Were our national Government now as it was then--as the rebels maintain, and as their Northern friends would have us act as if we believed--the rebellion would indeed be a justifiable attempt to secure self-evident rights. But it is not so. Under the Constitution, an executive is appointed directly by the people, who is bound, by an oath too sacred for any but a traitor to violate, to protect, defend, and preserve the organic law which binds us as a nation forever, and to apply and execute the laws of Congress made in accordance therewith.
And to these laws, which, made by the representatives of the people, embody their sovereign authority, there is given the further sanction of judicial supervision. In the Confederation there was no general and permanent standard by which decisions could be made and preserved. Everything was made to depend on the irresponsible and often conflicting action of the States, or on the unauthoritative determination of the congressional commission. To remedy this defect, and make more complete the national character of our present Government, a judicial power of the United States was vested in the Supreme Court, and in such inferior courts as Congress may establish. This Supreme Court, with original jurisdiction in all cases affecting foreign nations, and in all cases in which a State shall be a party, and with appellate jurisdiction in other cases, is at once a final tribunal for inter-State disagreement, and a representative to the world of an united nation, having an individual existence, and capable of performing all the functions of an individual nation.
We have thus traced the main lines of difference between the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution, and have seen that the latter was meant to be, and is the organic law of a developed and completed nationality. Under it, every one of us becomes an American citizen, exercising, as is right, certain local privileges, and dependent for their immediate protection on the State authorities, but possessing other wider and nobler rights, which inhere in him as a citizen of the United States, and which are asserted and supported by the power and dignity of the entire nation. No words can more fully express the lofty majesty of that state of nationality on which we have entered, never, under God, to fall from it, than those of the Constitution itself, to support which every member of every government, the local as well as the national, is bound by solemn oath. 'This Constitution, and the laws of the United States made in pursuance thereof, and all treaties made under the authority of the United States, shall be the SUPREME LAW OF THE LAND, anything in the constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.'