The relation
between the United States and the State is not the relation of
suzerain and liegeman or vassal. A State owes no allegiance, for
it is not subject to the Union; it is never in their State
capacity that its population and territory do or can rebel.
Hence, the Government has steadily denied that, in the late
rebellion, any State as such rebelled.
But as a State cannot rebel, no State can go out of the Union;
and therefore no State in the late rebellion has seceded, and the
States that passed secession ordinances are and all along have
been States in the Union. No State can rebel, but it does not
follow therefrom that no State can secede or cease to exist as a
State: it only follows that secession, in the sense of State
suicide, or the abdication by the State of its political rights
and powers, is not rebellion. Nor does it follow from the fact
that no State has rebelled, that no State has ceased to be a
State; or that the States that passed secession ordinances have
been all along States in the Union.
The secession ordinances were illegal, unconstitutional, not
within the competency of the State, and therefore null and void
from the beginning. Unconstitutional, illegal, and not within
the competency of the State, so far as intended to alienate any
portion of the national domain and population thereto annexed,
they certainly were, and so far were void and of no effect; but
so far as intended to take the State simply as a State out of the
Union, they were within the competency of the State, were not
illegal or unconstitutional, and therefore not null and void.
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