SECESSION.
The doctrine that a State has a right to secede and carry with it its population and domain, has been effectually put down, and the unity and integrity of the United States as a sovereign nation have been effectively asserted on the battle-field; but the secessionists, though disposed to submit to superior force, and demean themselves henceforth as loyal citizens, most likely hold as firmly to the doctrine as before finding themselves unable to reduce it to practice, and the Union victory will remain incomplete till they are convinced in their understandings that the Union has the better reason as well as the superior military resources.The nation has conquered their bodies, but it is hardly less important for our statesmen to conquer their minds and win their hearts.
The right of secession is not claimed as a revolutionary right, or even as a conventional right.The secessionists disclaim revolutionary principles, and hold that the right of secession is anterior to the convention, a right which the convention could neither give, nor take away, because inherent in the very conception of a sovereign State.Secession is simply the repeal by the State of the act of accession to the Union; and as that act was a free, voluntary act of the State, she must always be free to repeal it.The Union is a copartnership; a State in the Union is simply a member of the firm, and has the right to withdraw when it judges it for its interest to do so.There is no power in a firm to compel a copartner to remain a member any longer than be pleases.He is undoubtedly holden for the obligations contracted by the firm while he remains a member; but for none contracted after he has withdrawn and given due notice thereof.
So of a sovereign State in the Union.The Union itself, apart from the sovereign States that compose it, is a mere abstraction, a nullity, and binds nobody.All its substance and vitality are in the agreement by which the States constitute themselves a firm or copartnership, for certain specific purposes, and for which they open an office and establish an agency under express instructions for the management of the general affairs of the firm.The State is held jointly and severally for all the legal obligations of the Union, contracted while she is in it but no further; and is free to withdraw when she pleases, precisely as an individual may withdraw from an ordinary business firm.The remaining copartners have no right of compulsion or coercion against the seceding member, for he, saving the obligations already contracted, is as free to withdraw as they are to remain.
The population is fixed to the domain and goes with it; the domain is attached to the State, and secedes in the secession of the State.Secession, then, carries the entire State government, people, and domain out of the Union, and restores ipso facto the State to its original position of a sovereign State, foreign to the United States.Being an independent sovereign State, she may enter into a new confederacy, form a new copartnership, or merge herself in some other foreign state, as she judges proper or finds opportunity.The States that seceded formed among themselves a new confederacy, more to their mind than the one formed in , as they had a perfect right to do, and in the war just ended they were not rebels nor revolutionists, but a people fighting for the right of self-government, loyal citizens and true patriots defending the independence and inviolability of their country against foreign invaders.They are to be honored for their loyalty and patriotism, and not branded as rebels and punished as traitors.
This is the secession argument, which rests on no assumption of revolutionary principles or abstract rights of man, and on no allegation of real or imaginary wrongs received from the Union, but simply on the original and inherent rights of the several States as independent sovereign States.The argument is conclusive, and the defence complete, if the Union is only a firm or copartnership, and the sovereignty vests in the States severally.The refutation of the secessionists is in the facts adduced that disprove the theory of State sovereignty, and prove that the sovereignty vests not in the States severally, but in the States united, or that the Union is sovereign, and not the States individually.The Union is not a firm, a copartnership, nor an artificial or conventional union, but a real, living, constitutional union, founded in the original and indissoluble unity of the American people, as one sovereign people.There is, indeed, no such people, if we abstract the States, but there are no States if we abstract this sovereign people or the Union.
There is no Union without the States, and there are no States without the Union.The people are born States, and the States are born United States.The Union and the States are simultaneous, born together, and enter alike into the original and essential constitution of the American state.This the facts and reasonings adduced fully establish.
But this one sovereign people that exists only as organized into States, does not necessarily include the whole population or territory included within the jurisdiction of the United States.
It is restricted to the people and territory or domain organized into States in the Union, as in ancient Rome the ruling people were restricted to the tenants of the sacred territory, which had been surveyed, and its boundaries marked by the god Terminus, and which by no means included all the territory held by the city, and of which she was both the private proprietor and the public sovereign.The city had vast possessions acquired by confiscation, by purchase, by treaty, or by conquest, and in reference to which her celebrated agrarian laws were enacted, and which have their counterpart in our homestead and kindred laws.
