Congress, proceed to reconstruct, simply leaving it for
Congress to accept or reject the reconstructed State? If the power is
partly in the people of the disorganized States who or what defines
that people, decides who may or may not vote in the reorganization? On
all these questions there has been much crude, if not erroneous,
thinking, and much inconsistent and contradictory action.

The government started with the theory that no State had seceded or
could secede, and held that, throughout, the States in rebellion
continued to be States in the Union. That is, it held secession to be
a purely personal and not a territorial insurrection. Yet it
proclaimed eleven States to be in insurrection against the United
States, blockaded their ports, and interdicted all trade and
intercourse of any kind with them. The Supreme Court, in order to
sustain the blockade and interdict as legal, decided the war to be not
a war against simply individual or personal insurgents but "a
territorial civil war." This negatived the assumption that the States
that took up arms against the United States remained all the while
peaceable and loyal States, with all their political rights and powers
in the Union. The States in the Union are integral elements of the
political sovereignty, for the sovereignty of the American nation vests
in the States finite; and it is absurd to pretend that the eleven
States that made the rebellion and were carrying on a formidable war
against the United States, were in the Union, an integral element of
that sovereign authority which was carrying on a yet more formidable
war against them. Nevertheless, the government still held to its first
assumption, that the States in rebellion continued to be States in the
Union--loyal States, with all their rights and franchises unimpaired!

That the government should at first have favored or acquiesced in the
doctrine that no State had ceased to be a State in the Union, is not to
be wondered at. The extent and determination of the secession movement
were imperfectly understood, and the belief among the supporters of the
government, and, perhaps, of the government itself, was, that it was a
spasmodic movement for a temporary purpose, rather than a fixed
determination to found an independent separate nationality; that it was
and would be sustained by the real majority of the people of none of
the States, with perhaps the exception of South Carolina; that the true
policy of