On the 27th of March, he sent his veto of the bill into the Senate. It was a weak argument throughout. He objected to making the freedmen citizens by an act of Congress, while eleven of the thirty-six "States" were unrepresented in Congress, and made out that it was a discrimination in favor of the ignorant negro against the intelligent foreigner not yet naturalized. He objected to the extension of the powers of the central Government in behalf of civil equality within the "States" as destructive of the federal system of government, and as degrading to the {71} legislators and officials of the "States." He did not deny that the proposed measure might be sustained as constitutional under the Thirteenth Amendment, but maintained that it was unnecessary for the execution of the provisions of the Amendment. He objected, further, to the number of officers and agents authorized to institute proceedings under the measure, to the fee which they should receive, and to the power of the President to order the courts of the United States to migrate from one place to another when necessary for the prompt administration of justice. And he objected, finally, to the power vested in the President to use the land and naval forces and the militia to prevent the violation, and enforce the due execution, of the measure. Now all this was easily answered from the point of view which Congress and the North had now firmly taken, viz.: that the eleven former "States" in which rebellion had for so long prevailed were not "States," although the territory formerly occupied by them, and the population formerly inhabiting them, were within the United States and were subject to the jurisdiction of the central Government; that the rebellion had demonstrated that the central Government must be intrusted with a large increase of powers in protecting civil equality and civil liberty; and that the sovereign Nation had willed this in the enactment and adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. [Sidenote: Criticism of the bill.]