al government. The first, as we have seen, is
the principle of so-called "squatter sovereignty," embodied in the
famous Kansas-Nebraska Bill, which gave birth, in opposition, to the
Republican party of 1856. The people are sovereign only as the State,
and the State is inseparable from the domain. The Unionists without
the State government, without any State organization, could not hold
the domain, which, when the State organization is gone, escheats to the
United States, that is to say, ceases to exist. The American democracy
is territorial, not personal.

The General government, in time of war or rebellion, is indeed
invested, for war purposes, with all the power of the Union. This is
the war power. But, though apparently unlimited, the war power is yet
restricted to war purposes, and expires by natural limitation when
peace returns; and peace returns, in a civil war, when the rebels have
thrown down their arms and submitted to the national authority, and
without any formal declaration. During the war, or while the rebellion
lasts, it can suspend the civil courts, the civil laws, the State
constitutions, any thing necessary to the success of the war--and of
the necessity the military authorities are the judges; but it cannot
abolish, abrogate, or reconstitute them. On the return of peace they
revive of themselves in all their vigor. The emancipation proclamation
of the President, if it emancipated the slaves in certain States and
parts of States, and if those whom it emancipated could not be
re-enslaved, did not anywhere abolish slavery, or change the laws
authorizing it; and if the Government should be sustained by Congress
or by the Supreme Court in counting the disorganized States as States
in the Union, the legal status of slavery throughout the Union, with
the exception of Maryland, and perhaps Missouri, is what it was before
the war.[1]

The Government undoubtedly supposed, in the reconstructions it
attempted, that it was acting under the war power; but as
reconstruction can never be necessary for war purposes, and as it is in
its very nature a work of peace, incapable of being effected by
military force, since its validity depends entirely on its being the
free action of the territorial people to be reconstructed, the General
government had and could have, with regard to it, only its ordinary
peace powers. Reconstruction is jure pacis, not jure belli.

Yet such illegal organizations, though they are n