as conquered provinces and settle them with new men, and drive the present rebels as exiles from this country; for I tell you they have the pluck and endurance for which I gave them credit a year and a half ago, in a speech which I made, but which was not relished on this side of the House, nor by the people in the free states. They have such determination, energy, and endurance, that nothing but actual extermination or exile or starvation will ever induce them to surrender to this Government. I do not now ask gentlemen to endorse my views, nor do I speak for anybody but myself; but in order that I may have some credit for sagacity, I ask that gentlemen will write this down in their memories. It will not be two years before they call it up, or before they will adopt my views, or adopt the other alternative of a disgraceful submission by this side of the country." These words had hardly dropped from Stevens' lips, when Owen Lovejoy rose to find fault with them because Stevens had found no warrant for them in the Constitution, but had founded his conceptions solely upon military necessity.

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My chief object," said he, "is to repudiate for myself and the Republican party, and the administration, the idea advanced by the gentleman from Pennsylvania, that if it should be necessary, as I believe with him it is, to annihilate these rebels, to extirpate them, and repeople those states with a loyal population, that that exile and that annihilation by military authority would be unconstitutional. Now I claim that this is precisely, if necessary, just what the Constitution imperatively requires of us; that it imposes it upon us as a sacred duty to destroy these rebels, and, to the extent that may be necessary, to exterminate them in

order to restore, as a matter of fact, what still exists as a matter of right, the constitutional authority of the government of the United States." 1

Stevens was too good a lawyer to place the vae victis policy on constitutional grounds: he placed it upon the only ground where it could rest, upon necessity, and he hesitated not to brush away the Constitution and all its belongings with an impatient hand; and this he did by denying that the Constitution embraced a state in arms against the government. "I hold and maintain," said he, "that with regard to all the southern states in rebellion, the Constitution has no binding influence and no application.” "Are not those seceded states," asked Dunlap, "still members of this Union, and under the laws of the government?" "In my opinion they are not," was the answer. "Then," continued Dunlap, "I would ask the further question, did the ordinances of secession take them out of the Union?" "The ordinances of secession, backed by the armed power which made them a belligerent nation, did take them, so far as present operations are concerned, from under the laws of the nation." "Are they, then, members of the Union?" persisted Dunlap. "They are not, in my judgment," was Stevens' answer.2

The vaunt of Stevens, that he was always just ahead of his party, and that, in due course of time, it was sure to catch up with him and even to run ahead, was not an idle one.3 How readily the constitutionists of 1 Cong. Globe, 243, 244.

2 Cong. Globe, 239.

8 "I believe that not only a majority, but perhaps a very considerable majority of my friends on this floor do not go to the extent to which I go in the doctrines which I have enunciated. They are com

one of the original abolitionists, and had been in sympathy with the group of New England abolitionists, whose agitation had stirred the land from the day of the Missouri Compromise. In one respect he had differed from them: he revered the Constitution, and held in sanctity the personal and political rights of the citizen. To him nothing was a gain which had been acquired at the cost of another's right, and even the triumph of the North, if achieved at the cost of personal liberty, was the worst of defeats. Accordingly, when Senator Trumbull offered a resolution1 directing the Secretary of State, Seward, to inform the Senate whether, in the loyal states of the Union, any persons had been arrested and imprisoned by the Secretary's orders, and under what law this was done, and Trumbull had been severely reproached for his act on the floor of the Senate by every Republican leader that could find breath to utter his astonishment, Hale had risen in his place, and had uttered these noble sentiments:

“Instead of feeling grief and mortification and regret at the introduction of this resolution, I thank my friend from Illinois for introducing it. I think it eminently proper, eminently appropriate; and I shall feel mortified if the day has come when any act of your Executive may not be inquired into by his sworn

ing along behind, and will be up shortly, but they are not up yet. Still I do not propose to take one step backward. I hold the doctrines which I have enunciated to be true, and I abide by them." Cong. Globe, 244.

1 December 1, 1861.

constitutional advisers, the Senate of the United States. If, in answering that resolution, if it passes, the Secretary of State or the President shall deem it proper to send it to us under the seal of executive secrecy, I shall find no fault with that; but the right, the power, the propriety, and the necessity of making this inquiry, to my mind, eminently exists. What is the purpose of this inquiry? Have not arrests been made in violation of the great principles of our Constitution? If they have, let us know it, and let us know the necessity which impelled them. If the fact be that such arrests have been made, and if the necessity exists upon which they were made, then I trust there is magnanimity, there is justice, there is patriotism, there is forbearance enough in this Senate and in this Congress, to throw the mantle over every act that has been prompted by a patriotic impulse to serve the nation and preserve its liberties. You may gain your victories on the sea, you may sweep the enemy from the broad ocean and from all its arms and from all its rivers, until you may hoist, as the Dutch admiral once hoisted at the head of his flag-staff, a broom, indicative that you have swept the ocean of your foes, and you may crush every rebel that is arrayed against you and utterly break their power; and when you have done all that, when you have established a military power such as the earth never saw, and a naval power such as England never aspired to be, and constitutional liberty shall be buried amid the ashes of that conflagration in which you have overcome and destroyed your foes; then, sir, you will have got a barren victory, and with all your glory you will have but achieved your everlasting shame."

and the Secretary, now exempt from interference, redoubled his efforts, and the arrests went on merrily for another year, when Senator Saulsbury, of Delaware, offered a similar resolution in which the inquiry was addressed to the Secretary of War, who had been emulating the example of the Secretary of State. Wilson, who was shocked at this arraignment of the administration of the government, thought that instead of the few hundred arrests which had been made, there ought to have been several thousands, and that not one man in ten who should have been arrested had been arrested. Fessenden and Collamer addressed themselves to the hopeless task of defending the lettres des cachet; one alone, who could not defend the government, found voice to condemn himself, and this was the way John P. Hale ate his brave words of one short year before :

"I have regretted the exercise of this power from first to last; but will say that, where the emergencies of the country are such, and the condition of things is such, as to justify a resort to extraordinary proceedings for the safety of the Government, I am willing that the Executive should act upon that old maxim, which, translated into plain English, is, 'The safety of the republic is the supreme law.' I confess, for myself, that nothing in the whole history of the war has so embarrassed me, has left me in such doubt what course to take and pursue, as questions of this character. I have as earnest a desire for the preservation of the Constitution in all its integrity as any