Negro suffrage was the burning question, and they were not reconciled, even after it had become a fact, even when they consented, as they did in the fall of 1868, to use the negro vote. But valiantly did the Democratic party in that election turn to win them; helped them to form clubs, promised protection, and offered to give Democratic negroes the preference in employment, enlisted negro orators; and often had them speak from the same platform as white Democrats. Yet all this was but for the purpose of securing white ascendency, for it was in this very year that the Knights of the White Camelia became perfected into a Federal organization, pledged to secure white supremacy, and to prevent political power from passing to the negro. The negro franchise might be a fact, but, if organized effort could prevent it, negro office-holding should not.[42] The Southerner felt that the last scourge of defeat, Congressional reconstruction, was founded on falsehood and malice. He declared that the reports concerning outrages on negroes had been distorted and exaggerated. The only purpose he could see in the zeal to put the ballot in the hands of men too ignorant to use it without direction was to prolong party power. This hostility to the negro vote led to ingenious modes of reasoning to evade the results of the polls. On the eve of the assembling of the legislature of 1869 one of the city papers suggested that a certain negro Senator had been rendered ineligible by the adoption of a new registry law. As his ballot had been the casting vote which seated another negro, the latter held his seat illegally, and the article closes with the pertinent query whether laws made by such legislators would have any validity.[43] Another factor in the social problem, unique to the South, was not absent from Louisiana--the numerous “poor whites” in the northern part of the State. Living close to the subsistence line on the thin soil of the pine hills back of the bottom lands, without schools, with but few churches, given to rude sports and crude methods of farming, their ignorance and prejudice bred in them after the emancipation of the negro a dread of sinking to the social level of the blacks. The dread, in turn, bred hatred, and it was from this class, instigated very probably by the class above them, that the Colfax and Coushatta murders[44] took their unfortunate rise.