belligerent should have been seriously expected to have refrained from
aiming at it. January 1, 1863, after one hundred days' notice, President
Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the slaves within
the enemy's lines as rapidly as the Federal arms should advance. This
one break in the original policy involved, as possible consequences, all
the ultimate steps of reconstruction. Read-mission was no longer to be a
simple restoration; abolition of slavery was to be a condition-precedent
which the government could never abandon. If the President could impose
such a condition, who was to put bounds to the power of Congress to
impose limitations on its part? The President had practically declared,
contrary to the original policy, that the war should continue until
slavery was abolished; what was to hinder Congress from declaring that
the war should continue until, in its judgment, the last remnants of the
Confederate States were satisfactorily blotted out? This, in effect,
was the basis of reconstruction, as finally carried out. The steady
opposition of the Democrats only made the final terms the harder.

The principle urged consistently from the beginning of the war by
Thaddeus Stevens, of Pennsylvania, was that serious resistance to the
Constitution implied the suspension of the Constitution in the area
of resistance. No one, he insisted, could truthfully assert that the
Constitution of the United States was then in force in South Carolina;
why should Congress be bound by the Constitution in matters connected
with South Carolina? If the resistance should be successful, the
suspension of the Constitution would evidently be perpetual; Congress
alone could decide when the resistance had so far ceased that
the operations of the Constitution could be resumed. The terms of
readmission were thus to be laid down by Congress. To much the same
effect was the different theory of Charles Sumner, of Massachusetts.
While he held that the seceding States could not remove themselves from