So apparent was the growth of radicalism that the President, alarmed by the attitude of Sumner and Stevens and their followers, began to fear for the Constitution and forced the fight. The passage of a bill on February 6, 1866, extending the life of the Freedmen's Bureau furnished the occasion for the beginning of the open struggle. On the 19th of February Johnson vetoed the bill, and the next day an effort was made to pass it over the veto. Not succeeding in this attempt, the House of Representatives adopted a concurrent resolution that Senators and Representatives from the Southern States should be excluded until Congress declared them entitled to representation. Ten days later the Senate also adopted the resolution. Though it was not yet too late for Johnson to meet the conservatives of Congress on middle ground, he threw away his opportunity by an intemperate and undignified speech on the 22d of February to a crowd at the White House. As usual when excited, he forgot the proprieties and denounced the radicals as enemies of the Union and even went so far as to charge Stevens, Sumner, and Wendell Phillips with endeavoring to destroy the fundamental principles of the government. Such conduct weakened his supporters and rejoiced his enemies. It was expected that Johnson would approve the bill to confer civil rights upon the negroes, but, goaded perhaps by the speeches of Stevens, he vetoed it on the 27th of March. Its patience now exhausted, Congress passed the bill over the President's veto. To secure the requisite majority in the Senate, Stockton, Democratic Senator from New Jersey, was unseated on technical grounds, and Senator Morgan, who was "paired" with a sick colleague, broke his word to vote aye--for which Wade offensively thanked God. The moderates had now fallen away from the President and at least for this session of Congress his policies were wrecked. On the 16th of July the supplementary Freedmen's Bureau Act was passed over the veto, and on the 24th of July Tennessee was readmitted to representation by a law the preamble of which asserted unmistakably that Congress had assumed control of reconstruction. Meanwhile the Joint Committee on Reconstruction had made a report asserting that the Southerners had forfeited all constitutional rights, that their state governments were not in constitutional form, and that restoration could be accomplished only when Congress and the President acted together in fixing the terms of readmission. The uncompromising hostility of the South, the Committee asserted, made necessary adequate safeguards which should include the disfranchisement of the white leaders, either negro suffrage or a reduction of white representation, and repudiation of the Confederate war debt with recognition of the validity of the United States debt. These terms were embodied in the Fourteenth Amendment, which was adopted by Congress and sent to the States on June 13, 1866.