With developments in the South increasingly frustrating Republicans, the Thirty-Ninth Congress moved in its "lame duck" session to pass a sweeping bill that imposed military rule on the former Confederate states until they instituted the reforms the Congress deemed as needed for normal and full representation on the national stage. The Reconstruction Act of 1867 had been formulated in the Joint Committee on Reconstruction of the Thirty-Ninth Congress and reported as a bill on February 3, 1867. The bill passed the House on this day by a vote of 109 to 55, with another twenty-four members not voting. The U.S. Senate passed an amended version three days later. President Johnson vetoed the bill on March 2, 1867 but this was over-ridden in both chambers on the same day and it became law. (By John Osborne)
William MacDonald (ed.), Documentary Source Book of American History, 1606-1913 (New York: Macmillan Company, 1920), 502.
