It was England, however, that altered the designation of “The Brother in Black” to “The White Man’s Burden.”
In every way in 1890 the Negro seemed to have failed. His profligacy was exaggerated, but in his profligacy he had betrayed Judge Tourgee. A study of the Census of 1890 by the author of this work indicated that in a total population of 62,620,000 in the United States, 45,770,000 were native whites; 9,240,000 were foreign born whites; 6,339,000 were Negroes; 1,131,000 were mulattoes; 110,000 were Mongolians and 58,000 civilized Indians.
Comparing the two sections: There were a little more than twice as many native born whites in the North and West as in the South. There were about twelve times as many foreign born whites and about seven times as many civilized Indians with fifty times as many Mongolians, but there were only one-twelfth as many Negroes and one-fifth as many mulattoes.[240]
| 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.
The attitude, behavior and utterance of these six Negroes in this convention, in the State where twenty years previously the members of their race had held their most pronounced legislative orgy and to which they now came, to what they must have realized were the political obsequies of the race, had in it, sentimentally considered, something of the pathetic. It should be borne in mind that those who did come now could only come from those two counties where the Negroes were at their lowest, if contact with whites was elevating; for, in Beaufort and Georgetown, the whites composed a very small minority.