later, with the victory of Union forces at the end of the American Civil War and the abolition of slavery via the newly enacted Thirteenth Amendment, a new Mississippi constitution was created in May 1868 that bestowed citizenship and civil rights upon newly freed slaves in the state. Mississippi regained its congressional representation after it was fully readmitted back into the United States in February 1870. The 1868 state constitution, which was the third constitution that the State of Mississippi's history, lasted until 1890, when after the Compromise of 1877 and a lengthy campaign of terrorist violence to establish Democratic rule in the state succeeded, a constitutional convention composed almost entirely of white Democrats created and adopted the fourth (and current) constitution to specifically disenfranchise, isolate, and marginalize the state's African American population. Unlike the 1868 constitution, the 1890 one did not go to the people of the state at large for their approval and ratification. The convention created, approved, and ratified it all on its own initiative, as was done in the case of the 1817 and 1832 state constitutions. The new constitution was utilized by the Democrats and the state government, in conjunction with terrorist violence, to marginalize and prohibit black Mississippians from participating in the state's civil society until the 1960s and 1970s. Mississippi was not the only U.S. state at the time that created a new constitution specifically for the purpose of disenfranchising their African American voters; other ones did as well, South Carolina followed suit in December 1895 under its Democratic governor in replacing its 1868 state constitution. As with Mississippi's current 1890 constitution, the 1895 South Carolinian constitution is still in use today. The 1890 constitution effectively granted the Democrat-controlled Mississippi government free rein to prevent almost all African Americans from voting and casting ballots, in addition to forcing them to attend separate schools (almost always deliberately of substandard quality), forbidding them to marry people of other ethnic groups, or bear arms for self-defense. In the 1950s and 1960s, following investigations by the United States government, these discriminatory provisions were ruled by the U.S. Supreme Court to have violated the rights guaranteed to American citizens under the tenets of the U.S. Constitution, thus rendering them legally unenforcable. However, it would take 20 years to formally remove them from the state's constitution, which was done when they were finally repealed in the 1970s and 1980s