New York, March 5, 1884.
I send you a copy of the amendments which I think, and many
of which I have long thought, ought to be engrafted on our Constitution. I have
endeavored to show the perfect propriety of making amendments, — the necessity
of doing so; that our Rebellion arose out of two elements, slavery and
State-rights doctrine, and that the points which we now must consider as
settled and past all discussion are: that the integrity of our country and our
nationality shall not be given up; that slavery must be extinguished. I have
tried to show that no one within the American polity is sovereign, and
that the word ought never to have slipped in, as Coke declared in the House of
Commons, when the Bill of Rights was discussing, — that the English law does
not know the word sovereign. I then showed that in a constitution we
cannot get at this sovereignty except through the subject of allegiance. You
will also find there the reason why I use the expression “plenary allegiance,”
which, accurately speaking, is a pleonasm, since all modern allegiance
is plenary, and double allegiance is nonsense. There you will also see why I
bring in the crime of sedition. . . .
SOURCE: Thomas Sergeant Perry, Editor, The Life and
Letters of Francis Lieber, p. 342
