who supervised elections in the south during reconstruction
Reconstruction Era As Confederate states came back under control of the U.S. Army, President Abraham Lincoln set up reconstructed governments in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana during the war. He experimented by giving land to blacks in South Carolina. By fall 1865, the new President Andrew Johnson declared the war goals of national unity and the ending of slavery achieved and reconstruction completed. Republicans in Congress, refusing to accept Johnson's lenient terms, rejected new members of Congress, some of whom had been high-ranking Confederate officials a few months before. Johnson broke with the Republicans after vetoing two key bills that supported the Freedmen's Bureau and provided federal civil rights to the freedmen. The 1866 Congressional elections turned on the issue of Reconstruction, producing a sweeping Republican victory in the North, and providing the Radical Republicans with sufficient control of Congress to override Johnson's vetoes and commence their own "Radical Reconstruction" in 1867.[9] That same year, Congress removed civilian governments in the South, and placed the former Confederacy under the rule of the U.S. Army.[10] The army conducted new elections in which the freed slaves could vote, while whites who had held leading positions under the Confederacy were temporarily denied the vote and were not permitted to run for office.