Stanbery said he was clear and unqualifiedly against the whole talk and theory of territorializing the states. Congress could not dismantle them. It had not the power, and on that point he would say that it was never expedient to do or attempt to do that which we had not the power to do. Browning declared that no state could be cut down or extinguished. Congress could make and admit states, but could not destroy or extinguish them after they were made.[98] This extract is rather astounding for what it tells us of Stanton's position. Simultaneously, or nearly so, Congress passed an act virtually making the General of the Army independent of the President, and prohibiting the President from assigning him to duty elsewhere than in Washington City without the consent of the Senate, except at his own request. Congressman Boutwell, of Massachusetts, tells us that this provision was privately suggested to him by Stanton and that he (Boutwell) wrote it down at the War Department as dictated by Stanton, and took it to Thaddeus Stevens who incorporated it in an appropriation bill.[99] If the radicals were elated by the result of the elections, the conservatives were correspondingly depressed. It was no longer possible to prevent Stevens and Sumner from taking the lead, which they did forthwith. They crossed the Rubicon with the whole army. The Reconstruction policy initiated by Lincoln was now for the first time definitely abandoned by the Union party. In the month of February, Stevens carried through the House a bill declaring that there were no legal governments in the ten rebel states, and providing that the existing governments should be superseded by the military authority. It provided for no termination of such military government. Amendments were added by the Senate providing for constitutional conventions in those states, to be elected by the male citizens twenty-one years old and upward, of whatever race or color, except those disfranchised for participation in rebellion. It was provided further that when the constitutions so framed should contain clauses giving the elective franchise to all persons entitled to vote in the election for delegates, and when the constitutions should be ratified by a majority of the people, and when such constitutions should have been submitted to and approved by Congress, and when the states should have ratified the Fourteenth Amendment and it should have been adopted, then the states so reorganized should be entitled to representation in Congress, provided that no persons disfranchised by the Fourteenth Amendment should vote at the election or be eligible to membership of the conventions. The clause making negro suffrage a permanent condition of Reconstruction was adopted in a senatorial caucus on the motion of Sumner by a majority of two, after it had been rejected almost unanimously by the Senate committee to which it had been referred.[100]