With developments in the South increasingly frustrating Republicans, the Thirty-Ninth Congress moved in its "lame duck" session to pass a sweeping bill that imposed military rule on the former Confederate states until they instituted the reforms the Congress deemed as needed for normal and full representation on the national stage. The bill passed the House on February 13, 1867. The U.S. Senate passed its version on a vote of 29 to 10, and included a change the House had earlier rejected from James Blaine of Maine that a simple ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment would significantly aid a state's acceptance. The House accepted the changes and the bill went to the White House where President Johnson exercised his veto on March 2, 1867. This action was over-ridden in both chambers on the same day and the bill became law. (By John Osborne)
William MacDonald (ed.), Documentary Source Book of American History, 1606-1913 (New York: Macmillan Company, 1920), 502.
