Not one iota of evidence can be adduced from the annals of Congress in 1866 to show that any responsible member of the House or Senate believed the Fourteenth Amendment in any fashion would affect the operation of segregated schools in the States. All that Negro counsel could produce in their reargument on the point in 1953, despite the desperate labors of Dr. Kelly and his associates, were some generalities, some sweeping statements of ideals, and other nebulous expressions on the part of radical abolitionists on the one hand and apprehensive States’ Righters on the other. It is plain that the Stevens-Sumner group won from the Thirty-ninth Congress two compromise instruments, a statute and a constitutional amendment, both intended to guarantee to the Negro the essential civil rights spelled out in the Freedmen’s Bill and in the Civil Rights Act--to sue and be sued, to own and inherit property, and the like. “The right to go to school,” as Senator Trumbull of Pennsylvania was to say in 1872 in debating the General Amnesty Act, “is not a civil right and never was.” _2. Actions of the State legislatures and constitutional conventions._ The proposed Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution went out to the States on June 18, 1866. Connecticut ratified on June 30, New Hampshire on July 6, Tennessee on July 19. New Jersey and Oregon, both of whom later were to rescind their actions, ratified in September. Then came a jolt: On October 27, Texas flatly rejected the proposed amendment, by a vote of 70 to 5 in the House and 27 to 1 in the Texas Senate. Vermont ratified on October 30, but on November 1 Georgia rejected by 147-2 and 38-0 in its House and Senate. Then, in rapid succession, Arkansas, Florida, North Carolina, and South Carolina spurned the amendment. In January 1867, Virginia, Mississippi, Kentucky, and Maryland rejected. Early in February, Delaware and Louisiana turned it down also. On March 2, 1867, an infuriated Congress enacted over Johnson’s veto a law that seems incredible by any standpoint of constitutional law. This “Act to Provide for the More Efficient Government of the Rebel States” further defined the districts that had been created in the former Confederacy by earlier Reconstruction acts. Section 5 of the Act fixed two requirements for readmission of the Southern States to full standing in the Union. The first condition was that each of the States adopt a new State Constitution; the second was that, at the first legislature to be held after adoption of the new Constitution, each State must ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. Delegates to the State constitutional conventions were to be chosen by all male citizens regardless of race, except felons and those who had participated in the “rebellion.” No Confederate veteran who earlier had been a member of a State legislature, or held any other office under the government of a Southern State, could become a candidate for the new legislatures to be elected.