Really there was but one thing in the bill susceptible of successful criticism, and that could be explained so as to avoid it. It was the ninth section, which authorized the President to use military power in execution of the law. The language would permit the President to use the military before bringing the matter before the courts and securing a decision. It would permit the President to use the military as the {72} primal, instead of the final, agency for executing the law. It appeared to be in this respect a real force bill, that is a bill in which the Executive is empowered to use the military, not for the enforcement of judicial decision in aid of the marshals, deputies, constables, and their posses, which is the customary order in time of peace, but for the execution of the law in the first instance, before decision rendered or trial had. But it was entirely clear that what was meant in this section of the bill was that, when combinations too powerful to be dealt with by the courts and their officers should undertake to prevent the execution of the law, the President might use the military to overcome them. Under such an interpretation, this provision was justifiable and proper, certainly so in a transition period from a condition of general rebellion against the laws of the United States to that of gradual, and only gradual, acquiescence in their enforcement. [Sidenote: The President's blunder.] [Sidenote: The veto overridden.] The President most decidedly lost his chance of rehabilitating himself with his party, and leading it in the work of Reconstruction, by not signing this bill. He sinned against the Southerners themselves in not doing so. His veto of it made them believe that they could count upon the Administration, the Administration Republicans, and the whole Democratic party of the North, in denying equal civil rights to the freedmen, and that such a combination must eventually triumph. They, therefore, persisted in their course of exceptional legislation against the freedmen in the South, and in their arrogant demands for the immediate admission to seats in Congress of the very men who had led the rebellion for four years against the sovereignty and Government of the United States. It is amazing that they did not see that the large Republican majority in Congress would {73} be driven to the alternative of seeing the work of four years of terrible sacrifice undone or of securing its permanence by making such changes in the organic law as would effect it, while yet they had the power. On the 6th of April, the Senate overrode the President's veto of the Civil Rights bill, and on the 9th the House did likewise. [Sidenote: The Fourteenth Amendment.]