Among us the term is most known as the technical name for one of the political societies which compose our Union.  Of course, when used in the latter restricted sense, it must not be confounded with the same term when used in a different and broader sense.  But it is obvious that some persons attribute to the one something of the qualities which can belong only to the other.  Nobody has suggested, I presume, that any “State” of our Union has, through rebellion, ceased to exist as a civil society, or even as a political community.  It is only as a State of the Union, armed with State rights, or at least as a local government, which annually renews itself, as the snake its skin, that it can be called in question.  But it is vain to challenge for the technical “State,” or for the annual government, that immortality which belongs to civil society.  The one is an artificial body, the other is a natural body; and while the first, overwhelmed by insurrection or war, may change or die, the latter can change or die only with the extinction of the community itself, whatever may be its name or its form.

It is because of confusion in the use of this term that there has been so much confusion in the political controversies where it has been employed.  But nowhere has this confusion led to greater absurdity than in the pretension which has been recently made in the name of State Rights,—­as if it were reasonable to attribute to a technical “State” of the Union that immortality which belongs to civil society.

From approved authorities it appears that a “State,” even in a broader signification, may lose its life.  Mr. Phillimore, in his recent work on International Law, says:—­“A State, like an individual, may die,” and among the various ways, he says, “by its submission and the donation of itself to another country."[19] But in the case of our Rebel States there has been a plain submission and donation of themselves,—­effective, at least, to break the continuity of government, if not to destroy that immortality which has been claimed.  Nor can it make any difference, in breaking this continuity, that the submission and donation, constituting a species of attornment, were to enemies at home rather than to enemies abroad,—­to Jefferson Davis rather than to Louis Napoleon.  The thread is snapped in one case as much as in the other.

But a change of form in the actual government may be equally effective.  Cicero speaks of a change so complete as “to leave no image of a State behind.”  But this is precisely what has been done throughout the whole Rebel region:  there is no image of a constitutional State left behind.  Another authority, Aristotle, whose words are always weighty, says, that, the form of the State being changed, the State is no longer the same, as the harmony is not the same when we modulate out of the Dorian mood into the Phrygian.  But if ever an unlucky people modulated out of one mood into another, it was our Rebels, when they undertook to modulate out of the harmonies of the Constitution into their bloody discords.