sult, in a general way, from the
humiliation of the conquered, and which would naturally tend to a revival
of the _casus belli_. Having returned to their homes, and been soothed
into accord with their new surroundings by those domestic Penates which
had escaped the dispensation of fire and sword, through which they had
mutually passed, "Lee's ragamuffins," as they had been styled by the
Jenkinses of the period, set resolutely to work to restore their fallen
fortunes, and, at the same time, so amend the shattered social fabric as
that their personal and property rights might have that organized
protection which cannot always be assured in times of civil disturbance.
That they had forfeited any of those rights common to citizens of the
republic under which they lived, by taking up arms in defence of a great
national doctrine which, they were firmly persuaded, embodied its genius,
if it did not represent its life, was a bombproof theory never seriously
proposed until the glory of Appomattox had passed into history. To be
denationalized, even in the sense which their severer critics ascribed as
one of the conditions of their voluntary withdrawal from the national
compact, carried with it discomforts of no mean significance; but to have
the ill effects of their so-called treason visited upon them in the
commonest concerns of social being, and to be denied a part in the
administration of those State governments for whose (supposed) integrity
they had imperilled their lives, was the harshest of all possible
reconstruction issues, and one which candid thinkers will regard a very
faint reflection of that peace policy which the measure purported to
represent.

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 theo