Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 12.djvu/294

278 This surveillance was carried to the extent of arresting legislators in Maryland, suspending the writ of habeas corpus in counties and localities everywhere, and arresting and imprisoning thousands suspected of disloyalty to the United States government. Editors of newspapers were arrested for criticising the government, and martial law existed generally in the border States all being violations of the Constitution.

The proper legal course which should have been pursued by the United States, if the Union was "an indissoluble Union of indestructible States," as afterward stated by the Supreme court of the United States, and if the Constitution of the United States was to be the guide, was as follows: "With the cessation of hostilities against the power of the United States, nothing remained to be done but for the sovereigns, the people of each State, to assert their authority and restore order. If the principle of the sovereignty of the people, the corner-stone of our political institutions, had survived and was still in force, it was necessary only that the people of each State should reconsider and revoke their ordinances of secession and again recognize the Constitution of the United States as the supreme law of the land. This simple process would have placed the Union on its original basis, and would have restored what had ceased to exist the Union by consent. Unfortunately such was not the intention of the conqueror. Henceforth there was to be established a union by force." (Davis.)

These views were also entertained by Vice-President Alexander H. Stephens, and seemed to have been entertained by Generals Grant and Sherman in arranging with Generals Lee and Johnston for the surrender of the Southern armies. Certainly they were the true, legal, non-political views, unless, now that the war was over,