This proposition is perfectly clear, that no branch of the Federal Government—­executive, legislative, or judicial—­can have any just powers except those which it derives through and exercises under the organic law of the Union.  Outside of the Constitution we have no legal authority more than private citizens, and within it we have only so much as that instrument gives us.  This broad principle limits all our functions and applies to all subjects.  It protects not only the citizens of States which are within the Union, but it shields every human being who comes or is brought under our jurisdiction.  We have no right to do in one place more than in another that which the Constitution says we shall not do at all.  If, therefore, the Southern States were in truth out of the Union, we could not treat their people in a way which the fundamental law forbids.

Some persons assume that the success of our arms in crushing the opposition which was made in some of the States to the execution of the Federal laws reduced those States and all their people—­the innocent as well as the guilty—­to the condition of vassalage and gave us a power over them which the Constitution does not bestow or define or limit.  No fallacy can be more transparent than this.  Our victories subjected the insurgents to legal obedience, not to the yoke of an arbitrary despotism.  When an absolute sovereign reduces his rebellious subjects, he may deal with them according to his pleasure, because he had that power before.  But when a limited monarch puts down an insurrection, he must still govern according to law.  If an insurrection should take place in one of our States against the authority of the State government and end in the overthrow of those who planned it, would that take away the rights of all the people of the counties where it was favored by a part or a majority of the population?  Could they for such a reason be wholly outlawed and deprived of their representation in the legislature?  I have always contended that the Government of the United States was sovereign within its constitutional sphere; that it executed its laws, like the States themselves, by applying its coercive power directly to individuals, and that it could put down insurrection with the same effect as a State and no other.  The opposite doctrine is the worst heresy of those who advocated secession, and can not be agreed to without admitting that heresy to be right.

Invasion, insurrection, rebellion, and domestic violence were anticipated when the Government was framed, and the means of repelling and suppressing them were wisely provided for in the Constitution; but it was not thought necessary to declare that the States in which they might occur should be expelled from the Union.  Rebellions, which were invariably suppressed, occurred prior to that out of which these questions grow; but the States continued to exist and the Union remained unbroken.  In Massachusetts, in Pennsylvania, in