t never is the case
in great communities, for they always have constitutions and forms of
government. It may not be a constitution or form of government adapted
to its relation to the Government of the United States; and that would
be an evil to be remedied by the Government of the United States. That
is what we have been trying to do for the last four years. The practical
relations of the governments of those States with the Government of
the United States were all wrong--were hostile to that Government. They
denied our jurisdiction, and they denied that they were States of the
Union, but their denial did not change the fact; and there was never any
time when their organizations as States were destroyed. A dead State is
a solecism, a contradiction in terms, an impossibility.

These are, I confess, rather metaphysical distinctions, but I did not
raise them. Those who assert that a State is destroyed whenever its
constitution is changed, or whenever its practical relations with
this Government are changed, must be held responsible for whatever
metaphysical niceties may be necessarily involved in the discussion.

I do not know, sir, that I have made my views on this point clear to the
gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Kelley), who has questioned me upon it,
and I am still more doubtful whether, even if they are intelligible, he
will concur with me as to their justice. But I regard these States as
just as truly within the jurisdiction of the Constitution, and therefore
just as really and truly States of the American Union now as they were
before the war. Their practical relations to the Constitution of the
United States have been disturbed, and we have been endeavoring, through
four years of war, to restore them and make them what they were before
the war. The victory in the field has given us the means of doing this;
we can now re-establish the practical relations of those States to
the Government. Our actual jurisdiction over them, which they vainly
attempted to throw off, is already restored. The conquest we have
achieved is a conquest over the rebellion, not a conquest over the
States whose authority the rebellion had for a time subverted.

For these reasons I think the views submitted by the gentleman from
Pennsylvania (Mr. Stevens) upon this point are unsound. Let me next
cite some of the consequences which, it seems to me, must follow the
acceptance of his position. If, as he asserts, we have been waging war
with a