"Every thing that was done by that wicked effort to overturn our Government was done under color of law. The rebels insisted that they had a right to secede; they passed ordinances of secession, they set up State governments, and all that they did was under color of law. And if parties committing these high crimes are to go free because they acted under color of law, why is not Jeff Davis and every other rebel chief discharged at once? Why did this country put forth all its resources of men and money to put down the rebellion against the authority of the Government except it had a right to do so, even as against those who were acting under color of law? Lee, with his rebel hordes, thundering upon the outskirts of this very city, was acting under color of law; every judge who has held a court in the Southern States for the last four years, and has tried and convicted of treason men guilty of no other offense than loyalty to the Union, acted under color of law. "Sir, if we had authority by the use of the army and the war power to put down rebels acting under color of law, I put the question to every lawyer, if we had not authority to do that through the courts and the judicial tribunals if it had been practicable? Suppose it had been practicable, through the marshals, to arrest the Legislature which convened at Montgomery, and undertook to take the State of Alabama out of the Union and set up a government in hostility thereto, ought it not to have been done? Was not that a conspiracy against this Government? When the Legislature assembled at Montgomery in 1861, and resolved that the connection between Alabama and the United States was dissolved, and when its members took steps to maintain that declaration; when the same thing was done in South Carolina, and courts were organized to carry out the scheme, will any body tell me it would not have been competent, had it been practicable, for the United States courts in those States to have issued process for the arrest of every one of those legislators, governors, judges, and all. And, sir, had this been done, and it had turned out upon trial that any of the parties arrested had been engaged in armed hostility against the United States, as some of them had been when, with arms in their hands, they seized the arsenals and other public property of the United States, would they not have been found guilty of treason and hung for treason? and would the fact that they had acted under color of law have afforded them any protection?" The President, in his Veto Message, had said, "I do not apprehend that the conflicting legislation which the bill seems to contemplate is so likely to occur as to render it necessary, at this time, to adopt a measure of such doubtful constitutionality."