ubject. No one,
fellow-citizens, has a higher reverence for the reserved rights of the
States than the Magistrate who now addresses you. No one would make
greater personal sacrifices or official exertions to defend them from
violation; but equal care must be taken to prevent, on their part, an
improper interference with or resumption of the rights they have vested
in the nation. The line has not been so distinctly drawn as to avoid
doubts in some cases of the exercise of power. Men of the best
intentions and soundest views may differ in their construction of some
parts of the Constitution; but there are others on which dispassionate
reflection can leave no doubt. Of this nature appears to be the assumed
right of secession. It rests, as we have seen, on the alleged undivided
sovereignty of the States and on their having formed in this sovereign
capacity a compact which is called the Constitution, from which, because
they made it, they have the right to secede. Both of these positions are
erroneous, and some of the arguments to prove them so have been
anticipated.

The States severally have not retained their entire sovereignty. It has
been shown that in becoming parts of a nation, not members of a league,
they surrendered many of their essential parts of sovereignty. The right
to make treaties, declare war, levy taxes, exercise exclusive judicial
and legislative powers, were all of them functions of sovereign power.
The States, then, for all these important purposes were no longer
sovereign. The allegiance of their citizens was transferred, in the
first instance, to the Government of the United States; they became
American citizens and owed obedience to the Constitution of the United
States and to laws made in conformity with the powers it vested in
Congress. This last position has not been and can not be denied. How,
then, can that State be said to be sovereign and independent whose
citizens owe obedience to laws not made by it and whose magistrates are
sworn to disregard those laws when they come in conflict with those
passed by another? What shows conclusively that the States can not be
said to have reserved an undivided sovereignty is that they expressly
ceded the right to punish treason--not treason against their separate
power, but treason against the United States. Treason is an offense
against _sovereignty_, and sovereignty must reside with the power to
punish it. But the reserved rights of the States are not les