Now all this was easily answered from the point of view which Congress and the North had now firmly taken, viz.: that the eleven former "States" in which rebellion had for so long prevailed were not "States," although the territory formerly occupied by them, and the population formerly inhabiting them, were within the United States and were subject to the jurisdiction of the central Government; that the rebellion had demonstrated that the central Government must be intrusted with a large increase of powers in protecting civil equality and civil liberty; and that the sovereign Nation had willed this in the enactment and adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
Really there was but one thing in the bill susceptible of successful criticism, and that could be explained so as to avoid it. It was the
Criticism
of the bill.
The President most decidedly lost his chance of rehabilitating himself with his party, and leading it in the work of Reconstruction, by not
The
President's
blunder.
The veto
overridden.
While, as we have seen, the President did not exactly deny the constitutionality of the bill, the Democrats in Congress, and the
The Fourteenth
Amendment.