"That," said Mr.Blaine, "is my understanding and that, it seems to me, would be the legal construction; but if the gentleman from Pennsylvania is correct, then I maintain that it is the bounded duty of this House to make the language so plain that he who runs may read--that there may be no doubt about its construction." Mr.Garfield said that "the point made by the gentleman from Maine shows that, whatever may be the intention of the committee or of the House, the section is at least susceptible of double construction.
Some may say that it revokes and nullifies in part the pardons that have already been granted in accordance with law and the proclamation of the President.

Others may say that it does not apply to the rebels who have been pardoned." Mr.Stevens interrupted Mr.Garfield and said, "I was not perhaps sufficiently explicit in what I stated in answer to the interrogatory of the gentleman from Maine.

I admit that a pardon removes all liability to punishment for a crime committed, but there is a vast difference between punishment for a crime and withholding a privilege.
While I admit that the pardon will be full and operative so far as the crime is concerned, it offers no other advantage than an exemption from punishment for the crime itself." Mr.Garfield, resuming, said that he was about to remark that "if the section does not apply to those who have been pardoned then it would apply to so small a number of people as to make it of no practical value, for the excepted classes in the general system of pardons form a very small fraction of the rebels." Mr.Boyer, a Democratic member from Pennsylvania, declared that the effect of the amendment if adopted would be to disfranchise for a period of four years nine-tenths of the voting population of eleven States.
The point was subsequently alluded to by the leading lawyers of the House, with the general admission that, whatever might have been the implied pledge of the President or of Congress, or whatever might be the effect of the pardon of the President, it did not in any limit the power of the people to amend their Constitution.

To the proposition to exclude those who had been engaged in the Rebellion from the right of suffrage for National office until 1870, there was a strong hostility from two classes--one class opposing because it was a needless proscription, and the other, equally large, because it did not go far enough in proscribing those who had been guilty of rebellion.

The amendment came to a vote on the 10th of May and the result was 128 _ayes_ to 37 _noes_.