But as few or none will be inclined to take the ground that South Carolina and Georgia exist in the persons who left their soil on the breaking out of the Rebellion, we are forced back to the conception of an invisible spiritual soul and essence of a State, surviving its bodily destruction. But even this abstraction must still, from the point of view of the Federal constitution, be conceived of as owing allegiance to the Federal government; and it can confessedly get a new body only by the exercise of Federal authority. Its leading institution has been destroyed by Federal power. Its old legislature and governor, who alone, on State principles, could call a convention of the people, are spotted all over with treason, and might be hanged as traitors, by the law of the United States, while engaged in measures to repair the broken unity of the State life,--a fact which is of itself sufficient to show that the old State is dead beyond all bodily resurrection. The white inhabitants who occupy its old geographical limits are defeated Rebels, and not one can exercise the privilege of voting without taking an oath which no real "State" prescribes. They are all born again into citizens by a Federal fiat; they are "pardoned" into voters; they derive their rights, not from their old charters, but from an act of amnesty. Far from any discrimination being made between loyal and disloyal, the great body of both classes are compelled to submit to Federal terms of citizenship or be disfranchised; and they are called upon, not to revive the old State, but to make a new one, within the old State lines. And all this would result from the necessity of the case, even if it were not made justifiable by the essential sovereignty of the United States, of which the war-power is but an incident. But if the Federal government can thus give the white inhabitants, or any portion of them, the right of suffrage, cannot it confer that right upon the black freedmen? It will not do, at this stage, to say that the Federal government has no right to prescribe the qualifications of voters in the States: because, in the case of the whites, it does and must prescribe them; and President Johnson has just the same right to say that negroes shall vote as to say that pardoned Rebels shall vote. The right of States to decide on the qualifications of its electors applies only to loyal States; it cannot apply to political communities which have lost by Rebellion the Federal character of "States," which notoriously have no legitimate State authority to decide the question of qualification, and which are now taking the preparatory steps of forming themselves into States through the agency of provisional Federal governors, directing voters, constituted such by Federal authority, to elect delegates to a convention of the people. It is a misuse of constitutional language to Call North Carolina and Mississippi "States," in the same sense in which