The Civil War won, Congress turned its attentions to re-admitting the Confederate states back into the union. The Fourteenth Amendment abolished slavery, but the South remained defiant: save for Tennessee, none of the states were ready to admit their former slaves as equals. A series of five Reconstruction Acts were passed, dividing the South into five military districts, each headed by a general, and elections would be held in each one. Freed men were allowed to vote, as were whites who took an oath of loyalty. And each state had to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment as a precondition to joining the union.

On this day, March 2, in 1867, Congress passed the first of the acts. It was ratified by Congress over President Andrew Johnson’s veto.

Congress and Johnson had a history of confrontation around the Reconstruction. As a Southerner from Tennessee, Johnson brought a different vision for the South, believing only that they should abolish slavery and repeal their ordinance of succession as conditions of joining the union. As the Southern states had other laws that oppressed blacks, Congress often decided Johnson’s conditions did not go far enough.