e can get out of the
Union. If this was true, then all the States were still States, and it
was a reasonable presidential function to restore order and withdraw the
troops. The unreasonable result of this theory was the immediate
restoration of an enlarged influence to those very men who had tried to
break the Union, at a moment when the greenback movement threatened the
foundations of public faith. Yet Congress, by pretending to readmit or
restore States, denied that they were still States, and by implication
conceded the principle for which the Confederacy had contended: that the
members of the Union could get outside it. The power of Congress to seat
or unseat members, however, placed it beyond all control. Every effort
to get the courts to interfere broke down, when the suits were directed
against the President (Mississippi _vs._ Andrew Johnson), or the
Secretary of War (Georgia _vs._ Stanton). A personal suit that promised
some relief (_Ex parte_ McCardle) was evaded by a sudden amendment of
the law relating to appeals. The situation was unpremeditated, and the
Constitution made no provision for its facts. In the end, reconstruction
must be judged by its results rather than by its legality. If it brought
peace, restored prosperity, safeguarded the Union, and created no new
grievances of its own, it was good, whatever the Constitution.

Johnson enforced the Reconstruction Acts with care, and the Southern
conventions, meeting in the autumn of 1867, sat into the following
winter. In five of the States the roll of electors showed a majority of
negroes, and in none were conservatives able to control the election of
delegates. The old leaders were still disfranchised, and many of them
could not believe that the North would permit the radicals to subject
them to the control of illiterate negroes. The resulting conventions
contained many negroes and were dominated by white Republicans,
carpet-baggers, or scalawags as the case might be. An active part in
directing them was taken by the officers of the Freedmen's Bureau, while
the freedmen were consolidated by the secret ritual of the Union League.
Only Tennessee escaped the ordeal, she having ratified the Fourteenth
Amendment so promptly that Congress could not evade admitting her in
1866.

An analysis of the conventions of 1867 reveals the extent of the
political revolution which Congress intended to thrust upon the South,
whose industrial revolution was now well advanced