, in like manner as
it admits a new State; but the re-organization itself must be the work
of the territorial people themselves, under their old electoral law.
The power that reconstructs is in the people themselves; the power that
admits them, or receives them into the Union, is Congress. The
Executive, therefore, has no authority in the matter, beyond that of
seeing that the laws are duly complied with; and whatever power he
assumes, whether by proclamation or by instructions given to the
provisional governors, civil or military, is simply a usurpation of the
power of Congress, which it rests with Congress to condone or not, as
it may see fit. Executive proclamations, excluding a larger or a
smaller portion of the electoral or territorial people from the
exercise of the elective franchise in reorganizing the State, and
executive efforts to throw the State into the hands of one political
party or another, are an unwarrantable assumption of power, for the
President, in relation to reconstruction, acts only under the peace
powers of the constitution, and simply as the first executive officer
of the Union. His business is to execute the laws, not to make them.
His legislative authority is confined to his qualified veto on the acts
of Congress, and to the recommendation to Congress of such measures as
he believes are needed by the country.

In reconstructing a disorganized State, neither Congress nor the
Executive has any power that either has not in time of peace. The
Executive, as commander-in-chief of the army, may ex necessitate, pace
it ad interim under a military governor, but he cannot appoint even a
provisional civil governor till Congress has created the office and
given him authority to fill it; far less can be legally give
instructions to the civil governor as to the mode or manner of
reconstructing the disorganized State, or decide who may or may not
vote in the preliminary reorganization. The Executive could do nothing
of the sort, even in regard to a Territory never erected into a State.
It belongs to Congress, not to the Executive, to erect Territorial or
provisional governments, like those of Dacotah, Colorado, Montana,
Nebraska, and New Mexico; and, Congress, not the executive, determines
the boundaries of the Territory, passes the enabling act, and defines
the electoral people, till the State is organized and able to act
herself. Even Congress, in reconstructing and restoring to life and
vigor in the