The Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified in 1870 to protect the suffrage of freedmen after the American Civil War. It prevented any state from denying the right to vote to any citizen on account of his race.
African Americans were an absolute majority of the population in Mississippi, Louisiana and South Carolina, and represented over 40% of the population in four other former Confederate states. Southern conservative whites resisted the freedmen's exercise of political power, fearing black domination. During Reconstruction, blacks controlled a majority of the vote in states such as South Carolina. White supremacist paramilitary organizations allied with the Democratic Party practiced intimidation, violence and assassinations to repress and prevent blacks' exercising their civil and voting rights in elections from 1868 through the mid-1870s. In most Southern states, black voting decreased markedly under such pressure, and white Democrats regained political control of Southern legislatures and governors' offices in the 1870s.
In the 1880s, white Southern legislators began devising statutes that created more barriers to voting by blacks and poor whites. Results could be seen in states such as Tennessee. After Reconstruction, Tennessee had the most "consistently competitive political system in the South". A bitter election battle in 1888 marked by unmatched corruption and violence resulted in white Democrats' taking over the state legislature. To consolidate their power, they worked to suppress the black vote and sharply reduced it through changes in voter registration, election procedures and poll taxes.
From 1890 to 1908, starting with Mississippi, Southern Democratic legislators created new constitutions with provisions for voter registration that effectively completed disfranchisement of most African Americans and many poor whites. They created a variety of barriers, including requirements for poll taxes, residency requirements, rule variations, literacy and understanding tests, that achieved power through selective application against minorities, or were particularly hard for the poor to fulfill.
The constitutional provisions survived Supreme Court challenges in cases such as Williams v. Mississippi (1898) and Giles v. Harris (1903). In practice, these provisions, including white primaries, created a maze that blocked most African Americans and many poor whites from voting in Southern states for decades after the turn of the century. Voter registration and turnout dropped sharply across the South. The impact and longevity of disfranchisement can be seen at the feature "Turnout for Presidential and Midterm Elections" at the University of Texas Politics: Historical Barriers to Voting page. It shows results for Texas, the South overall, and the rest of the United States.
Disfranchisement attracted attention of Congress, and some members proposed stripping the South of seats related to the numbers of people who were barred from voting. In the end, Congress did not act to change apportionment. For decades white Southern Democrats exercised Congressional representation derived from a full count of the population, but they disfranchised several million black and white citizens. Southern white Democrats comprised a powerful voting block in Congress until the mid-20th century. Their power allowed them to defeat legislation against lynching, among other issues. Because of the one-party control, many Southern Democrats achieved seniority in Congress and occupied chairmanships of significant Congressional committees, thus increasing their power over legislation, budgets and important patronage projects.
Reconstruction, KKK, and redemption
Between 1864 and 1866 ten of the eleven Confederate states inaugurated governments that did not provide suffrage and equal civil rights to freedmen. Because of this, Congress refused to readmit these states to the Union and established military districts to oversee affairs until the state governments could be reconstructed.
The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) formed in 1865 and quickly became a powerful secret vigilante group, with chapters across the South, during early Reconstruction. It was one form of insurgency after the Civil War, as armed veterans in the South began varied forms of resistance. The Klan tried to keep black citizens from using their new citizenship and voting power. Starting in 1866, the KKK tried to prevent blacks from voting and from participating in new governments. It carried out lynchings, intimidation, and other attacks against blacks and allied whites, and their property.
The Klan's murders moved the Congress to pass laws to end it. In 1870 the strongly Republican Congress passed an act imposing fines and damages for conspiracy to deprive blacks of the suffrage.
The Force Act of 1870 was used to reduce the power of the KKK. The Federal government banned the use of terror, force or bribery to prevent someone from voting because of his race. It empowered the President to employ the armed forces to suppress organizations which deprived people of rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. For such organizations to appear in arms was made rebellion against the United States. The President could suspend habeas corpus in that area.
President Ulysses S. Grant used these provisions in parts of the Carolinas in the fall of 1871. United States marshals supervised state voter registrations and elections, so they could command the help of military or naval forces if needed.
More significant in terms of their effects were paramilitary organizations that arose in the 1870s as part of continuing insurgent resistance in the South. Groups included the White League, formed in Louisiana in 1874 out of white militias, with chapters forming in other Deep South states; the Red Shirts, formed in 1875 in Mississippi but also active in North Carolina and South Carolina; and other "White Liners" such as rifle clubs. Compared to the Klan, they were open societies, better organized, and often solicited newspaper coverage for publicity. Made up of well-armed Confederate veterans, a class that covered most adult men who could have fought in the war, they worked for political aims: to turn Republicans out of office, disrupt their organizing, and use force to intimidate and terrorize freedmen to keep them from the polls. They have been described as "the military arm of the Democratic Party." They were instrumental in many southern states in driving blacks away from the polls and ensuring a white Democratic takeover in most states of legislatures and governorships in the elections of 1876.
State disfranchising constitutions, 1890-1908
See also: Voting rights in the United StatesDespite white Southerners' complaints about Reconstruction, several of the Southern states had kept most provisions of their Reconstruction constitutions for more than two decades, until late in the 19th century. In some states the number of blacks elected to local offices reached a peak in the 1880s. State legislatures passed more restrictions on African Americans. From laws that made election rules and voter registration more complicated, the legislatures moved to new constitutions. Florida passed a new constitution in 1885 that included provisions for poll taxes as a prerequisite for voter registration and voting. From 1890 to 1908, ten of the eleven Southern states rewrote their constitutions. All included provisions that restricted voter registration and suffrage, including new requirements for poll taxes, residency and literacy tests.
With educational improvements, by 1891, the rate of black illiteracy in the South had declined to 58 percent. The white rate of illiteracy in the South was 31 percent. Some states used grandfather clauses to exempt white voters from literacy tests. Other states required black voters to satisfy literacy and understanding administered by white registrars, who subjectively applied criteria, in the process rejecting most black voters. By 1900 the majority of blacks had achieved literacy, but even many of the best-educated "failed" literacy tests administered by white registrars.
The historian J. Morgan Kousser noted, "Within the Democratic party, the chief impetus for restriction came from the black belt members," whom he identified as "always socioeconomically privileged." In addition to wanting to affirm white supremacy, the planter and business elite were also concerned about voting by lower-class and uneducated whites. "They disfranchised these whites as willingly as they deprived blacks of the vote." While other historians have found more complexity in the support of disfranchisement, competition between white elites and lower classes, and the attempt to prevent alliances between lower class whites and African Americans, have both formed part of the motivation for voter restrictions.
With passage of new constitutions, Southern states adopted provisions that caused disfranchisement of large portions of their populations by skirting US constitutional protections of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments. While their voter registration requirements applied to all citizens, in practice they disfranchised most blacks and also "would remove the less educated, less organized, more impoverished whites as well - and that would ensure one-party Democratic rules through most of the 20th century in the South."
There were several negative effects of Reconstruction. For the Republican Party Reconstruction rubbed salt into the wounds of Southern whites,
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