Before 1869, Negro suffrage was rejected in Connecticut, Wisconsin, Kansas, Ohio, Maryland, Missouri, Michigan, and Minnesota.

The Republicans in their national platform of 1868 went only so far as to say that, while Negro suffrage was to be forced upon the South, it must remain a local question in the North.

The Border States rapidly lined up with the white South on matters of race, church, and politics.
It was not until 1874, however, that the changing opinion was made generally effective in the elections.

The skillfully managed radical organization held large majorities in every Congress from the Thirty-ninth to the Forty-third, and the electoral votes in 1868 and 1879 seemed to show that the conservative opposition was insignificant.
But these figures do not tell the whole story.

Even in 1864, when Lincoln won by nearly half a million, the popular vote was as eighteen to twenty-two, and four years later Grant, the most popular man in the United States, had a majority of only three hundred thousand over Seymour, and this majority and more came from the new Negro voters.
Four years later with about a million Negro voters available and an opposition not pleased with its own candidate, Grant's majority reached only seven hundred thousand.