politics moved from a state divided between the Whigs and Democrats to a solid one-party Democratic state. At the time, the conservative Democratic Party strongly believed in states' rights as well as the right to the slave system. Tensions began to build between southern Democrats and northern Republicans and abolitionists. Civil War and Reconstruction In the summer of 1860, the Mississippi delegation walked out of the Democratic National Convention as a response to the convention's refusal to allow slavery in the state. Soon after, Mississippi seceded from the Union and joined many other states in forming the Confederate States of America. After the end of the American Civil War in 1865, Reconstruction began in the United States. Many laws were put in place to allow suffrage for African-Americans, which troubled white Democrats. Democrats overpowered the Republicans to combat these laws by means of force and violence in a method known as the Mississippi Plan, formulated in 1875 and implemented in the election of 1876. This plan was also used in other southern states to overthrow Republican rule. Thereafter, these states became known as the Solid South, meaning that they were solidly Democratic in political nature. This continued for the next seventeen presidential elections, until the elections of 1948. At this time, the national party began to show support for the Civil Rights Movement, which reduced its support in the Solid South. 1948 presidential election and Dixiecrat movement When the 1948 Democratic National Convention adopted a plank proposed by Northern liberals calling for civil rights, 35 southern delegates, including all Mississippi's delegates, walked out. Southern Democrats sought to exclude Harry Truman's name from the ballot in the South. The Southern defectors created a new party called the States' Rights Party (Dixiecrats), with its own nominees for the 1948 presidential election: Democratic South Carolina Governor J. Strom Thurmond for president and Fielding L. Wright, governor of Mississippi for vice president. (In his 1948 gubernatorial inaugural address, Wright had described racial segregation as an "eternal truth" that "transcends party lines".) The Dixiecrats thought that if they could win enough Southern states, they would have a good chance of forcing the election into the U.S. House of Representatives, where Southern bargaining power could determine the winner. To this end Dixiecrat leaders had the Thurmond-Wright ticket declared the official Democratic ticket in some Southern states, including Mississippi. (In other states, they were forced to run