re such names as Judge Pettigrew and Governor
Aiken; and when in New York city alone there is to-day a large body of
Georgians, whose loyalty has made them exiles, and who only await the
day of their State's deliverance to return and restore their State's
loyalty; and when the signs in North Carolina are so positive that a
Union element yet survives there; and when even far-off Texas has her
loyal exiles in our midst. Considering those 'signs of the times,' the
assumption that there are loyal men in the rebellious States seems
certainly a valid and proper one, and one on which fairly to rest an
argument. But it is believed that the argument is good without this
assumption. Suppose that, the rebellion being overthrown, not even one
man remains loyal to the Nation within the territorial limits of any
single State, has the State ceased to exist? A State is called, in the
language of publicists, a body politic. It is, in effect, a sort of
corporation, administered for the benefit of its inhabitants by trustees
whom they appoint. One of the maxims of law is that a trust shall not
fail for lack of a person to execute it. It might, therefore, in such a
case as the one supposed, be competent for the United States to
designate persons who should take charge of the State Government, and
administer it in trust for the children of its former recreant
inhabitants, and as their legal and political successors. Reverting to
the settled principles of the law, we find that the essential idea of a
corporation is its immortality, or individuality, or the perpetual
succession of persons under it, notwithstanding the changes of the
individual persons who compose it. The State, like a corporation, has an
individuality of its own, which is not affected by the changes of the
individual persons composing it. It has an immortality, not affected by
their entire extinction. Its own organic existence is not thereby
extinguished. In other words, the State cannot be merged, or swallowed
up, in the Nation.

It seems, then, that the doctrine of State suicide, as propounded in so
many words, by its author, in the original resolutions offered in
Congress, is equally repugnant to the Constitution and good sense. It
is, in effect, revolutionary; for it would dismember the Union, by
striking out of existence States as purely and completely sovereign
within the sphere of their functions as the Nation itself. It is idle to
deny that it thus recognizes and give