In 1870, to enforce Reconstruction, Congress and Grant created the Justice Department that allowed the Attorney General and the new Solicitor General to prosecute the Klan. Congress and Grant passed a series of Enforcement Acts, designed to protect blacks and Reconstruction governments. Using the powers of the Enforcement Acts, Grant crushed the Ku Klux Klan, but in both his terms Blacks lost political strength in the Southern United States. By October, Grant suspended "habeas corpus" in part of South Carolina and sent federal troops to help marshals, who initiated prosecutions. Grant's Attorney General, Amos T. Akerman, who replaced Hoar, was zealous to destroy the Klan. Akerman and South Carolina's U.S. marshal arrested over 470 Klan members, while hundreds of Klansmen, including the wealthy leaders, fled the state. By 1872 the Klan's power had collapsed, and African Americans voted in record numbers in elections in the South. Attorney General George H. Williams, Akerman's replacement, in the Spring of 1873, suspended prosecutions of the Klan in North Carolina and South Carolina, but prior to the election of 1874, he changed course and prosecuted the Klan.