“The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a republican form of government.”

Who is the United States?  Not the judiciary; not the President; but the sovereign power of the people, exercised through their representatives in Congress, with the concurrence of the Executive.  It means the political Government—­the concurrent action of both branches of Congress and the Executive.  The separate action of each amounts to nothing, either in admitting new States or guaranteeing republican governments to lapsed or outlawed States.  Whence springs the preposterous idea that either the President, or the Senate, or the House of Representatives, acting separately, can determine the right of States to send members or Senators to the Congress of the Union?

To prove that they are and for four years have been out of the Union for all legal purposes, and, being now conquered, subject to the absolute disposal of Congress, I will suggest a few ideas and adduce a few authorities.  If the so-called “confederate States of America” were an independent belligerent, and were so acknowledged by the United States and by Europe, or had assumed and maintained an attitude which entitled them to be considered and treated as a belligerent, then, during such time, they were precisely in the condition of a foreign nation with whom we were at war; nor need their independence as a nation be acknowledged by us to produce that effect.

After such clear and repeated decisions it is something worse than ridiculous to hear men of respectable standing attempting to nullify the law of nations, and declare the Supreme Court of the United States in error, because, as the Constitution forbids it, the States could not go out of the Union in fact.  A respectable gentleman was lately reciting this argument, when he suddenly stopped and said, “Did you hear of that atrocious murder committed in our town?  A rebel deliberately murdered a Government official.”  The person addressed said, “I think you are mistaken.”  “How so?  I saw it myself.”  “You are wrong, no murder was or could be committed, for the law forbids it.”

The theory that the rebel States, for four years a separate power and without representation in Congress, were all the time here in the Union, is a good deal less ingenious and respectable than the metaphysics of Berkeley, which proved that neither the world nor any human being was in existence.  If this theory were simply ridiculous it could be forgiven; but its effect is deeply injurious to the stability of the nation.  I cannot doubt that the late confederate States are out of the Union to all intents and purposes for which the conqueror may choose so to consider them.

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