A Just and Lasting Peace : Johnson's proclamation establishing government for North Carolina

May, 1865.

I suppose it can't get any clearer that in the eyes of the Unionists the legal justification for the Civil War lay in the constitution's Article IV, Section 4 guarantee to each state of a republican form of government.

[Update, 07052013.

Well, for reconstruction, anyway.]

That justification absurdly presupposes each of the secessionist states had been taken over by non-republican governments, from which the federal government was authorized and indeed bound to rescue them.

The rationale is absurd, but since they keep repeating it one has to suppose the Unionists had none better, apparently not wishing to admit they had made aggressive war on and conquered those states that had peaceably withdrawn from the Union, constitutionally or not, partly but never merely to force them back into the Union and partly, and even more fundamentally, to destroy slavery in those states and everywhere in what were and had been the United States of America.

This proclamation of Johnson's makes clear his willingness to restore political normality on relatively easy terms to any state repudiating slavery, the Confederate debt, and its own act of secession.

That gave rise to new state governments passing Black Codes, excluding the freedmen from the vote and many other aspects of legal equality.

Johnson allowing this so displeased the Radical Republicans in the congress that they eventually impeached him.

Almost convicted him, too.

Johnson's Amnesty Proclamation of the same date offered amnesty and a role in new state governments to southerners on the same lines as Lincoln had, though he excluded several additional groups of people.