influence of the President.

Not until after the new year was it plain that there was to be a fight to the
finish between Congress and the President. Congress had refused in December
1865, to accept the President's program, but there was still hope for a
compromise. Many conservatives had voted for the delay merely to assert the
rights of Congress; but the radicals wanted time to frame a program. The
Northern Democrats were embarrassingly cordial in their support of Johnson and
so also were most Southerners. The moderates were not far away from the
position of the President and the administration Republicans. But the radicals
skillfully postponed a test of strength until Stevens and Sumner were ready.
The latter declared that a generation must elapse "before the rebel
communities have so far been changed as to become safe associates in a common
government. Time, therefore, we must have. Through time all other guarantees
may be obtained; but time itself is a guarantee."

To the Joint Committee were referred without debate all measures relating to
reconstruction, but the Committee was purposely making little
progress--contented merely to take testimony and to act as a clearing house
for the radical "facts" about "Southern outrages" while waiting for the tide
to turn. The "Black Laws" and the election of popular Confederate leaders to
office in the South were effectively used to alarm the friends of the Negroes,
and the reports from the Bureau agents gave support to those who condemned the
Southern state governments as totally inadequate and disloyal.

So apparent was the growth of radicalism that the President, alarmed by the
attitude of Sumner and Stevens and their followers, began to fear for the
Constitution and forced the fight. The passage of a bill on February 6, 1866,
extending the life of the Freedmen's Bureau furnished the occasion for the
beginning of the open struggle. On the 19th of February, Johnson vetoed the