The dread of black suffrage drove many former secessionists to new heights of indignation. Although blacks made up 13 percent of the total U.S. population, they constituted 36 percent of the South, with outright majorities in Mississippi and South Carolina. The Fifteenth Amendment meant that blacks, armed with the vote, could exercise real power and invert, in an astonishingly short period, the power structure that had long suppressed them. Many southern whites found this insupportable and argued that hapless, newly enfranchised blacks were being manipulated by scheming northern Republicans.
