Benson J. Lossing, Pictorial Field Book of the Civil War. Volume 1.

“ [71] matter what may be the physical strength which the Government has at its command. Under such circumstances, to send a military force into any State, with orders to act against the people, would be simply making war upon them.”

The Attorney-General limited the exercise of the powers of the Executive, in the matter in question, to a simple protection of the public property. If he could not collect the revenue on account of insurrection, he had no warrant for the use of military force. Congress might vote him the power, yet he doubted the ability of that body to find constitutional permission to do so. It seemed to him, that an attempt to force the people of a State into submission to the laws of the Republic, and to desist from attempts to destroy it, would be making war upon them, by which they would be converted into alien enemies, and “would be compelled to act accordingly.” If Congress should sanction such an attempt to uphold the authority of the National Government, he wished to know whether all of the States would “not be absolved from their Federal obligations? Is any portion of the people,” he asked, “bound to contribute their money or their blood to carry on a contest like this?” The Attorney-General virtually counseled the President to suffer this glorious concrete Republic to become disintegrated by the fires of faction, or the blows of actual rebellion, rather than to use force, legitimately at his service, for the preservation of its integrity.

The vital weakness in the arguments of the conspirators, and of those who adopted their peculiar political views, appears at all times in the erroneous assumption, as premises, that States, as such, had seceded, and that the National Government, if it should take action against rebellious movements, must of necessity war against a “Sovereign State.” The undeniable fact opposed to this argument was, that no State, as such, had seceded, or could secede; that the secession of certain States had been declared only by certain politicians in those States, who were usurpers, as we shall observe hereafter, of the rights and sovereignty which belonged only to the people; that only certain persons in certain States were in rebellion, and that the Government could only act against those certain persons in certain States as individuals collectively rebellious, like a mob in a city. Therefore, there could be no such thing as the “coercion of a State.” That which the conspirators and the politicians so adroitly and effectively exhibited as “coercion” was an unsubstantial phantom, created by the subtle alchemy of sophistry, for an ignoble purpose — an invention of disloyal metaphysicians in the Slave-labor States, bearing, to undisciplined and unreasoning minds, the semblance of truth and reality. If we shall keep this fact in mind clearly, as we proceed in our consideration of the events of the civil war, we shall perceive the wisdom, righteousness, and dignity of the National Government, and the opposing qualities in its enemies, from the beginning to the end of the troubles.

The President followed the counsel of his legal adviser in the preparation of that part of his Message which related to anticipated insurrection. But before yielding wholly to that counsel, he said, in discussing the doctrine of the right of a State to secede :--“In order to justify secession as a constitutional remedy, it must be on the principle that the Federal Government is a mere voluntary association of States, to be dissolved at pleasure by any one ”