government required. Officers were regularly chosen, and
were required to take an oath of allegiance to the Confeder-
ate government. It was subsequently held by the High
Court of Errors and Appeals that the provision in the Con-
stitution of the United States requiring members of the
state legislature to take an oath to support the national
Constitution was merely directory, and the failure to take
such an oath did not invalidate their legislation. ¹ The state
legislature met regularly during the war, and enacted laws
which every inhabitant was bound to obey. Transactions
involving millions of dollars were made in accordance with
formalities prescribed by the state government; contracts
were entered into; marriage relations were formed and
children born; estates of decedents were administered;
conveyances of property were made; courts were held,
judgments rendered, and decrees executed in accordance
therewith; vested rights were acquired, and business relations
formed. If the government under which these transactions
occurred was insurrectionary in its character, what, there-
fore, was their legal status upon the suppression of the
insurrection? Clearly no sound principle of state policy, to
say nothing of reason, could be subserved by holding that
no government existed in the state from 1861 to 1865; that
the inhabitants were reduced to a state of anarchy; that all
executory contracts were voidable at the pleasure of either
party, and that all executed contracts were void; that all
rights acquired were unlawful; and that all relations formed
must, as far as possible, be undone. To hold that all the
acts of the government during this period were illegal would
have led to consequences productive of incalculable mischief. ²
These acts fall naturally into two classes: First, those the
primary purpose of which was to maintain peace and order,
and regulate the private relations of the inhabitants. This
class of acts sustained no direct relation to the prosecution
of the war, but were measures which, in all probability, would
have been enacted had there been no war. The second class
includes those done in "aid of the rebellion." The Supreme
Court, after the war, uniformly held the acts of the first

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