In 1867, African American males voted for the first time in Virginia when military governor John Schofield (1831-1906) ordered a referendum over the possibility of a new state constitution. The 1870 ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, which prohibited states from denying men suffrage on the basis of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, garnered little public support from Virginia's white voters. An 1870 act of the Virginia Assembly provided for a "general registration of all male citizens of twenty-one years," but noted that the "list of voters, white and colored, shall be kept in separate books." Further state legislation, such as the 1884 Anderson-McCormick Act, authorized the Democratic majority in the General Assembly to appoint local voting registrars and appoint all members of electoral boards. By the 1890s, voting corruption such as stuffing ballot boxes and bribery disenfranchised thousands of black voters and white Republicans throughout Virginia, despite reform measures such as the Walton Act of 1894. It was not until the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965 that African Americans would vote in large numbers in Virginia.