State suicide. The State so acting through a convention of its
people was no longer a State, in the meaning that word bears in the
Federal constitution; for, whatever it may have been before it was one
of the United States, it was transformed into a different political
society by making the Federal constitution a part of its own organic
law. In cutting that bond, it bled to death as a State, as far as the
Federal constitution knows a State, to rise again as a Rebel community,
holding a portion of the Federal territory by force of arms. A State, in
the meaning of the Federal constitution, is a political community
forbidden to exercise sovereign powers, and at once a part of the
Federal government and owing allegiance to it. Is South Carolina, which
has exercised sovereign powers, which has broken its allegiance to the
Federal government, and which at present is certainly not a part of it,
such a political society?

It is, we know, contended by some reasoners on the subject, that the
Rebel States _could not_ do what they palpably _did_. This course of
argument is sustained only by confounding duties with powers. By the
constitution a State cannot (that is, has no right to) secede, only as,
by the moral law, a man cannot (that is, has no right to) commit murder;
nevertheless, States have broken away from their obligations to the
Union, as murderers have broken away from their obligations to the moral
law. It is folly to claim that criminal acts are impossible because they
are unjustifiable. The real question relates to the condition in which
the criminal acts of the Rebel States left them as political societies.
They cannot claim, as some of their Northern champions do for them, that
being _in_ the Union in our view, and _out_ of it in their own, the only
result of defeating them as Rebels is to restore them as citizens. This
would be playing a political game of "Heads I win, tails you lose,"
which they must know can hardly succeed with a nation which has made
such enormous sacrifices of treasure and blood in putting them down.
After having, by a solemn act of their own, through conventions of the
people, forsworn their duties to the constitution, they by that act
forfeited its privileges. In our view they became Rebel enemies, against
whom we had both the rights of sovereignty and the rights of war; in
their own view, they became foreigners; and from that moment they had no
more "constitutional" control of the area they o