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 reconstruction,” also resorted to a famous provision known as “the grandfather clause.”  This plan admitted to the suffrage any man who did not have either property or educational qualifications, provided he had voted on or before 1867 or was the son or grandson of any such person.

The devices worked effectively.  Of the 147,000 negroes in Mississippi above the age of twenty-one, only about 8600 registered under the constitution of 1890.  Louisiana had 127,000 colored voters enrolled in 1896; under the constitution drafted two years later the registration fell to 5300.  An analysis of the figures for South Carolina in 1900 indicates that only about one negro out of every hundred adult males of that race took part in elections.  Thus was closed this chapter of reconstruction.