![]() ![]() Through his work for Harper’s Weekly and other major publications, he offered some of “the most strident arguments objecting to violence against African-Americans,” says Brooks Simpson, professor of history at Arizona State University. The artist came to the United States from Germany when he was 6. Just look at this cartoon by the renowned illustrator Thomas Nast from September 1866. With the troops now mobilized in the former Confederacy, African-Americans’ rights could actually be protected.īut getting to the Reconstruction Act of 1867 was a long, painful slog. “The reason it’s a game-changer is because it divides the 10 southern states into five military districts, requires new state constitutional conventions to be written, and it’s the first time African-American men are given a blanket right to vote over a large area,” says Richardson, a professor at Boston College and author of The Death of Reconstruction. But on March 2, 1867, Congress passed what historian Heather Richardson calls “one of the most important pieces of legislation in history”: the Military Reconstruction Act. Massacres of African-Americans in southern states had continued unabated, and the federal government was locked in its own bloodless battles over how to repair a country split in two. In March 1867, it had been nearly two years since the end of the Civil War-but the bloodshed was far from over.
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