THIS was a motion made by Messrs. Sharkey and R. J. Walker, on behalf of the State of Mississippi, for leave to file a bill in the name of the State praying this court perpetually to enjoin and restrain Andrew Johnson, a citizen of the State of Tennessee and President of the United States, and his officers and agents appointed for that purpose, and especially E. O. C. Ord, assigned as military commander of the district where the State of Mississippi is, from executing or in any manner carrying out two acts of Congress named in the bill, one 'An act for the more efficient government of the rebel States,' passed March 2d, 1867, notwithstanding the President's veto of it as unconstitutional, and the other an act supplementary to it, passed in the same way March 23d, 1867; acts commonly called the Reconstruction Acts.
The former of these acts, reciting that no legal State governments or adequate protection for life or property now exists in the rebel States of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Florida, Texas, and Arkansas, and that it was necessary that peace and good order should be enforced in them until loyal and republican State governments could be legally established, divided the States named into five military districts, and made it the duty of the President to assign to each one an officer of the army, and to detail a sufficient military force to enable him to perform his duties and enforce his authority within his district. It made it the duty of this officer to protect all persons in their rights, to suppress insurrection, disorder, violence, and to punish, or cause to be punished, all disturbers of the public peace and criminals, either through the local civil tribunals or through military commissions, which the act authorized. It provided, further, that on the formation of new constitutions and certain conditions which the act prescribed, the States respectively should be declared entitled to representation in Congress and the preceding part of the act become inoperative; and that until they were so admitted any civil governments which might exist in them should be deemed provisional only, and subject to the paramount authority of the United States, at any time to abolish, modify, control, or supersede it.
The second of the two acts related chiefly to the registration of voters who were to form the new constitutions of the States in question.
The bill set out the political history of Mississippi so far as related to its having become one of the United States; and 'that forever after it was impossible for her people, or for the State in its corporate capacity, to dissolve that connection with the other States, and that any attempt to do so by secession or otherwise was a nullity;' and she 'now solemnly asserted that her connection with the Federal government was not in anywise thereby destroyed or impaired;' and she averred and charged 'that the Congress of the United States cannot constitutionally expel her from the Union, and that any attempt which practically does so is a nullity.'
The bill then went on: