A candid examination of the power and proper principles of reconstruction can be offensive to no one, and may possibly be profitable by exciting inquiry.  One of the suggestions of the message which we are now considering has special reference to this.  Perhaps it is the principle most interesting to the people at this time.  The President assumes, what no one doubts, that the late rebel States have lost their constitutional relations to the Union, and are incapable of representation in Congress, except by permission of the Government.  It matters but little, with this admission, whether you call them States out of the Union, and now conquered territories, or assert that because the Constitution forbids them to do what they did do, that they are therefore only dead as to all national and political action, and will remain so until the Government shall breathe into them the breath of life anew and permit them to occupy their former position.  In other words, that they are not out of the Union, but are only dead carcasses lying within the Union.  In either case, it is very plain that it requires the action of Congress to enable them to form a State government and send representatives to Congress.  Nobody, I believe, pretends that with their old constitutions and frames of government they can be permitted to claim their old rights under the Constitution.  They have torn their constitutional States into atoms, and built on their foundations fabrics of a totally different character.  Dead men cannot raise themselves.  Dead States cannot restore their own existence “as it was.”  Whose especial duty is it to do it?  In whom does the Constitution place the power?  Not in the judicial branch of Government, for it only adjudicates and does not prescribe laws.  Not in the Executive, for he only executes and cannot make laws.  Not in the Commander-in-Chief of the armies, for he can only hold them under military rule until the sovereign legislative power of the conqueror shall give them law.

There is fortunately no difficulty in solving the question.  There are two provisions in the Constitution, under one of which the case must fall.  The fourth article says: 

“New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union.”

In my judgment this is the controlling provision in this case.  Unless the law of nations is a dead letter, the late war between two acknowledged belligerents severed their original compacts, and broke all the ties that bound them together.  The future condition of the conquered power depends on the will of the conqueror.  They must come in as new States or remain as conquered provinces.  Congress—­the Senate and House of Representatives, with the concurrence of the President—­is the only power that can act in the matter.  But suppose, as some dreaming theorists imagine, that these States have never been out of the Union, but have only destroyed their State governments so as to be incapable of political action; then the fourth section of the fourth article applies, which says: