To help cope with these surfacing problems, Congress created the Freedmen's Bureau; it aided slaves with their needs and struggle for independence (23), but blacks still suffered. .
"When [Congress] convened in December 1865, it refused to seat the delegates of the ex-Confederate states . . . [and] Republicans prepared to dismantle the black codes (Boyer, et al. 503)." The radical ideas of the Radical Republicans clashed with President Johnson's envisionment of Reconstruction; whereas Johnson carried out a lenient plan to admit the South into the Union, Radical Republicans pushed for civil rights legislation. Congress passed The Civil Rights Act of 1866 against Johnson's veto, granting U.S. citizenship to blacks (504). Gaining momentum, Congress also passed the Fourteenth Amendment, making everyone born in the United States (or brought up in the United States) to be a citizen, and declaring "no state could abridge their rights without due process of law or deny them equal protection under the law (Boyer, et al. 505)." Johnson asked, "Was it sound policy to make all those colored people citizens? (P. McKissack and F. McKissack 32-34)" Finally, Congress passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867. This act put the South under military rule by Union officers and forced seceded states to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment to return to the Union (507). Thus the federal government could enforce the new laws.
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The recent acts of Congress and new amendments gave blacks only a brief respite from discrimination. In President Grant's administration, Congress passed an Amnesty Bill, pardoning Southerners and admitting the South back into Congress by 1875 (P. McKissack and F. McKissack 57). By 1875 the Radical Republicans had little effect on politics, and the Republican party had generally retreated from Reconstruction (Boyer, et al. 526). By the election of 1876, both Republicans and Democrats were attempting to find ways they could agree (P.
