ccupied, were no more
"States," than if they had transferred their allegiance to a European
power, and the war had been prosecuted to wrest the territory they
occupied, and the people they ruled, from the clutch of England or
France. Even if we consider the Union a mere partnership of States, the
same principle will apply; for partnership implies mutual obligations,
and no partner can steal the property of his firm, and abscond with it,
and then, after he has been hunted down and arrested, claim the rights
in the business he enjoyed before he turned rogue.

But it is sometimes asserted that the small minority of citizens in the
Rebel States claiming to be, and to have been, loyal, constitute the
States in the constitutional meaning of the term. Now without insisting
on the fact that it is so plainly impossible to accurately distinguish
these from the disloyal, that an oath, not required by State
constitutions, has, in the recent attempt at reconstruction, been
imposed by Federal authority on all voters alike, it is plain that no
minority in a political society can claim exemption from political evils
it had not power to prevent. Had we gone to war with Great Britain, the
property of Cobden and Bright on the high seas would have been as liable
to capture as that of Lindsay or Laird. No loyal citizens at the South
could have been more bitterly opposed to Secession than some of our
Northern Copperheads were to the war for the Union; and yet the persons
of the Copperheads were as liable to conscription, and their property to
taxation, as those of the most enthusiastic Republicans. There would be
an end to political societies, if men should refuse to be held
responsible for all public acts except those they personally approved. A
member of a community whose people, in a convention, broke faith with
the United States, and made war against it, the Southern Unionist was
forced into complicity with the crime. By the pressure of a power he
could not resist he was compelled to pay Confederate taxes, serve in
Confederate armies, and become a portion of the Confederate strength.
More than this: the property in human beings, which he held by local
law, was confiscated by the Federal government's edict of emancipation,
equally with the same kind of property held by the most disloyal. And
now that the war is over, he and those who sympathized with him are not
the State, which was extinguished by its own act when it rebelled. He
and his