on of
issuing a proclamation, which he would have no right to hold back; but
in other respects its requirements were entirely fair and
unobjectionable, from any point of view, and it finally passed the House
by a vote of 74 to 59. The Senate amended it, but afterward receded from
the amendment, and thus the measure came before Mr. Lincoln on July 4,
1864. Congress was to adjourn at noon on that day, and he was at the
Capitol, signing bills, when this one was brought to him. He laid it
aside. Zachariah Chandler, senator from Michigan, a dictatorial
gentleman and somewhat of the busybody order, was watchfully standing
by, and upon observing this action, he asked Mr. Lincoln, with some show
of feeling, whether he was not going to sign that bill. Mr. Lincoln
replied that it was a "matter of too much importance to be swallowed in
that way." Mr. Chandler warned him that a veto would be very damaging at
the Northwest, and said: "The important point is that one prohibiting
slavery in the reconstructed States." "This is the point," said Mr.
Lincoln, "on which I doubt the authority of Congress to act." "It is no
more than you have done yourself," said the senator. "I conceive,"
replied Mr. Lincoln, "that I may in an emergency do things on military
grounds which cannot be done constitutionally by Congress." A few
moments later he remarked to the members of the cabinet: "I do not see
how any of us now can deny and contradict what we have always said: that
Congress has no constitutional power over slavery in the States.... This
bill and the position of these gentlemen seem to me, in asserting that
the insurrectionary States are no longer in the Union, to make the fatal
admission that States, whenever they please, may of their own motion
dissolve their connection with the Union. Now we cannot survive that
admission, I am convinced. If that be true, I am not President; these
gentlemen are not Congress. I have laboriously endeavored to avoid that
question ever since it first began to be mooted.... It was to obviate
this question that I earnestly favored the movement for an amendment to
the Constitution abolishing slavery.... I thought it much better, if it
were possible, to restore the Union without the necessity for a violent
quarrel among its friends as to whether certain States have been in or
out of the Union during the war,--a merely metaphysical question, and
one unnecessary to be forced into discussion."[58] So the bill remained