The campaign's most chilling feature was the huge wave of murder and arson orchestrated by the Ku Klux Klan against black and white Republicans in the South. As state conventions drafted new constitutions that endowed blacks with the franchise, the white South acted to stamp out that voting power through brute force. Nathan Bedford Forrest boasted that the Klan had recruited forty thousand men in Tennessee alone, half a million across the South. This bloodthirsty backlash grew out of simple arithmetic: in South Carolina and Mississippi, blacks made up a majority of the electorate, while in other southern states, the substantial black populace, joined with white Republicans, appeared set to prevail during Reconstruction.