Redeemers By 1876, "
Redeemer" Democrats had taken control of all state governments in the South. From then until the 1960s, state and local government in the South was almost entirely monopolized by Democrats. The Democrats elected all but a handful of U.S. Representatives and Senators, and Democratic presidential candidates regularly swept the region – from 1880 through 1944, winning a cumulative total of 182 of 187 states. The Democrats reinforced the loyalty of white voters by emphasizing the suffering of the South during the war at the hands of "
Yankee invaders" under Republican leadership, and the noble service of their white forefathers in "
the Lost Cause". This rhetoric was effective with many Southerners. However, this
propaganda was totally ineffective in areas that had been loyal to the Union during the war, such as
East Tennessee. Most of East Tennessee welcomed U.S. troops as liberators, and voted Republican even in the Solid South period. Despite White Southerners' complaints about Reconstruction, several Southern states kept most provisions of their Reconstruction constitutions for more than two decades, until late in the 19th century. Disfranchisement of African Americans was a gradual and sometimes haphazard process, and began first in the
Deep South states that had the largest African American populations. In Georgia, a poll tax was first imposed in 1877. In South Carolina, an indirect literacy test and multiple-ballot box law, called the "Eight Box Law," was enacted in 1882. Even after white Democrats regained control of state legislatures, some black candidates were elected to local offices and state legislatures in the South. Black U.S. Representatives were elected from the South as late as the 1890s, usually from overwhelmingly black areas. Intimidation of African American voters and outright
electoral fraud were common, before widespread disfranchisement began after the failure of the
Lodge Bill of 1890.
Third parties In Virginia, the bi-racial
Readjuster Party existed from 1877 to 1895, electing
William E. Cameron in
1881 as the 39th
Governor of Virginia from 1882 to 1886.
William Mahone served as a U.S. Senator from Virginia from 1881 to 1887 as a member of the Readjuster Party. Democratic president
Grover Cleveland narrowly won
Virginia in 1884 51.05% to 48.90%, and won
Virginia in 1888 by just 49.99% to 49.46%, a 0.53 percentage point margin and the closest the Republican Party came to winning a former Confederate state until
Warren G. Harding won
Tennessee in 1920. In Arkansas, the
1888 and
1890 gubernatorial elections were competitive, with Democrat
James Philip Eagle winning only 54.09% to 45.91% and 55.51% to 44.49%, respectively. Eagle ran against a
fusion ticket of the
Union Labor and Republican parties, with the Republican party endorsing the Union Labor party candidates. Wealthy white landowners were extremely angry that poor blacks and whites might be uniting against them. In 1891, the Arkansas Democratic Party thus introduced a poll tax that would weigh extremely heavily upon poor Union Labor supporters and also introduced the
secret ballot which would make it more difficult for illiterate blacks and poor whites to cast a vote even if they could pay the poll tax.
Populist Party (1897 to 1901) The
People's Party, usually known as the Populist Party or simply the Populists, was an
agrarian populist party political party that was founded in 1892. The Populists developed a following in the South, among
poor white people who resented the Democratic Party establishment. Populists formed alliances with Republicans (including black Republicans) and challenged the Democratic
bosses. In some cases, the Populists and their allies defeated their Democratic opponents. Unfortunately, the success of the Populist Party was a major impetus for even more thorough disfranchisement. The Populist Party was dissolved in 1909, by which point disfranchisement of African Americans was virtually complete. The Populist Party did win some U.S. House seats in the former Confederate states, including
Thomas E. Watson of Georgia (1891–1893) and several representatives in North Carolina. The Populists also elected North Carolina U.S. Senator
Marion Butler (1895–1901). In North Carolina, Republican
Daniel Lindsay Russell was
elected Governor of North Carolina in 1896 on a
fusionist ticket, a collaboration between Republicans and
Populists, and served as the 49th
governor of North Carolina from 1897 to 1901. On November 8, 1898, a part-black fusion slate won elections in
Wilmington, then the state's largest city and with a black majority.
Alfred Waddell, whom Russell had defeated for Congress in 1878, led thousands of white rioters in the
Wilmington Insurrection of 1898; they seized the city government by force, and destroyed the only black-owned newspaper in the state. Although Russell was not up for election in 1898, Democrats used him as a foil in their campaign that year, attacking him for undermining "white supremacy" and fanning fears of "negro rule" to regain control of the state legislature. To prevent fusionist coalitions or Republicans winning office again, in 1899 the Democrats used their control of the North Carolina legislature to pass an amendment that effectively disenfranchised blacks and many poor whites. As a result, voter rolls dropped dramatically, blacks were excluded from the political system, and the Republican Party was crippled in the state. In Alabama,
Reuben Kolb sought to unite poor farmers and sharecroppers with industrial workers and Black voters as a Populist in
1892 and
1894. The gubernatorial elections he lost in 1892 and 1894 are considered to have had widespread vote tampering and fraud. In 1894, Kolb retreated from his brief flirtation with the idea of Black rights, "a telling reflection of the shallow commitment of Kolb and many of his followers to the notion of racial equality." And, after the Populist party's electoral failure in
1896, "Kolb confessed his apostasy and pathetically pleaded to be allowed to return to the party of white supremacy." In Louisiana, the
1896 Louisiana gubernatorial election was competitive, with incumbent Democratic governor
Murphy J. Foster defeating the Republican-Populist
fusion candidate John Newton Pharr (1829–1903), a sugar planter from
St. Mary Parish. Pharr had possibly gained a majority of votes cast and won twenty-six of the then fifty-nine parishes, with his greatest strength in north central Louisiana and the
Florida Parishes to the east of
Baton Rouge. With the assistance of the Democratic
political machine based in New Orleans, Foster officially received 116,116 votes (57 percent) to Pharr's 87,698 ballots (43 percent). The election was heavily marked by fraud which benefited Foster and widespread violence to suppress black Republican voting, and a clear accounting of the election results is unknown. Subsequently, as governor, Foster signed off on the new Louisiana Constitution of 1898, establishing a poll tax, literacy test, grandfather clause, and the secret ballot that made voting by poor whites much more difficult and producing a reduction in the number of registered black voters by 96 percent, from 130,334 to 5,320. After Foster's re-election in 1896, Louisiana general elections were non-competitive. The only competition took place in Democratic primaries. In Georgia,
Thomas E. Watson had long supported black enfranchisement throughout the South, as a basic tenet of his populist philosophy. However, after 1900 Watson's interpretation of populism shifted. He no longer viewed the populist movement as being racially inclusive. By 1908, Watson identified as a
white supremacist and ran as such during his presidential bid. He used his highly influential magazine and newspaper to launch vehement diatribes against blacks.
Disfranchisement in March 1889. The senators from Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Washington, and Wyoming were not seated until later in the Congress. To prevent bi-racial and Populist coalitions in the future and to stop relying on violence and electoral fraud associated with suppressing the black vote during elections, Southern Democrats acted to disfranchise both black people and poor white people. From 1890 to 1910, after the failure of the
Lodge Bill and beginning with
Mississippi in 1890, all 11 former Confederate states adopted new constitutions and other laws which included various devices to restrict voter registration. These changes disfranchised virtually all black and many poor white residents. These devices applied to all citizens; in practice they disfranchised most black citizens and also "would remove [from voter registration rolls] the less educated, less organized, more impoverished whites as well – and that would ensure one-party Democratic rules through most of the 20th century in the South". All the Southern states adopted provisions that restricted voter registration and suffrage, including new requirements for
poll taxes, longer residency, and subjective
literacy tests. Some also used the device of
grandfather clauses, exempting voters who had a grandfather voting by a particular year (usually before the Civil War, when black people could not vote.) In 1900, U.S. Senator
Benjamin Tillman explained how African Americans were disenfranchised in his state of South Carolina in a white supremacist speech: In my State there were 135,000 negro voters, or negroes of voting age, and some 90,000 or 95,000 white voters.... Now, I want to ask you, with a free vote and a fair count, how are you going to beat 135,000 by 95,000? How are you going to do it? You had set us an impossible task.We did not disfranchise the negroes until 1895. Then we had a constitutional convention convened which took the matter up calmly, deliberately, and avowedly with the purpose of disfranchising as many of them as we could under the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments. We adopted the educational qualification as the only means left to us, and the negro is as contented and as prosperous and as well protected in South Carolina to-day as in any State of the Union south of the
Potomac. He is not meddling with politics, for he found that the more he meddled with them the worse off he got. As to his "rights"—I will not discuss them now. We of the South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men, and we never will.... I would to God the last one of them was in Africa and that none of them had ever been brought to our shores. White Democrats passed "
Jim Crow" laws which reinforced
white supremacy through
racial segregation. The
Fourteenth Amendment provided for apportionment of representation in Congress to be reduced if a state disenfranchised part of its population. However, this clause was never applied to Southern states that disenfranchised black residents. No black candidate was elected to any office in the South for decades after the
turn of the century. Black residents were also excluded from
juries and other participation in civil life. The border state of Kentucky still remained a Democratic stronghold in presidential elections, even though it did not disenfranchise African Americans. The
German-American Texas counties of
Gillespie and
Kendall, Arkansas
Ozarks counties of
Newton and
Searcy, and a number of counties in
Appalachian parts of Alabama and Georgia would vote Republican in presidential elections through this period. Arkansas consistently voted Democratic from 1876 to 1964, though Democratic margins were lower than in the Deep South. In Louisiana, non-partisan tendencies remained strong among wealthy sugar planters in
Acadiana (
Cajun Country) and within the business elite of
New Orleans. In
East Tennessee,
Western North Carolina, and
Southwest Virginia, Republicans retained a significant presence in these remote Appalachian regions which supported the Union during the Civil War and had few African Americans, winning occasional U.S. House seats and often drawing over 40% in presidential votes statewide. In particular, Tennessee's
1st and
2nd congressional districts have been continuously held by Republicans since 1881 and 1867, respectively, to the present day. Although Tennessee disenfranchised African Americans, support for Republicans remained high in East Tennessee and kept the state relatively competitive during the Jim Crow era, although Democrats almost always still won statewide.
1920s onward , all the former
Confederate states except Tennessee voted for the Democratic Party, and all other states except Kentucky voted for the Republican Party. By the 1920s, as memories of the Civil War faded, the Solid South cracked slightly. For instance,
a Republican was elected U.S. Representative from Texas in 1920, serving until 1932. The Republican national landslides in 1920 and 1928 had some effects. In the 1920 elections, Tennessee elected
a Republican governor and five out of 10 Republican U.S. Representatives, and became the first former Confederate state to vote for a Republican candidate for U.S. President since Reconstruction. North Carolina abolished its poll tax in 1920. In the
1928 presidential election,
Al Smith received serious backlash as a Catholic in the largely Protestant South in 1928. Southern Baptist churches ordered their followers to vote against Smith, claiming that he would close down Protestant churches, end freedom of worship, and prohibit reading the Bible. It reached southeastern Alabama in 1909, and by the mid-1920s had entered all cotton-growing regions in the U.S., traveling 40 to 160 miles per year. The boll weevil contributed to Southern farmers' economic woes during the 1920s, a situation exacerbated by the
Great Depression in the 1930s. The boll weevil infestation has been credited with bringing about economic diversification in the Southern US, including the expansion of
peanut cropping. The citizens of
Enterprise, Alabama, erected the
Boll Weevil Monument in 1919, perceiving that their economy had been overly dependent on cotton, and that mixed farming and manufacturing were better alternatives. By 1922, it was taking 8% of the cotton in the country annually. A 2020 NBER paper found that the boll weevil spread contributed to fewer lynchings, less Confederate monument construction, less KKK activity, and higher non-white voter registration. Southern demography also began to change. From 1910 through 1970, about 6.5 million black Southerners moved to urban areas in other parts of the country in the
Great Migration, and demographics began to change Southern states in other ways. The failures of the South's cotton crop due to the boll weevil was a major impetus for the Great Migration, although not the only one. However, with the Democratic national landslide of 1932, the South again became solidly Democratic. A number of conservative Southern Democrats felt chagrin at the national party's growing friendliness to organized labor during the
Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, forming the
conservative coalition with conservative Republicans in 1937 to stymie further New Deal legislation. Roosevelt was unsuccessful in attempting to purge some of these conservative
Southern Democrats in white primaries in the
1938 elections, such as Senator
Walter George of Georgia and Senator
Ellison Smith of South Carolina, in contrast to successfully ousting representative and chair of the
House Rules Committee John J. O'Connor of New York. In the 1930s, black voters outside the South largely switched to the Democrats, and other groups with an interest in civil rights (notably Jews, Catholics, and academic intellectuals) became more powerful in the party. as did Florida in 1937. The Republican Party began to make gains in the South after
World War II, as the South industrialized and urbanized. Florida began to expand rapidly after World War II, with retirees and other migrants in
Central and
South Florida becoming a majority of the state's population. Many of these new residents brought their Republican voting habits with them, diluting traditional Southern hostility to the Republicans. In 1944, the Supreme Court ruled 8–1 in
Smith v. Allwright against
white primary systems, and most Southern states ended their racially discriminatory primary elections. They retained other techniques of disenfranchisement, such as
poll taxes and
literacy tests, which in theory applied to all potential voters, but in practice were administered in a discriminatory manner by white officials.
Oklahoma won Oklahoma in the
1920 presidential election, while losing all the former Confederate states except Tennessee.
Oklahoma was considered part of the Solid South, but did not
become a state until 1907, and shared characteristics of both the border states and the former Confederate states in the
Upper South. Oklahoma disenfranchised its African American population, which
comprised less than 10% of the state's population from 1870 to 1960. However, Oklahoma did not enact a poll tax and remained electorally competitive at the state and federal levels during the Jim Crow era. Oklahoma had a strong Republican presence in
Northwestern Oklahoma, which had close ties to neighboring
Kansas, a Republican stronghold. During the Civil War, most of present-day Oklahoma was designated as
Indian Territory and
permitted slavery, with most tribal leaders aligning with the Confederacy. However,
some tribes and bands sided with the Union, resulting in bloody conflict in the territory, with severe hardships for all residents. The
Oklahoma Territory was settled through a series of
land runs from 1889 to 1895, which included significant numbers of Republican settlers from the
Great Plains. Oklahoma did not have
a Republican governor until
Henry Bellmon was elected in
1962, though Republicans were still able to draw over 40% of the vote statewide during the Jim Crow era. Democrats were strongest in Southeast Oklahoma, known as
"Little Dixie", whose white settlers were Southerners seeking a start in new lands following the American Civil War. However, Oklahoma did not enact a
poll tax, unlike the former Confederate states. ==Border states==