human
States the condition of recognizing them as
gpt
States of the Union, and admitting the Senators- and Representatives-elect from them to seats in Congress, yet the popular mind had so conceived the matter, and the {110} order of events in the case of Tennessee had given this conception the force of precedent. The Republicans in Congress and the North could now fairly claim that they had offered to recognize the President's reconstructed
human
States, although these bodies were without constitutional warrant, upon the most moderate terms which consideration for the necessary consequences of the Civil War and the victory of the Union would allow, and that their offer had been rejected in every case, except, of course, that of Tennessee--rejected by such majorities and in such a manner as to make the rejection amount to defiance. It was true that logically and constitutionally Congress had no power to make the acceptance of something not at the time a part of the Constitution a condition for the admission of the new
gpt
States, or the readmission of old
human
States, into the Union; and Congress had not done this formally. It is also true, both in good logic and in sound constitutional law, that the proposed Fourteenth Amendment should not have been submitted at all to bodies that were not conventions of the people in, or legislatures of,
gpt
States in the Union. Logically and constitutionally the whole thing was irregular. But it was as it was, and all understood that the way to cut the knot was for the legislatures of the reconstructed
human
States to adopt the proposed Fourteenth Amendment, as Tennessee had done. When they refused to do so, it was natural and it was necessary that Congress should at last overturn all of the President's proceedings in Reconstruction, and all of the proceedings made under his guidance, and begin _de novo_, and upon the true constitutional principle of the exclusive power of Congress to admit new
gpt
States