nflict with Radical Republicans in Congress who wanted to protect blacks' right top vote and wished to reshape, if necessary by force, various facets of Southern society and economy. Johnson failed by one vote in the Senate from being driven from office through the impeachment process. During the mid-to-late 1860s and from 1870-1876, the federal government under Johnson and his successor Ulysses Grant sent Federal troops to the South to control violence invariably fomented by whites seeking to deny blacks the right to vote and to reduce them under the Black Codes to a state of near-servitude on the plantation. The North also enacted the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments which together abolished slavery, gave all citizens the right to equal protection under law and guaranteed all American citizens the right to vote.
They and the various Reconstruction Acts passed by Congress were inconsistently enforced. Grant sent federal troops to the South to stop white hate groups [such as the Ku Klux Klan] from terrorizing and killing blacks" (Harkrader 33). In his second term, Grant's attention was largely diverted from Reconstruction problems because of other national concerns such as hard v. soft money, tariff levels and the endemic corruption within Grant's administration. According to Ferrell, by the 1870s, "death [including Radical Republicans Thaddeus] Stevens in 1869 and [Charles] Sumner's in 1874), retirements, frustrations with the South and the influence of competing issues were all turning the nation's attention away from the South" (48).Democrats gained control of the House of Representatives in the mid-term elections of 1874. Rehnquist observed that "scandal and hard times [due to the Panic of 1873] were a boon to the Democrats and a curse to the Republicans" (27). By 1876 eight of the eleven Confederate states had been "redeemed" or taken control of by Southern Democrats and influence of free blacks, northern carpetbaggers and South...