hield them from Federal regulation in defeat. We are
required to substitute technicalities for facts; to consider the
Rebellion--what it notoriously was not--a mere revolt of loose
aggregations of men owing allegiance to the United States; and to hold
the States, which endowed them with such a perfect organization and
poisonous vitality, as innocent of the crime. The verbal dilemma in
which this reasoning places us is this: that the Rebel States could not
do what they did, and therefore we cannot do what we must. Among other
things which it is said we cannot do, the prescribing of the
qualifications of voters in the States occupies the most important
place; and it is necessary to inquire whether the Rebel communities now
held by our military power are States, in the sense that word bears in
the Federal Constitution. If they are, we have not only no right to say
that negroes shall enjoy in them the privilege of voting, but no right
to prescribe any qualifications for white voters.

In the American system, the process by which constitutions are made and
governments instituted is by conventions of the people. The State
constitutions were ordained by conventions of the people of the several
States; the constitution of the United States was made the supreme law
of the land by conventions of the people of all the States; and the only
method by which a State could be released, with any show of legality,
from its obligations to the United States, would be the assent of the
same power which created the Federal constitution,--namely, conventions
of the people of _all_ the States. The course adopted by the so-called
"seceding" States was separate State action by popular conventions in
the States seceding. This was an appeal to the original authority from
which State governments and constitutions derived their powers, but a
violation of solemn faith towards the government and constitution
decreed by the people of all the States, and which, by the assent of
each State, formed a vital part of each State constitution. No State
convention could be called for the purpose of separating from the
Union,--of destroying what the officers calling it had sworn to
support,--without making official perjury the preliminary condition of
State sovereignty. Looked at from the point of view of the State
seceding, the act was an assertion of State independence; looked at from
the point of view of the constitution of the United States, it was an
act of