President Lincoln called Congress together in special session, July 4, 1861; and Congress at once undertook to limit the scope of the war in regard to two most important points, slavery and State rights.  Resolutions passed both Houses, by overwhelming majorities, that slavery in the seceding States was not to be interfered with, that the autonomy of the States themselves was to be strictly maintained, and that, when the Union was made secure, the war ought to cease.  If the war had ended in that month, these resolutions would have been of some value; every month of the extension of the war made them of less value.  They were repeatedly offered afterward from the Democratic side, but were as regularly laid on the table.  Their theory, however, continued to control the Democratic policy to the end of the war.

For a time the original policy was to all appearance unaltered.  The war was against individuals only; and peace was to be made with individuals only, the States remaining untouched, but the Confederate States being blotted out in the process.  The only requisite to recognition of a seceding State was to be the discovery of enough loyal or pardoned citizens to set its machinery going again.  Thus the delegates from the forty western counties of Virginia were recognized as competent to give the assent of Virginia to the erection of the new State of West Virginia; and the Senators and Representatives of the new State actually sat in judgment on the reconstruction of the parent State, although the legality of the parent government was the evident measure of the constitutional existence of the new State.  Such inconsistencies were the natural results of the changes forced upon the Federal policy by the events of the war, as it grew wider and more desperate.

The first of these changes was the inevitable attack upon slavery.  The labor system of the seceding States was a mark so tempting that no belligerent should have been seriously expected to have refrained from aiming at it.  January 1, 1863, after one hundred days’ notice, President Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the slaves within the enemy’s lines as rapidly as the Federal arms should advance.  This one break in the original policy involved, as possible consequences, all the ultimate steps of reconstruction.  Read-mission was no longer to be a simple restoration; abolition of slavery was to be a condition-precedent which the government could never abandon.  If the President could impose such a condition, who was to put bounds to the power of Congress to impose limitations on its part?  The President had practically declared, contrary to the original policy, that the war should continue until slavery was abolished; what was to hinder Congress from declaring that the war should continue until, in its judgment, the last remnants of the Confederate States were satisfactorily blotted out?  This, in effect, was the basis of reconstruction, as finally carried out.  The steady opposition of the Democrats only made the final terms the harder.