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.  In a word, his objection to the bill lay chiefly in the fact that it established one single and exclusive process for reconstruction.  The rigid exclusiveness seemed to him a serious error.  Upon his part, in putting forth his own plan, he had taken much pains distinctly to keep out this characteristic, and to have it clearly understood that his proposition was not designed as “a procrustean bed, to which exact conformity was to be indispensable;” it was not the only method, but only a method.

So soon as it was known that the President would not sign the bill, a vehement cry of wrath broke from all its more ardent friends.  H.W.  Davis and B.F.  Wade, combative men, and leaders in their party, who expected their opinion to be respected, published in the New York “Tribune” an address “To the Supporters of the Government.”  In unbridled language they charged “encroachments of the executive on the authority of Congress.”  They even impugned the honesty of the President’s purpose in words of direct personal insult; for they said:  “The President, by preventing this bill from becoming a law, holds the electoral votes of the rebel States at the dictation of his personal ambition....  If electors for president be allowed to be chosen in either of those States [Louisiana or Arkansas], a sinister light will be cast on [his] motives.”  They alleged that “a more studied outrage on the legislative authority of the people has never been perpetrated.”  They stigmatized this “rash and fatal act” as “a blow at the friends of the administration, at the rights of humanity, and at the principles of republican government.”  They warned Mr. Lincoln that, if he wished the support of Congress, he must “confine himself to his executive duties,—­to obey and execute, not make the laws; to suppress by arms armed rebellion, and leave political reorganization to Congress.”  If they really meant what they said, or any considerable part of it, they would have been obliged to vote “Guilty” had the House of Representatives seen fit to put these newspaper charges of theirs into the formal shape of articles of impeachment against the President.