If one of the States (wrote Judge Black) should declare her independence, your action cannot depend upon the rightfulness of the cause upon which such declaration is based. Whether the retirement of a State from the Union be the exercise of a right reserved in the Constitution, or a revolutionary movement, it is certain that you have not in either case the authority to recognise her independence or to absolve her from her Federal obligations. Congress or the other States in Convention assembled must take such measures as may be necessary and proper. In such an event I can see no course for you but to go straight onward in the path which you have hitherto trodden—that is, execute the laws to the extent of the defensive means placed in your hands, and act generally upon the assumption that the present constitutional relations between the States and the Federal Government continue to exist until a new order of things shall be established either by law or by force. The seceding States attempted to establish “a new order of things by force,” and maintained that attempt for four years with such resolution, pertinacity, and courage as more than once brought them within what an eminent English statesman would perhaps call such a “measurable distance” of success as may well explain the conviction expressed in England at one period of the struggle, that Jefferson Davis had “established a nation.”