It was several hundred miles beyond the Western border of continuous settlement, and the men who came from it were regarded as adventurous pioneers on the very outposts of civilization.

Under this condition of affairs it is not strange that the Senate failed to pass the bill for the admission of the State over the veto of the President.
Edmunds, Fessenden, Foster, Grimes, Harris, Morgan, and some other Republicans, less prominent, voted in the negative.

The result was twenty-nine in favor of passing it over the veto, and nineteen against.
Defeated in the Senate the bill did not go to the House, and the admission of Colorado was by this action postponed for several years.
The President gave specious reasons for his vetoes, especially in the case of Colorado, but they did not conceal the fact that his position was radically different from that which Mr.Lincoln had held--radically different from the position which he would himself had assumed if he had maintained in good faith the principles he had professed when he secured the suffrages of the Republican party for the Vice-Presidency.
Having allied himself with the South and compromised his patriotic record by espousing the cause he had so hotly opposed, he naturally adopted all its principles and its worst prejudices.

For nearly half a century the leading exponents of Southern sentiment had been envious of the growth of the free North-West, and so far as lay in their power they had obstructed it--being unwilling for a long period to admit one of its giant Territories to the Union until its power could be politically offset by one of less population and wealth in the South.
Mr.Johnson in his new associations at once adopted this jealous and ungenerous policy--which had indeed lost something of its significance by the abolition of slavery, but was still stimulated by partisan considerations and was invariable hostile to the admission of a Republican State.

The most bitter prejudices could not blind Mr.
Johnson or the Southern leaders to the inevitable growth of free commonwealths in the North-West, but it seemed to be an object with both to keep them from participation in the government of the Union so long as possible, and to accomplish this end by every expedient that could be adopted.
An Act in relation to the President's power to grant pardon and amnesty, passed at this session, was more important in its spirit than in its results.