But he did not. He did not, it is true, veto the bill. He simply allowed the session to expire without signing it. This having happened in less than ten days from the time it was submitted to him, the bill failed, as provided in such cases by the Constitution. He, however, issued on the 8th of July a proclamation in regard to the subject, in which he objected to the setting aside of the "free State constitutions and governments already adopted and installed in Arkansas and Louisiana;" doubted the competency of Congress to abolish slavery within the "States;" expressed the hope and expectation that this might be done for the whole country by constitutional amendment; declared his willingness to have the loyal people in any of the rebellious "States" reconstruct their governments upon the Congressional plan, if they should choose to do so; but declared also his unwillingness to commit himself inflexibly to any single plan of restoration; and virtually asked the voters to make the difference between himself and Congress upon the subject an issue in the coming Presidential election. [Sidenote: The Wade-Davis protest against the President's proclamation.] This was one of the boldest acts of Mr. Lincoln's career as President, and it is little wonder that men of so much intelligence, courage and tenacity as Messrs. Wade and Davis did not allow the proclamation to go unanswered. Congress had adjourned, as we have seen, before the appearance of the proclamation. There was, {19} therefore, no way for Congress as a whole to make immediate answer. Messrs. Wade and Davis believed that the public interests would suffer if the answer should be postponed until the next meeting of Congress. They, therefore, issued a protest against the proclamation over their own names. The protest was printed in the New York _Tribune_ of August 5, 1864. It was an intemperate arraignment of the President. It declared, among other things, that "a more studied outrage on the legislative authority of the people had never been perpetrated;" that the President had "greatly presumed on the forbearance which the supporters of his Administration" had "so long practised, in view of the arduous conflict in which" they were "engaged and the reckless ferocity of" their "political opponents;" that he must understand that their support was not of a man but of a cause; and that he must confine himself to his executive duties, and leave political reorganization to Congress. Such denunciations of the President's purposes could have but one effect, viz., the strengthening of his hands by the support of the people, who so generally trusted him, in the election of 1864. It injured Mr. Davis so much that he failed of even a renomination for his seat in Congress. [Sidenote: The President's message of December 6, 1864.]