elect a convention for the purpose of reestablishing a state government.  The new organization must disfranchise prominent civil and military officers of the Confederacy, establish the permanent abolition of slavery, and prohibit the payment by the new State of any indebtedness incurred for Confederate purposes.  After Congress should have expressed its assent to the work of the convention, the President was to recognize by proclamation the reorganized State.  This bill, of course, gave to the legislative department the whole valuable control in the matter of recognition, leaving to the President nothing more than the mere empty function of issuing a proclamation, which he would have no right to hold back; but in other respects its requirements were entirely fair and unobjectionable, from any point of view, and it finally passed the House by a vote of 74 to 59.  The Senate amended it, but afterward receded from the amendment, and thus the measure came before Mr. Lincoln on July 4, 1864.  Congress was to adjourn at noon on that day, and he was at the Capitol, signing bills, when this one was brought to him.  He laid it aside.  Zachariah Chandler, senator from Michigan, a dictatorial gentleman and somewhat of the busybody order, was watchfully standing by, and upon observing this action, he asked Mr. Lincoln, with some show of feeling, whether he was not going to sign that bill.  Mr. Lincoln replied that it was a “matter of too much importance to be swallowed in that way.”  Mr. Chandler warned him that a veto would be very damaging at the Northwest, and said:  “The important point is that one prohibiting slavery in the reconstructed States.”  “This is the point,” said Mr. Lincoln, “on which I doubt the authority of Congress to act.”  “It is no more than you have done yourself,” said the senator.  “I conceive,” replied Mr. Lincoln, “that I may in an emergency do things on military grounds which cannot be done constitutionally by Congress.”  A few moments later he remarked to the members of the cabinet:  “I do not see how any of us now can deny and contradict what we have always said:  that Congress has no constitutional power over slavery in the States....  This bill and the position of these gentlemen seem to me, in asserting that the insurrectionary States are no longer in the Union, to make the fatal admission that States, whenever they please, may of their own motion dissolve their connection with the Union.  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.