according to their own judgment. It has no
authority to purge the electoral people, and say who may or may not
vote, for the whole question of suffrage and the qualifications of
electors is left to the State, and can be settled neither by an act of
Congress nor by an Executive proclamation.

If the government theory were admissible, that the disorganized States
remain States in the Union, the General government could have nothing
to say on the subject, and could no more interfere with elections in
any one of them than it could with elections in Massachusetts or New
York. But even on the doctrine here defended it can interfere with
them only by way of general superintendence. The citizens have,
indeed, lost their political rights, but not their private rights.
Secession has not dissolved civil society, or abrogated any of the laws
of the disorganized State that were in force at the time of secession.
The error of the government is not in maintaining that these laws
survive the secession ordinances, and remain the territorial law, or
lex loci, but in maintaining that they do so by will of the State, that
has, as a State, really lapsed. They do so by will of the United
States, which enacted them through the individual State, and which has
not in convention abrogated them, save the law authorizing slavery, and
its dependent laws.

This point has already been made, but as it is one of the niceties of
the American constitution, it may not be amiss to elaborate it at
greater length. The doctrine of Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Madison, and the
majority of our jurists, would see to be that the States, under God,
are severally sovereign in all matters not expressly confided to the
General government, and therefore that the American sovereignty is
divided, and the citizen owes a double allegiance--allegiance to his
State, and allegiance to the United States--as if there was a United
States distinguishable from the States. Hence Mr. Seward, in an
official dispatch to our minister at the court of St. James, says: "The
citizen owes allegiance to the State and to the United States." And
nearly all who hold allegiance is due to the Union at all, hold that it
is also due to the States, only that which is due to the United States
is paramount, as that under feudalism due to the overlord. But this is
not the case. There is no divided sovereignty, no divided allegiance.
Sovereignty is one, and vests not in the General government or in the