It is true beyond question that the Acts of Secession are all inoperative and void against the Constitution of the United States.

Though matured in successive conventions, sanctioned in various forms, and maintained ever since by bloody war, these Acts, no matter by what name they may be called, are all equally impotent to withdraw an acre of territory or a single…

But while thus impotent against the United States, it does not follow that they were equally impotent in the work of self-destruction.

Clearly, the Rebels, by utmost effort, could not impair the national jurisdiction; but it remains to be seen if their enmity did not act back with fatal rebound upon those very State Rights in behalf of which they commenced their treason.

It is sometimes said that the States themselves committed suicide, so that, as States, they ceased to exist, leaving their whole jurisdiction open to the occupation of the United States under the Constitution.

This assumption is founded on the fact, that, whatever the existing governments in these States, they are in no respect constitutional; and since the State itself is known by the government with which its life is intertwined, it must cease…

Nobody has suggested, I presume, that any “State” of our Union has, through rebellion, ceased to exist as a civil society, or even as a political community.

It is only as a State of the Union, armed with State Rights, or at least as a local government, annually renewing itself, as the snake its skin, that it can be called in question.

But it is vain to challenge for the technical “State,” or for the annual government, that immortality which belongs to civil society.

The one is an artificial body, the other is a natural body; and while the former, overwhelmed by insurrection or war, may change or die, the latter can change or die only with the extinction of the community itself, whatever its name or…

It is because of confusion in the use of this term that there has been so much confusion in the political controversies where it has been employed.

But nowhere has this confusion led to greater absurdity than in the pretension recently made in the name of State Rights,--as if it were reasonable to claim for a technical “State” of the Union that immortality belonging to civil society.

Cicero speaks of change so complete as “to leave no image of a State behind.” This is precisely what has been done throughout the whole Rebel region: no image of a constitutional State is left behind.

Another authority, Aristotle, whose words are always weighty, says, that, the form of the State being changed, the State is no longer the same, as the harmony is not the same when we modulate out of the Dorian mood into the Phrygian.

But, if ever an unlucky people modulated out of one mood into another, it was our Rebels, when they undertook to modulate out of the harmonies of the Constitution into their bloody discords.

The idea of a people is the idea of a corporation.

It is wholly artificial, and made, like all other legal fictions, by common agreement.

When men, therefore, break up the original compact or agreement which gives its corporate form and capacity to a state, they are no longer a people, they have no longer a corporate existence, they have no longer a legal coactive force to…

It only remains that we should see things as they are, and not seek to substitute theory for fact.

On this important question I discard all theory, whether of State suicide, or State forfeiture, or State abdication, on the one side, or of State Rights, immortal and unimpeachable, on the other side.

It is enough, that, for the time being, and in the absence of a loyal government, they can take no part and perform no function in the Union, so that they cannot be recognized by the National Government.

Since there are in these States no local functionaries bound by constitutional oaths, there are, in fact, no constitutional functionaries; and as the State Government is necessarily composed of such functionaries, there can be no State…

Thus, for instance, in South Carolina, Pickens and his associates may call themselves Governor and Legislature, and in Virginia Letcher and his associates may call themselves Governor and Legislature; but we cannot recognize them as such.

Therefore to all pretensions in behalf of State governments in the Rebel States I oppose the simple FACT, that, for the time being, no such governments exist.

Let us at all hazards prevent the extension of Slavery and the increase of the Slave Power.