The well-known fact that the negro vote in the South did not have the influence its numbers warranted aroused the North to demand a Federal elections law, which was voiced by bills introduced by Senator Hoar of Massachusetts and by Henry Cabot Lodge, then a member of the House of Representatives.

Lodge's bill, which was passed by the House in 1890, permitted Federal officials to supervise and control congressional elections.

This so-called "Force Bill" was bitterly opposed by the Southerners and was finally defeated in the Senate by the aid of the votes of the silver Senators from the West, but the escape was so narrow that it set Southerners to finding another way of suppressing the negro vote than by force or fraud.

Later the division of the white vote by the Populist party also endangered white supremacy in the South.
In this same year (1890) Mississippi framed a new constitution, which required as a prerequisite for voting a residence of two years in the State and one year in the district or town.

A poll tax of two dollars--to be increased to three at the discretion of the county commissioners--was levied on all able-bodied men between twenty-one and sixty.