e, and destitute of all moral authority; and that such
combination is a usurpation incapable of any constitutional
existence and utterly lawless, so that everything dependent upon it
is without constitutional or legal support.

3d. That the termination of a State under the Constitution
necessarily causes the termination of those peculiar local
institutions which, having no origin in the Constitution, or in
those natural rights which exist Independent of the Constitution,
are upheld by the sole and exclusive authority of the State.

... Congress will assume complete jurisdiction of such vacated
territory where such unconstitutional and illegal things have been
attempted, and will proceed to establish therein republican forms
of government under the Constitution.

It is not shown how a usurpation or illegal act by conspirators in any
State or States could justify or make legal a usurpation by the general
Government, as this scheme evidently was, nor by what authority Congress
could declare that the illegal, inoperative, and void acts of usurpers
who might have temporary possession of or be a majority in a State,
could constitute a practical abdication by the State itself of all
rights under the Constitution, regardless of the rights of a legal,
loyal minority, guilty of no usurpation or attempted secession--the
innocent victims of a conspiracy; nor where Congress or the Federal
Government obtained authority to pronounce "an instant _forfeiture_ of
all those functions and powers essential to the continued existence of a
State as a body politic, so that from that time forward the territory
falls under the exclusive jurisdiction of Congress as other territory,
and the State, being, according to the language of the law, _felo de
se_, ceases to exist."

The administration of Mr. Buchanan had laid down as a rule of
government that a State could not be coerced. The whole country not in
rebellion had declared there should be no secession, division, or
destruction of the Federal Union, but here was the most conspicuous
leader of the Republican party in the Senate proposing a scheme to
punish a State, to annihilate and destroy its government, to
territorialize it, to exclude or expel it from the Union, to make no
discrimination in its exclusions and denunciations between the loyal and
disloyal inhabitants, but to punish alike, without trial or conviction,
the just and