e flung the Great Seal into the Thames, and thought he
had stopped the machinery of the English government.

Mr. Buchanan, then President of the United States, admitted at once that
the Secessionists had done their work in such a way that, though they
had done wrong, the government was powerless to compel them to do right.
And here the matter should have rested, if the government established by
the Constitution was such a government as Mr. Johnson's supporters now
declare it to be. If it is impotent to prescribe terms of peace in
relation to insurgent States, it is certainly impotent to make war on
insurgent States. If insurgent States recover their former
constitutional rights in laying down their arms, then there was no
criminality in their taking them up; and if there was no criminality in
their taking them up, then the United States was criminal in the war by
which they were forced to lay them down. On this theory we have a
government incompetent to legislate for insurgent States, because
lacking their representatives, waging against them a cruel and unjust
war. And this is the real theory of the defeated Rebels and Copperheads
who formed the great mass of the delegates to the Johnson Convention.
Should they get into power, they would feel themselves logically
justified in annulling, not only all the acts of the "Rump Congress"
since they submitted, but all the acts of the Rump Congresses during the
time they had a Confederate Congress of their own. They may deny that
this is their intention; but what intention to forego the exercise of an
assumed right, held by those who are out of power, can be supposed
capable of limiting their action when they are in?

But if the United States is a government having legitimate rights of
sovereignty conferred upon it by the people of all the States, and if,
consequently, the attempted secession of the people of one or more
States only makes them criminals, without impairing the sovereignty of
the United States, then the government, with all its powers, remains
with the representatives of the loyal people. By the very nature of
government as government, the rights and privileges guaranteed to
citizens are guaranteed to loyal citizens; the rights and privileges
guaranteed to States are guaranteed to loyal States; and loyal citizens
and loyal States are not such as profess a willingness to be loyal after
having been utterly worsted in an enterprise of gigantic disloyalty. The
organ