tead of
calling upon them to do it as the United States in convention
assembled, or by an amendment to the constitution of the United States
in the way ordained by that constitution itself. This understood, the
constitution and laws of a defunct State remain in force by virtue of
the will of the United States, till the State is raised from the dead,
restored to life and activity, and repeals or alters them, or till they
are repealed or altered by the United States or the national
convention. But as the defunct State could not, and the convention had
not repealed or altered them, save in the one case mentioned, the
General government had no alternative but to treat them and all rights
created by them as the territorial law, and to respect them as such.

What then do the people of the several States that seceded lose by
secession? They lose, besides incurring, so far as disloyal, the pains
and penalties of treason, their political rights, or right, as has just
been said, to be in their own department self-governing communities,
with the right of representation in Congress and the electoral
colleges, and to sit in the national convention, or of being counted in
the ratification of amendments to the constitution--precisely what it
was shown a Territorial people gain by being admitted as a State into
the Union. This is the difference between the constitutional doctrine
and that adopted by Mr. Lincoln's and Mr. Johnson's Administrations.
But what authority, on this constitutional doctrine, does the General
government gain over the people of States that secede, that it has not
over others! As to their internal constitution, their private rights
of person or property, it gains none. It has over them, till they are
reconstructed and restored to the Union, the right to institute for
them provisional governments, civil or military, precisely as it has
for the people of a territory that is not and has never been one of the
United States; but in their reconstruction it has less, for the
geographical boundaries and electoral people of each are already
defined by a law which does not depend on its will, and which it can
neither abrogate nor modify. Here is the difference between the
constitutional doctrine and that of the so-called radicals. The State
has gone, but its laws remain, so far as the United States in
convention does not abrogate them; not because the authority of the
State survives, but because the United States so