The Columbian

UNFOLDING OF THE PLOT.

A PAPER was circulated in this city yesterday evening, purporting to be a proclamation of Governor Wells ordering elections to be held in certain parishes to fill vacancies in the convention of 1864.

We suppose it to be a genuine document, although it purports to be signed "under my hand, at the city of New Orleans, this twenty-seventh day of July, A. D. 1866," when the Governor is known not to be within many miles of this place. It also wants the attestation of the Secretary of State who has, we learn, refused to countersign it or attach the seal of the State, as is customary, if not material, to the paper.

Not one of the State officers, we believe, elected at the same time as Gov. Governor Wells, and on the same ticket, forming with him the State administration, agrees with him in these extraordinary proceedings.

The paper was, however, doubtless issued by the Governor, and is in that respect a genuine production; but it is one he has not a shadow of authority for issuing, and is of no more legal force than it would be if it had been issued by any other person, in or out of the State.

It has been demonstrated, over and over again, that the convention of 1864 has no legal existence in 1866. It expired by the conclusion of its labor and the adoption of the constitution it made. It attempted to prolong its own existence by providing that it might be reconvoked by the presiding officer.

This authority to convoke the defunct body was in itself a usurpation; but it was a conditional authority, vested in a particular person, to be exercised in a single event, and there was no provision made for the intervention of the Governor at all. That person was the President of the convention, and that event the failure of the people to ratify the constitution. The President of the convention was directed to call it together if the constitution was rejected. It was only in that event that the provision to fill vacancies should come into force in that way. "Then and in that case" he (the President of the convention) might call on the proper officers to cause elections to be held. The case never occurred; the constitution was ratified; the President of the convention decides the body to be constitutionally extinct; and the pretended authority, which was a usurpation, lapses by its own terms, and leaves not a vestige of title or authority anywhere, or in anybody, to fill vacancies in the body alive or dead.

Nevertheless Governor Wells has issued this paper, ordering and commanding elections to be held to fill the vacancies which the very authority he recites declares are only to be filled in the event that the constitution should be rejected.

It is the plainest possible case of the use of a power which those who bestowed it had no right to give, for a purpose different from that to which they expressly limited it, and in a manner entirely different from that which they prescribed.

The Governor bases his proclamation on the report of Judge Howell, as President pro tem. of the convention, when Judge Howell only represents a small majority, which irregularly excluded the true President—if there be a President at all—and is a mere pretender to authority, without the support of more than a fourth of a quorum of the body he affects to speak for, but which the Governor accepts as the sovereign authority of the State in perpetual session.

The proclamation does not call elections to fill vacancies in the convention as it existed when it adjourned in 1864, but to bring in new members to the number fifty-one, from parishes which were not represented in that convention at all. There is no notice taken of vacancies which have occurred among the members actually chosen and taking part in its proceedings.

The real fact we suppose to be that a majority of the surviving members of the convention is not to be had in support of the executive and his partisans and that it is designed to bring in by the new elections, in which it is thought that no citizen of the State, not in the Governor's clique, can consistently take part, enough to get a majority who will sanction everything done, however irregular, and depend on the executive and a partisan judiciary, which is in confederacy with him, to overthrow a unanimous Legislature, all the State officers elected by the people, and impose a new government on a disfranchised people.

How this revolutionary scheme is to be met and baffled peaceably, and within the terms of the law, is a subject for the most serious consideration of the people of the State. That there are means we cannot doubt, nor can we doubt that these will be taken with a deliberation befitting the gravity of the occasion, and carried through with the firmness which such high duties, in such emergencies, require of patriotic citizens.—New Orleans Picayune.