d independence,
as the secessionists maintain. Certainly, if the States were, Prior to
the Union, sovereign States; but this is precisely what has been denied
and disproved; for prior to the Union there were no States. Secession
restores, or reduces, rather, the State to the condition it was in
before its admission into the Union; but that condition is that of
Territory, or a Territory subject to the United States, and not that of
an independent sovereign state. The State holds all its political
rights and powers in the Union from the Union, and has none out of it,
or in the condition in which its population and domain were before
being a State in the Union.

State suicide, it has been urged, releases its population and territory
from their allegiance to the Union, and as there is no rebellion where
there is no allegiance, resistance by its population and territory to
the Union, even war against the Union, would not be rebellion, but the
simple assertion of popular sovereignty. This is only the same
objection in another form. The lapse of the State releases the
population and territory from no allegiance to the Union; for their
allegiance to the Union was not contracted by their becoming a State,
and they have never in their State character owed allegiance to the
United States. A State owes no allegiance to the United States, for it
is one of them, and is jointly sovereign. The relation between the
United States and the State is not the relation of suzerain and
liegeman or vassal. A State owes no allegiance, for it is not subject
to the Union; it is never in their State capacity that its population
and territory do or can rebel. Hence, the Government has steadily
denied that, in the late rebellion, any State as such rebelled.

But as a State cannot rebel, no State can go out of the Union; and
therefore no State in the late rebellion has seceded, and the States
that passed secession ordinances are and all along have been States in
the Union. No State can rebel, but it does not follow therefrom that
no State can secede or cease to exist as a State: it only follows that
secession, in the sense of State suicide, or the abdication by the
State of its political rights and powers, is not rebellion. Nor does
it follow from the fact that no State has rebelled, that no State has
ceased to be a State; or that the States that passed secession
ordinances have been all along States in the Union.

The secession ordinances