twenty years all of the cotton
States except Florida and Texas followed its example. Arkansas based
the franchise on a one year poll tax in 1893; South Carolina required
residence, enrollment, and poll tax in 1895; Delaware adopted an
educational test in 1897, Louisiana resorted to the same test and poll
tax in 1898 and North Carolina fell in line in 1900. Alabama
established the residence, registry and poll tax requirement in 1901;
and Virginia, Georgia and Oklahoma based suffrage on property,
literacy or poll tax in 1902, 1908, and 1910 respectively. As these
measures bore heavily also upon certain ignorant whites they were
relieved of this disability by the "Grandfather Clause" specifying
that the persons deprived by these regulations of the right to vote
might be placed upon the roll of voters if they had exercised this
privilege before the year 1867 or were descended from such voters.
This was essentially the clause adopted in North Carolina, Alabama,
Virginia, and Georgia.[24] The Supreme Court, however, has declared
the "Grandfather Clause" a violation of the Fifteenth Amendment.

During the campaigns after 1888 the Republican party made no special
mention of the Negro as it had formerly and did not show any
inclination to shoulder the grievances of the race. At this time the
Republicans were face to face with a large element of political
reformers led by the Democrats who, prior to the campaign of 1884 had
carried Pennsylvania and New York and made such other inroads in
northern strongholds as to convince the leaders of the Republican
party that the Negro issue and the "bloody shirt" would no longer
suffice to hold those voters who had been won by the intelligent
appeal for deliverance from the corrupt practices in the local and
national governments. This movement culminated in the election of
Grover Cleveland in 1884 and in his election the second time in 1892.

To attach Negroes to their cause, to be sure, the Republicans were
very deferential to them in the national conventions, where they were
of much service in naming candidates for the national ticket although
they could not vote in the South and were not sufficiently numerous in
the North to be a large factor at the polls. At the convention in
1884, the national committee had named ex-Senator Powell Clayton of
Arkansas as temporary chairman of the convention, an arrangement which
was supposed to be in the interest of Mr. Blaine. The young men of
the par