The Red Shirt Campaign of 1876, largely orchestrated by the former Confederate generals Martin W. Gary and M. C. Butler of Edgefield, was a massive organized effort on the part of the white population to regain control of the political machinery of the state. Violence was a calculated part of the strategy to remove Republican dominance. The Freedmen and their Republican allies tried valiantly to maintain their political control in the face of the fierce campaign by the former Confederates. By the middle of 1877 the Red Shirt strategy, along with an increasing willingness on the part of the rest of the nation to allow the South to go forward on its own terms, proved successful in bringing the control of the state back into the hands of the white population. In the ensuing decades the black population of Edgefield, like that of the entire South, was thrust back into second-class citizenship by the persistent efforts of the whites who were determined to see that the conditions of Reconstruction were never allowed to return.