Alabama - July 13, 1868
Arkansas - June 22, 1868
Florida - June 25, 1868
Georgia - July 21, 1868 (Approved on 2nd attempt July 15, 1870)
Louisiana - July 9, 1868
Mississippi - February 23, 1870
North Carolina - July 4, 1868
South Carolina - July 9, 1868
Tennessee - July 24, 1866
Texas - March 30, 1870
Virginia January 26, 1870
My contention is that the rebel States never actually seceded. Re-admission being merely a fancy political term for when they became eligible for Federal Revenue funds-sharing.
A wonderful example of complete and total revisionist history.
Carry on, yank...
The Federal government couldn't make up its mind about the status of the defeated states. First, it treated them as states that never seceded and counted the "ratifications" of the thirteenth Amendment by these states or by the pseudo or puppet state legislatures that the Federal government recognized. This was Lincoln's position.
Then the Federal government treated the states as though they had seceded and were no longer in the Union. The states had to adopt constitutions approved by the Federal government (read Republican government) and ratify the proposed 14th Amendment, as yet unratified. Thaddeus Stevens remarks are representative of this second attitude toward the defeated states [Source: Thaddeus Stevens in the Congressional Globe, July 9, 1867, pg 545; my emphasis below].
Some twelve million of the inhabitants of the country claimed that they no longer belonged to this nation. They set up an independent government. They established all the machinery of government, both of a national government and of States under that national government. They raised large armies to defend their pretensions. We, at the period when we declared against them a blockade, admitted them to be, not an independent nation, but an independent belligerent, rising above the rank of insurrectionists, and entitled to all the privileges and subject to the liabilities of an independent belligerent. The nations of Europe so treated them. We so treated with them in our dealings with prisoners of war. In short, there could be no doubt of the fact.
We were, then, at war as two independent nations; ... For these conquered rebels to pretend that they had any rights under a Constitution which they had thus repudiated and attempted to destroy, and that the states which had been arrayed in hostility to the nation were still States within this Union, as asserted to-day by the gentleman from Wisconsin, [Mr. Eldridge,] seems to me a bold absurdity. Yet that was the doctrine of the President.
How is it that you list Virginia as having ratified the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution on February 9, 1865? The Confederate government and legislature in Richmond certainly never ratified such on that date. I looked in the Richmond Daily Dispatch newspaper and found the following in the February 11, 1865 edition:
That part of Virginia which is represented at Alexandria, by whatever name the Yankees call it, "ratified" the abolition amendment by its "Legislature" on Wednesday.
What good is such a ratification or the forced ratification of the 14th Amendment? Those are pretty poor legal underpinnings for such important amendments.
In addition to that, Thaddeus Stevens tried to force a state constitution on Alabama that the Alabama voters had rejected. This was objected to by Representative Beck of Kentucky [Congressional Globe, May 13, 1868; my bold below]:
Taxation without representation for the white man, and representation without taxation for the negro is now the rule in South Carolina.
Now as far as Alabama is concerned ... all the facts are known to this House. We all know that the constitution of Alabama was defeated, and defeated in the mode permitted by the laws passed by this Congress, and this House has so decided; yet we are called upon [by Stevens and the Radicals] to impose that constitution on the people of Alabama, a constitution which they themselves have rejected, which we have said they have rejected. The people of Alabama having rejected that constitution, it is now brought forward in an omnibus bill, along with constitutions of other States, and we are asked to declare that they have adopted that constitution.
Let me look hurriedly at the provisions respecting the other States. ... The fact appears in all the publications of the day, and is true beyond all peradventure, that hundreds or thousands of negroes who came to the polls to vote for the constitutions and the officers under them came from the plantations with halters in their hands, that they might lead home the mules they expected to receive; for forty acres of land and a mule were promised to every ignorant negro who would vote for the constitutions.
The parties have indeed switched philosophies.