Feeling constrained to withhold my consent, I herewith return the resolution to the Senate, in which House it originated, with a brief statement of the reasons which have induced my action.  This joint resolution is based upon the assumption that some of the States whose inhabitants were lately in rebellion are not now entitled to representation in Congress and participation in the election of President and Vice-President of the United States.

Having heretofore had occasion to give in detail my reasons for dissenting from this view, it is not necessary at this time to repeat them.  It is sufficient to state that I continue strong in my conviction that the acts of secession, by which a number of the States sought to dissolve their connection with the other States and to subvert the Union, being unauthorized by the Constitution and in direct violation thereof, were from the beginning absolutely null and void.  It follows necessarily that when the rebellion terminated the several States which had attempted to secede continued to be States in the Union, and all that was required to enable them to resume their relations to the Union was that they should adopt the measures necessary to their practical restoration as States.  Such measures were adopted, and the legitimate result was that those States, having conformed to all the requirements of the Constitution, resumed their former relations, and became entitled to the exercise of all the rights guaranteed to them by its provisions.

The joint resolution under consideration, however, seems to assume that by the insurrectionary acts of their respective inhabitants those States forfeited their rights as such, and can never again exercise them except upon readmission into the Union on the terms prescribed by Congress.  If this position be correct, it follows that they were taken out of the Union by virtue of their acts of secession, and hence that the war waged upon them was illegal and unconstitutional.  We would thus be placed in this inconsistent attitude, that while the war was commenced and carried on upon the distinct ground that the Southern States, being component parts of the Union, were in rebellion against the lawful authority of the United States, upon its termination we resort to a policy of reconstruction which assumes that it was not in fact a rebellion, but that the war was waged for the conquest of territories assumed to be outside of the constitutional Union.

The mode and manner of receiving and counting the electoral votes for President and Vice-President of the United States are in plain and simple terms prescribed by the Constitution.  That instrument imperatively requires that “the President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates, and the votes shall then be counted.”  Congress has, therefore, no power, under the Constitution, to receive the electoral votes or reject them.  The whole power is exhausted