Having determined to supersede the military policy enforced against the Southern States by the Union generals, with such felicitous results, the National Legislature, which, immediately upon the close of the war, had developed those diagnostics which caused fair-minded men of the period to look upon it as a distempered and revolutionary body (and achieved for it the title of the "Rump Congress"), resolved to replace it by another, altogether dissimilar in type, and contrasting strangely with it even in reference to the objects supposed to be had in view. The people of the South, contending for the doctrine of State sovereignty, and pledging their fortunes and their lives in defence of a supposed inalienable right, and the masses of the North as strenuously opposing this theory, and asserting that no emergency could arise whereby a member of the Union might reclaim its sovereignty from the national compact, presented an issue altogether susceptible of settlement. And, indeed, proceeding upon the obvious plan that where questions of great practical moment cannot be adjudicated otherwise, they must submit to the _a fortiori_ of determined majorities, the Southern people had already been driven to the amplest concessions regarding this measure; and whatever doubts they may have retained affecting the metaphysics of the discussion, were quite convinced that no other plan of adjustment would prove feasible.
But this inference (and it could be presented in no more tangible shape at the time) was far from satisfying that singular body of peace commissioners who, in the capacity of a national legislature, had assembled at Washington, not only to reaffirm the Southern doctrine, but to reconsider all the mighty results of Grant's and Sherman's campaigns, by disallowing the claims of the States lately in rebellion, and forcing them into that mourning period of so-called reconstruction and social and political anarchy, lately terminated. And thus, during the few years succeeding this new legislative departure, was presented the singular spectacle of States belonging to the National Union, who, by certain inherent properties of their being, could not forfeit, nor submit to forfeiture of the bond which established their identity therewith, acting independently of the national government in all things, save those non-essentials represented by taxation, the performance of military duty, etc.; and, at a later period, through the mysterious processes of pardons, congressional amnesties, and reconstruction, becoming (re)-invested with the only sovereignty which it was claimed they had ever possessed, that derived from the national compact.