The aftermath of the American Civil War

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X is Tennessee. It was left out because it had ratified the 14th Amendment and been readmitted to the Union in 1866.

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One feature of the Reconstruction Acts was military rule. Passed in March 1867 over President Johnson's veto, they divided the ten former Confederate states that had not been readmitted, every one except Tennessee, into five military districts. Each district was commanded by a Union general with troops, whose job was to keep order, protect freed people and supervise the creation of new state governments.

A second feature was the conditions a state had to meet to rejoin the Union. Each state had to hold a convention elected by all adult men, including Black men, and write a new constitution that guaranteed Black men the vote. It then had to ratify the 14th Amendment before Congress would readmit it. Former Confederate leaders barred from office by the 14th Amendment could not vote for these conventions, so for the first time Black men voted in large numbers.

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One way African Americans' lives were affected was that they gained political rights for the first time. The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 gave Black men in the South the vote, and the 15th Amendment of 1870 protected it across the nation. About 2,000 African Americans held public office during Reconstruction, from local sheriffs to members of Congress; Hiram Revels of Mississippi became the first Black US senator in 1870, and Black men formed a majority in South Carolina's lower house. People who had been enslaved only a few years earlier now helped make the laws.

A second way was through education and community life. The Freedmen's Bureau and Northern missionary societies opened schools, and the Reconstruction governments created the South's first state public school systems; colleges such as Fisk and Howard were founded. Freed people built their own churches, which became the centre of community life, and reunited families separated by slavery.

However, economic change was limited, and this was linked to their vulnerability. The promise of 'forty acres and a mule' was broken when Johnson returned confiscated land to its former owners, so most freed people became sharecroppers, farming a white landowner's land for a share of the crop and often falling into debt. Without economic independence, they were exposed to pressure and violence. The Ku Klux Klan murdered and beat Black voters and burned schools and churches; federal laws in 1870-71 weakened the Klan, but other groups such as the White League used terror in the mid-1870s. By 1877, as Democrats regained control of the Southern states, many of the political gains of Reconstruction were being taken away.

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President Johnson's own actions played a large part in the Radicals' rise. In 1865 he pardoned many former Confederates and allowed Southern states back with few conditions. In 1866 he vetoed the bill to extend the Freedmen's Bureau and then the Civil Rights Act, measures that moderate Republicans, not just Radicals, had supported. This pushed the moderates towards the Radicals, and in April 1866 Congress overrode his veto of the Civil Rights Act. Johnson made things worse by attacking Republican leaders such as Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner by name, by opposing the 14th Amendment, and by his 'Swing Around the Circle' speaking tour in 1866, where he traded insults with hecklers and looked undignified.

Events in the South were also very important. From late 1865 Southern states passed Black Codes that seemed to bring back slavery under another name, and they elected former Confederate leaders, including the Confederate vice-president Alexander Stephens, to Congress. Every Southern state except Tennessee refused to ratify the 14th Amendment. Most shocking of all were the riots of 1866: in May white mobs, including police, attacked Black residents of Memphis, and in July a meeting of Black and white Republicans in New Orleans was attacked; dozens of African Americans were killed in each. To many Northerners, it seemed that the South had learned nothing from defeat.

Overall, events in the South were the more important reason. Johnson's behaviour was unwise, but what made Northern voters turn against him was the evidence that his policy was failing: the Black Codes, the return of Confederate leaders and the killings in Memphis and New Orleans. These events turned the November 1866 elections into a verdict on Johnson's Reconstruction, and the Republicans won more than two-thirds of both houses of Congress. With veto-proof majorities, Congress passed the Reconstruction Acts in March 1867. Johnson's actions made the defeat worse, but events in the South gave the Radicals their case.