Congress, however, gave this legislature one more opportunity to redeem itself. The proposed Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States was submitted to it for ratification in June of 1866. After long deliberation upon it, the legislature rejected it on the 9th of January, 1867. This act sealed the fate of that legislature. Virginia was brought, with the other Southern communities which had rejected or not adopted the proposed Amendment, under the Reconstruction Acts of March, 1867, and became the first military district under those Acts, with General Schofield as commander. Schofield ordered the election for delegates to a constitutional convention, by the voters designated in the Reconstruction Acts, to be held in November of 1867, and ordered the delegates so elected to assemble in Richmond on the 3d of the following December. These orders were successfully executed under the supervision and control of the military. Schofield himself appeared in the convention, and urged the delegates to be moderate in the propositions for the disfranchisement and disqualification of those who had participated in rebellion. But the delegates {227} elected under the Reconstruction Acts, and by the electorate created through them, were not only radical, but bent upon retaliation. They would not listen to the wise counsel of Schofield, but drafted and adopted such provisions in regard to suffrage qualifications and eligibility to office and mandate as would have put the "State" government, based on such a constitution, in the hands of negroes, "scalawags" and "carpet-bag" adventurers. The opposition to these provisions on the part of the commander and the Administration at Washington was, however, sufficiently effective to delay indefinitely the submission of the constitution to the voters. Near the end of the year 1868, a conference of prominent Virginians assembled at Richmond and appointed a committee, and sent its members to Washington to petition Congress to allow the disfranchising and disqualifying clauses, and the clauses in reference to county organization, to be voted on separately from the other parts of the proposed constitution. This committee proceeded to Washington in January of 1869, and argued their case before committees of both of the Houses of Congress, and also presented the same to the new President-elect, General Grant. [Sidenote: Grant's message to Congress of April 7th, 1869, and his proclamation of May 14th.]