ransfer his obedience accordingly. If the sovereign withdraws
from association with its confederates in the Union, the allegiance of
the citizen requires him to follow the sovereign. Any other course is
rebellion or treason--words which, in the cant of the day, have been so
grossly misapplied and perverted as to be made worse than unmeaning. His
relation to the Union arose from the membership of the State of which he
was a citizen, and ceased whenever his State withdrew from it. He can
not owe obedience--much less allegiance--to an association from which
his sovereign has separated, and thereby withdrawn him.

Every officer of both Federal and State governments is required to take
an oath to support the Constitution, a compact the binding force of
which is based upon the sovereignty of the States--a sovereignty
necessarily carrying with it the principles just stated with regard to
allegiance. Every such officer is, therefore, virtually sworn to
maintain and support the sovereignty of all the States.

Military and naval officers take, in addition, an oath to obey the
lawful orders of their superiors. Such an oath has never been understood
to be eternal in its obligations. It is dissolved by the death,
dismissal, or resignation of the officer who takes it; and such
resignation is not a mere optional right, but becomes an imperative duty
when continuance in the service comes to be in conflict with the
ultimate allegiance due to the sovereignty of the State to which he
belongs.

A little consideration of these plain and irrefutable truths would show
how utterly unworthy and false are the vulgar taunts which attribute
"treason" to those who, in the late secession of the Southern States,
were loyal to the only sovereign entitled to their allegiance, and which
still more absurdly prate of the violation of oaths to support "_the
Government_," an oath which nobody ever could have been legally required
to take, and which must have been ignorantly confounded with the
prescribed oath to support the Constitution.

Nullification and secession are often erroneously treated as if they
were one and the same thing. It is true that both ideas spring from the
sovereign right of a State to interpose for the protection of its own
people, but they are altogether unlike as to both their extent and the
character of the means to be employed. The first was a temporary
expedient, intended to restrain action until the question at issue could
be