President Lincoln called Congress together in special session, July 4,
1861; and Congress at once undertook to limit the scope of the war
in regard to two most important points, slavery and State rights.
Resolutions passed both Houses, by overwhelming majorities, that slavery
in the seceding States was not to be interfered with, that the autonomy
of the States themselves was to be strictly maintained, and that, when
the Union was made secure, the war ought to cease. If the war had ended
in that month, these resolutions would have been of some value; every
month of the extension of the war made them of less value. They were
repeatedly offered afterward from the Democratic side, but were as
regularly laid on the table. Their theory, however, continued to control
the Democratic policy to the end of the war.

For a time the original policy was to all appearance unaltered. The war
was against individuals only; and peace was to be made with individuals
only, the States remaining untouched, but the Confederate States being
blotted out in the process. The only requisite to recognition of a
seceding State was to be the discovery of enough loyal or pardoned
citizens to set its machinery going again. Thus the delegates from the
forty western counties of Virginia were recognized as competent to
give the assent of Virginia to the erection of the new State of West
Virginia; and the Senators and Representatives of the new State actually
sat in judgment on the reconstruction of the parent State, although
the legality of the parent government was the evident measure of the
constitutional existence of the new State. Such inconsistencies were
the natural results of the changes forced upon the Federal policy by the
events of the war, as it grew wider and more desperate.

The first of these changes was the inevitable attack upon slavery.
The labor system of the seceding States was a mark so tempting that no