As a result of this decision, Southern men who, under the Fourteenth Amendment, had incurred disabilities by reason of participation in the Rebellion, _could not assume office under the National Government until their disabilities should be removed by a vote of two-thirds of the Senate and House of Representatives, even though they had previously been pardoned by the President._ The language of the amendment, the very careful form in which the tense was expressed, appeared to leave no other meaning possible, and the intention of legislators was definitively established by the negative votes already referred to. The intention indeed was in no wise to interfere with the pardon of the President, leaving to that its full scope in the remission of penalty which it secured to those engaged in the Rebellion. The pertinent clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was regarded as merely prescribing a qualification for office, and the Constitutional lawyers considered it to be within the scope of the amending power as much as it would be to change the age at which a citizen would be eligible to the Senate or the House of Representatives.(2) One of the singular features attending the discussion and formation of this amendment, was that all the Democratic senators preferred the third section as embodied in the Constitutional amendment finally passed, to that which had been proposed as it passed the House. The amendment could not probably be incorporated in the Constitution for a year and according to the original proposition of the House, therefore, it would only have excluded those who participated in the Rebellion from the ballot-box for a period of three years,--until the 4th of July, 1870; whereas the third section, as adopted, perpetually excluded the great mass of the leading men of the South from holding public office, either in Nation or State, unless their disabilities should be removed by a vote of two-thirds in each House of Congress. No adequate explanation was given for the preference, and the final vote substituting that which was incorporated in the Constitution for the House proposition was 42 in the affirmative to 1 in the negative. The negative vote was given by Reverdy Johnson; while such staunch Democrats as Guthrie of Kentucky, Hendricks of Indiana, McDougal of California and Willard Saulsbury of Delaware voted to prefer the one to the other. Mr. Johnson afterward explained that he voted under a misapprehension; so that the substitution was made, in effect, by a unanimous vote of the Senate.