North & West South Native Whites 31,150,000 14,620,000 Foreign Born White 8,510,000 730,000 Negroes 489,000 5,850,000 Hybrids 195,000 936,000 Chinese & Japanese 108,000 2,000 Civilized Indians 51,000 7,000 In the eight Southern States, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas there were 6,162,000 whites to 4,480,000 colored persons, and in the first six named of these 3,599,000 whites to 3,492,000 colored persons. By States the comparison was as follows: Whites Colored South Carolina 462,000 688,000 Georgia 978,000 858,000 Florida 224,000 166,000 Alabama 833,000 678,000 Mississippi 544,000 742,000 Louisiana 558,000 559,000 In the same year in which Tillman had risen to power in South Carolina, Mississippi had disfranchised the great bulk of her Negro majority and, with his control of political affairs, Tillman set to work to accomplish the same thing in South Carolina. By 1895 he had succeeded in obtaining a constitutional convention and in that year it met. For almost two centuries the Negroes had been trained in slavery. Then for a decade they had enjoyed what was much more akin to unbridled license than liberty. For about twenty years succeeding that they had been, by every device which could be conceived of, stripped of the exercise of the franchise and to a very great degree excluded from jury duty. The proposition was now to exclude the vast bulk of them legally from the franchise. It is interesting to consider and observe in what way they received the suggestion; for they were now absolutely without white aid, and dependent entirely upon such arguments as they themselves could advance. There was no attempt to hide the purpose. It was openly avowed that the main purpose of the constitutional convention of South Carolina for 1895 was to frame a law, by which the tremendous preponderance of the Negro electorate should be reduced to an inconsiderable minority. This had been accomplished in Mississippi, and the inconsistency of the Emigrant Tax Law, restraining in the State those whom the law makers had to protect the State from, escaped attention for the time. Blunt and rough as he was in his political utterances, the prime mover for this convention, Senator B. R. Tillman, with a breadth of thought greatly to his credit, sought unceasingly to make it representative of all factions, classes and conditions of the white population of the State and, when it finally assembled, it was found to be so. In addition it contained a sprinkling of Negroes, through the presence of six Negro delegates from two coast counties, where they were in such overwhelming numbers as to preclude their exclusion by any methods afforded by existing laws.