But this gives the General government
no authority in the organization or re-organization of States
beyond seeing that the form of government adopted by the
territorial people is republican. To press it further, to make
the constitutional clause a pretext for assuming the entire
control of the organization or re-organization of a State, is a
manifest abuse--a palpable violation of the constitution and of
the whole American system. The authority given by the clause is
specific, and is no authority for intervention in the general
reconstruction of the lapsed State. It gives authority in no
question raised by secession or its consequences, and can give
none, except, from within or from without, there is an overt
attempt to organize a State in the Union with an unrepublican
form of government.
The General government gives permission to the territorial people
of the defunct State to re-organize, or it contents itself with
suffering them, without special recognition, to reorganize in
their own way, and apply to Congress for admission, leaving it to
Congress to admit them as a State, or not, according to its own
discretion, 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.
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