s of which it had repudiated. When confident
of success, the Southerner scornfully scouted the mere suspicion of
entertaining such a degrading notion; when assured of defeat, his only
thought was to "get his State back into the Union on the best terms that
could be made." The idea of "conditions of readmission" was as firmly
fixed in the Southern as in the Northern mind. If the politicians of the
South now adopt the principle that the Rebel States have not, as States,
ever altered their relations to the Union, they do it from policy,
finding that its adoption will give them "better terms" than they ever
dreamed of getting before the President of the United States taught them
that it would be more politic to bully than to plead.

In the last analysis, indeed, the theory of the minority of the
Reconstruction Committee reduces the Rebel States to mere abstractions.
It is plain that a State, in the concrete, is constituted by that
portion of the inhabitants who form its legal people; and that, in
passing back of its government and constitution, we reach a convention
of the legal people as its ultimate expression. By such conventions the
acts of secession were passed; and, as far as the people of the Rebel
States could do it, they destroyed their States considered as organized
communities forming a part of the United States. The claim of the United
States to authority over the territory and inhabitants was of course not
affected by these acts; but in what condition did they place the people?
Plainly in the condition of rebels, engaged in an attempt to overturn
the Constitution and government of the United States. As the whole force
of the people in each of the Rebel communities was engaged in this work,
the whole of the people were rebels and public enemies. Nothing was
left, in each case, but an abstract State, without any external body,
and as destitute of people having a right to enjoy the privileges of the
Constitution as if the territory had been swept clean of population by a
pestilence. It is, then, only this abstract State which has a right to
representation in Congress. But how can there be a right to
representation when there is nobody to be represented? All this may
appear puerile, but the puerility is in the premises as well as in the
logical deductions; and the premises are laid down as indisputable
constitutional principles by the eminent jurists who supply ideas for
the National Union Party.

The doctrine of