Hence, as the United States survive the particular State, the
lapse of the State does not abrogate the State laws, or dissolve
civil society within its jurisdiction.
This is evidently so, because civil society in the particular
State does not rest on the State alone, nor on Congress, but on
the United States. Hence all civil rights of every sort created
by the individual State are really held from the United States,
and therefore it was that the people of non-slaveholding States
were, as citizens of the United States, responsible for the
existence of slavery in the States that seceded. There is a
solidarity of States in the Union as there is of individuals in
each of the States. The political error of the Abolitionists was
not in calling upon the people of the United States to abolish
slavery, but in calling upon them to abolish it through the
General government, which had no jurisdiction in the case; or in
their sole capacity as men, on purely humanitarian grounds, which
were the abrogation of all government and civil society itself,
instead of calling upon them to do it as the United States in
convention assembled, or by an amendment to the constitution of
the United States in the way ordained by that constitution
itself. This understood, the constitution and laws of a defunct
State remain in force by virtue of the will of the United States,
till the State is raised from the dead, restored to life and
activity, and repeals or alters them, or till they are repealed
or altered by the United States or the national convention.
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