Having at an early period accepted the Constitution in regard to the Executive office in the sense in which it was interpreted with the concurrence of its founders, I have found no sufficient grounds in the arguments now opposed to that construction or in any assumed necessity of the times for changing those opinions.  For these reasons I return the bill to the Senate, in which House it originated, for the further consideration of Congress which the Constitution prescribes.  Insomuch as the several parts of the bill which I have not considered are matters chiefly of detail and are based altogether upon the theory of the Constitution from which I am obliged to dissent, I have not thought it necessary to examine them with a view to make them an occasion of distinct and special objections.

Experience, I think, has shown that it is the easiest, as it is also the most attractive, of studies to frame constitutions for the self-government of free states and nations.  But I think experience has equally shown that it is the most difficult of all political labors to preserve and maintain such free constitutions of self-government when once happily established.  I know no other way in which they can be preserved and maintained except by a constant adherence to them through the various vicissitudes of national existence, with such adaptations as may become necessary, always to be effected, however, through the agencies and in the forms prescribed in the original constitutions themselves.

Whenever administration fails or seems to fail in securing any of the great ends for which republican government is established, the proper course seems to be to renew the original spirit and forms of the Constitution itself.

ANDREW JOHNSON.

WASHINGTON, March 2, 1867.

To the House of Representatives: 

I have examined the bill “to provide for the more efficient government of the rebel States” with the care and anxiety which its transcendent importance is calculated to awaken.  I am unable to give it my assent, for reasons so grave that I hope a statement of them may have some influence on the minds of the patriotic and enlightened men with whom the decision must ultimately rest.

The bill places all the people of the ten States therein named under the absolute domination of military rulers; and the preamble undertakes to give the reason upon which the measure is based and the ground upon which it is justified.  It declares that there exists in those States no legal governments and no adequate protection for life or property, and asserts the necessity of enforcing peace and good order within their limits.  Is this true as matter of fact?

It is not denied that the States in question have each of them an actual government, with all the powers—­executive, judicial, and legislative—­which properly belong to a free state.  They are organized like the other States of the Union, and, like them, they make, administer, and execute the laws which concern their domestic affairs.  An existing de facto government, exercising such functions as these, is itself the law of the state upon all matters within its jurisdiction.  To pronounce the supreme law-making power of an established state illegal is to say that law itself is unlawful.