Both Houses repassed the bill over the President's veto by the necessary two-thirds majority, the Senate on the 7th of January and the House on the 8th, and negro suffrage was established in the District of Columbia. The President's veto so angered some of the extremists that resolutions of impeachment were introduced into the House, and a resolution for the appointment of a committee to inquire whether there were reasons for impeachment was actually carried, and a committee was appointed. The committee sought everywhere and in every way for grounds upon which to arraign the President at the bar of the Senate, but for the moment it failed. [Sidenote: Stories of outrages at the South.] At the same time the halls of Congress were ringing with the most extravagant tales of outrages against the negroes and loyal men of the South at the hands of the late rebels, and of the collusion of the newly established "State" governments with the same. In addition to this, the other three of the ten newly constructed "State" legislatures rejected the proposed Fourteenth Amendment, two of them by unanimous vote, and the other by every vote but one. [Sidenote: The Fourteenth Amendment as the condition of recognizing the revival of statehood.] While, as we have seen, the Congress did not pass the proposition to make the acceptance of the proposed Fourteenth Amendment by the newly reconstructed "States" the condition of recognizing them as "States" of the Union, and admitting the Senators- and Representatives-elect from them to seats in Congress, yet the popular mind had so conceived the matter, and the {110} order of events in the case of Tennessee had given this conception the force of precedent. The Republicans in Congress and the North could now fairly claim that they had offered to recognize the President's reconstructed "States," although these bodies were without constitutional warrant, upon the most moderate terms which consideration for the necessary consequences of the Civil War and the victory of the Union would allow, and that their offer had been rejected in every case, except, of course, that of Tennessee--rejected by such majorities and in such a manner as to make the rejection amount to defiance. It was true that logically and constitutionally Congress had no power to make the acceptance of something not at the time a part of the Constitution a condition for the admission of the new "States," or the readmission of old "States," into the Union; and Congress had not done this formally. It is also true, both in good logic and in sound constitutional law, that the proposed Fourteenth Amendment should not have been submitted at all to bodies that were not conventions of the people in, or legislatures of, "States" in the Union. Logically and constitutionally the whole thing was irregular. But it was as it was, and all understood that the way to cut the knot was for the legislatures of the reconstructed "States" to adopt the proposed