 Efforts were made in Maryland, Kentucky and Oklahoma.Their actions were designed to thwart the objective of the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1870, which sought to protect the suffrage of freedmen after the American Civil War.During the later elections of Reconstruction era, beginning in the 1870s, white Democrats used violence by paramilitary groups (such as the Ku Klux Klan), as well as fraud, to suppress black Republican voters and turn Republicans out of office.