uction acts, which divided the South into five military districts and laid out strict guidelines for the readmission of the Confederate states into the Union. The new laws required the southern states to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment and to guarantee blacks the right to vote. The radical Republicans were angered by Johnson's attempts to block the Reconstruction measures, and they instituted impeachment proceedings against him, the first time a president underwent this ordeal. The impeachment measure fell one vote short of the two-thirds majority in the House and Senate needed to remove Johnson from office, but the president exercised little power during the last two years of his term. During the 1868 presidential contest, Douglass campaigned for the Republican candidate, Ulysses S. Grant, the former commander in chief of the Union army. In a famous speech, "The Work Before Us," Douglass attacked the Democratic party for ignoring black citizens and warned about the rise in the South of white supremacist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan. These secret societies attempted to intimidate blacks with fire and the hangman's noose. They also attacked "Yankee carpetbaggers" (northerners who had flooded into the South at the end of the Civil War) and "scalawags" (southern whites who cooperated with the federal Reconstruction authorities). Douglass feared that the terrorist tactics of the Klan would succeed in frightening blacks into giving up the civil rights they had gained in the South. "Rebellion has been subdued, slavery abolished, and peace proclaimed," he said, "and yet our work is not done.....We are face to face with the same old enemy of liberty and progress.....The South today is a field of blood." Black voters came out strongly for the Republicans in the 1868 elections, helping Grant win the presidency. With Grant in office, the Fifteenth Amendment passed through Congress and was submitted to the states for ratification. This am...
