The 15th Amendment to the Constitution stipulates that "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude," of which this 15th Amendment was ratified in 1870, and therefore the upshot of this Amendment, was that black males, previously enslaved or not, now had the legal right to vote in democratic elections, and the immediate aftereffect of this legislation was that in some of the Southern States, blacks were duly elected to legislative and other offices. However, regrettably, there was never going to be a time when the elite and powerful of the South, were going to countenance being ruled or policed by the black man, fairly elected or not, and in short order, those voting rights as Constitutionally provided to the black man, became, through hook or by crook, violence, and intimidation, effectively null and void.
This thus meant, for the South, in which States such as Mississippi, as reported by the jacksonfreepress.com, had approximately 55 percent of their population previously enslaved, and hence blacks thereupon became the majority race in Mississippi; as well as reported by Bowdoin.edu, in which the census of 1870, showed that 44.2% of the lower South, were blacks, that the black vote, now being effectively negated, meant that because the Constitution stipulated that its elected Congress, be proportionally represented by the aggregation of the total population of the United States, and then in proportion to the enumerated population of each individual State, within a construct in which no longer was the counting of slaves apportioned as three-fifths of a person, but that instead all blacks would therefore be counted each as a whole person; and therefore this signified the increase of the corresponding amount of representatives in the South, of which those representatives so elected to the House of Representatives, would not reflect the diversity of the South, but would solely reflect the white ruling class of the South, and by this, keep those that had formerly been enslaved to suffer the ill effects of not only State and regional power placed against them, but Federal power as well, or if not that, Federal power that had become eviscerated in regards to civil rights.
So then, despite Constitutional Amendments that were meant to give blacks a seat at the table, which they did indeed have for a very brief period of time during the reconstruction era, materially helped by the power and authority of Federal troops so situated in the South; what happened though, within a very short order, was that the power structure reverted to the Southern white elite, and blacks were subsequently in many respects reduced to slavery by another name. So that in practice, States such as Mississippi which had but four seats in Congress in 1852, had by 1904, eight seats in Congress, in which each of those seats were occupied by white men. So then, it can be said, though having lost the Civil War, the South, through the bastardization of the 15th Amendment and other Constitutional law, actually got stronger in its national legislative power, as well as more entrenched in its old ways in each of its respective Southern States.