actual race distinctions in suffrage. Between 1870 and 1877, the white people of the South were largely disfranchised, not because of their race, but because of their participation in the War. After 1877, the Negroes were largely disfranchised by unlawful methods adopted by the white people of the South. If this were a history of the actual race distinctions in suffrage, it would be necessary to consider at length the "tissue ballots," the stuffing of ballot boxes, the intimidation of Negroes by the Ku Klux Klan and other bodies of white men, and other election devices and practices in the South at that time. But this study, as has been said before, is confined to the race distinctions in the law, not those in defiance of the law. Out of all the suffrage irregularities of the period very little suffrage law was evolved. Few judicial decisions and no statutes bearing directly on the relation of race to suffrage have been found.
Some cases of intimidation of Negroes at the polls reached the courts of record. In Lawrence County, Ohio, in 1870, for instance, two white men by threats of violence kept three Negroes from voting. One of the white men was convicted in the Federal court[38] under the Act of 1870, and imprisoned six months; the other was acquitted because he had not been heard to use threatening language. In 1871 a white man in South Carolina was convicted in the Federal court[39] for conspiring to keep a Negro from voting at a congressional election. The same year, in a contested election for mayor of Leavenworth, Kansas, the defeated candidate claimed that he would have been elected had not a number of Negroes been improperly kept from voting. He did not show that they
