The Unconstitutionality of Congressional Action [pp. 292-300]

PARAMOUNT UNWRITTEN LAW.
tion of the United States, upon the people of every State, and
upon constitutional government throughout the world. For the
very moment the authority of the Constitution of the United
States was re-established in any State during the late war, the
State became restored to the Uniion by the effect of previous unrepealed resolutions of Congress, the war-making power, declaring the objects of the war. It was immediately entitled to
equal representation in the Senate, beyond question, as a matter of
known law; and probably also to representation in the House on
the basis of white population; as slavery, the reason which had
allowed in the I-House a representation of two-fifths of the colored race, had ceased to exist. But, in order to exclude the
Southern States from the unquestionable right to equal, irnmediate representation in the Senate, another palpable fraud upon the
Constitution had been committed by Congress, by resolutions
making the admission of members into either House depend upon
the joint action of both; while the Constitution expressly makes
each House the exclusive judge of the qualification and election of
its own members. The guilt of these acts, their palpable fraud,
their avowed violence against the whites, under the treasonable
pretense of giving political power to the blacks, will remain forever in human memory, long after these acts are expunged from
the statute books which they disgrace. These acts will be exhumed in future years by laborious students of human nature, as
monuments to prove the degradation into which man can plunge
in times of civil war; and how, in a free and civilized country,
men who are not monsters in private life, could, by the lash of
party discipline, and by the hope of party distinction and emolument, be driven on firom crime to crime, until their private judgmnent and their individual will were surrendered to the dictation
of a demoralized party, itself degenerated into a mob, and stimulating its debased congressional instruments to the perpetration
of new and ever exaggerated enormities, by demoniac yells of
rage and by frantic bursts of applause.
A party passing beyond its legitimate purposes, by proposing
measures or principles at variance with the infinite unwritten law,
may, indeed, become a mob. When such a party prevails in a
government, the whole government becomes a mob. Where
such a party prevails in any one branch of the government-as
in the present Congress-that branch, whether legislative, executive, or judicial, becomes a mob. But mobs, and whatever they
undertake: mob governments, mob laws, mob executive acts,
and mob judicial decisions, are all in direct conflict with the eternal and irresistible laws of life, and are necessarily short-lived.
Congress has done its best to immolate ten States to gratify its
cupidity, its lust of office. Decked with party spoils wrung from
its victims, it stands before the inquiring friends of those victims,
before the whole civilized world, and accounts for the possession
of those spoils, for its usurped authority, with the savage bars
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