It was found impracticable to secure repression and the contest went forward with constantly accelerating speed.
The first question on the subject of Reconstruction which engaged the attention of Congress, was the re-adjustment of the basis of representation; and for a time it absorbed all others.

The first proposition to amend the Constitution in this respect had been made by Mr.Stevens on the 5th of December, providing "that representatives shall be apportioned among the States which may be within the Union according to their respective legal voters, and for this purpose none shall be named as legal voters who are not either natural born citizens of the United States or naturalized foreigners." During the month of December the question of representation was discussed, partly in public debate, but more in conference among members; and the plan of placing the basis upon legal voters, at first warmly urged, was quickly abandoned as its probable results were scrutinized.

When Congress convened after the holidays, on Friday the 5th of January, Mr.Spalding of Ohio, in a speech already referred to, proposed an amendment to the Constitution in regard to representation in Congress, directing that "people of color shall not be counted with the population in making up the ratio of representation, except it be in States where they are permitted to exercise the elective franchise," and this was probably the earliest foreshadowing of the real change in the basis of representation that was made by the Fourteenth Amendment.
On the ensuing Monday Mr.Blaine of Maine proposed the following, in lieu of the Constitutional provision then existing: "Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which shall be included within this Union according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by taking the whole number of persons, _except those whose political rights or privileges are denied or abridged by the constitution of any State on account of race or color_." Mr.Blaine objected to taking voters as the basis of representation.

"If," said he, "voters instead of population shall be made the basis of representation, certain results will follow, not fully appreciated perhaps by some who are now urgent for the change.
I shall confine my examination of these results to the nineteen free States, whose statistics are presented in the census of 1860, and the very radical change which the new basis of apportionment would produce among those States forms the ground of my opposition to it.

The ratio of voters to population differs very widely in different sections, varying, in the States referred to, from a minimum of nineteen per cent to a maximum of fifty-eight per cent; and some of the changes which its effect would work in the relative representation of certain States would be monstrous.