In 1867, in the cases of Mississippi v. Johnson and Georgia v. Stanton, these two states asked the Supreme Court to enjoin the president and secretary of war, respectively, from enforcing the Reconstruction Act. The states contested the constitutionality of the Act. To ask the Court to enjoin something is to ask for an injunction.

Lincoln had gotten to appoint 5 justices to the Supreme Court between 1861 and 1864. The Republican-dominated Supreme Court evidently did not wish to give the Republican Congress a hard time. The response of the Court to these cases was to evade the issue all together, and say that it had "no power to enjoin an executive officer in the performance of his official duties." The request for injunction was denied.

In March 1868 Congress removed the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court over cases arising out of the Reconstruction Act.

However an obscure case arose in Texas in 1869 called Texas v. White that did not directly involve the Reconstruction Act itself. It gave the Court, by an indirect route, a chance to set the record straight about the constitutional issue of secession. President Johnson had approved a provisional government for Texas in 1865. It was a presidentially reconstructed government. This state government brought suit to recover state-owned securities that had been sold by the Confederate government of Texas during the Rebellion. The people who had bought the securities and did not want to return them argued that since Texas had seceded from the Union, and Congress had not yet restored Texas to the Union, there was as yet no government of Texas which could sue them. This raised the question of whether Texas was out of the Union and whether or not it had seceded.

Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, who had been named to that post by Lincoln, wrote the majority opinion. He declared that the Constitution had created an indestructible Union of indestructible states. He said that secession was illegal and therefore Texas had never left the Union. He agreed that participation in the rebellion had left the state without a lawful government and had temporarily suspended its rights as a member of the Union. He agreed that therefore Congress had a responsibility to restore lawful state government. He also said that Congress had recognized the government of Texas as provisional, and therefore it could sue to recover the securities sold by the Confederate government of Texas. Further, he said that since secession had been illegal, all acts of the Confederate Texas government were invalid and null and void and the provisional government was entitled to sue to recover the securities.

This decision endorsed Lincoln's position that the Union was perpetual and irrevocable, and that the Confederate states had never left the Union. Rather, there was civil unrest and armed insurrection, and the states had been without a lawful government, and the rights of the Confederate states had merely been suspended pending restoration by Congressional action. Legally, and constitutionally, this settled the question once and for all. In the opinion of a majority of the Court, there had been no secession because there can be no secession. There was a rebellion, but no valid secession. Secession is not permitted under the Constitution. The Union is perpetual and no state may secede--period. (see Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court, Texas v. White, p. 869, 1992 edition).