According to the convention's delegates, some of whom were former Confederates, Black suffrage was an effort to "pull down civilization". Indeed, according to the president of the 1890 constitutional convention, Sol S. Calhoon, a judge from Hinds County, the convention was called specifically to disenfranchise the state's African American voters, restrict their rights and isolate and segregate them from the rest of society. He unabashedly stated that a constitution not doing this was unacceptable to the convention's members: Another delegate, a Bolivar County planter by the name of George P. Melchior, reiterated this view, stating: One opposing delegate, a former Confederate general and lawyer from Adams County named William T. Martin, continued this train of thought of the convention's members, stating: The primary reasoning behind the desire of white Democrats in Mississippi, and the Democrats in other Southern U.S. states, to disenfranchise their black voting populations was due to their voting overwhelmingly for Republican candidates and installing them into office, a result which Democrats referred to pejoratively as "the menace of Negro domination" or "Negro supremacy". During the time, the official policy of Democrats throughout the country was to implement patriarchal white supremacy as much as and as far as possible, using as its party slogans, "This is a White Man's Country: Let the White Man Rule!" and "This is a White Man's Government!" As one South Carolinian politician said in 1909, the Democratic Party existed for "one plank and only one plank, namely, that this is a white man's country and the white men must govern it." It even referred to itself as "The White Man's Party". Due to Mississippi's large African American population, which comprised nearly 58 percent of the state's total population at the time, many Republican candidates would have been elected into office in most elections, were they free and fair and held without outside interference from white supremacist terrorists and Democrat-sponsored paramilitaries. The second reason for the desire of the Democrats to disfranchise and marginalize black Mississippians was due to the profound ideology of virulent bigotry and prejudice that the Democrats held towards African Americans, whom they looked upon in contempt and held in low regard. The Democrats justified their bigoted views regarding African Americans using a mixture of pseudo-scientific racism and a discredited alternative misinterpretation of the Christian Holy Bible. During the convention, one delegate, A.J. Paxton, suggested adding a clause into the new