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1865–1877
A Short-Lived Political Revolution
former Confederate states would be reseated in Congress, the Radical Republicans 337
balked. Concerned for the civil rights of the freedpeople, they quickly appointed a
joint committee to examine issues of suffrage and representation for the former Con-
federate states. The struggle between the president and Congress escalated in early
1866 when Congress passed two bills over Johnson’s veto: the reauthorization of the
Freedmen’s Bureau and the Civil Rights Act.
Established in March 1865, the Freedmen’s Bureau aimed to help freedpeople
in their economic, social, and political transition to freedom. To prevent them from
becoming wards of the state and the bureau from becoming a permanent guardian,
it remained a temporary agency that Congress had to renew annually. In reautho-
rizing the Freedmen’s Bureau in February 1866, Congress expanded its powers by
establishing military commissions to hear cases of civil rights abuses — of which
there were many. The bureau heard shocking reports of whites violently beating
and abusing blacks (even murdering them), cheating them out of their wages, short-
changing them on purchased goods, and stealing their crop shares. In September
1865, for example, the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Mississippi reported, “Men,
who are honorable in their dealings with their white neighbors, will cheat a negro
without feeling a single twinge of their honor; to kill a negro they do not deem mur-
der; to debauch a negro woman they do not think fornication; to take property away
from a negro they do not deem robbery. . . . They still have the ingrained feeling
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that the black people at large belong to the whites at large.” When Johnson vetoed
the reauthorization bill, stating that the military commissions were unconstitutional,
Congress passed the bill over his veto. The bureau experienced severe cutbacks in
1869, however, and its reach and effectiveness seriously declined before it was finally
ended in 1872.
To further protect the civil rights of freedpeople, Congress passed the Civil Rights
Act of 1866, again over Johnson’s veto. This act defined U.S. citizenship for the first
time and affirmed that all citizens were equally protected by the laws. It overturned
black codes and ensured that blacks could make contracts and initiate lawsuits, but it
did not protect black voting rights. In February 1866, Frederick Douglass and a dele-
gation of other black leaders met with Johnson to try to convince him of the impor-
tance of black suffrage, but without success.
Tensions between the stubborn and increasingly isolated Johnson and an ener-
getic Congress escalated over the Fourteenth Amendment, which Congress quickly
proposed and sent to the states for ratification in 1866. Ratified in 1868, this amend-
ment affirmed the Civil Rights Act’s definition of citizenship and guarantee of “equal
protection of the laws” to all citizens. Declaring that “all persons born or natural-
ized in the United States” are “citizens of the United States and of the State wherein
they reside,” it reversed the Dred Scott decision of 1857, which had ruled that blacks
could not be citizens. To protect citizens against civil rights violations by the states,
the amendment also declared that “no State shall make or enforce any law which shall
abridge the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any

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