upon him to resign. In the 1860 presidential election, not yet ready to become a Republican, he declined to be a candidate for the Republican nomination for Vice President of the United States, instead supported the Constitutional Union ticket of John Bell and Edward Everett. Defeated that year for reelection to Congress, in the winter of 1860 and 1861―between the secession of some Southern states and the beginning of the Civil War with the assault on Fort Sumter―Davis was involved in compromise measures. After Abraham Lincoln was elected and the Civil War began, Davis became a Republican. He was re-elected in 1862 to the U.S. House of Representatives and quickly became an aggressive Radical Republican, which was viewed as particularly surprising given that Maryland was a slaveholding border state. From December 1863 to March 1865 Davis served as chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs. In 1864, unwilling to leave the delicate questions concerning the French intervention in Mexico entirely in the hands of President Lincoln and Secretary of State William H. Seward, Davis brought in a report very hostile to France, which was adopted by the House but not by the Senate. With other Radical Republicans, Davis was a bitter opponent of Lincoln's plan for the Reconstruction of the Southern states, which he thought too lenient. On February 15, 1864, he reported from committee a bill (known as the Wade–Davis Bill, after Davis and Senator Benjamin Wade) which would place the process of Reconstruction under the control of Congress, and stipulated that the Confederate states, as a condition of being re-admitted to the Union, would disfranchise all important civil and military officers of the Confederacy, abolish slavery, and repudiate all debts incurred by or with the sanction of the Confederate government. In his speech supporting this measure, Davis declared that until Congress should recognize a government established under its auspices, there was no government in the rebel states save the authority of Congress. The bill, the first formal expression by Congress with regard to Reconstruction, did not pass both Houses until the closing hours of the session, on July 2, 1864. President Lincoln disapproved of the bill, and as he did not sign it, it did not become law; on July 8, Lincoln issued a proclamation defining his position. Soon afterward, on August 4, 1864, Davis joined Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio, who had piloted the bill through the