mit
Louisiana to the Union, for the General Government was sole judge
as to time and expediency--but when once admitted, the power of
the State was greater than the power of the Government which
permitted the State to come into existence. Such were the
contradictions and absurdities which the creed of the Secessionists
inevitably involved, and in which so clever a man as Mr. Benjamin
was compelled to blunder and flounder.

Pursuing his argument, Mr. Benjamin wished to know whether those
who asserted that Louisiana had been bought by the United States
meant that the United States had the right based on that fact to
sell Louisiana? He denied in every form that there had ever been
such a purchase of Louisiana as carried with it the right of sale.
"I deny," said he, "the fact on which the argument is founded. I
deny that the Province of Louisiana or the people of Louisiana were
ever conveyed to the United States for a price as property that
could be bought or sold at will." However learned Mr. Benjamin
may have been in the law, he was evidently ill informed as to the
history of the transaction of which he spoke so confidently. He
should have known that the United States, sixteen years after it
bought Louisiana from France, actually sold or exchanged a large
part of that province to the King of Spain as part of the consideration
in the purchase of the Floridas. He should have known that at the
time the Government of the United States disposed of a part of
Louisiana, there was not an intelligent man in the world who did
not recognize its right and power to dispose of the whole. The
theory that the United States acquired a less degree of sovereignty
over Louisiana than was held by France when she transferred it, or
by Spain when she owned it, was never dreamed of when the negotiation
was made. It was an afterthought on the part of the hard-pressed
defenders of the right of secession. It was the ingenious but lame
device of an able lawyer who undertook to defend what was
indefensible.

Mr. Yulee of Florida had endeavored to make the same argument on
behalf of his State, feeling the embarrassment as did Mr. Benjamin,
and relying, as Mr. Benjamin did, upon the clause in the treaty
with Spain entitling Florida to admission to the Union. Mr. Benjamin
and Mr. Yulee should both have known that the guaranty which they
quoted was nothing more and nothing less than the ordinary condition
which every enlightened nation make