Page:Journal of Negro History, vol. 7.djvu/167

Rh It is especially significant that each one of the Negro Reconstruction Congressmen from South Carolina, namely Cain, De Large, Elliott, Rainey, Ransier, and Smalls were members of the State Constitutional Convention of 1868. Two of them, Cain and Rainey, had been formerly State Senators; Smalls had served two terms in the Senate and four in the House; while each of the others had been members for one term or more in the lower branch of the legislature. Ransier, moreover, had held, prior to his election to Congress, the high office of lieutenant-governor of the State; Elliott had served as adjutant-general, and Smalls had held successivlysuccessively [sic] the offices of lieutenant-colonel, brigadier-general and major-general in the State militia.

Of the two South Carolinians who served in Congress after the Reconstruction, Thomas E. Miller was for four terms a member of the lower chamber of the State legislature and for one term a member of the Senate. Furthermore, he was for one term a school commissioner of his county, and received also his party's nomination for the office of lieutenant-governor of the State. Indeed, of the entire South Carolina group, Murray, alone, seems to have been elected to Congress without previously having held public office. Jefferson F. Long, of Georgia, was not unlike Mr. Murray in that the former had never held public office. In this, his experience differed from that of Walls, of Florida, who had been a member of the Florida State Senate.