The 45th Congress remained politically divided between a Democratic House and Republican Senate. President Hayes vetoed an Army appropriations bill from the House which would have ended Reconstruction and prohibited the use of federal troops to protect polling stations in the former Confederacy. Striking back, Congress overrode another of Hayes’s vetoes and enacted the Bland-Allison Act that required the purchase and coining of silver. Congress also approved a generous increase in pension eligibility for Northern Civil War veterans.
