It is clear to my apprehension that the States lately in rebellion are still members of the National Union.  When did they cease to be so?  The “ordinances of secession” adopted by a portion (in most of them a very small portion) of their citizens were mere nullities.  If we admit now that they were valid and effectual for the purpose intended by their authors, we sweep from under our feet the whole ground upon which we justified the war.  Were those States afterwards expelled from the Union by the war?  The direct contrary was averred by this Government to be its purpose, and was so understood by all those who gave their blood and treasure to aid in its prosecution.  It can not be that a successful war, waged for the preservation of the Union, had the legal effect of dissolving it.  The victory of the nation’s arms was not the disgrace of her policy; the defeat of secession on the battlefield was not the triumph of its lawless principle.  Nor could Congress, with or without the consent of the Executive, do anything which would have the effect, directly or indirectly, of separating the States from each other.  To dissolve the Union is to repeal the Constitution which holds it together, and that is a power which does not belong to any department of this Government, or to all of them united.

This is so plain that it has been acknowledged by all branches of the Federal Government.  The Executive (my predecessor as well as myself) and the heads of all the Departments have uniformly acted upon the principle that the Union is not only undissolved, but indissoluble.  Congress submitted an amendment of the Constitution to be ratified by the Southern States, and accepted their acts of ratification as a necessary and lawful exercise of their highest function.  If they were not States, or were States out of the Union, their consent to a change in the fundamental law of the Union would have been nugatory, and Congress in asking it committed a political absurdity.  The judiciary has also given the solemn sanction of its authority to the same view of the case.  The judges of the Supreme Court have included the Southern States in their circuits, and they are constantly, in banc and elsewhere, exercising jurisdiction which does not belong to them unless those States are States of the Union.

If the Southern States are component parts of the Union, the Constitution is the supreme law for them, as it is for all the other States.  They are bound to obey it, and so are we.  The right of the Federal Government, which is clear and unquestionable, to enforce the Constitution upon them implies the correlative obligation on our part to observe its limitations and execute its guaranties.  Without the Constitution we are nothing; by, through, and under the Constitution we are what it makes us.  We may doubt the wisdom of the law, we may not approve of its provisions, but we can not violate it merely because it seems to confine our powers within limits narrower than we