are to be honored for their
loyalty and patriotism, and not branded as rebels and punished as
traitors.

This is the secession argument, which rests on no assumption of
revolutionary principles or abstract rights of man, and on no
allegation of real or imaginary wrongs received from the Union, but
simply on the original and inherent rights of the several States as
independent sovereign States. The argument is conclusive, and the
defence complete, if the Union is only a firm or copartnership, and the
sovereignty vests in the States severally. The refutation of the
secessionists is in the facts adduced that disprove the theory of State
sovereignty, and prove that the sovereignty vests not in the States
severally, but in the States united, or that the Union is sovereign,
and not the States individually. The Union is not a firm, a
copartnership, nor an artificial or conventional union, but a real,
living, constitutional union, founded in the original and indissoluble
unity of the American people, as one sovereign people. There is,
indeed, no such people, if we abstract the States, but there are no
States if we abstract this sovereign people or the Union. There is no
Union without the States, and there are no States without the Union.
The people are born States, and the States are born United States. The
Union and the States are simultaneous, born together, and enter alike
into the original and essential constitution of the American state.
This the facts and reasonings adduced fully establish.

But this one sovereign people that exists only as organized into
States, does not necessarily include the whole population or territory
included within the jurisdiction of the United States. It is restricted
to the people and territory or domain organized into States in the
Union, as in ancient Rome the ruling people were restricted to the
tenants of the sacred territory, which had been surveyed, and its
boundaries marked by the god Terminus, and which by no means included
all the territory held by the city, and of which she was both the
private proprietor and the public sovereign. The city had vast
possessions acquired by confiscation, by purchase, by treaty, or by
conquest, and in reference to which her celebrated agrarian laws were
enacted, and which have their counterpart in our homestead and kindred
laws. In this class of territory, of which the city was the private
owner, was the territory of all the Roman provinces, whi