compacts or contracts, at the option of the party obli gated thereby. It destroys all claims of one belligerent upon the other, except those which may be sanctioned by a treaty of peace. A civil territorial war has the same effect, excepting only that the sovereign may treat the rebels as subjects as well as belligerents. Hence civil war, in which the belligerents have become territorial enemies, instantly annuls all rights or claims of public enemies against the United States, under the constitution or laws, whether that constitution be called a compact, a treaty, or a covenant, and whether the parties to it were States, in their sovereign capacity, or the people of the United States, as individuals. Any other result would be as incomprehensible as it would be mischievous. A public enemy cannot lawfully claim the right of entering Congress and voting down the measures taken to subdue him.

Why not? Because he is a public enemy; because, by becoming a public enemy, he has annulled and lost his rights in the government, and can never regain them excepting by our consent.

STATE RIGHTS TO BE REGAINED ONLY BY OUR CONSENT.

If the inhabitants of a large part of the Union have, by becoming public enemies, surrendered and annulled their former rights, the question arises, Can they recover them? Such rights cannot be regained by reason of their having ceased to fight. The character of a public enemy having once been stamped upon them by the laws of war, remains fixed until it shall have been, by our consent, removed. To stop fighting does not make them cease to be public enemies, because they may have laid down their arms for want of powder

not for want of will. Peace does not restore the noble Idead who have fallen a sacrifice to treason. Nor does it revive the rights once extinguished by civil, territorial war. The land of the Union belongs to the people of the United States, subject to the rights of individual ownership. Each person inhabiting those sections of the country declared by the President's Proclamation to be in rebellion, has the right to what belongs to a public enemy, and no more. He can have no right to take any part in our government. That right does not belong to an enemy of the country while he is waging war, or after he has been subdued. A public enemy has a right to participate in, or to assume the government of the United States, only when he has conquered the United States. We find in this well-settled doctrine of belligerent law the solution of all questions in relation to State rights. After the inhabitants of a district have become public enemies they have no rights, either State or National, as against the United States. They are belligerents only, and have left to them only belligerent rights.

STATE RIGHTS ARE NOT APPURTENANT TO LAND.

Suppose that all the inhabitants living in South Carolina should be swept off, so that solitude should reign throughout its borders, unbroken by any living thing; would the State rights of South Carolina still exist as attached to the land itself? Can there be a sovereignty without a people, or a State without inhabitants? State rights, so far as they concern the Union, are the rights of persons, as members of a State, in relation to the general government; and when the person has become a public enemy, then he loses all rights except the

rights of war. And when all the inhabitants have (by engaging in civil, territorial war) become public ene mies, it is the same, in legal effect, as though the inhab itants had been annihilated. So far as this government is concerned, civil, territorial war obliterates from districts in rebellion all lines of States or counties; the only lines recognized by war are the lines which separate us from a public enemy.

FORFEITURE NOT CLAIMED - THE RIGHT OF SECESSION NOT AD MITTED, SINCE CITIZENS MAY BE DEEMED BELLIGERENTS AND SUBJECTS.

I do not place reliance upon the common law doctrine of forfeitures of franchises as applicable to this revolution, for forfeiture can be founded only upon an admission of the validity of the act on which forfeiture is founded. Nor does the belligerent law of civil, territorial war, whereby a public enemy loses his rights as a citizen, admit the right of secession. It is not any vote or law of secession that makes an individual a public enemy. A person may commit heinous offences against municipal law, and commit acts of hostility against the government, without being a public enemy. To be a personal enemy, is not to be a public enemy to the country, in the eye of belligerent or international law. Whosoever engages in an insurrection is a personal enemy, but it is not until that insurrection has swelled into territorial war that he becomes a public enemy. It must also be remembered that the right of secession is not conceded by enforcement of belligerent law, since in civil war a nation has the right to treat its citizens either as subjects or belligerents, or as both. Hence, while belligerent law destroys all claims of

subjects engaged in civil war, as against the parent government, it does not release the subject from his duties to that government. By war, the subject loses his rights, but does not escape his obligations. The inhabitants of the conquered districts will thus lose their right to govern us, but will not escape their obligations to obey, us. Whatever rights are left to them besides the rights of war, will be such as we choose to allow them. It is for us to dictate to them, not for them to dictate to us, what privileges they shall enjoy.

THE PLEDGE OF THE COUNTRY TO ITS SOLDIERS, ITS CITIZENS, AND ITS SUBJECTS, MUST BE KEPT INVIOLATE.

Among the war measures sanctioned by the President, to which he has, more than once, pledged his sacred honor, and which Congress has enforced by solemn laws, is the liberation of slaves. The government has invited them to share the dangers, the honor, and the advantages of sustaining the Union, and has pledged itself to the world for their freedom. Whatever disasters may befall our arms, whatever humiliation may be in store for us, it is earnestly hoped that we may be saved the unfathomable infamy of breaking the nation's faith with Europe, and with colored citizens and slaves in the Union.

If the rebellious States shall attempt to return to the Union with constitutions guaranteeing the perpetuity of slavery, if the laws of these States shall be again revived and put in force against free blacks and slaves, we shall at once have reinstated in the Union, in all its force and wickedness, that very curse which has brought on the war and all its terrible train of sufferings. The war is fought by slaveholders for the per

petuity of slavery. Shall we hand over to them, at the end of the war, just what they have been fighting for? Shall all our blood and treasure be spilled uselessly upon the ground? Shall the country not protect itself against the evil which has caused all our woes? Will you breathe new life into the strangled serpent, when, without your aid, he will perish?

If you concede State rights to your enemies, what security can you have that traitors will not pass State laws which will render the position of the blacks intolerable, or reduce them all to slavery?

Would it be honorable on the part of the United States to free these men, and then hand them over to the tender mercy of slave laws?

Will it be possible that State slave laws should exist and be enforced by slave States without overriding the rights guaranteed by the United States law to men, irrespective of color, in the slave States?

Will you run the risk of these angry collisions of State and National laws while you have the remedy and antidote in your own hands?

PLAN OF RECONSTRUCTION RECOMMENDED.

One of two things should be done in order to keep faith with the country and save us from obvious peril. Allow the inhabitants of conquered territory to form themselves into States, only by adopting constitutions such as will forever remove all cause of collision with the United States, by excluding slavery therefrom, or continue military government over the conquered district, until there shall appear therein a sufficient number of loyal inhabitants to form a republican government,