Page:The rising son, or, The antecedents and advancement of the colored race (IA risingsonthe00browrich).pdf/427

 men had no rights that white men were bound to respect," was revived, with all its negro hate.

Military occupation of the South was all that saved the freedmen from destruction. Under it, they were able to take part in the various Constitutional and Legislative elections, and to hold seats in those bodies. As South Carolina had been the most conspicuous in the Rebellion, so she was the first to return to the Union, and to recognize the political equality of the race whom in former days she had bought and sold. Her Senate hall, designed to echo the eloquence of the Calhouns, the McDuffies, the Hammonds, the Hamptons, and the Rhetts, has since resounded with the speeches of men who were once her bond slaves. Ransier, the negro, now fills the chair of President of the Senate, where once sat the proud and haughty Calhoun; while Nash, the tall, gaunt, full-blooded negro, speaks in the plantation dialect from the desk in which Wade Hampton in former days stood. The State is represented in Congress by Elliott, Rainey, and De Large. South Carolina submitted quietly to her destiny.

Not so, however, with Georgia. At the election in November, 1867, for members to the State Convention, thirty thousand white and eighty thousand colored votes were polled, and a number of colored delegates elected. A Constitution was framed and ratified, and a Legislature elected under it was convened. After all this, supposing they had passed beyond Congressional control, the Rebel element in the Legislature asserted itself; and many of those whose disabilities had been removed by the State Convention, which comprised a number of colored members, joined