On the withdrawal of Federal troops and the open abandonment of the policy of military coercion, the whites, seeing that the Federal courts were not inclined to interfere, quickly completed the process of obtaining control over the machinery of state government. That process had been begun shortly after the War, taking the form of intimidation at the polls. It was carried forward another step when the "carpet baggers" and other politicians who had organized and used the negro vote were deprived of Federal support and driven out. When this active outside interference in southern politics was cut off, thousands of negroes stayed away from the polls through sheer indifference, for their interest in politics had been stimulated by artificial forces--bribery and absurd promises. Intimidation and indifference worked a widespread disfranchisement before the close of the seventies. These early stages in the process of disfranchisement were described by Senator Tillman in his famous speech of February 26, 1900. "You stood up there and insisted that we give these people a 'free vote and a fair count.' They had it for eight years, as long as the bayonets stood there.... We preferred to have a United States army officer rather than a government of carpet baggers and thieves and scallywags and scoundrels who had stolen everything in sight and mortgaged posterity; who had run their felonious paws into the pockets of posterity by issuing bonds. When that happened we took the government away. We stuffed the ballot boxes. We shot them. We are not ashamed of it. With that system--force, tissue ballots, etc.--we got tired ourselves. So we had a constitutional convention, and we eliminated, as I said, all of the colored people whom we could under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments." The experience of South Carolina was duplicated in Mississippi. "For a time," said the Hon. Thomas Spight, of that state, in Congress, in 1904, "we were compelled to employ methods that were extremely distasteful and very demoralizing, but now we are accomplishing the same and even better results by strictly constitutional and legal procedure." It should be said, however, that in the states where the negro population was relatively smaller, violence was not necessary to exclude the negroes from the polls. A peaceful method of disfranchising negroes and poor whites was the imposition of a poll tax on voters. Negroes seldom paid their taxes until the fight over prohibition commenced in the eighties and nineties. Then the liquor interests began to pay the negroes' poll taxes and by a generous distribution of their commodities were able to carry the day at the polls. Thereupon the prohibitionists determined to find some effective constitutional means of excluding the negroes from voting.