The election returns showed more than a two-thirds majority in each House against the President.

The Fortieth Congress would therefore be safely radical, and in consequence the Thirty-ninth was encouraged to be more radical during its last session.
Public interest now for a time turned to the South, where the Fourteenth Amendment was before the state legislatures.

The radicals, taunted with having no plan of reconstruction beyond a desire to keep the Southern States out of the Union, professed to see in the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment a good opportunity to readmit the States on a safe basis.

The elections of 1866 had pointed to the ratification of the proposed amendment as an essential preliminary to readmission.

But would additional demands be made upon the South?
Sumner, Stevens, and Fessenden were sure that Negro suffrage also must come, but Wade, Chase, Garfield, and others believed that nothing beyond the terms of the Fourteenth Amendment would be asked.
In the Southern legislatures there was little disposition to ratify the amendment.