The Congress had but just put itself in working order, when a bill was introduced and passed extending the suffrage to negroes in the District of Columbia. The Republicans reasoned that they could not with good grace force negro suffrage on the South before establishing it in the District, and that the District was the best place in the country to try the experiment first. The bill went to the President on the 26th of December, six days after the adjournment of Congress for the Christmas vacation, although it had passed the Houses on the 13th and 14th. The President held it until January 5th, 1867, and then returned it to the Senate with his veto. {108} [Sidenote: The President's veto of the bill establishing negro suffrage in the District of Columbia.] The Message was a strong paper, and to an impartial mind at this day it is a convincing paper. There is no question that Congress had the constitutional power to establish negro suffrage in the District. The President did not dispute that. He simply argued that in legislating for the District, Congress stood in a relation to the inhabitants of the District analogous to that which the legislature of a "State" bore to the inhabitants of the "State," and that as the legislature of a "State" would not act in opposition to the expressed will of a large majority of the voters in the "State," so Congress in legislating for the District of Columbia ought not to disregard the expressed will of a large majority of the voters in the District. He then referred to the vote of the District upon this very subject, taken in December of 1865, only one year before, when out of a poll of 6,556, one of the largest votes ever cast in the Capital city, only thirty-five ballots were cast for negro suffrage, and in Georgetown out of a poll of 813 only one ballot was cast for negro suffrage. He further argued that Congress ought not to make the District a place for trying political experiments of so grave a character as conferring suffrage, the highest privilege of American citizenship, upon a race of men just emerging from the ignorance and vice attendant on a condition of slavery. And he finally asked the Congress to reconsider an act which appeared to him to be the degradation and possibly the destruction of American suffrage. There is no gainsaying that this was good reasoning, but Congress was in no frame of mind to give ear to the counsel of the President. It took the ground that in legislating for the District it was acting for the whole United States and not simply for the inhabitants of the District, and that there was no place in the entire {109} country where political experiments could be more safely tried than in the District, since Congress had plenary legislative power in the District and could discover and correct mistakes and defects in its legislation more easily and promptly there than anywhere else. [Sidenote: The first attempts at impeachment.]