State remained unaffected by the deed. By this
course of reasoning, a State is defined an abstract essence which can
comfortably exist in all its rights and privileges, _in potentia_, apart
from all visible embodiment; a State which is the possibility of a State
and not the actuality of one; a State which can be brought into the line
of real vision only by some such contrivance as that employed by the
German playwright, who, in a drama on the subject of the Creation,
represented Adam crossing the stage _going_ to be created.

There is, it is true, one method of getting a kind of body to this
abstract State, but it is a method which may well frighten the hardiest
American reasoner. It was employed by Burke in one of the audacities of
his logic directed against the governments established after the French
Revolution of 1789. He took the ground, that France was not in the
French territory or in the French people, but in the persons who
represented its old polity, and who had escaped into England and
Germany. These constituted what he called "Moral France," in distinction
from "Geographical France"; and Moral France, he said, had emigrated.

But as few or none will be inclined to take the ground that South
Carolina and Georgia exist in the persons who left their soil on the
breaking out of the Rebellion, we are forced back to the conception of
an invisible spiritual soul and essence of a State, surviving its bodily
destruction. But even this abstraction must still, from the point of
view of the Federal constitution, be conceived of as owing allegiance to
the Federal government; and it can confessedly get a new body only by
the exercise of Federal authority. Its leading institution has been
destroyed by Federal power. Its old legislature and governor, who alone,
on State principles, could call a convention of the people, are spotted
all over with treason, and might be hanged as traitors, by the law of
the United States, while engaged in measures to repair the broken unity
of the State life,--a fact which is of itself sufficient to show that
the old State is dead beyond all bodily resurrection. The white
inhabitants who occupy its old geographical limits are defeated Rebels,
and not one can exercise the privilege of voting without taking an oath
which no real "State" prescribes. They are all born again into citizens
by a Federal fiat; they are "pardoned" into voters; they derive their
rights, not from their old charters, but