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1865–1877
A Short-Lived Political Revolution
of 1866, the Radical Republicans captured two-thirds of both houses of Congress, and 339
the next year they moved quickly to take charge of Reconstruction by passing several
Reconstruction Acts. The first Reconstruction Act of 1867, passed on March 2, 1867,
dissolved state governments in the former Confederacy (except for Tennessee) and
divided the old Confederacy into five military districts subject to martial law, each with
a military governor. To reenter the Union, a state was required to call a constitutional
convention, which would be elected by universal male suffrage (including black male
suffrage); to write a new state constitution that guaranteed black suffrage; and to rat-
ify the Fourteenth Amendment. The other three Reconstruction Acts passed in 1867
and early 1868 empowered the military commander of each district to ensure that the
process of reconstruction in each state went forward despite strong ex- Confederate
opposition.
On March 2, 1867, Congress also passed — and later passed again, over Johnson’s
veto — the Tenure of Office Act, which prohibited the president from removing any
cabinet member from office without the Senate’s approval. The act was designed to
protect Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, a Radical Republican who was openly
critical of the president. When Johnson dismissed Stanton in February 1868, the
House of Representatives impeached Johnson for this violation of the act and other
charges. The Senate failed to convict him, but thereafter the president was politically
sidelined, and Congress assumed primary responsibility for Reconstruction.

Black Reconstruction
By early March 1867, the military Reconstruction of the South was already under way.
Many former Confederates were ineligible to vote in elections for delegates to state
constitutional conventions, and up to 30 percent of whites refused to participate in
elections in which black men could vote. Thus in some states, black voters were in the
majority. Of the slightly more than 1,000 delegates elected to write new state consti-
tutions, 268 were black. In South Carolina and Louisiana, blacks formed the majority
of delegates. Black delegates advocated the interests of freedpeople specifically and of
the people of their states and the nation generally. They also argued for curtailing the
interests of caste and property. In South Carolina, for example, delegate Robert Smalls
proposed that the state sponsor a public school system that was open to all.
The state constitutional conventions initiated a new phase of Reconstruction. (See
Document Project: The Vote, pp. 356–65.) Decades later, the black scholar and activ-
ist W. E. B. Du Bois called it “Black Reconstruction” in a book by that title. His sub-
title, “An Essay toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt
to Reconstruct Democracy in America,” suggests a transformative yet short-lived rev-
olutionary moment during which African Americans participated in southern political
life. The constitutions these conventions drafted provided for a range of “firsts” for the
South: universal male suffrage, public schools, progressive taxes, improved court and
judicial systems, commissions to promote industrial development, state aid for railroad

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