Also, Chase held that Texas had never left - if true then the acts of the state were legitimate and the decision re: the bonds wrong. Only by holding that Texas was not a state would his decision have merit. Justice Grier, who authored the Prize Cases dissented in TvW (5-3), holding that Texas was not a state in the union.
As another aside, I remember reading where someone asserted that President Davis did not want to be tried. He did, as documented by Rev. J. William Jones (author of Personal reminiscences, anecdotes, and letters of Gen. Robert E. Lee and other works):
'O that they had dared give me [Davis] the trial I so much coveted, and for which I so earnestly begged, in order that I might have opportunity to vindicate my people and their cause before the world and at the bar of history! They knew that I would have been triumphantly acquitted, and our people purged of all taint of treason, and they never dared to bring my case to trial."'
Chase told Stanton, 'If you bring these leaders to trial [Davis & Benjamin], it will condemn the North, for by the Constitution, secession is not rebellion', and that Davis capture was a mistake, and his 'trial will be a greater one. We cannot convict him of treason.'
You suggested a position on the meaning of the EP that a reading of any general history of the war would have told you was false.
Now, did you take that position in ignorance, or malevolence?
Walt