With that vindictive and extortionate act, military government settled upon the South and all semblance of free republican government vanished. With no alternative but to submit or remain under the sword, the Southern States accepted the amendment. Arkansas ratified in April 1868, Florida on June 9, North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, and Louisiana in July. Meanwhile, Ohio on January 13, 1868, had undertaken to rescind its ratification of the amendment, and New Jersey, on March 25, had done the same thing. In both States, recently the bitter foes of the South, the new amendment was denounced as unconstitutionally approved in the House of Representatives and unconstitutionally demanded of the Southern States. (It was several months later, in October 1868, that Oregon also attempted to rescind its ratification.) On July 20, 1868, Secretary Seward issued a cautious proclamation certifying that the Fourteenth Amendment had been ratified. There were, he surmised, thirty-seven States then “in the Union.” Twenty-eight, by Seward’s count, had approved the amendment, but he was doubtful about the whole affair. Among his twenty-eight were Arkansas, Florida, North Carolina, Louisiana, and South Carolina, where ratification had been sanctioned by “newly constituted and newly established bodies avowing themselves to be acting as the legislatures” of these States. If their resolutions were valid, and if the original ratifications of Ohio and New Jersey were still valid, notwithstanding their subsequent withdrawals, the amendment was a part of the Constitution. On the following day, July 21, Congress passed a joint resolution to resolve Seward’s doubts. It ordered him to declare the amendment unconditionally adopted; and on July 28, adding the names of Alabama and Georgia, whose notifications had just been received, Seward declared the Fourteenth officially a part of the Constitution.