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
untouched at his side.
A few days after the adjournment, having then decided not to sign the
bill, he issued a proclamation in which he said concerning it, that he
was "unprepared by a formal approval of [it] to be inflexibly committed
to any single plan of restoration;" that he was also "unprepared to
declare that the free-state constitutions and governments, already
adopted and installed in Arkansas and Louisiana, [should] be set aside
and held for naught, thereby repelling and discouraging the loyal
citizens, who have set up the same, as to further effort;" also that he
was unprepared to "declare a constitutional competency in Congress to
abolish slavery in the States." Yet he also said that he was fully
satisfied that the system proposed in the bill was "_one_ very proper
plan" for the loyal people of any State to adopt, and that he should be
ready to aid in such adoption upon any opportunity.
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