=The Supreme Court Refuses to Intervene.=—­Numerous efforts were made to prevail upon the Supreme Court of the United States to declare such laws unconstitutional; but the Court, usually on technical grounds, avoided coming to a direct decision on the merits of the matter.  In one case the Court remarked that it could not take charge of and operate the election machinery of Alabama; it concluded that “relief from a great political wrong, if done as alleged, by the people of a state and by the state itself, must be given by them, or by the legislative and executive departments of the government of the United States.”  Only one of the several schemes employed, namely, the “grandfather clause,” was held to be a violation of the federal Constitution.  This blow, effected in 1915 by the decision in the Oklahoma and Maryland cases, left, however, the main structure of disfranchisement unimpaired.

=Proposals to Reduce Southern Representation in Congress.=—­These provisions excluding thousands of male citizens from the ballot did not, in express terms, deprive any one of the vote on account of race or color.  They did not, therefore, run counter to the letter of the fifteenth amendment; but they did unquestionably make the states which adopted them liable to the operations of the fourteenth amendment.  The latter very explicitly provides that whenever any state deprives adult male citizens of the right to vote (except in certain minor cases) the representation of the state in Congress shall be reduced in the proportion which such number of disfranchised citizens bears to the whole number of male citizens over twenty-one years of age.

Mindful of this provision, those who protested against disfranchisement in the South turned to the Republican party for relief, asking for action by the political branches of the federal government as the Supreme Court had suggested.  The Republicans responded in their platform of 1908 by condemning all devices designed to deprive any one of the ballot for reasons of color alone; they demanded the enforcement in letter and spirit of the fourteenth as well as all other amendments.  Though victorious in the election, the Republicans refrained from reopening the ancient contest; they made no attempt to reduce Southern representation in the House.  Southern leaders, while protesting against the declarations of their opponents, were able to view them as idle threats in no way endangering the security of the measures by which political reconstruction had been undone.

=The Solid South.=—­Out of the thirty-year conflict against “carpet-bag rule” there emerged what was long known as the “solid South”—­a South that, except occasionally in the border states, never gave an electoral vote to a Republican candidate for President.  Before the Civil War, the Southern people had been divided on political questions.  Take, for example, the election of 1860.  In all the fifteen slave states the variety of opinion was