No constitutional theory ever met all the problems of reconstruction. The war had been fought on the basis that no State can get out of the Union. If this was true, then all the States were still States, and it was a reasonable presidential function to restore order and withdraw the troops. The unreasonable result of this theory was the immediate restoration of an enlarged influence to those very men who had tried to break the Union, at a moment when the greenback movement threatened the foundations of public faith. Yet Congress, by pretending to readmit or restore States, denied that they were still States, and by implication conceded the principle for which the Confederacy had contended: that the members of the Union could get outside it. The power of Congress to seat or unseat members, however, placed it beyond all control. Every effort to get the courts to interfere broke down, when the suits were directed against the President (Mississippi _vs._ Andrew Johnson), or the Secretary of War (Georgia _vs._ Stanton). A personal suit that promised some relief (_Ex parte_ McCardle) was evaded by a sudden amendment of the law relating to appeals. The situation was unpremeditated, and the Constitution made no provision for its facts. In the end, reconstruction must be judged by its results rather than by its legality. If it brought peace, restored prosperity, safeguarded the Union, and created no new grievances of its own, it was good, whatever the Constitution. Johnson enforced the Reconstruction Acts with care, and the Southern conventions, meeting in the autumn of 1867, sat into the following winter. In five of the States the roll of electors showed a majority of negroes, and in none were conservatives able to control the election of delegates. The old leaders were still disfranchised, and many of them could not believe that the North would permit the radicals to subject them to the control of illiterate negroes. The resulting conventions contained many negroes and were dominated by white Republicans, carpet-baggers, or scalawags as the case might be. An active part in directing them was taken by the officers of the Freedmen's Bureau, while the freedmen were consolidated by the secret ritual of the Union League. Only Tennessee escaped the ordeal, she having ratified the Fourteenth Amendment so promptly that Congress could not evade admitting her in 1866.