The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 19, July 1915 - April, 1916 Page: 17

Texas v. White

come foreign, and her citizens foreigners. The war must have
ceased to be a war for the suppression of the rebellion, and must
have become a war for conquest and subjugation."
Our conclusion, therefore, is, that Texas continued to be a
State in the Union, notwithstanding the transactions to which we
have referred.
Confronted with the alternative of declaring a particular po-
litical community a State or not a State,--an alternative created
by conditions arising from secession, the war, and the attempts to
restore or reconstruct the commonwealths which were formerly the
Southern States in the Union,--the court encountered the diffi-
culties of those who would reconcile the facts and results of revo-
lution with historic traditions, legal precedents, and political
theories which that revolution, in large measure, sought to de-
stroy. In the state which has no written constitution the problem
is not a particularly serious or difficult one, for the facts of revo-
lution can then be admitted without legal complications; but when
the public law of a country is embodied in the fixed and rigid forms
of a written constitution, the effort becomes involved in complica-
tions and, oftentimes, in contradictions. In the United States,
there has always been a very large element which has sought to pre-
serve the historic continuity of our constitutional law. Even during
the war and reconstruction periods, when radicalism was rampant,
a strong effort was made, especially in the Senate, to prevent a
hiatus in legal development. Loyalty to and respect for the Con-
stitution were often invoked in order to prevent too radical a de-
parture from earlier forms. And when the time came for the
establishment of the results of the war in the law of the land,
care was taken that there should be an uninterrupted progression
in the legal history of the nation. In laboring for the accom-
plishment of this purpose, the course of reasoning followed by the
conservatives was frequently tortuous and inconsistent. Notwith-
standing this fact, the duty and task of securing this end were
assumed by the Supreme Court of the United States, and the opin-
ion in the case of Texas v. White was written with this purpose
in view.
1"This would have been contrary to the resolutions of Congress, declaring
the nature of the war, Dunning, Essays, 13.