there remained the new task, longer and more
perplexing, if not more difficult, than the first, of restoring the
South to its normal position in the Union. It was, from the nature of
the case, a delicate one. The proud and sensitive South smarted under
defeat and was not yet cured of the illusions which had led her to
secede. Salve and not salt needed to be rubbed in to her wounds. The
North stood ready to forgive the past, but insisted, in the name of its
desolate homes and slaughtered President, that the South must be
restored on such conditions that the past could never be repeated. The
difficulty was heightened by the lack of either constitutional provision
or historical precedent. Not strange, therefore, that the actors in this
new drama of reconstruction played their parts awkwardly and with many
mistakes.

[Illustration: Handwriting.]
Facsimile of a portion of President Lincoln's draft of the
Preliminary Proclamation of Emancipation, September. 1862
From the original in the Library of the State of New York, Albany.

[1865]

A most interesting constitutional problem had to be faced at the outset:
What effect had secession had upon the States guilty of it; was it or
was it not an act of state suicide? This question was warmly debated in
Congress and out. Although ridiculed in some quarters as a mere
metaphysical quibble, it lay at the bottom of men's political thinking
on reconstruction, and their views of the proper answer to it powerfully
influenced their action.

All loyal Democrats and most Republicans answered it in the negative.
Secession, they said, being an invalid act, had no effect whatever; the
rebellious tracts were still States of the Union in spite of themselves.
But the two parties reasoned their way to this conclusion by different
roads. The Democrats deduced the view from the State's intrinsic
sovereignty, the Republicans from the national Constitution as ordaining
"an indestructible Union of indestructible States." This class of
thinkers, in whichever party they were found, naturally preferred the
term "restoration" to "reconstruction."

The theory of state suicide was held by many, but with a difference.
Sumner and a few others deemed that secession had destroyed statehood
alone; that over individuals the Constitution still extended its
authority and its protection, as in Territories. Thaddeus Stevens and
his followers viewed secession as having left the State not only defunct
but a was