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- After the Civil war, the Reconstruction Era began. It was supposed to fix the South, but the still-furious Southerners kept on revolting and resisting against the Union.
- Tillman used far more illegitimate strategies than Hampton. When he became governor, Tillman immediately enacted all kinds of new laws and requirements to disenfranchise African American and any other Republican voters.
- Wade Hampton (the angry fellow to the left) was one of those Southern retaliators. Having been a General in the Confederate Army during the Civil War, he didn't take very kindly to all of the Union Soldiers and U.S. Cavalrymen that were now patrolling the South every day.
- Now that he was governor, Hampton had the power to kick the Union out, and prevent them from doing anything in South Carolina... and he did just that.
- Soon enough, with the help of his Confederate compadres, Wade Hampton had been elected as Governor of South Carolina, and through rather... illegitimate means.
- One of those things that Tillman enacted was the Literacy Test. Taking advantage of the rate of illiteracy among African Americans, he created a literacy test requirement that he knew most Black voters would not be able to pass.
- So, this essentially means that Wade Hampton's election as South Carolina State Governor signaled the end of Reconstruction. And now that the Union was powerless in South Carolina, it meant that Freedmen, Carpetbaggers, and many others were now equally powerless. In fact, they were now defenseless.
- However, Hampton wasn't governor forever, of course. The man who soon took Hampton's place, Ben Tillman, was far worse.
- To replace the reconstruction-era Constitution of 1868, Ben Tillman, with the help of his supporters, enacted the Constitution of 1895, which was filled with new unfair, racist laws.
- Another thing Tillman put in was the Poll Tax. With this, he was now also taking advantage of the rate of poverty among freedmen.
- PAY POLL TAXES HERE
- LITERACY TESTS
- However, White Democrat voters would not have to worry about either the poll tax or the literacy test, because they were protected by yet another thing that was put in place by Ben Tillman: the Grandfather Clause. If their grandfathers voted in the past, that allowed White Democrat voters to vote without taking the literacy test or paying the poll tax.
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