consideration about the thousands exempted in state government service, on November 10, Representative Waller R. Staples of Virginia was able to secure a report from the Superintendent of Conscription over the objections of Representative James T. Leach of North Carolina, who protested the questioning of any state's loyalty. The report identified only North Carolina and Georgia as harboring “excessive exemptions” among their state agencies”. Both houses of Congress dropped the investigation. A bill concerning the exemption system reported out of conference committee did become law on March 16, 1865, but Davis accepted the law as passed reluctantly. It did not allow him the power to detail all southern men for emergency defense. In a final effort to increase manpower by tinkering with exemptions, Congress abolished the Bureau of Conscription, replacing it with one administered by the Army, netting some 3,000 employees. Although the subject of impressing slaves as soldiers as well as laborers had been considered and rejected in the Confederate press throughout 1864, by September 6, Secretary of War Seddon wrote privately to Louisiana Governor Henry W. Allen that every able-bodied slave should be used as a soldier. But, in October, he publicly refused to commit to the proposal, and Jefferson Davis was also evasive. At the opening of the last session of Congress on November 7, Representative William Graham Swan of Tennessee sought a resolution against the use of Negro soldiers. The equivocating Jefferson Davis effectively stalled the House, and a Committee was appointed to confer with the president to no avail. In January, Congress received communication from General Lee advocating the enlistment of slaves and their subsequent emancipation. On February 10, Representative Ethelbert Barksdale of Mississippi and Senator Williamson S. Oldham of Texas introduced bills in their respective houses providing for the raising of Negro troops, with Oldham proposing a requisition of 200,000 and Barksdale a number at the president's discretion. General Lee weighed in with another letter warning that the measure was both expedient and necessary, and that if the Confederate Congress did not use them, the Union army would. The bill passed the Congress, with a majority of Representatives from North Carolina, Texas, Arkansas and Missouri voting against. The provision for manumission failed in the Senate by one vote, until the Virginia Assembly then in session, instructed its senators to vote for an emancipation provision, and the bill then passed with a nine to eight