people thus constituted by himself, Mr. Johnson set
Provisional Governors nominated by himself. These Governors called
popular conventions, whose members were elected by the votes of those to
whom Mr. Johnson had given the right of suffrage; and these conventions
proceeded to do what Mr. Johnson dictated. Everywhere Mr. Johnson;
nowhere the assumed rights of the States! North Carolina was one of
these creations; and North Carolina, through the lips of its Chief
Justice, has already decided that Mr. Johnson was an unauthorized
intruder, and his work a nullity, and even Mr. Johnson's "people" of
North Carolina have rejected the constitution framed by Mr. Johnson's
Convention. Other Rebel communities will doubtless repudiate his work,
as soon as they can dispense with his assistance. But whatever may be
the condition of these new Johnsonian States, they are certainly not
States which can "recover" rights which existed previous to their
creation. The date of their birth is to be reckoned, not from any year
previous to the Rebellion, but from the year which followed its
suppression. It may, in old times, have been a politic trick of shrewd
politicians, to involve the foundations of States in the mists of a
mythical antiquity; but we happily live in an historical period, and
there is something peculiarly stupid or peculiarly impudent in the
attempt of the publicists of the Philadelphia Convention to ignore the
origins of political societies for which, after they have obtained a
certain degree of organization, they claim such eminent traditional
rights and privileges. Respectable as these States may be as infant
phenomena, it will not do to _Methuselahize_ them too recklessly, or
assert their equality in muscle and brawn with giants full grown.

It is evident, from the nature of the case, that Mr. Johnson's labors
were purely experimental and provisional, and needed the indorsement of
Congress to be of any force. The only department of the government
constitutionally capable to admit new States or rehabilitate insurgent
ones is the legislative. When the Executive not only took the initiative
in reconstruction, but assumed to have completed it; when he presented
_his_ States to Congress as the equals of the States represented in that
body; when he asserted that the delegates from his States should have
the right of sitting and voting in the legislature whose business it was
to decide on their right to admission; when, in short,