d electors of President and
Vice-President.

This bill was passed on the last day of the session, July 4, 1864. It
was commonly regarded as a rebuke to the course of the President in
proceeding with the grave and momentous task of reconstruction without
waiting the action or invoking the counsel of Congress. Some of the
more radical members of both Houses considered the action of the
President as beyond his constitutional power, and they were very
positive and peremptory in condemning it. But Mr. Lincoln, with his
habitual caution and wise foresight, had specially avoided any form of
guaranty, or even suggestion to the States whose reconstruction he was
countenancing and aiding, that their senators and representatives would
be admitted to seats in Congress. Admission to membership he took care
to advise them was a discretion lodged solely in the respective Houses.
What he had done was in his own judgment clearly within his power as
Commander-in-Chief of the Armies of the Union, and was thus obviously
and solely an Executive act.

Mr. Lincoln was not therefore in the humor to be rebuked by Congress.
Though the least pretentious of men, he had an abounding self-respect
and a full appreciation of the dignity and power of his office. He had
given careful study to the duties, the responsibilities, and the
limitations of the respective departments of the Government, and he was
not willing that his judgment should be revised or his course censured,
however indirectly, by a co-ordinate branch of the Government. He
therefore declined to sign the bill. He did not veto it but let it
quietly die. Four days after the session had closed, he issued a
proclamation in which he treated the bill merely as the expression of
an opinion by Congress as to the plan of Reconstruction--"which plan,"
he remarked, "it is thought fit to lay before the people for their
consideration."

The President further stated in his proclamation that he had "already
propounded one plan of restoration," and that he was "unprepared by a
formal approval of this bill to be inflexibly committed to any single
plan of restoration," and also "unprepared to declare that the Free-State
constitutions and governments already adopted and installed in
Louisiana and Arkansas shall be set aside and held for naught, thereby
repelling and discouraging the loyal citizens who have set up the same
as to further effort;" and also "unprepared to declare a constitutional
c