Bingham declined to admit it, shutting off all amendments by the force of the previous question, for which the House sustained his demand. After a few hours' debate the House passed the joint resolution by 125 _ayes_ to 12 _noes_. The Democrats all supported the measure, though they objected strenuously to some of the implications of the preamble. The few votes in the negative were given by some radical Republicans, though Mr. Stevens, the leader of that wing of the party, supported the bill. When the bill admitting Tennessee reached the Senate, there was a discussion of some length in regard to changing the preamble which had been adopted by the House, the principal aim being to insert the declaration that "said State Government can only be restored to its former political relations in the Union by the consent of the law-making power of the United States." There was division among the Republican senators in regard to the expedience of this change. It was the judgment of the more conservative Republicans who followed Mr. Fessenden, that it was needless to risk a veto of an important bill of this character by confronting the President with a distinct negative of his own theory in a place where it practically availed nothing. After much discussion however it was concluded to change the preamble for the sake of establishing a precedent in the first one of the Confederate States restored to the right of representation in Congress. The phrase, "hereby restored to her former, proper, practical relations to the Union," was one much cherished, because it was the original expression of Mr. Lincoln in his last public speech. The House readily concurred in the change of preamble. The President accepted the challenge of his theory embodied in the preamble, not by veto, but in the more innocent form of argument. "If," said he, in a special message of July 25th, "the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States be one of the conditions of admitting Tennessee, and if, as is also declared by the preamble, said State Government can only be restored to its former political relations to the Union by the consent of the law-making power of the United States, it would really seem to follow that the joint resolution, which at this late day has received the sanction of Congress, should have been passed, approved and placed on the statute-books before any amendment to the Constitution was submitted to the State of Tennessee for ratification. Otherwise the inference is plainly deducible that while in the opinion of Congress the people of a State may be too disloyal to be entitled to representation, they may nevertheless have an equally potent voice with other States in amending the Constitution, upon which so essentially depends the stability, prosperity and very existence of the nation."