(1867), laws passed by Congress abolishing the southern state governments formed under President Andrew Johnson's plan for Reconstruction. They divided the ten Confederate states not yet readmitted to the Union (only Tennessee was) into five military districts each governed by an army commander and patrolled by federal troops to help enforce the acts. The laws also outlined the process by which a state would be readmitted into the Union: each state was to hold a convention, write a new constitution, allow black men to vote, elect a governor and a state legislature, and ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. Johnson vetoed the Reconstruction Acts, but Congress, controlled by the
Radical Republicans, overrode his vetoes.
