A Just and Lasting Peace : Thaddeus Stevens, speech on Reconstruction

September 6, 1865, Lancaster, Pennsylvania

Editor Smith’s brief introduction is good.

Stevens in this speech eschewed the theory the states had never left the union and insisted that they had, though the departure was contrary to the constitution’s implicit perpetuity and involved plunder of Union property (forts and the like, located in the South).

The Union war against them was just and righteous while their war to defend their Confederate States of America was unrighteous and unjust, altogether.

Since the states involved actually had left the Union, all of their people had ceased to be US citizens and would remain non-citizens pending readmission of their states to the Union.

And those people were all traitors, too, according to Stevens, though that's an odd view for him, since there was no actual fighting until after secession, when they were no longer US citizens, in the case of each of these states and secession, itself, though in his opinion (baseless, I think, and also mistaken) unconstitutional, is not treason.

Stevens declaimed against the limits of US authority under the first clause of Article IV, Section 4, in the South if secession had not actually happened.

The text, again.

The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government[.]

[Aside:

As I have remarked before, the appeal to this text to justify the Civil War and the impositions of the Union upon the states of the defeated Confederacy is, to my mind, entirely bogus.

/Aside]

He insisted instead that, on the theory the states of the South had left the union they were not states any longer but conquered foreign territory.

He insisted that congressional authority to govern territories would then apply, and was much more sweeping than anything congress - much less the president - could do under IV, 4.

Article 4, Section 3, clause 2.

The Congress shall have Power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States[.]

[Aside:

18^th Century capitalization makes the question tricky, but some have argued that “the Territory” in this text refers only and strictly to the Northwest Territory and no other.

The Northwest Territory

That could be the correct understanding, in which case the constitution contains no text granting the congress power to make laws for US territories.

Other property, maybe?

/Aside]

He also held that, given the South was occupied enemy territory, the imaginary, natural, or in any case not positive laws of war concerning which he quotes European scholars – not the constitution, of which he quotes not one word – authorized confiscation of land to pay the Union costs of the war and to provide the freedmen with personal allotments (he was partial to the plot of 40 acres) carved out of plantation or other property, as well as a strong occupational regime and a much more demanding approach toward construction of new governments for these states.

The 13^th being not yet ratified and the 14^th and 15^th not passed by congress and perhaps not even drafted or seriously contemplated, he makes no reference to these amendments and discusses how far the Union can impose upon the states in the interests of the freedmen.

He wants the vote for them and all their posterity, forever, along with full civil rights and full citizenship rights, and is not in the least shy about saying so in this speech to constituents in Pennsylvania.

He is concerned that, under the constitution, control of all of these belongs to the states, they having the power to decide who has the franchise, what are the rights of citizenship in general (they do not include the franchise), and what rights or what citizenship status free blacks might have.

But despite Dred Scott - which Wikipedia says was never overturned, being rather mooted by the Civil War Amendments - he thinks congress can forbid slavery in territories and anyway he says the South is occupied enemy territory subject to whatever the North can do in that case, according to his European books on the laws of war.

He finds nothing helpfully relevant to read in the actual constitution, that document being totally mum on the question of occupation of a defeated enemy.

He deplores the president's adherence to Lincoln's theory that the states had never actually seceded and that the power of the Union to conquer and control them was granted, but also limited, by IV, 4 - though Johnson also now and again makes reference to Article II, Section 3 and Article I, Section 8, clause 15.

In both cases the assumption lurks that the states did not actually leave the Union.

II, 3

[The President]  . . . . shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed[.]

I, 8, 15

[Congress shall have power] to provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions[.]

Just one more thing.

Stevens points out that if the states of the confederacy never left the union then they number among the states three fourths of which must accept any amendment abolishing slavery, and he protests that coerced ratifications, or ratifications by governments imposed upon the states by no legitimate authority, will not stand or be accepted by future federal courts.

These warnings fell on deaf ears, but no future court seems to have worried about the legitimacy of either the amendments or the governments that ratified them.