Finally, the bill put into the hands of the commanding generals the appointment of the officers of the elections, and the control of the machinery of the elections, only requiring them to hold the elections by {132} ballot, and to proclaim the results of the elections in accordance with the returns made to them by their boards of registration. [Sidenote: Congress in permanence.] Congress had passed a resolution ordering the assembly of the Fortieth Congress so soon as the Thirty-ninth expired, and in accordance therewith the newly elected Congress opened its session on the 4th of March, 1867, instead of on the first Monday of the following December. The Congress was, therefore, in position to deal at once with a veto of the supplemental bill to the Reconstruction Act, in case one should be sent in. [Sidenote: The veto of the supplemental Reconstruction bill.] On the 23d of March the veto appeared. The President argued that the oath required by the bill from every person before his name could be admitted to registration, viz., "that he had not been disfranchised for participation in any rebellion or civil war against the United States," was so entirely uncertain in its meaning that it would prove a most terrible means of oppression in the hands of the military officers and their appointed agents, and declared he could never approve of an election law whose plain and manifest purpose was to disfranchise the great body of respectable white people, and create a new electorate on the basis of universal negro suffrage. He contended that the existing constitutions of the ten "States" to be re-reconstructed conformed to the long-established standards of loyalty and Republicanism, and that the new test of these qualities now set up by Congress, viz., universal negro suffrage, was a gross exaggeration, and would make many of the Northern "States" themselves unrepublican. The President did not expressly say that this bill was unconstitutional, but he quite distinctly implied it. In this, however, he was wrong, unless his doctrine that the rebellious {133} communities remained "States" of the Union throughout the rebellion, or had been reconstructed by his plan, was true, that is, unless these communities were "States" of the Union at the time Congress passed this bill. [Sidenote: Criticism of the veto.] On the other hand, from the point of view of the correct legal principle in regard to this subject, the principle which holds that the result of general rebellion within a "State" against the Constitution and laws of the United States is the loss of the "State" form of local government, and brings the territory and population of the former "State" under the exclusive jurisdiction of the central Government, Congress certainly had, and has, the power to create the electorate in such territory at its own discretion, Congress was referred, and is referred, in such a case, only to its own sense of right and policy.