The Redeemers were a conservative political coalition of Southern Democrats that dominated the politics of the American South from 1877 to 1910. The "Redeemers" were broadly synonymous with the national Bourbon Democrats, representing the planter class and the rising Southern business community, especially those with interests in railroads, cotton textiles, and urban land speculation. The "Redeemers" sought to "redeem" the Reconstruction-era South by ousting the Radical Republicans (a coalition of freedmen, northern "carpetbaggers", and southern "scalawags"), and they did so initially by supporting white supremacist insurgent groups and the Ku Klux Klan, and, after 1877, by suppressing Black participation in politics now that Reconstruction was at an end.
Encyclopedia Britannica opined that, "Even on racial questions the new Southern political leaders were not so reactionary as the label Bourbon might suggest. Though whites were in the majority in all but two of the Southern states, the conservative regimes did not attempt to disenfranchise African-Americans. Partly their restraint was caused by fear of further federal intervention; chiefly, however, it stemmed from a conviction on the part of conservative leaders that they could control African-American voters, whether through fraud, intimidation, or manipulation." The regimes favored the businessmen and planters of the South at the expense of the small white farmers, reducing or eliminating state programs which benefited the poor, such as starving the public school system in the South, neglecting the care of state prisoners, the insane, and the blind, and rejecting measures to safeguard the public health. These regimes were astonishingly corrupt, engaging in embezzlement and misappropriation of funds, as well as occasionally purchasing Black votes, such as in the 1896 Louisiana gubernatorial election. The small white farmers resentful of planter dominance, residents of the hill country outvoted by "Black Belt" constituencies, and politicins excluded from the ruling cabals tried repeatedly to overthrow the conservative "Redeemer" regimes in the South, supporting independent or Greenback Party candidates during the 1870s, but without notable success. In 1879, the farmer-led Readjuster Party in Virginia gained control of the legislature and secured the election of its leader William Mahone to the US Senate a year later, advocating for the readjustment of the huge funded debt of the state so as to lessen the tax burden on small farmers.
However, in 1890, the Farmers' Alliance dropped its ban on politics and challenged conservative hegemony. In that year, with Alliance backing, Benjamin R. Tillman was chosen Governor of South Carolina and James S. Hogg was elected Governor of Texas, marking the heyday of Southern populism. Although some Populist leaders such as Tom Watson in Georgia saw that poor whites and poor Blacks in the South had a community of interest in the struggle against the planters and the businessmen, most small white farmers exhibited vindictive hatred toward African-Americans, whose votes had so often been instrumental in upholding conservative regimes. Beginning in 1890, when Mississippi held a new constitutional convention, and continuing through 1908, when Georgia amended its constitution, every state of the former Confederacy moved to disenfranchise African-Americans. The Southern states excluded African-Americans by requiring that potential voters be able to read or to interpret any section of the US Constitution, a requirement that local registrars waived for whites but rigorously insisted upon when an African-American wanted to vote. Louisiana also added the "grandfather clause" to its constitution, which exempted from this literacy test all of those who had been entitled to vote on 1 January 1867 (before Congress imposed Black suffrage upon the South), together with their sons and grandsons. Other states imposed stringent property qualifications for voting or enacted complex poll taxes. Socially as well as politically, race relations in the South deteriorated as farmers' movements rose to challenge the conservative regimes. By 1890, with the triumph of Southern populism, the African-American's place was clearly defined by law; he was relegated to a subordinate and entirely segregated position. From 1889 to 1899, lynchings in the South averaged 187.5 per year.
At the same time, the Redeemer governments maintained their hold on power by removing hundreds of thousands of Blacks and poor whites from voter rolls and implementing property requirements for voting, and, by 1941, more poor whites (600,000) than Blacks (500,000) had been disenfranchised in Alabama. The Bourbon Democrats were overthrown by William Jennings Bryan in 1896 and met their demise after the 1904 presidential election, but the Southern Democrats remained divided between pro-business and populist wings which engaged in intraparty clashes and primary election battles until the Republican Party's resurrection in the South during the 1950s-1970s, when many conservative Democrats drifted to the GOP.
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