A Just and Lasting Peace : The emancipation proclamations

Reading A Just and Lasting Peace,  A Documentary History of Reconstruction,  edited by John David Smith. Signet Classics, 2013.

If you read this, keep a copy of the US Constitution close by.

A truly fascinating collection of documents.

Article IV, Section 4 of the constitution says the federal government shall protect the states against domestic violence on application of the legislature or the executive.

Article I, Section 8, clause 15 says congress can provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections or repel invasions.

Was it the latter that Lincoln claimed gave the general government authority to fight a war to conquer the CSA and force those states back into the Union?

Clearly,  it was not likely the former.

As for the latter,  if this is authority at all to act without a state's request,  it is absurd to read it as allowing  or requiring use of force to prevent secession or bring states that leave the Union back in.

It is equally gratuitous to read it as implying either such permission or such a requirement.

It is one thing to use force to exact compliance from a state that's in the Union and quite another to use force to make it stay in the Union.

And yet another,  again,  to force a state that's out into the Union.

And that would be so even if the constitution expressly denied states the authority to leave the Union, which it does not.

Some have said it was the theory of the North that secession was not legally possible and so the southern states had not in fact left the Union.

But the legislation and other federal actions of the Reconstruction Era everywhere speak of their readmission to the Union,  imposing terms apparently as authorized by Article IV, Section 3.

And that supposes they did leave it.

Did the states of the South count in determining how many states were needed to ratify any or all of the Civil War Amendments?

That would make sense if they had not left the Union.

But how in that case could the government make ratification a condition of readmission?

And why in case they had left the Union?

Because in that case there were not enough states in the Union in favor to ratify?

Imagine an amendment just needing one more state for ratification,  but not likely to get it.

So congress makes admission to statehood for the next N states conditional on supporting ratification,  N large enough to carry the amendment to ratification.

Constitutional?

Yes, I think so.

Not everything deplorable is unconstitutional.

As for federal occupation and control of the southern states,  the constitution seems unhelpfully silent on the matter if they were foreign states defeated and occupied.

But if they never left the Union?

Nothing in the constitution, even now, permits such federal dictatorship on any pretext,  unless it be that same passage in I, 8, 15.

More invisible ink, I see.

Article I, Section 5 says in each house a majority of all members is a quorum.

What was a quorum during the war years?

As to the necessity for the 13th Amendment,  note that emancipating slaves is different from ending slavery.

In 1862, in apparent defiance of Dred Scott, congress abolished slavery in DC.

Lincoln's later Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves in some states but abolished slavery in none.

Nor did his Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction of December,  1863, either abolish slavery or require abolition, though it did require acceptance of previously proclaimed emancipations, subject to future revision by congress or the Supremes.