Foster appointed Adolphe Lafargue, a newspaper publisher and a state representative from Avoyelles Parish to a state court judgeship, which Lafargue retained until shortly before his death in 1917. He named as his private secretary William Washington Vance, a state senator from Bossier Parish and a native of South Carolina. He appointed Swords Lee, a Mississippi native descended from the Lee family of Virginia and a timber businessman from Pollock as the assessor for Grant Parish. Foster appointed William B. Bailey, the co-founder of the Lafayette Daily Advertiser and the former mayor of Lafayette as the clerk of the state district court for Lafayette Parish. In 1896, Foster directed state troopers to forcefully overthrow Louisiana's last enclave of Republican and African-American office holders in St. John the Baptist Parish. Challenge by John N. Pharr and second term In the 1896 general election, Foster was re-elected as the incumbent. He defeated the Republican-Populist fusion candidate John Newton Pharr (1829–1903), a sugar planter from St. Mary Parish. Lewis Strong Clarke, a neighboring sugar planter from St. Mary Parish, directed the Pharr campaign. Pharr had possibly gained a majority of votes cast and won twenty-six of the then fifty-nine parishes, with his greatest strength in north central Louisiana and the Florida Parishes to the east of Baton Rouge. With the assistance of the Regular Democratic Organization political machine based in New Orleans, Foster officially received 116,116 votes (57 percent) to Pharr's 87,698 ballots (43 percent). The election, however, suffered heavily from fraud which benefited Foster, and widespread violence to suppress black Republican voting. A clear accounting of the election results is probably not possible. Subsequently, as governor, Foster signed off on the new Louisiana Constitution of 1898, establishing a variety of voter registration requirements that would "disenfranchise blacks, Republicans, and white Populists." (All of these categories of voters had voted overwhelmingly for John N. Pharr, and similar coalitions gained governorships and/or congressional seats in some southern states. The new constitution ensured that Louisiana would become a one-party state, and it was part of the "Solid South" Democratic hegemony for the next six decades.) After Foster's reelection in 1896, Louisiana general elections were non-competitive; the only competition took place in Democratic primaries. Voter rolls were sharply reduced by the new initiatives, and blacks and other groups were excluded from the political system. The white-controlled legislature imposed racial segregation and Jim Crow. As an example