were illegal, unconstitutional, not within the
competency of the State, and therefore null and void from the
beginning. Unconstitutional, illegal, and not within the competency of
the State, so far as intended to alienate any portion of the national
domain and population thereto annexed, they certainly were, and so far
were void and of no effect; but so far as intended to take the State
simply as a State out of the Union, they were within the competency of
the State, were not illegal or unconstitutional, and therefore not null
and void. Acts unconstitutional in some parts and constitutional in
others are not wholly void. The unconstitutionality vitiates only the
unconstitutional parts; the others are valid, are law, and recognized
and enforced as such by the courts.

The secession ordinances are void, because they were never passed by
the people of the State, but by a faction that overawed them and
usurped the authority of the State. This argument implies that, if a
secession ordinance is passed by the people proper of the State, it is
valid; which is more than they who urge it against the State suicide
doctrine are prepared to concede. But the secession ordinances were in
every instance passed by the people of the State in convention legally
assembled, therefore by them in their highest State capacity--in the
same capacity in which they ordain and ratify the State constitution
itself; and in nearly all the States they were in addition ratified and
confirmed, if the facts have been correctly reported, by a genuine
plebiscitum, or direct vote of the people. In all cases they were
adopted by a decided majority of the political people of the State, and
after their adoption they were acquiesced in and indeed actively
supported by very nearly the whole people. The people of the States
adopting the secession ordinances were far more unanimous in supporting
secession than the people of the other States were in sustaining the
Government in its efforts to suppress the rebellion by coercive
measures. It will not do, then, to ascribe the secession ordinances to
a faction. The people are never a faction, nor is a faction ever the
majority.

There has been a disposition at the North, encouraged by the few Union
men at the South, to regard secession as the work of a few ambitious
and unprincipled leaders, who, by their threats, their violence, and
their overbearing manner, forced the mass of the people of their
respective S