eguards had been adopted and applied during the civil wars and
during our Revolution, instead of after the one and at the close of the
other? I too am devotedly for them after civil war, and before Civil war,
and at all times, "except when, in cases of rebellion or invasion, the
public safety may require" their suspension. The resolutions proceed to
tell us that these safeguards "have stood the test of seventy-six years
of trial under our republican system, under circumstances which show that,
while they constitute the foundation of all free government, they are the
elements of the enduring stability of the republic." No one denies that
they have so stood the test up to the beginning of the present rebellion,
if we except a certain occurrence at New Orleans hereafter to be
mentioned; nor does any one question that they will stand the same test
much longer after the rebellion closes. But these provisions of the
Constitution have no application to the case we have in hand, because
the arrests complained of were not made for treason--that is, not for the
treason defined in the Constitution, and upon the conviction of which the
punishment is death--nor yet were they made to hold persons to answer
for any capital or otherwise infamous crimes; nor were the proceedings
following, in any constitutional or legal sense, "criminal prosecutions."
The arrests were made on totally different grounds, and the proceedings
following accorded with the grounds of the arrests. Let us consider the
real case with which we are dealing, and apply to it the parts of the
Constitution plainly made for such cases.

Prior to my installation here it had been inculcated that any State had
a lawful right to secede from the national Union, and that it would be
expedient to exercise the right whenever the devotees of the doctrine
should fail to elect a president to their own liking. I was elected
contrary to their liking; and accordingly, so far as it was legally
possible, they had taken seven States out of the Union, had seized many
of the United States forts, and had fired upon the United States flag, all
before I was inaugurated, and, of course, before I had done any official
act whatever. The rebellion thus begun soon ran into the present civil
war; and, in certain respects, it began on very unequal terms between the
parties. The insurgents had been preparing for it more than thirty years,
while the government had taken no steps to resist them. The for