Reconstruction Acts

American  

plural noun

1. U.S. History. the acts of Congress during the period from 1865 to 1877 providing for the reorganization of the former Confederate states and setting forth the process by which they were to be restored to representation in Congress, especially the acts passed in 1867 and 1868.

---

Example Sentences

Congress passed, over President Andrew Johnson’s veto, the first of four Reconstruction Acts.

From Washington Times • Mar. 2, 2021

The Reconstruction Acts required the Southern states to ratify the 14th Amendment and give African Americans the vote before they’d be readmitted to the Union.

From Washington Post • May 16, 2018

Democrats and Conservatives represented the South’s pro-Confederate whites, even though the Reconstruction Acts barred most Confederate leaders from this round of constitution making.

From Textbooks • Jan. 18, 2018

Andrew Johnson detested the goal of racial equality as embodied in the Reconstruction Acts, but he could not defy them because Congress had vested enforcement in the War Department.

From Textbooks • Jan. 18, 2018

Johnson enforced the Reconstruction Acts with care, and the Southern conventions, meeting in the autumn of 1867, sat into the following winter.

From The New Nation by Dodd, William E.