or other measures to block voting, and did not guarantee the right of blacks to hold office. Preliminary drafts did include officeholding language, but scholars disagree as to the reason for this change. This compromised proposal was approved by the House on February 25, 1869, and the Senate the following day. The vote in the House was 144 to 44, with 35 not voting. The House vote was almost entirely along party lines, with no Democrats supporting the bill and only 3Republicans voting against it, some because they thought the amendment did not go far enough in its protections. The House of Representatives passed the amendment, with 143 Republicans and oneConservative Republican voting "Yea" and 39 Democrats, three Republicans, oneIndependent Republican and oneConservative voting "No"; 26 Republicans, eightDemocrats, and oneIndependent Republican did not vote. The final vote in the Senate was 39 to 13, with 14 not voting. The Senate passed the amendment, with 39 Republicans voting "Yea" and eightDemocrats and five Republicans voting "Nay"; 13 Republicans and oneDemocrat did not vote. Some Radical Republicans, such as Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, abstained from voting because the amendment did not prohibit literacy tests and poll taxes. Following congressional approval, the proposed amendment was then sent by Secretary of State William Henry Seward to the states for ratification or rejection. Ratification Though many of the original proposals for the amendment had been moderated by negotiations in committee, the final draft nonetheless faced significant hurdles in being ratified by three-fourths of the states. Historian William Gillette wrote of the process, "it was hard going and the outcome was uncertain until the very end." One source of opposition to the proposed amendment was the women's suffrage movement, which before and during the Civil War had made common cause with the abolitionist movement. State constitutions often connected race and sex by limiting suffrage to "white male citizens." However, with the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, which had explicitly protected only male citizens in its second section, activists found the civil rights of women divorced from those of blacks. Matters came to a head with the proposal of the Fifteenth Amendment, which barred race discrimination but not sex discrimination in voter laws. One of Congress's most explicit discussions regarding the link between suffrage and officeholding occurred during discussions about the Fifteenth Amendment. Initially, both houses passed a version of the amendment that included language referring to