and,
therefore, when of a State nothing remains but territory and
population, the State has evidently disappeared. It will not do then
to maintain that State suicide is impossible, and that the States that
adopted secession ordinances have never for a moment ceased to be
States in the Union, and are free, whenever they choose, to send their
representatives and senators to occupy their vacant seats in Congress.
They must be reorganized first.

There would also be some embarrassment to the government in holding
that the States that passed the secession ordinance remain,
notwithstanding, States in the Union. The citizens of a State in the
Union cannot be rebels to the United States, unless they are rebels to
their State; and rebels to their State they are not, unless they resist
its authority and make war on it. The authority of the State in the
Union is a legal authority, and the citizen in obeying it is disloyal
neither to the State nor to the Union. The citizens in the States that
made war on the United States did not resist their State, for they
acted by its authority. The only men, on this supposition, in them,
who have been traitors or rebels, are precisely the Union men who have
refused to go with their respective States, and have resisted, even
with armed force, the secession ordinances. The several State
governments, under which the so-called rebels carried on the war for
the destruction of the Union, if the States are in the Union, were
legal and loyal governments of their respective States, for they were
legally elected and installed, and conformed to their respective State
constitutions. All the acts of these governments have been
constitutional. Their entering into a confederacy for attaining a
separate nationality has been legal, and the debts contracted by the
States individually, or by the confederacy legally formed by them, have
been legally contracted, stand good against them, and perhaps against
the United States. The war against them has been all wrong, and the
confederates killed in battle have been murdered by the United States.
The blockade has been illegal, for no nation can blockade its own
ports, and the captures and seizures under it, robberies. The Supreme
Court has been wrong in declaring the war a territorial civil war, as
well as the government in acting accordingly. Now, all these
conclusions are manifestly false and absurd, and therefore the
assumption that the States in questio