Sensing the danger that two more Republican votes would add to the already large anti-Democratic majority in the United States Senate, President Andrew Johnson vetoed the recently passed bill conferring statehood on the Colorado Territory. In his message, he cited the speed of the advance from territory to statehood and the fact that the bill dictated African-American suffrage in the new state. His veto was upheld in the Senate on March 1, 1867 on a vote of 29 to 17, with more conservative Republicans like Senator William P. Fessenden of Maine and Senator George Edmunds of Vermont siding with the minority. It is worth noting that with two more Republican votes the impeachment and removal of President Johnson the following year may well have been carried. (By John Osborne)
David Miller DeWitt, The Impeachment and Trial of Andrew Johnson: Seventeenth President of the United States: A History (New York: Macmillan and Company, 1903), 179.
