bill, and the next day an effort was made to pass it over the veto. Not
succeeding in this attempt, the House of Representatives adopted a concurrent
resolution that Senators and Representatives from the Southern states should
be excluded until Congress declared them entitled to representation. Ten days
later the Senate also adopted the resolution.

Though it was not yet too late for Johnson to meet the conservatives of
Congress on middle ground, he threw away his opportunity by an intemperate and
undignified speech on the 22d of February to a crowd at the White House. As
usual when excited, he forgot the proprieties and denounced the radicals as
enemies of the Union and even went so far as to charge Stevens, Sumner, and
Wendell Phillips with endeavoring to destroy the fundamental principles of the
government. Such conduct weakened his supporters and rejoiced his enemies. It
was expected that Johnson would approve the bill to confer civil rights upon
the Negroes, but, goaded perhaps by the speeches of Stevens, he vetoed it on
the 27th of March. Its patience now exhausted, Congress passed the bill over
the President's veto. To secure the requisite majority in the Senate,
Stockton, Democratic Senator from New Jersey, was unseated on technical
grounds, and Senator Morgan, who was "paired" with a sick colleague, broke his
word to vote aye--for which Wade offensively thanked God. The moderates had
now fallen away from the President, and at least for this session of Congress,
his policies were wrecked. On the 16th of July, the supplementary Freedmen's
Bureau Act was passed over the veto, and on the 24th of July Tennessee was
readmitted to representation by a law the preamble of which asserted
unmistakably that Congress had assumed control of reconstruction.

Meanwhile the Joint Committee on Reconstruction had made a report asserting
that the Southerners had forfeited all constitutional rights, that their state
governments were not in constitutional form, and that restoration could be
accomplished only when Congress and the President acted together in fixing the