discharge of their duties and to keep the peace at the polls.

These laws, the Republican authors urged, were designed to safeguard the purity of the ballot, not only in the South but also in the North, and particularly in New York, where it was claimed that fraud was regularly employed by the Democratic leaders. John Sherman declared that the Democrats in Congress would be a "pitiful minority, if those elected by fraud and bloodshed were debarred," adding that, "in the South one million Republicans are disfranchised." Democrats, on the other hand, replied that these laws were nothing more than a part of a gigantic scheme originated by the Republicans to fasten their rule upon the country forever by systematic interference with elections. Democratic suspicions were strengthened by reports of many scandals—for instance, that the supervisors in Louisiana under the Republican régime had registered "eight thousand more colored voters than there were in the state when the census was taken four years later." Undoubtedly, there were plenty of frauds on both sides, and it is an open question whether Federal interference reduced or increased the amount.

At all events, the Democrats, finding themselves in a majority in the House of Representatives in 1877, determined to secure the repeal of the "force laws," and in their desperation they resorted to the practice of attaching their repeal measures to appropriation bills in the hope of compelling President Hayes to sign them or tying up the wheels of government by a stoppage in finances. Hayes was equal to the occasion, and by a vigorous use of the veto power he defeated the direct assaults of the Democrats on the election laws. At length, however, in June, 1878, he was compelled to accept a "rider" in the form of a proviso to the annual appropriation bill for the army making it impossible for United States marshals to employ federal troops in the execution of the election laws. While this did not satisfy the Democrats by any means, because it still left Federal supervision under the marshals, their deputies and the election supervisors, it took away the main prop of the Republicans in the South—the use of troops at elections.

The effect of this achievement on the part of the Democrats was apparent in the succeeding congressional election, for they were able to carry all of the southern districts except four. This cannot be attributed, however, entirely to the suppression of the negro vote, for there was a general landslide in 1878 which gave the Democrats a substantial majority in both the House and the Senate. Inasmuch as a spirit of toleration was growing up in Congress, the clause of the Fourteenth Amendment excluding from Congress certain persons formerly connected with the Confederacy, was not strictly enforced, and several of the most prominent and active representatives of the old régime found their way into both houses. Under their vigorous leadership a two years' political war was waged between Congress and the President over the repeal of the force bills, but Hayes won the day, because the Democrats could not secure the requisite two-thirds vote to carry their measures against the presidential veto.

However, the Supreme Court had been undermining the "force laws" by nullifying separate sections, although it upheld the general principle of the election laws against a contention that elections were wholly within the control of state authorities. In the case of United States v. Reese, the Court, in 1875, declared void two sections of the law of 1870 "because they did not strictly limit Federal jurisdiction for protection of the right to vote to cases where the right was denied by a state," but extended it to denials by private parties. In the same year in the case of United States v. Cruikshank the Court gave another blow to Federal control, in the South. A number of private citizens in Louisiana had waged war on the blacks at an election riot, and one of them, Cruikshank, was charged with conspiracy to deprive negroes of rights which they enjoyed under the protection of the United States. The Supreme Court, however, held that the Federal government had no authority to protect the citizens of a state against one another, but that such protection was, as always, a duty of the state itself. Seven years later the Supreme Court, in the case of United States v. Harris, declared null that part of the enforcement laws which penalized conspiracies of two or more citizens to deprive another of his rights, on the same ground as advanced in the Louisiana case.[1]

On the withdrawal of Federal troops and the open abandonment of the policy of military coercion, the whites, seeing that the Federal courts were not inclined to interfere, quickly completed the process of obtaining control over the machinery of state government. That process had been begun shortly after the War, taking the form of intimidation at the polls. It was carried forward another step when the "carpet baggers" and other politicians who had organized and used the negro vote were deprived of Federal support and driven out. When this active outside interference in southern politics was cut off, thousands of negroes stayed away from the polls through sheer indifference, for their interest in politics had been stimulated by artificial forces—bribery and absurd promises. Intimidation and indifference worked a widespread disfranchisement before the close of the seventies.

These early stages in the process of disfranchisement were described by Senator Tillman in his famous speech of February 26, 1900. "You stood up there and insisted that we give these people a 'free vote and a fair count.' They had it for eight years, as long as the bayonets stood there.... We preferred to have a United States army officer rather than a government of carpet baggers and thieves and scallywags and scoundrels who had stolen everything in sight and mortgaged posterity; who had run their felonious paws into the pockets of posterity by issuing bonds. When that happened we took the government away. We stuffed the ballot boxes. We shot them. We are not ashamed of it. With that system—force, tissue ballots, etc.—we got tired ourselves. So we had a constitutional convention, and we eliminated, as I said, all of the colored people whom we could under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments." The experience of South Carolina was duplicated in Mississippi. "For a time," said the Hon. Thomas Spight, of that state, in Congress, in 1904, "we were compelled to employ methods that were extremely distasteful and very demoralizing, but now we are accomplishing the same and even better results by strictly constitutional and legal procedure." It should be said, however, that in the states where the negro population was relatively smaller, violence was not necessary to exclude the negroes from the polls.

A peaceful method of disfranchising negroes and poor whites was the imposition of a poll tax on voters. Negroes seldom paid their taxes until the fight over prohibition commenced in the eighties and nineties. Then the liquor interests began to pay the negroes' poll taxes and by a generous distribution of their commodities were able to carry the day at the polls. Thereupon the prohibitionists determined to find some effective constitutional means of excluding the negroes from voting.

This last stage in the disfranchisement process—the disqualification of negroes by ingenious constitutional and statutory provisions—was hastened by the rise during the eighties and nineties of the radical or Populist party in