<P> During Reconstruction, former slaves were granted citizenship and the vote by the 14th and 15th Amendments . The consequences of this were far - reaching and almost immediate, as freedmen eagerly registered and flooded the polls . Of the 100 delegates to the constitutional convention that drafted the Reconstruction document, only 16 were black . </P> <P> In Mississippi's 1874 election, the Republican Party carried a 30,000 majority in what had been a Democratic Party stronghold when only whites voted . Republicans took the governor's office and some legislative seats, but blacks never held a majority of seats in any of the state legislatures, although that was their proportion of the population . Freedmen and other blacks (some free blacks had migrated from the North), were elected to many local offices and 10 of 36 seats in the state legislature . (They comprised a large majority of the population and voted for white Republicans as well as blacks .) </P> <P> In 1874 whites in the city of Vicksburg were determined to suppress black voting in that year's election . White armed patrols prevented blacks from voting and succeeded in defeating all Republican city officials in the August election . By December the emboldened party forced the black sheriff, Crosby, to flee to the state capital . Blacks who rallied to the city to aid the sheriff also had to flee in the face of superior white forces, as armed whites flooded the city . Over the next few days, armed white gangs may have murdered up to 300 blacks in the city and its vicinity, in what became known as the Vicksburg riots . </P> <P> U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant sent a company of troops to Vicksburg in January 1875 to quell the violence and allow the sheriff's safe return . The sheriff was assassinated by his white deputy, A. Gilmer on June 7, 1875 . </P>

The mississippi plan of disenfranchisement included all of the following except