Regarding the attitude of the Supreme Court during this period, the important fact is to be noticed that, though it threw the weight of its influence upon the side of the States so far as concerned a liberal interpretation of the powers reserved to them by the Constitution, not once, in the slightest measure, did it during these years, any more than it had done in the years preceding, intimate that the actual legal and political supremacy was not vested in the National Government. The position of Taney and of the court upon this point was clearly shown in the judgment rendered and in the opinion delivered in the case of Ableman v. Booth,27 decided in 1859. The facts of this case were these: Booth had been tried in a lower federal court for a violation of the federal fugitive slave law of 1850, and had been found guilty and sentenced to imprisonment. The highest court of the State of Wisconsin, however, stepped in, disregarded this judgment and released the prisoner. Not only this but it went on to declare that its decision, thus rendered, was subject to no appeal and was conclusive upon all the courts of the United States; and when a writ of error from the United States Supreme Court directed to the Wisconsin court was issued, the clerk of the state court replied to it that he had been directed to make no return, and refused to make up and send a record of the case to the federal court. Thereupon the Attorney-General of the United States filed in the Supreme Court of the United States an uncertified record which it was ordered should be received as though returned by the clerk of the Wisconsin court. Having thus gotten the case before it, despite the resistance of the State, the decision of the Supreme Court thereupon was an emphatic condemnation of the State's action. "No State, judge or court," declared Taney who rendered the opinion of the court, "after they are judicially informed that the party is imprisoned under the authority of the United States, has any right to interfere with him, or require him to be brought before them. And if the authority of the State, in form of judicial process or otherwise, should attempt to control the marshal or other authorized officer or agent of the United States, in any respect, in the custody of his prisoner, it would be his duty to resist it, and to call to his aid any force that might be necessary to maintain the authority of law against illegal interference."

27 21 How. 506; 16 L. ed. 169.

-From the foregoing brief review it is thus seen that prior to the Civil War the supremacy of the federal law had been sustained under a wide variety of circumstances and that the resulting subordinate status of the States had been made fully evident That status the people of certain of the Southern States in 1861 decided no longer to support, and in defense of their views, declared their respective commonwealths independent of the Union, and in support of this independence resorted to the arbitrament of war. That this secession was an illegal act, and that, therefore the seceding States, from the constitutional viewpoint, never were out of the Union, has repeatedly been declared by the Supreme Court. In Texas v. White28 the Union was declared to be "an indestructible Union composed of indestructible States." The opinion continues: "When, therefore, Texas became one of the United States, she entered into an indissoluble relation. . . . The act which consummated her admission into the Union was something more than a compact; it was the incorporation of a new member into the political body. The union between Texas and the other States was as complete, as perpetual and as indissoluble as the union between the original States. There was no place for reconsideration, or revocation, except through revolution, or through the consent of the States. Considered, therefore, as transactions under the Constitution, the ordinance of secession, adopted by the convention and ratified by a majority of the citizens of Texas, and all the acts of her legislature intended to give effect to that ordinance, were absolutely null. They were utterly without operation in law. The obligations of the State, as a member of the Union, and of every citizen of the State, as a citizen of the United States, remained perfect and unimpaired. It certainly follows that the State did not cease to be a State, nor her citizens to be citizens of the Union."

28 7 Wall. 700; 19 L. ed. 227.

In Knox v. Lee29 the court said, speaking through the mouth of Justice Bradley: "The doctrine so long contended for, that the federal Union was a mere compact of States, and that the States, if they chose, might annul and disregard the acts of the national legislature, or might secede from the Union at their pleasure, and that the General Government had no power to coerce them into submission to the Constitution, should be regarded as definitely and forever overthrown. This has been finally affected by the national power, as it had often been before by overwhelming argument. . . . The United States is not only a government, but it is a National Government, and the only government in this country that has the character of nationality."