During and after, the government treated the seceded states as elements in rebellion but not separated when it suited them and foreign states that had left the union when it suited them. The result was a legal nightmare that everyone later tacitly agreed not to pursue. To this day, questions like the OP’s have to be still guessed at because no court ever addressed them.
When Andrew Johnson allowed the south to pretty much ignore the past immediately after the war, the new Radical Republican majority after the 1866 election passed a series of Reconstruction Acts (for which the era is named) which put the recalcitrant states under military control and required ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment before they could be readmitted. Readmittion sounds to me as if Congress was treating the states as having left the union.
It’s unlikely that Lincoln would have allowed this language, but the post-war era was a different world. The Supreme Court was a useless appendage. Grant gave positions to three railroad lawyers and named Morrison Waite as Chief Justice after his first six choices either turned him down or withdraw before the Senate could vote against them.
With different mentalities controlling the government at different stages, no coherent legal structure ever developed. It simply was.
I think most, if not all, the posters in this thread will find the following disconcerting. While reading about the Confiscation Act of 1861, I ran across this quote: “These slaves, rather than being freed, became the property of the U.S. government.” (Freedom Under Fire, U.S. Civil Liberties in Times of War, Michael Linfield, 1990, p. 31.)
This is yet another example of how there is not always a bright line between the good guys and the bad guys in times of conflict.
That’s not clear to me. The reality is that not all representations made by law makers are in good faith. This is true today, was true 160 years ago, and was true before the founding.
I am less concerned by conclusory statements of law cunningly adopting the more prevalent language of their time as a step towards abolition than I am by our seeming unwillingness to maybe read between the lines and think at what is really meant, why certain language may have been adopted over some other, and the extent we should consider ourselves bound by the mere text.
Consider, for instance, how “the spirit of Appomattox” often gets invoked by lost cause propagandists to justify their position that we should all just let bygones be bygones and stop tearing down statues of white supremacists. That only makes sense if you ignore the context in which Lincoln and Grant first pushed a conciliatory stance. They did so out of necessity. However, we are no longer in such dire straits. We can re-evaluate the “conciliatory” approach and abandon it wholesale as appropriate.
Quite so, even if it pisses off white 21st Century liberals.
Right now (2022) the United States (and pretty much all of the rest of the world) considers house-pets to be personal property. Is that right? Wrong? Good? Evil?
Legally it doesn’t matter because they are indeed property, no two ways about it, even if the ignorant 21st Century speciesists are considered morally bankrupt in the 23rd Century when pets are citizens with rights equal to humans.