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 "States" into the Union, or, more scientifically expressed, to create new States or control their creation on territory {111} of the Union in which loyal civil government did not exist. [Sidenote: The correctness of the Republican view.] There can be no question in the mind of any sound political scientist and constitutional lawyer that Congress was in the right, logically, morally, and legally, in insisting upon brushing aside the results of executive Reconstruction in the winter of 1867, and beginning the work itself from the bottom up. It ought to have done so in 1865. It ought to have created, so soon as armed resistance to the execution of the laws of the United States ceased, regular Territorial civil governments throughout the country which had been in insurrection, and then have admitted these Territories as "States" whenever the conditions warranting the same should have been attained. The phantom of the "indestructible State" had too strong an influence over the minds of all at that moment to admit of such a solution of the question. But after the experiences of 1865 and 1866, and the discussions in the last session of the Thirty-ninth Congress, the minds of the Republicans at least, both in and out of Congress, were prepared to break away from the influence of this idea and to view the process of Reconstruction as nothing but the admission of new "States" into the Union, new "States" founded on territory and including inhabitants that had indeed once formed "States," but had renounced Statehood in the Union through disloyalty to the Union, and had been brought back to the position of territories, civilly unorganized in local instance, but subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the central Government. From such a point of view, the method of procedure was plain. While it is strange that the Congress did not follow this course in 1865, it is simply astounding that it made such a mess of it in 1867. {112} [Sidenote: The Reconstruction bill.]