The passage of the Reconstruction Acts by the U.S. Congress in 1867 set in motion a remarkable experiment. Because this legislation (passed over the objections of President Andrew Johnson [1808–1875; served 1865–69] and many white Southerners) guaranteed participation by all the citizens of the South—whether black or white—this experiment was truly revolutionary. For the first time in the nation's history, the state governments of the South (including the eleven that had formed the Confederacy, which had in 1861 seceded or broken away from the rest of the United States, sparking the Civil War [1861–65]) would take the form of multiracial democracies.

In a region that had once been the setting for the enslavement of four million blacks (brought from Africa since the seventeenth century and forced to work without pay on white farms, plantations, and households), people of both African and white European heritage were participating...