worthy of note is the fact that Judge Brooks, of Selma, judge Goldthwaite, of Montgomery, and others of unquestioned loyalty to their people, shortly after in the legislature advocated qualified suffrage for negroes. This was prior to the advent of carpetbaggers and organization in Alabama of the Republican party.

Under this authority, an election was held, and the legislature then elected assembled on November 20, 1865, and ratified the amendments to the federal Constitution, excepting the fourteenth. That was regarded as equivalent to a bill of attainder, depriving vast numbers of the rights of citizenship without trial. The legislature comprised a majority of men who had been anti-secessionists—the senate at least two-thirds; but they had held offices before the war and served the Confederate government. The legislature rejected the fourteenth amendment; its adoption would have been political suicide for the members. It enacted a law to protect freedmen in Alabama in their rights of person and property. The federal authorities were duly notified of the proceedings, and on December 18, 1865, Governor Parsons received from Secretary of State Seward a telegram saying that “in the judgment of the president the time had arrived when the care and conduct of the affairs of Alabama could be remitted to the constitutional authorities chosen by the people thereof without danger to the peace and safety of the United States”, and directing him to transfer to his excellency the governor of Alabama, the papers and property in his hands. Accordingly, on December 10, 1865, Robert M. Patton, of Lauderdale, was inaugurated governor, and Parsons retired.

(Patton was a Virginian, long settled as a merchant in northern Alabama. As a Whig, he had served in both houses of the legislature and become president of the senate. In the election of 1865, he defeated Colonel M. J. Bulger. He was intelligent and painstaking in the discharge of duties. Patton continued in the office of governor until 1868, several months beyond the full term, pending action by Congress respecting the results of the election of that year, when he was displaced by operation of the reconstruction acts. During his incumbency a federal military commander, supported by soldiers stationed in the capitol, supervised all of his appointments and official acts.)

As evidence of confidence, the legislature elected former Governor Parsons United States senator for the term ending March 3, 1871. At the same time, it chose George S. Houstan for the term ending March 3, 1867, and John Anthony Winston for the term of six years, commencing March 4, 1867.

At the election in November, 1865, C. C. Langdon was elected to Congress from the first district: George C. Freemen, from the second; Cullen A. Battle, from the third; Joseph W. Taylor, from the fourth; Burwell T. Pope, from the fifth, and Thomas J. Foster, from the sixth.

Then came early rumblings of the storm that was soon to break. These chosen men were not permitted to take their seats as representatives, and the state was not represented in Congress until 1868.

CHAPTER THREE

Military Government

March 2, 1867, after two years of peace, Congress passed over President Johnson’s veto a bill relegating the southern states to the condition of conquered provinces. A military commander was appointed and authorized to supersede civil and judicial tribunals by military courts of his own creation, with power to inflict usual punishments, excepting only death.

This act was supplemented with another, of July 13, forbidding state authorities to interfere with the military commander, who was given the additional power to displace any official and appoint his successor. This act provided that military rule should cease within a state when a convention of the people thereof should frame, and the voters adopt, a constitution ratifying the amendment to the federal Constitution which conferred the suffrage on negroes, and being otherwise acceptable to Congress, and when the legislature also should ratify that amendment.

The new constitution was to be framed by delegates to be chosen by votes of all male citizens of legal age, excepting those disfranchised by the fourteenth amendment; and it was to be ratified by an affirmative vote of a majority of voters registered under the supervision of the military commander and his subalterns.

Under the reconstruction acts of 1867, in April of that year, Alabama became a part of the department comprising, with itself, the states of Georgia and Florida. The military commander called a convention to frame a constitution. At the election for delegates the polls were kept open for five days. The whites held aloof from it. The gathering of delegates thus elected was stigmatized as “the carpetbaggers’ convention.” The men who composed it and framed the constitution were in many cases grossly corrupt and ignorant.

As an illustration of the character of the men sent to the convention, Samuel Hale, a brother of United States Senator Hale, one of the few Union men and later Republicans resident in Sumter county, wrote Senator Wilson in January, 1868, a letter protesting against recognition by Congress of radicals in the south, in which he said that the men who sat in the convention and framed the constitution were, “so far as I am acquainted with them, worthless vagabonds, homeless, houseless, drunken knaves”; that the Sumter delegates were a negro and two whites—Yordy and Rolfe. Rolfe, he said, left his family in New York and had not seen them for four years, during which period he had led an immoral life with negroes; that he was known as the “Hero of Two Shirts,” having left at a hotel in Selma, as security for an unpaid hotel bill, his carpetbag containing only two shirts: that his name was not signed to the constitution which he helped to frame because he was too drunk to write it. These men and Hays and Price, all strangers, were the only white men in Sumter county who took part in the election for delegates. As an early indication of future leadership, at that election Price ordered the negroes to secure their arms and prevent expulsion from the booth of one of their members who was vauntingly flourishing a gun. Only intervention by cool-headed whites prevented trouble. Mr. Hale, in the letter quoted from, stigmatized the election thus: “As shameless a fraud as was ever perpetrated upon the face of the earth.”

Rolfe and Hays were wheelwrights, but their talents found employment in more lucrative occupations. Rolfe’s first “get-rich-quick” scheme was the selling to negroes of badges, which he said he was engaged in by order of General Grant.

While agent of the Freedmen’s Bureau Hays defrauded negroes of a thousand dollars derived from sales of cotton with which they had entrusted him. That was his disappearing act.

That convention deprived of the right to vote all men who were proscribed by the fourteenth amendment from holding office.

The constitution framed called for an election in February, 1868, to which it was to be submitted for ratification, and at which time officers were to be elected. It was submitted under a solemn congressional provision that if it should not receive in its favor the ballots of a majority of the registered voters, it was to be considered as rejected.

The Democratic convention of 1865 entrusted to the party’s state executive committee, of which General James H. Clanton was chairman, all matters of