This enabled the Amendment to pass with two votes to spare, 119 to 56. When the result was announced, Republicans on the floor and spectators in the gallery broke into prolonged—and unprecedented—cheering, while in the streets of Washington cannons boomed a hundred-gun salute. The scene “beggared description,” wrote a Republican congressman in his diary. “Members joined in the shouting and kept it up for some minutes. Some embraced one another, others wept like children. I have felt, ever since the vote, as if I were in a new country.” By acclamation the House voted to adjourn for the rest of
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