If no State, by seceding, had got
itself out of the Union, there was difficulty in maintaining that those
citizens of a seceding State, who had not disqualified themselves by
acts of treason, were not still lawfully entitled to conduct the public
business and to hold the usual elections for national and state
officials, so soon as the removal of hostile force should render it
physically possible for them to do so. Upon the basis of this principle,
the resumption by such citizens of a right which had never been lost,
but only temporarily interfered with by lawless violence, could
reasonably be delayed by the national government only until the loyal
voters should be sufficient in number to relieve the elections from the
objection of being colorable and unreal. This philosophy of
"reconstruction" seemed to Mr. Lincoln to conform with law and good
sense, and he was forward in meeting, promoting, almost even in creating
opportunities to apply it. From the beginning of the war he had been of
opinion that the framework of a state government, though it might be
scarcely more than a skeleton, was worth preservation. It held at least
the seed of life. So after West Virginia was admitted into statehood,
the organization which had been previously established by the loyal
citizens of the original State was maintained in the rest of the State,
and Governor Pierpoint was recognized as the genuine governor of
Virginia, although few Virginians acknowledged allegiance to him, and
often there were not many square miles of the Old Dominion upon which
the dispossessed ruler could safely set his foot.
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