The paper then related the history of the bill. Its treatment by the President, they declared, indicated a persistent though unavowed purpose to defeat the will of the people by the Executive perversion of the Constitution. They insinuated that only the lowest personal motives could have dictated this action. “The President,” they said, “by preventing this bill from becoming a law, holds the electoral votes of the rebel States at the dictation of his personal ambition.
“If those votes turn the balance in his favor, is it to be supposed that his competitor, defeated by such means, will acquiesce?
“If the rebel majority assert their supremacy in those States, and send votes which elect an enemy of the Government, will we not repel his claims?
“And is not that civil war for the Presidency inaugurated by the votes of the rebel States?
“Seriously impressed with these dangers, Congress, ‘the proper constitutional authority,’ formally declared that there are no State governments in the rebel States, and provided for their erection at a proper time; and both the Senate and the House of Representatives rejected the Senators and Representatives chosen under the authority of what the President calls the free constitution and government of Arkansas.
“The President’s proclamation ‘holds for naught’ this judgment, and discards the authority of the Supreme Court, and strides headlong toward the anarchy his proclamation of the 8th of December inaugurated.
“If electors for President be allowed to be chosen in either of those States, a sinister light will be cast on the motives which induced the President to ‘hold for naught’ the will of Congress rather than his government in Louisiana and Arkansas.
“The judgment of Congress which the President defies was the exercise of an authority exclusively vested in Congress by the Constitution, to determine what is the established government in a State, and in its own nature and by the highest judicial authority binding on all other departments of the Government.”
They ridiculed the President’s expressed hope that the constitutional amendment abolishing slavery might be adopted. “We curiously inquire,” continue Messrs. Wade and Davis, “on what his expectation rests, after the vote of the House of Representatives at the recent session, and in the face of the political complexion of more than enough of the States to prevent the possibility of its adoption within any reasonable time; and why he did not indulge his sincere hopes with so large an installment of the blessing as his approval of the bill would have secured?