n 1878 the Democrats even won a majority in the Senate
and returned to power a large number of men once prominent in the
Confederate cause.

The passions of the war by this time were evidently cooling. A new
generation of men was coming on the scene. The supremacy of the whites
in the South, if not yet complete, was at least assured. Federal
marshals, their deputies, and supervisors of elections still possessed
authority over the polls, but their strength had been shorn by the
withdrawal of United States troops. The war on the remaining remnants of
the "force bills" lapsed into desultory skirmishing. When in 1894 the
last fragment was swept away, the country took little note of the fact.
The only task that lay before the Southern leaders was to write in the
constitutions of their respective states the provisions of law which
would clinch the gains so far secured and establish white supremacy
beyond the reach of outside intervention.

=White Supremacy Sealed by New State Constitutions.=--The impetus to
this final step was given by the rise of the Populist movement in the
South, which sharply divided the whites and in many communities threw
the balance of power into the hands of the few colored voters who
survived the process of intimidation. Southern leaders now devised new
constitutions so constructed as to deprive negroes of the ballot by law.
Mississippi took the lead in 1890; South Carolina followed five years
later; Louisiana, in 1898; North Carolina, in 1900; Alabama and
Maryland, in 1901; and Virginia, in 1902.

The authors of these measures made no attempt to conceal their purposes.
"The intelligent white men of the South," said Governor Tillman, "intend
to govern here." The fifteenth amendment to the federal Constitution,
however, forbade them to deprive any citizen of the right to vote on
account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. This made
necessary the devices of indirection. They were few, simple, and
effective. The first and most easily administered was the ingenious
provision requiring each prospective voter to read a section of the
state constitution or "understand and explain it" when read to him by
the election officers. As an alternative, the payment of taxes or the
ownership of a small amount of property was accepted as a qualification
for voting. Southern leaders, unwilling to disfranchise any of the poor
white men who had stood side by side with them "in the dark days of
reconstr