If I find it does continue to be a State after that, then I shall strive to ascertain whether it will so continue to be a Government--a State--after, by means of universal treason, it has ceased to have any constitution, laws, legislatures, courts, or citizens in it.
Blaine questions the status of a government that has lost its constitutional framework due to treason.
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But this is a totally different thing from an offensive war to punish the people for the political misdeeds of their State Government, or to enforce an acknowledgment that the Government of the United States is supreme.
If it be true that war cannot be declared, nor a system of general hostilities carried on by the Central Government against a State, then it seems to follow that an attempt to do so would be ipso facto an expulsion of such State from the…
The States are colleagues of one another, and if some of them shall conquer the rest, and hold them as subjugated provinces, it would totally destroy the whole theory upon which they are now connected.
Under such circumstances, to send a military force into any State, with orders to act against the people, would be simply making war upon them.
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