Having wrested control over Reconstruction policy from President Andrew Johnson, Congressional Republicans wrote their own Reconstruction Act. In addition to considerable confusion over who was eligible to vote, white Southerners often refused to participate in the elections and constitutional convention process. Border South states were seeing the erosion of their proscriptive measures. Former Confederate states varied in the severity of the political disabilities they imposed on former Confederates. Like blacks and women, former Confederates claimed they needed the vote to protect themselves and the Union from a centralizing and oppressive federal government. At the same time, Congress was relieving many former Confederates of their Fourteenth Amendment-imposed inability to hold office. Despite much white southern rhetoric about the horrors of bayonet rule under the Reconstruction and Enforcement Acts, white Southerners used violence and fraud to regain control of the former Confederate states.