Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/590

 5 So /. A. Woodburn the laws of war and nations alone. If the rebel states were still in the Union and under the Constitution, as some contended, he saw no reason why they should not elect the next President of the United States. If the rebels declined to vote, then one hundred loyal men who, as his legal opponents contended, still continued to be " the state," might meet and choose electors. The few loyal men around Fortress Monroe or Norfolk, or Alexandria, and a few cleansed patches in Louisiana, being one thousandth part of the state, might choose electors for the whole state. It was such reasoning that seemed like a mockery of constitutional law and political science to Stevens. As to the minority who were loyal to the Union within a seceded state, he would regard them as citizens of that state and subject to its conditions. They must migrate or bear the burdens and penalties of their domicile, although in dealing with persons he would dis- tinguish between the innocent and the guilty. The states were at war with the nation. The idea that a few loyal citizens are the state and may override and govern the disloyal millions, he was unable to comprehend. " If ten men fit to save Sodom can elect a governor and other state officers against more than a million Sodom- ites in Virginia, then the democratic doctrine that the majority shall rule is discarded and ignored." The position of Stevens was vigorously assailed by Mr. Francis P. Blair, of Missouri, in a notable speech in the House, February 5, 1864. Blair held that Stevens's policy of confiscation could only be effected by the extermination of our whole kindred race in the South. The world would expect them to shed the last drop of blood rather than to submit to such spoliation, with no alternative but to die as paupers. Europe would be justified in intervening to put down such an innovation on the code of humanity and to arrest barbarities in defiance of the law of nations. It was frenzied altruism tending to promote " amalgamation of repugnant races in the name and by the charm of equality." Blair held that the Southern states were indestructible ; that their status was like that of Missouri, whose state organization had remained loyal to the Union. All that was needed was to drive out the rebel power that was holding the state government in duress. Our army and navy were crushing the life out of the usurpation, vetoing what Blair called the " assumption of Stevens that the state governments in the rebel states are as perfect now as before the rebellion, and being subsisting states, capable of corporate action, they have as states changed their allegiance from the United States to the Confederate States." In this undeniable fact, as Stevens had