settled, in the
judgment of the law-making power of the Government, that the operation
of the Fourteenth Amendment would not in the least degree be affected
by the President's pardon. Before the proposed amendment of Mr.
Doolittle, Mr. Saulsbury had tested the sense of the Senate practically
on the same point, by moving to make the clause of the amendment read
thus: "Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House and the
President may by the exercise of the pardoning power, remove such
disabilities;" but it was rejected by a large majority, and every
proposition to permit the pardon of the President to affect the
disabilities prescribed by the Fourteenth Amendment in any way whatever
was promptly overruled.

As a result of this decision, Southern men who, under the Fourteenth
Amendment, had incurred disabilities by reason of participation in the
Rebellion, _could not assume office under the National Government until
their disabilities should be removed by a vote of two-thirds of the
Senate and House of Representatives, even though they had previously
been pardoned by the President._ The language of the amendment, the
very careful form in which the tense was expressed, appeared to leave
no other meaning possible, and the intention of legislators was
definitively established by the negative votes already referred to.
The intention indeed was in no wise to interfere with the pardon of the
President, leaving to that its full scope in the remission of penalty
which it secured to those engaged in the Rebellion. The pertinent
clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was regarded as merely prescribing
a qualification for office, and the Constitutional lawyers considered
it to be within the scope of the amending power as much as it would be
to change the age at which a citizen would be eligible to the Senate
or the House of Representatives.(2)

One of the singular features attending the discussion and formation
of this amendment, was that all the Democratic senators preferred the
third section as embodied in the Constitutional amendment finally
passed, to that which had been proposed as it passed the House. The
amendment could not probably be incorporated in the Constitution for
a year and according to the original proposition of the House,
therefore, it would only have excluded those who participated in the
Rebellion from the ballot-box for a period of three years,--until the
4th of July, 1870; whereas the third section, as