So far, then, secession is possible, feasible, and not unconstitutional or unlawful.But it is, as Mr.Sumner and others have maintained, simply State suicide.Nothing hinders a State from committing suicide, if she chooses, any more than there was something which compelled the Territory to become a State in the Union against its will.
It is objected to, this conclusion that the States were, prior to the Union, independent sovereign States, and secession would not destroy the State, but restore it to its original sovereignty and independence, as the secessionists maintain.Certainly, if the States were, Prior to the Union, sovereign States; but this is precisely what has been denied and disproved; for prior to the Union there were no States.Secession restores, or reduces, rather, the State to the condition it was in before its admission into the Union; but that condition is that of Territory, or a Territory subject to the United States, and not that of an independent sovereign state.The State holds all its political rights and powers in the Union from the Union, and has none out of it, or in the condition in which its population and domain were before being a State in the Union.
State suicide, it has been urged, releases its population and territory from their allegiance to the Union, and as there is no rebellion where there is no allegiance, resistance by its population and territory to the Union, even war against the Union, would not be rebellion, but the simple assertion of popular sovereignty.This is only the same objection in another form.The lapse of the State releases the population and territory from no allegiance to the Union; for their allegiance to the Union was not contracted by their becoming a State, and they have never in their State character owed allegiance to the United States.A State owes no allegiance to the United States, for it is one of them, and is jointly sovereign.The relation between the United States and the State is not the relation of suzerain and liegeman or vassal.A State owes no allegiance, for it is not subject to the Union; it is never in their State capacity that its population and territory do or can rebel.
Hence, the Government has steadily denied that, in the late rebellion, any State as such rebelled.
But as a State cannot rebel, no State can go out of the Union;and therefore no State in the late rebellion has seceded, and the States that passed secession ordinances are and all along have been States in the Union.No State can rebel, but it does not follow therefrom that no State can secede or cease to exist as a State: it only follows that secession, in the sense of State suicide, or the abdication by the State of its political rights and powers, is not rebellion.Nor does it follow from the fact that no State has rebelled, that no State has ceased to be a State; or that the States that passed secession ordinances have been all along States in the Union.
The secession ordinances were illegal, unconstitutional, not within the competency of the State, andtherefore null and void from the beginning.Unconstitutional, illegal, and not within the competency of the State, so far as intended to alienate any portion of the national domain and population thereto annexed, they certainly were, and so far were void and of no effect; but so far as intended to take the State simply as a State out of the Union, they were within the competency of the State, were not illegal or unconstitutional, and therefore not null and void.
Acts unconstitutional in some parts and constitutional in others are not wholly void.The unconstitutionality vitiates only the unconstitutional parts; the others are valid, are law, and recognized and enforced as such by the courts.
The secession ordinances are void, because they were never passed by the people of the State, but by a faction that overawed them and usurped the authority of the State.This argument implies that, if a secession ordinance is passed by the people proper of the State, it is valid; which is more than they who urge it against the State suicide doctrine are prepared to concede.But the secession ordinances were in every instance passed by the people of the State in convention legally assembled, therefore by them in their highest State capacity--in the same capacity in which they ordain and ratify the State constitution itself; and in nearly all the States they were in addition ratified and confirmed, if the facts have been correctly reported, by a genuine plebiscitum, or direct vote of the people.In all cases they were adopted by a decided majority of the political people of the State, and after their adoption they were acquiesced in and indeed actively supported by very nearly the whole people.
The people of the States adopting the secession ordinances were far more unanimous in supporting secession than the people of the other States were in sustaining the Government in its efforts to suppress the rebellion by coercive measures.It will not do, then, to ascribe the secession ordinances to a faction.The people are never a faction, nor is a faction ever the majority.
