By those who considered the union indissoluble, except by the common consent of the people of the several States, the organization known as the Confederate States could only be regarded as unlawful and rebellious, to be suppressed, if necessary, by force of arms.  The Constitution prohibits any treaty, alliance, or confederation by one State with another, and it declares on its face that it is the supreme law of the land.  The Confederate government, therefore, could only be treated by the United States as the military representative of the insurrection against their authority.  Belligerent rights were accorded to its armed forces in the conduct of the war, and they thus had the standing and rights of parties engaged in lawful warfare.  But no further recognition was ever given to it, and when those forces were overthrown its whole fabric disappeared.  But not so with the insurgent States which had composed the Confederacy.  They retained the same form of government and the same general system of laws, during and subsequent to the war, which they had possessed previously.  Their organizations as distinct political communities were not destroyed by the war, although their relations to the central authority were changed.  And their acts, so far as they did not impair or tend to impair the supremacy of the general government, or the rights of citizens of the loyal States, were valid and binding.  All the ordinary authority of government for the protection of rights of persons and property, the enforcement of contracts, the punishment of crime, and the due order of society, continued to be exercised by them as though no civil war had existed.

There was, therefore, a general expectation throughout the country, upon the cessation of actual hostilities, that these States would be restored to their former relations in the Union as soon as satisfactory evidence was furnished to the general government that resistance to its authority was overthrown and abandoned, and its laws were enforced and obeyed.  Some little time might elapse before this result would clearly appear.  It was not expected that they would be immediately restored upon the defeat of the armies of the Confederacy, nor that their public men, with the animosities of the struggle still alive, would at once be admitted into the councils of the nation, and allowed to participate in its government.  But whenever it was satisfactorily established that there would be no renewal of the struggle and that the laws of the United States would be obeyed, it was generally believed that the restoration of the States would be an accomplished fact.