In Knox v. Lee (12 Wall., 557) 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 finally been effected 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.

In Keith v. Clark (97 U. S., 454), decided in 1878, the Supreme Court again emphatically asserted the legal conclusion that the seceding States had never been out of the Union. Referring to Tennessee, the Court declared: "This political body has not only been all this time a State and the same State, but it has always been one of the United States,—a State of the Union. Under the Constitution by virtue of which Tennessee was born into the family of States, she had no lawful power to depart from that Union. . . She never escaped the obligations of that Constitution, though for a while she may have evaded their enforcement.'

Before either of the cases of Texas v. White, and

Union. Whether rightfully out of it or not is a question not before the Court." With Justice Grier Justices Swayne and Miller concurred.

Keith v. Clark was decided, an attempt was made to have the reconstruction acts held unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, by asking for an injunction restraining the President from enforcing them. The federal court, however, decided that it could not grant a restraining order against the Chief Executive under the circumstances, the matters involved being political and not judicial in character (Mississippi v. Johnson, 4 Wall., 475).

CHAPTER V

THE SUPREMACY OF FEDERAL LAW

THE foregoing pages have sufficiently shown that the Federal Government has no power to coerce a State, as a State. They have also shown that the National State, because of its absolute sovereignty over all the land and people of the United States, and because of its paramountcy over all its political subdivisions, has full power to protect any right and to enforce any law of its own at any time, and at any place within its territorial limits, any resistance of private individuals, or state officials, acting with or without the authority of state law to the contrary notwithstanding. Having the authority, the United States has the right to declare illegal, to fix and enforce by its own tribunals a penalty upon any resistance opposed to its agents when acting within their official spheres, and, if necessary, to prevent by its own armed forces such interference when threatened or overcome it when actually attempted.

The possession by the National Government of this general right has been uniformly asserted by the Supreme Court, throughout the whole period of its existence, whenever such an assertion has been necessary. Thus in 1824, in the case of Osborn v. Bank of U. S. (9 Wh., 738)-a case to which we have already

referred in another connection-Chief Justice Marshall met the argument that the suit, being against one of its officials and based upon acts committed by him in his official capacity, was in fact a suit against the State of Ohio, one, therefore, which, under the Eleventh Amendment, the Court was without authority to try, by declaring: "A denial of jurisdiction forbids all inquiry into the nature of the case. It applies to cases perfectly clear in themselves; to cases where the [National] Government is in the exercise of its best established and most essential powers, as well as to those which may be deemed questionable. It asserts that the agents of a State, alleging the authority of a law, void in itself, because repugnant to the Constitution, may arrest the execution of any law in the United States. It maintains that if a State shall impose a fine or penalty on any person employed in the execution of any law of the United States, it may levy that fine or penalty by a ministerial officer, without the sanction even of its own courts; and that the individual, though he perceives the approaching danger, can obtain no protection from the judicial department of the [National] Government. . . . The question, then, is whether the Constitution of the United States has provided a tribunal which can peacefully and rightfully protect those who are employed in carrying into execution the laws of the Union from the attempts of a particular State to resist the execution of those laws.' That Marshall answered this question in the affirmative need not be said.

Again, after the Civil War, the Court said, when

confronted by the proposition that because the United States was without any general criminal law jurisdiction it might not punish criminally individuals who had violated certain of its laws relating to congressional elections: "It is argued that the preservation of peace and good order in society is not within the powers confided to the government of the United States, but belongs exclusively to the States. Here again we are met with the theory that the government of the United States does not rest upon the soil and territory of the country. We think that this theory is founded on an entire misconception of the nature and powers of that government. We hold it to be an incontrovertible principle that the government of the United States may, by means of physical force, exercised through its official agents, execute on every foot of American soil the powers and functions that belong to it. This necessarily involves the power to command obedience to its laws, and hence the power to keep the peace to that extent (Ex parte Siebold, 100 U. S., 371).

Finally in the Debs case (In re Debs, 158 U. S., 564), a case growing out of the great railway strike of 1894, the plenitude of the federal power was emphatically stated. Speaking of the right of the National Government to protect, by armed force if necessary, interstate commerce and the transportation of the mails, the Court said: "If all the inhabitants of a single State or even a great body of them should combine to obstruct interstate commerce or the transportation of the mails, prosecution of such offenses had in such a community would be doomed in advance to failure.