The rule indeed seemed to be for each branch to desert its own proposition as soon as there was a prospect that the other branch would agree to it.

The strange controversy was finally ended and the subject brought into intelligible shape by a conference committee, which reported the Fifteenth Amendment in the precise form in which it became incorporated in the Constitution.

It received the sanction of the house by a vote far beyond the two-thirds required to adopt it, the _ayes_ being 145, the _noes_ 44.

In the Senate the _ayes_ were 39, the _noes_ were 13.

The action of Congress on the Amendment was completed on the 26th of February, six days before General Grant was installed in the Presidency.
The gradual progress of public opinion in the United States on questions relating to slavery and to the personal and political rights of the negro race, may be clearly traced in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution.
-- The Thirteenth Amendment, proposed by Congress while the war was yet flagrant, simply declared that neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist within the United States or in any place subject to National jurisdiction.
-- The Fourteenth Amendment advanced the negro to the status of a citizen, but did nothing affirmatively to confer the right of suffrage upon him.