In the case of murder the man is killed, and murder is thus committed in spite of the law.  The fact of killing is essential to the committal of the crime; and the fact of going out is essential to secession.  But in this case there was no such fact.  I think I need not argue any further the position that the rebel States have never for one moment, by any ordinances of secession, or by any successful war, carried themselves beyond the rightful jurisdiction of the Constitution of the United States.  They have interrupted for a time the practical enforcement and exercise of that jurisdiction; they rendered it impossible for a time for this Government to enforce obedience to its laws; but there has never been an hour when this Government, or this Congress, or this House, or the gentleman from Pennsylvania himself, ever conceded that those States were beyond the jurisdiction of the Constitution and laws of the United States.

During all these four years of war Congress has been making laws for the government of those very States, and the gentleman from Pennsylvania has voted for them, and voted to raise armies to enforce them.  Why was this done if they were a separate nation?  Why, if they were not part of the United States?  Those laws were made for them as States.  Members have voted for laws imposing upon them direct taxes, which are apportioned, according to the Constitution, only “among the several States” according to their population.  In a variety of ways—­to some of which the gentleman’ who preceded me has referred—­this Congress has, by its action, assumed and asserted that they were still States in the Union, though in rebellion, and that it was with the rebellion that we were making war, and not with the States themselves as States, and still less as a separate, as a foreign Power.

* * * * *

Why, sir, if there be no constitution of any sort in a State, no law, nothing but chaos, then that State would no longer exist as an organization.  But that has not been the case, it never is the case in great communities, for they always have constitutions and forms of government.  It may not be a constitution or form of government adapted to its relation to the Government of the United States; and that would be an evil to be remedied by the Government of the United States.  That is what we have been trying to do for the last four years.  The practical relations of the governments of those States with the Government of the United States were all wrong—­were hostile to that Government.  They denied our jurisdiction, and they denied that they were States of the Union, but their denial did not change the fact; and there was never any time when their organizations as States were destroyed.  A dead State is a solecism, a contradiction in terms, an impossibility.

These are, I confess, rather metaphysical distinctions, but I did not raise them.  Those who assert that a State is destroyed whenever its constitution is changed, or whenever its practical relations with this Government are changed, must be held responsible for whatever metaphysical niceties may be necessarily involved in the discussion.