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chapter 9 Reconstruction: The Making and Unmaking of a Revolution
IOWA 1865–1877
NEBRASKA OHIO MD.
ILLINOIS IND. W. VA.
24%
COLORADO VA. MILITARY
KANSAS MISSOURI DISTRICT NO. 1
KENTUCKY
N.C.
11%
TENN. MILITARY
NEW INDIAN ARK. DISTRICT NO. 2
MEXICO TERRITORY 13% S.C.
TERRITORY MILITARY GA. 61%
DISTRICT NO. 4 ALA. 19%
17%
MISS.
MILITARY 17% MILITARY
DISTRICT NO. 5 DISTRICT NO. 3
TEXAS LA.
10% 50%
FLA.
40%

Former Confederate states
Military district boundary
40% Percentage of elected state legislators
who were African American, 1867–1868
MAP 9.1 Black Political Participation in the Reconstruction South, 1867–1868
WHI_02133_08_M01 Black Political Participation in the Reconstruction South, 1867–1868
During the overlapping years of congressional reconstruction and Black reconstruction, the states
Black Cyan Magenta Yellow
of the former confederacy were reorganized into five military districts under the first reconstruction
Second Proof
act of 1867. Within these districts, for the first time ever, thousands of newly enfranchised blacks
BB185 20
participated in politics, voted, and held elected offices at all levels of the government. as this map
illustrates, the percentages of african americans elected to the first state legislatures as a result of the
32px 19p6
four reconstruction acts were significant: half of Louisiana’s elected state legislators were black, and
in South carolina, black legislators comprised a 61 percent majority. ■ What made black political
participation at this particular moment “revolutionary”? data source: The Atlas of African-American History and
Politics: From the Slave Trade to Modern Times, by Arwin Smallwood and Jeffrey Elliot. Copyright © 1998 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
Vote, pp. 356–65.) When black men voted, they cast a family vote — a choice that
reflected the collective aspirations of their wives, children, relatives, and extended kin,
as well as those of their neighbors and communities.
Freedpeople allied themselves with the Republican Party, the party of emancipa-
tion and Abraham Lincoln. They were actively recruited by the Union League, which
had been created in the North in 1862 to build support for the Republican Party and
sent representatives to the South after the war. Along with the Freedmen’s Bureau,
southern branches of the Union League mobilized black support for the Republican
Party and helped blacks understand their political rights and responsibilities as
citizens.
African Americans viewed the right to vote as the most important of all civil
rights and the one on which all other civil rights depended. The vote made economic,
social, and political liberties possible and helped protect blacks. To ensure this right,

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