Free negroes could vote in North Carolina until 1835, when a Constitutional Convention, not without division of sentiment, abolished negroid franchise on the ground that it was an evil. Thereafter, negroes first voted in the South in 1866, when the "Prince of Carpet-Baggers," Henry C. Warmouth, who had been dismissed from the Federal Army, conferred the privilege in a bogus election; he had a charity-box attachment to every ballot-box and a negro dropping a ballot into one had to drop fifty cents into the other, contributions paying Warmouth's expenses as special delegate to Washington, where Congress refused to recognize him. He returned to Louisiana and in two years was governor and in three was worth a quarter of a million dollars and a profitable autograph. "It cost me more," said W. S. Scott, "to get his signature to a bill than to get the bill through the Legislature"--a striking comparison, for to get a bill through this Legislature of which Warmouth said, "there is but one honest man in it," was costly process. Warmouth said of himself, "I don't pretend to be honest, but only as honest as anybody in politics." Between the attitude of the army and the politicians on the negro question, General Sherman drew this comparison: "We all felt sympathy for the negroes, but of a different kind from that of Mr. Stanton, which was not of pure humanity but of politics.... I did not dream that the former slaves would be suddenly, without preparation, manufactured into voters.... I doubted the wisdom of at once clothing them with the elective franchise ... and realised the national loss in the death of Mr. Lincoln, who had long pondered over the difficult questions involved." April Fool's Day, 1870, a crowd clustered around General Grant in the White House; a stroke of his pen was to proclaim four millions of people, literate or illiterate, civilised or uncivilised, ready or unready, voters. When the soldier had signed the instrument politicians had prepared for him, the proclamation announcing that the Fifteenth Amendment had been added to the Constitution of the United States by the ratification of twenty-nine, some one begged for the historic pen, and he silently handed it over. One who was present relates: "Somebody exclaimed, 'Now negroes can vote anywhere!', and a venerable old gentleman in the crowd cried out, 'Well, gentlemen, you will all be d----d sorry for this!' The President's father-in-law, Dent, Sr., was said to be the speaker." In Richmond, the Dent family had seen a good deal of freedmen. Negroes voted in 1867, over two years prior to this, Congress by arbitrary act vesting them with a right not conferred by Federal or State Constitutions. They voted for delegates to frame the new State Constitutions; then on their own right to vote!--this right forming a plank in said Constitutions.