port. In the meantime the senators and representatives elected to Congress under the president's plan were in Washington seeking to be admitted to their seats. Their names were not put on the rolls in organizing the two houses of Congress, and they were left in expectancy, awaiting the pleasure of Congress, until February 26, 1866, when another concurrent resolution was passed in both houses to the effect that neither house should admit any members from the late insurrectionary States until the committee of fifteen, known as the "reconstruction committee," made its report, and Congress had taken action on it. It was resolved also that the Union troops should be kept in the South till Congress recalled them.
On February 6, 1866, another Freedmen's bureau bill, enlarging the powers of the bureau and with much severer conditions than the preceding one, was passed, but was vetoed by the president. In March, a "civil rights" bill was passed, making all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power "citizens of the United States," and affixing penalties to cover the execution of the law. Each measure bore severely on the white people of the South and enlarged the rights and political conditions of the negroes lately enfranchised, and both showed a determination to override the president and make Congress the sole authority in all matters relating to the reconstruction of the lately seceded States. In June, the Fourteenth amendment to the Constitution was proposed to the States for adoption. The object of this amendment was to put into the fundamental law the provisions of the "civil rights" bill, which had been passed over the president's veto. Congress had now full power, since it had the majority necessary to pass its bills over the veto of the president. This Fourteenth amendment meant negro citizenship and white disfranchisement, and it reduced representation in Congress, taking the right to regulate suffrage from the States and putting it in the hands of Congress, thus
