9 authority of Congress, I am sure, has no more declared champion than yourself. But the adversaries of this authority take their stand on quite different grounds. The state rights, which have already furnished to the South a pretext for war, and a point of support for slavery, still furnish it an argument for setting aside the jurisdiction of Congress. It claims the right to return on the spot, without waiting for readmission, bv virtue of state rights ! We, who judge from a distance, who view things as a whole, and who are ignorant of your constitutional subtleties—we cannot even conceive the possibility of such a pretension ! The question seems to us too simple to leave room for debate. The states which claim the full right of returning by law have rent in a thousand pieces both their rights and the common Constitution. They have solemnly decided that they were no longer what they wish to be to-day—regular and official members of your federal representation. For four years, they have fired upon the flag of the Union. In the eyes of America, as in the eyes of foreign nations, they have ostentatiously repudiated all political association with you. This is what they have done ; and now that their plan has failed, now that it suits them to return to Congress, to return thither unconditionally, to return thither for the purpose of resuming the old quarrel as far as possible, and of saving by their votes what remains of slavery, they impudently declare that their right to do so has neter been forfeited, and that their ordinances of secession are as if they had never existed, since they have declared them null, and of no effect I Null ; that is a matter of course. Of no effect; that is quite a different thing. Whatever may be done, a fact has been consummated which was styled the Southern rebellion ; and on the day that this fact was consummated, the South ostentatiously renounced the rights which it suits it to reclaim to-day. Doubtless, its acts of secession were unable 2
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