forbidding the president to remove civil officials, including his own cabinet, without Senate consent, and the Command of the Army Act, which stopped the president from issuing military orders except through the commanding General of the Army IMPEACHING PRESIDENT JOHNSON The Radical Republicans wanted to impeach President Johnson, and in 1868 they found a reason to so when President Johnson dismissed Secretary of War Edwin Stanton over congressional objections On March 5, 1868, senators formed a court of impeachment to hear the charges against the president, and they introduced a resolution containing 11 articles of impeachment The Senate tried the case through April and May of 1868 William M Evarts served as President Johnson’s counsel, basing his defense on a clause in the Tenure of Office Act that stated that the current secretaries would hold their posts throughout the term of the president who appointed them President Lincoln had appointed Stanton so the president’s counsel claimed that the applicability of the act had already run its course The Senate held three votes On all three occasions, 35 of the senators voted “guilty” and 19 “not guilty.” Seven Republicans joined the Democrats and Independents to vote for acquittal The vote was one short of the constitutional two-thirds majority to convict the president In 1868 voters were tired of the political turmoil of the Johnson administration and they turned to popular Civil War hero general Ulysses S Grant Grant had his choice of either the Democratic or Republican nomination He accepted the Republican nomination because he believed that Republican Reconstruction policies were more popular in the North Grant’s victory over Democratic candidate Horatio Seymour of New York proved to be a narrow one Without the 500,000 new AfricanAmerican voters in the South, Grant would have lost the popular vote By 1870 all southern states had been readmitted to the United States, with Georgia the last on July 15, 1870 When President Ulysses S Grant signed the Amnesty Act of 1872, all but 500 sympathizers were pardoned The white southerners who lost power re-formed themselves into conservative parties that battled the Republicans throughout the South The party names varied somewhat, and by the late 1870s they called themselves simply Democrats Despite his lack of political experience and scandals in his administration, President Grant won a substantial Reconstruction in the United States 351 victory in 1872 One scandal after another marked his second administration END OF RECONSTRUCTION In some states, where African Americans were the majority or the populations of the two races were almost equal, whites used intimidation and violence to keep African Americans from voting Started in 1866 and led by former Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Ku Klux Klan gradually absorbed some of the smaller organizations and expanded to create terror in black communities across the South In 1870 and 1871 the Republican Congress passed two Enforcement Acts, also known as the Ku Klux Klan Acts. These acts empowered the federal government to supersede the state courts and prosecute violations of the law, the first time the federal government had ever claimed the power to prosecute crimes by individuals under federal law By 1870 the Democratic-Conservative leadership ended its opposition to Reconstruction as well as to black suffrage The Democrats in the North concurred They wanted to fight the Republicans on economic grounds rather than race But not all Democrats agreed A group of hard-core Democrats wanted to resist Reconstruction to the bitter end Finally a group of Democrats called Redeemers wrested control of the party in state after state by forming coalitions with conservative Republicans, emphasizing the need for economic modernization President Grant accepted responsibility for the panic of 1873, and state after state fell to the Redeemers. In the 1874 elections, the Republican Party lost 96 seats around the country, and President Grant decided not to run for reelection Most Democrats and Northern Republicans agreed that the Civil War goals had been achieved and further federal military interference would be an undemocratic violation of historic republican values In 1875 Rutherford B Hayes won a hotly contested Ohio gubernatorial election, indicating that his policy toward the South would become Republican policy It became Republican policy the next year when he won the 1876 Republican nomination for president After Rutherford B Hayes won the disputed presidential election of 1876, the South agreed to accept his victory if he withdrew the last federal troops from its territory He did so in a political move called the Compromise of 1877, and the South was redeemed The end of Reconstruction marked the reduction of many civil, political, and economic rights and opportunities for African Americans African Americans would legally and