March 2, 1867, after two years of peace, Congress passed over President Johnson's veto a bill relegating the southern states to the condition of conquered provinces. A military commander was appointed and authorized to supersede civil and judicial tribunals by military courts of his own creation, with power to inflict usual punishments, excepting only death. This act was supplemented with another, of July 13, forbidding state authorities to interfere with the military commander, who was given the additional power to displace any official and appoint his successor. This act provided that military rule should cease within a state when a convention of the people thereof should frame, and the voters adopt, a constitution ratifying the amendment to the federal Constitution which conferred the suffrage on negroes, and being otherwise acceptable to Congress, and when the legislature also should ratify that amendment. The new constitution was to be framed by delegates to be chosen by votes of all male citizens of legal age, excepting those disfranchised by the fourteenth amendment; and it was to be ratified by an affirmative vote of a majority of voters registered under the supervision of the military commander and his subalterns. Under the reconstruction acts of 1867, in April of that year, Alabama became a part of the department comprising, with itself, the states of Georgia and Florida. The military commander called a convention to frame a constitution. At the election for delegates the polls were kept open for five days. The whites held aloof from it. The gathering of delegates thus elected was stigmatized as "the carpetbaggers' convention." The men who composed it and framed the constitution were in many cases grossly corrupt and ignorant.