The year was 1867.....................

  
     Grant considered Reconstruction a noble experiment while Welles and other cabinet members condemned it as a misguided disaster that would put shiftless blacks in power.  Conventions now began to meet in southern states to draw up new constitutions, which would allow them to be readmitted to the Union.  At the Louisiana and South Carolina conventions, blacks made up a majority of the delegates.  Never before in American history had there been such racially integrated governmental meetings, that they pioneered in establishing public schools and contesting discrimination.  In Alabama, a racially mixed convention guaranteed voting rights to "all colored male persons of the age of 21 years."  The Louisiana convention enacted a provision calling for equal access to public transportation "without distinction of race or color or previous condition."  In Charleston, seventy-six black delegates made up a majority of the state convention, many of them former slaves.  Such a spectacle was an anathema to many terrified whites, prompting the Charleston Mercury to jeer at this assembly as the "Congo Convention."  More than 80 percent of the black delegates were literate, but the handful of illiterates provided endless fodder for vicious satire in the white press, creating an enduring caricature of Reconstruction as a period of misrule by inept black politicians.
     Nothing alarmed white southerners more than the specter of blacks casting votes.  The united power of blacks, carpetbaggers, and scalawags produced a stunning string of Republican election victories in fall 1867 across a region long solidly Democratic.  Blacks embraced voting rights and registered amazingly high participation rates:  a 70 percent turnout in Georgia and almost 90 percent in Virginia, casting virtually unanimous Republican voters.  In Alabama, there were 89,000 black voters versus 74,000 whites, while 95,000 black voters in Georgia nearly equaled the 100,000 white voters.  In a startling reversal for an area once dominated by slavery, the elections spawned black sheriffs, school board members, state legislators, and congressmen.  That yesterday's slave laborer was today's state legislator horrified many white southerners who refused to accept this extraordinary inversion of their bygone world.

-Ron Chernow,  Grant