He returned the bill to Congress with a veto message so weak in argument that it appeared as if he had been laboriously groping for pretexts to kill the bill. One of the principal reasons he gave was again the sinister one that Congress had passed the bill while eleven States were unrepresented, thus repeating the threatening hint that the validity of the laws made by such a Congress might be questioned. _False Encouragement to the South_ Congress promptly passed the bill over the President's veto by a two-thirds majority in each House, and thus the Civil Rights Bill became a law. President Johnson's defeat was more fatal than appeared on the surface. The prestige he had won by the success of his veto of the Freedmen's Bureau Bill was lost again. The Republicans, whom in some way he had led to expect that he would sign the Civil Rights Bill, now believed him to be an insincere man capable of any treachery. The last chance of an accommodation with the Republican party was now utterly gone. But, worse than all, the reactionists in the South, who were bent upon curtailing the freedom of the emancipated negroes as much as possible, received his veto of the Civil Rights Bill with shouts of delight. Believing him now unalterably opposed to the bestowal, upon the freedmen, of equal civil rights such as were specified in the bill, they hailed President Johnson as their champion more loudly than ever. Undisturbed by the defeat of the veto, which they looked upon as a mere temporary accident, they easily persuaded themselves that the President, aided by the Administration Republicans and the Democratic party at the North, would at last surely prevail, and that now they might safely deal with the negro and the labor question in the South as they pleased. The reactionary element felt itself encouraged to the point of foolhardiness by the President's attitude. Legislative enactments and municipal ordinances and regulations tending to reduce the colored people to a state of semi-slavery multiplied at a lively rate. Measures taken for the protection of the emancipated slaves were indiscriminately denounced in the name of the Constitution of the United States as acts of insufferable tyranny. The instant admission to seats in the national Congress of senators and representatives from the "States lately in rebellion" was loudly demanded as a constitutional right, and for these seats men were presented who but yesterday had stood in arms against the national government, or who had held high place in the insurrectionary Confederacy. And the highest authority cited for all these denunciations and demands was Andrew Johnson, President of the United States.