law, before you can disfranchise them. It is
impossible to reconstruct any one of the disorganized States with those
alone, or as the dominant party, who have adhered to the Union
throughout the fearful struggle, as self-governing States. The State,
resting on so small a portion of the people, would have no internal
strength, no self-support, and could stand only as upheld by federal
arms, which would greatly impair the free and healthy action of the
whole American system.

The government attempted to do it in Virginia, Louisiana, Arkansas, and
Tennessee, before the rebellion was suppressed, but without authority
and without success. The organizations, effected at great expense, and
sustained only by military force, were neither States nor State
governments, nor capable of being made so by any executive or
congressional action. If the disorganized States, as the government
held, were still States in the Union, these organizations were
flagrantly revolutionary, as effected not only without, but in defiance
of State authority; if they had seceded and ceased to be States, as was
the fact, they were equally unconstitutional and void of authority,
because not created by the free suffrage of the territorial people, who
alone are competent to construct or reconstruct a state.

If the Unionists had retained the State organization and government,
however small their number, they would have held the State, and the
government would have been bound to recognize and to defend them as
such with all the force of the Union. The rebellion would then have
been personal, not territorial. But such was not the case. The State
organization, the State government, the whole State authority rebelled,
made the rebellion territorial, not personal, and left the Unionists,
very respectable persons assuredly, residing, if they remained at home,
in rebel territory, traitors in the eye of their respective States, and
shorn of all political status or rights. Their political status was
simply that of the old loyalists, or adherents of the British crown in
the American war for Independence, and it was as absurd to call them
the State, as it would have been for Great Britain to have called the
old Tories the colonies.

The theory on which the government attempted to re-organize the
disorganized States rested on two false assumptions: first, that the
people are personally sovereign; and, second, that all the power of the
Union vests in the Gener