The Southern States refused to agree to the Fourteenth Amendment. To them the insuperable objection was the clause excluding from the office-holding class those who had taken an oath to support the Constitution of the United States and had afterwards engaged in insurrection against the same. The common people refused to accept better terms than were accorded to their leaders. This was true chivalry and is not to be condemned, but the consequence was an increase of the power of the radicals in the North. It disabled conservatives like Fessenden, Trumbull, and Grimes in Congress, John A. Andrew, Henry Ward Beecher, and William C. Bryant, influential in other walks in life, from making effective resistance to the measures of Sumner and Stevens. If the Fourteenth Amendment had been ratified by any of the other ex-Confederate States, such states would have been admitted at once as Tennessee was. Both Wade and Howard, hot radicals as they were, refused to go with Sumner when he insisted that further conditions should be exacted. When he offered an amendment looking to negro suffrage, Howard said that the Joint Committee on Reconstruction had maturely considered that question and had carefully abstained from interfering with "that very sacred right"--the right of each state to regulate the suffrage within its own limits. He argued that it was inexpedient in a party point of view to do so, and predicted that if the rebel states were coerced to adopt negro suffrage by an act of Congress, or by constitutional amendment, they would rid themselves of it after gaining admission.[97] FOOTNOTES: [96] Trumbull did not take an active part in the framing of the Fourteenth Amendment. A minute and unbiased history of it has been written by Horace Edgar Flack, Ph.D., and published by the Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 1908. It is impossible to resist the conclusion of this writer, that partisanship was a potent factor in the framing and adoption of it. [97] _Cong. Globe_, February 15, 1867, p. 1381. CHAPTER XIX CROSSING THE RUBICON