6 JOURNAL OF PROCEEDINGS [Jan. 3,

citizens are entrusted to your keeping. They rely upon your
intelligence and patriotism and expect your deliberations and
acts to be characterized by harmony, firmness and prudence.

We have met at a time when difficulties are pressing
heavily upon our country—when the heart of every friend of
republican institutions, every lover of Constitutional liberty
is filled with anxious and perhaps sad forbodings. The
actual conflict of arms of our late terrible civil war has long
since ended. The vast armies with which that conflict was
waged on either side have long since been disbanded, and the
soldier has again become the citizen. From one end of the
Union to the other not a single armed hand is raised to resist
the rightful authority of the Federal Government. Every
one every where in every State acknowledges the Constitution
of the United States and the laws passed in pursuance thereof,
to be the Supreme law of the land. The Constitutional amend-
ment abolishing slavery has been adopted by the requisite
number of States, and is now part of that Constitution—part
of that Supreme law. Slavery has not only been abolished
by this amendment, but also by the separate action of the
several States in which it formerly existed, and nowhere, so
far as we know, is any purpose formed or any desire manifest-
ed to revive it. The ordinances of secession in each and all
of the Southern States have been revoked or declared void,
and State Governments in all respects Republican in form as
contemplated by the Constitution of the United States, with
Executive, Legislative and Judicial Departments are estab-
lished and are now exercising their respective, legislative,
executive and judicial functions in each and all of them.
They have assumed their proportionate share of the public
debt incurred by the war, are now paying its interest and
manifest no purpose of ever repudiating it. The Federal
courts have again been organized and established, and are now
exercising their appropriate functions without obstruction or
hindrance in each of the several Districts and Circuits com-
prised within their limits. The revenue and tax laws have
been extended over them, and the duties upon imports are
collected at the usual Custom Houses in their ports with as
much facility, and the income and other internal revenue taxes
are paid by their people with as much promptness as in any
other part of the Union. And finally their Legislatures have
chosen Senators, and their people elected Representatives to
the Congress of the United States. The great and avowed
object of the war, therefore, the maintenance of the supremacy
of the Constitution has been fully accomplished, and yet we
all know the Union has not been restored, nor, if we may
judge of the signs of the times, is it likely soon to be. We
all remember the plighted faith of the country, the solemn re-
solve and pledge of Congress in 1861, that "banishing all