Belief 7 - Reading 6 of 13, The Reconstruction Convention

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Belief 7 - Reading 6 of 13

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STATES AND STATE RIGHTS

Harper's Weekly, July 15, 1865, page 434 (Editorial)

The question of State rights is very unimportant compared with the question of national security. The people of the United States have exactly the same right to determine upon what conditions the rebel States shall be reorganized that they had to prevent the secession of those States from the Union. It is simple folly to speak of any part of the country or any body of citizens who are lying under the disabilities consequent upon rebellion having any right whatever to any share in the government of the country except upon the conditions which, in the opinion of the country, guarantee its safety.

In the dispassionate and patriotic, but, as it seems to us, illogical reasoning of many of our friends upon reorganization, they say that the duty of the Government under existing circumstances is, first, to adopt sure measures to secure the obedience of all citizens to the national Constitution, and, second, to preserve inviolate the rights guaranteed to the States by the national Constitution. But how if the measures which the country deems essential to the national security should require a violation of such rights? Is the nation to go constitutionally to destruction? Are the national rights of existence, or the State rights of internal regulation, to yield? Or, with the experience of the last four years, are we to assume that there can be no real collision between differing views of the limitations of State rights?

According to the view we are considering the State may have such a Constitution as it chooses, subject only to the condition that it be republican in form. If then, in the absolute sense claimed, a State always exists, this Constitution is the fundamental law, and an election held under it is valid. In that case Mr. Clark and not Judge Sharkey is the Governor of the State of Mississippi. By what constitutional authority, then, according to this reasoning, is Judge Sharkey sent to Mississippi as Governor? Mr. Clark was elected by the voters under the State Constitution, which, by long sufferance, the United States had allowed to be republican. Mr. Clark is not impeached; he is not convicted of crime; but he is summarily set aside by the national authority. Grant that he is accused of high treason. Has a warrant been issued? And if he has been lawfully arrested to answer the charge, does not the government of the State devolve upon the Lieutenant-Governor? If that officer be similarly charged and arrested the constitutional provision must be made for the exigency. But all the late voters of the State are held to be incompetent. By what authority? The United States. Then the State has gone into abeyance or paralysis. Who decides that? The people of the State, the voters, the Constitution? No; it is decided in despite of them all by the United States. By what right? Solely that of superior force. On what ground? The national safety.

Now does any sober man seriously contend that the people of the United States, in their government, are constitutionally required to relinquish the exercise of that superior force except upon such conditions as seem to it necessary to secure the public safety? If they may require that the State Constitution shall be revised, may they not require that certain regulations shall be inserted in it? If they have authority to interfere in any degree with the local government of a State upon the ground of the public safety, have they not authority to interfere just so far as they think essential to secure the object of the interference? Granting that a State always exists, and that its political powers merely go into abeyance by rebellion—an expression evidently invented to conceal a want of precise perception—can those powers come out of abeyance except upon terms satisfactory to the authority that holds them there? If they can, upon what authority do they come? And if there be such an authority, is it not palpably superior to that which holds the powers in abeyance? If it be desperately urged that the Constitution of the United States is the authority, that is merely to say that the Constitution requires that the State political powers, which have been in abeyance because they endangered the nation, shall, when the nation is victorious, come out of abeyance, whether they endanger the nation or not—which is sheer nonsense.

In truth, freed from all these misty theories, which Mr. Lincoln so truly called "pernicious abstractions," one point is perfectly clear. The people of the United States, who have won a victory at countless cost of lives and money over the assumptions of State sovereignty, will not relinquish the fruits of that victory to any claim of State rights. The people of the States which have been in rebellion will not be allowed to exercise political power as States until they make their Constitutions conform to the general conviction of the requirements of the public safety. If the States are in abeyance they will not be in operation until the United States are satisfied that their operation is safe. This is common sense. This is the necessity of the case. This is the true doctrine of the Constitution as the people of the United States have just interpreted it by war.

Harper's Weekly, July 15, 1865, page 434 (Editorial)

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