seceding, but the law it violates is not state law, but United States law; and as that law overrides all state law, her illegal acts can bind no citizen of the United States to obedience, not because they are in the state court non avenus, but because they are null and void in the federal courts. Their illegality, therefore, is no proof that they are not acts of the state, or her legal acts, so far as herself is concerned, but a proof that she has usurped the sovereign power, and therefore destroyed herself as a federal state.

Secession, there can be no question, is rebellion, for it is an act of hostility to the superior, the total denial of the superior’s authority. The state, then, in seceding, loses all its rights and its very existence as a civil or political community. The population and territory remain within the jurisdiction of the United States, but the entity called the state is out of the Union, as completely so, as though it had never been in it and therefore is no longer a state at all, for a state without population or territory is a sheer nullity. It does not, as it imagines, become by secession a separate and independent state, because its act being illegal, null, and void, as against the superior, cannot carry either the population or territory essential to its existence with it. It does not fall back on the people in their original and primary capacity, because the people in that capacity are simply population, and the people, as population, so long as they remain on territory within the jurisdiction of the United States, are not an independent people, but simply a part of the population of the United States, bound to obey the constitutional acts of the federal government as “the supreme law of the land.” Its act of secession is simply an act of self-destruction, and the surcease of its authority. Its secession ordinance has killed it. The population and territory belong to the Union, but are not in the Union as a state, consequently have no right of representation in the federal congress, and, till reorganized into a state or territory, no political or even civil existence whatever.

That congress may reorganize the people of the geographical districts vacated by the decease of the seceding states into territorial governments, and then authorize the territorial people to assemble in conventions, adopt state constitutions, and apply for admission as states into the Union, we readily concede; but we deny the right of congress or of the executive to recognize them as states till they have been so organized and formally admitted, There is now no state of Tennessee. The state of Tennessee has abdicated, and the word is now only a geographical expression. The gentlemen from the geographical district called Tennessee, now sitting in congress, are most estimable gentlemen, but they represent no political entity, and have, so far as we can see, not a shadow of right to the seats they occupy. The same must be said of the gentlemen in congress from Western Virginia. Western Virginia is not and never was a federal state. It is included in Virginia, and Virginia as a state is no more. The loyal people remaining in the seceding states lost their federal rights by the suicide of those states. They are not anywhere states or successors of the defunct states, and have no power of themselves to organize themselves into states, with the right of representation in congress.

The policy we oppose, and which we devoutly pray may never be adopted, is to treat the loyal men found in a seceded state as the state itself, and to recognize the defunct constitution as still in force. But this is only an indirect way of imposing a constitution on a state, the capital error of Mr. Buchanan's administration with regard to Kansas. These people are not the state, and the old constitution is not in force. Neither congress nor the executive can revive that constitution, nor organize these people into a state. Congress can organize them into a territory, and pass in their favor an “enabling act,” as it is called. But the act of organizing them into a state, and adopting a state constitution, must be the act of the people themselves, though of a legally recognized and defined territorial people. These Union men, or the population on the territory of any of the lapsed states, are not such people. For the federal government to treat them as such, and allow them to act under the old constitution, and elect state and federal officers, as in Western Virginia, would strike a deadly blow to constitutional government, and violate in a most flagrant manner our federal system and the rights of the loyal states.

The states that have remained loyal, and that now constitute the political community called the United States, have the constitutional right to settle the affairs of the nation, without the interference of gentlemen who have no constitutional right to seats on the floor of either house of congress. We know to a moral certainty that, if government treats as a state the population of each district it recovers from the so-called confederacy, and concedes them the full state representation in congress, the status quo will be restored, slavery be reestablished, the slave interest again be dominant, and our political condition after the war be more disgraceful and humiliating than it was ever before. In every one of the seceded states there are, no doubt, Union men, and, as our armies advance, they will become much more numerous. Some will be heartily Union men, a much larger number will be Union men because secession is the losing, and the Union the winning side. Nowhere are these men the state; nowhere can they claim to be the state, or by any state law hold a regular election for either state or federal officers. There is no possible way for them to perform any legal or constitutional state act. All their acts must lack authority, and in their principle and essence be illegal and revolutionary. To allow them to send representatives to congress, is therefore an outrage upon the loyal states, which deprives them of their constitutional rights, for these representatives, though representing population, would be the representatives of no state. It would destroy constitutionalism by placing the unorganized and unconstituted population of a geographical division of territory on the same footing with a legally organized and constituted state. It is states according to population, not population simply, that is represented in the lower house of congress and states alone that are represented in the upper house or senate. Let those who are ready to adopt this policy, and who profess to be the special friends of the constitution, ponder this well.

These people in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Arkansas, that it is proposed, under these names, to treat as states, even if loyal, are not and never were states. They are in all the states named, we presume, only a minority, though that is not fatal, for it is only the loyal majority of a legally constituted people that is of moment. Now, to allow this population to be represented in congress, is an outrage on the federal principle of our government. We then make population alone, not states, the people represented, and thus in principle convert our republic from a federal to a centralized republic, and sanction the wildest and most irregular democracy ever broached by the most rabid Jacobin or radical. We should not in this way preserve our federal system, our federal constitution, but should revolutionize and destroy it. We should put an end to the republic of Washington and Adams, Jefferson and Madison, and attempt the dangerous experiment of a pure, centralized democracy. We are not prepared for such a revolution. We love our country with all her faults, for she is our country; but we love her institutions because we have studied them, and believe them the wisest and best the world has yet seen. It is our political civil constitution, not our learning, our science, our polish, or our personal morals, that places us in the front rank of the grand army of civilization. To destroy the federal element in these institutions would ruin them, and ruin the country no less than secession itself, for all centralism is absolutism, whether democratic or monarchical centralism. We should be on the one hand, were we to adopt it, as much as the confederates do on the other.

Receive back, without territorial discipline, the seceded states the moment they cease fighting because fighting has become a losing game, and you simply pay a premium for rebellion, and make treason more profitable than loyalty. The border-state representation, aided by Democratic pro-slavery representatives, and a few renegade administration members, even now all but control congress, and make it well-nigh impossible to pass any comprehensive measure for punishing rebels, or for indemnifying loyal men by confiscating rebel property. The slave interest is nearly as dominant in congress now as it was before the secession of Toombs and Davis, Slidell and Mason, Wigfall and Hunter, It must be protected at all hazards. No damage must be done it, whatever becomes of loyalty. It thwarts the patriotic action of congress, and has from the outset paralyzed the arm of the executive, only just now beginning to be emancipated. For a long time every military precaution was neglected lest the border states should be irritated and secede; and the finest months in the season for military operations were suffered to wear away without any thing being done, and the wisest strategic movements were sternly forbidden to be made, and the most important strategic points were left to the enemy, lest the Union men in Kentucky should vote to join the confederates. Let now Tennessee, North Carolina, Arkansas, and one after another of all the seceded states return to the Union, and send their delegations to congress, and it is easy to foresee the injustice that will be done to loyalty.

If one thing more than another should be insisted on, it is that the expenses of putting down the rebellion should be paid out of the property of rebels, of rebel states and rebel individuals. This is alike the dictate of justice and sound policy. But even as congress is now constituted this could hardly be effected. Let all the seceded states come back. and the United States would soon find that, in addition to the federal debt, in addition to the damages done to the property of so-called loyal men, by either army, federal or confederate, the federal treasury would be drawn upon to pay the scrip of the confederacy, and discharge all the obligations contracted by the rebels in their war against the Union. Some northern “dough-face” say the honorable Mr. Diven of New York, for instance,--could be found to introduce a bill to that effect, it would be supported by all the Union men of the border states, from interest and the desire to stand well with their neighbors, late rebels to the government, by the whole southern delegation, as a matter of course, and by a fair share of northern men who would be anxious to prove that the, era of good feeling had returned, and that they entertained no grudge against their southern brethren, and the bill would be passed, If necessary, even over the presidential veto. As sure as the armies of the Union continue to be victorious, and the seceded states are suffered to return to the Union the moment they lay down their arms, this is what will be done. It will be the rebels, not the loyalists, to whom will endure the victory. Slavery will again be in power, and the cotton lords will dominate as of old in the halls of congress, the executive chair, and the departments, threatening anew, if we of the free states show any disposition to assert our own rights, to secede, to convulse the nation again with civil war, to murder again our fathers, husbands, sons, and brothers, till they break our spirit, and we become as tame and docile as their own negroes. Is this the premium to be paid for treason? And this the penalty to be inflicted on loyalty?

We trust in God that the federal government will never adopt, or, rather, that it will not persist in so insane and suicidal a policy. We trust that it will abandon the proton phesos with which it started, and will understand that a state may secede, that state secession is state suicide, and that the slaveholding states, by seceding, have lapsed as states, and that even loyal men inhabiting the geographical territories once under their jurisdiction have lost by the lapse of their respective states, all right of federal representation; while it itself is absolved from all obligation to protect or to recognize any of their municipal rights derived from state legislation or state authority alone. By the secession of the rebellions states, and by the rebellion of the greater part of the slaveholders throughout the non-seceding slaveholding states, slavery is legally well-nigh extinguished. We earnestly beseech the government, whatever it may do in regard to slavery in Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and Delaware, it will never recognize its existence anywhere else, and resist a outrance the return of the slave interest to power. As sure as it exists in the nation, that interest, will rule it, for it must rule or die. We plead not now for the black alone, but for the white also; not for the abolition of slavery, but especially against reducing again to slavery the recently emancipated free men of the North. Nowhere on territory within the usurped rule of the so-called confederacy, has black slavery to-day any legal existence. We say to the negroes fail the seceding states, you are free, no law or usage now in force binds you to service. The rebellion of your masters restores you to the ownership of yourselves. Your wives and children are your own. Let the federal government refuse to suffer you to be remanded to slavery, and you will be free, and the poor white men of the North will also be free.

The two most important measures ever introduced into the American congress are, first, the resolutions of Mr. Summer, in the senate, declaring that a state by rebellion commits suicide, and, second, General Ashley's bill providing for the government of the rebellious states as territories. We fear the democratic and border state influence, aided by a certain number of “clough-faced” republicans, may be too strong for their friends, and defeat the whole utility of the war, by forcing the acceptance of some base, timid, and disgraceful compromise, but they are wise and noble measures, almost the only measures introduced into the present congress that belong to high and comprehensive statesmanship. Let those measures be adopted, and our government will rise from its degradation, will reassume its majestic port and step, and command anew the admiration of the world. Their adoption would save constitutional government, and give new guaranties of man's capacity for freedom. But whether these measures be adopted or not Mr. Summer's resolutions will serve as a platform all which will take their stand all in the country worthy of consideration for their political sagacity, their wise statesmanship, their disinterestedness, and their nobility of sentiment.

Never have we trembled more for the fate of the republic than we do at this moment when the shouts of victory are ringing in our ears. Yet we do not despair. If the present congress fails ill its duty, we shall regret it. If it receives back the revolted states, and restores them to their former status, permitting them to remand the persons now legally free to their former servitude, we shall blush for our country, and hold that she knows not how to avail herself of this, her hour of visitation, but we shall not cease to labor for liberty, or to hope for its final triumph. We shall, if slavery be reestablished in the territory of rebellion, hold the federal government and the whole nation responsible for it, and therefore treat slavery as a matter that comes legitimately within the sphere of the political action of the citizens of the non-slaveholding states. It will then be our business as much as it would be if we lived in South Carolina or Tennessee. We shall then have the right to agitate the slave question politically, for the adoption of the policy we oppose makes slavery, if it exists anywhere on the territory of the seceded states, henceforth a national and not a mere state question. The government and people may be sure, if the policy we have opposed prevails, they will find it necessary, though in a different way, to reckon with the friends of freedom as well as with the friends of slavery.

If the view of state suicide we have taken be accepted, and the territorial government bill before congress adopted, the slave interest will be crushed in all except the border states, now nominally in the Union. The slavery question, when confined to these border states, will not amount to much. The slaves of rebels may be liberated under a confiscation act, and the few owned by loyal masters may be liberated under the war power, and their owners indemnified, or they may be purchased and set free, or, in fine, left as they are. In these states slavery will not long remain, after it is abolished further South, and the market for their surplus stock of slaves is cut off. Confined to these states, and forbidden to expand, it will soon die out. We are far from being sanguine that there is either statesmanship enough, or love of liberty enough, left in the country, to adopt, though evidently legal, constitutional, and just, the policy we recommend. There is one cause that operates powerfully in keeping the negro in bondage, the horror of africanizing free American society. This horror is the greatest obstacle the friends of freedom have to overcome. The majority of the people in the free states are anti-abolitionists, not because they approve of slavery, but because they do not like the negro for an associate, a neighbor, or a fellow-citizen. They believe he is a man, wish him to enjoy the rights of man, but not in their community. Not a few of these believe with the late Mr. Calhoun, that if the two races are to live on the same territory, it is best both for the white race and the negro race that the negro should be retained in the condition of a slave. Here is the great obstacle in the way of adopting Mr. Sumner's and General Ashley's policy. If the slaves were of the white race, that policy would be speedily adopted, and our republic made in reality, as well as in name, a free republic.

We have no space left for the discussion of this question. We suppose we share in the common prejudice against the negro race, and have no wish to see our free American society Africanized.  But prejudice, however strong, must not be permitted to override justice. We are not now pleading for the abolition of slavery, but against its reestablishment. In all the seceding states the slaves are freed, and what we ask is, that their freedom should be recognized. We want them treated as freemen: of their social and political status we say nothing. If recognized as freemen, we think, as white men press in to take their place as laborers, they would gradually, yet effectually, disappear from our republic by emigration to Hayti, or other black communities; where they can be free, and form integral portions of communities of their own race. We would urge no forced colonization; we would compel no emigration, but we believe the force of circumstances would lead them to emigrate, and we should have no objection to the govevernment taking measures to facilitate and aid their emigration, providing their emigration is voluntary on their part, like the emigration hither of Irish and Germans. However this may be, we insist that no prejudice of race or color should induce us to remand to slavery those who, by the crimes of their masters, or the surcease of the state authorities making them slaves, are now legally freemen. We must insist on this as an act of justice to them, as a duty we owe to God, and cannot neglect with impunity, and as the only way of saving the country from the domination of the slave interest, and enabling it to live, flourish, and fulfil its civilizing mission.