From the political debauchery of the day, men of the old order shrank appalled. Even when the test-oath qualification was no longer exacted and disabilities were removed, many Southerners would not for a time touch the unclean thing; then they voted as with averted faces, not because they had faith in or respect for the process, but because younger men told them the country's salvation demanded thus much of them. If a respectable man was sent to the Legislature or Congress, he felt called upon to explain or apologise to a stranger who might not understand the circumstances. His relatives hastened to make excuse. "Uncle Ambrose is in the Legislature, but he is honest," Uncle Ambrose's nieces and nephews hurried to tell before the suspicious "Honourable" prefixed to his name brought judgment on a good old man who had intended no harm, but had got into the Legislature by accident rather than by design--who was there, in fact, by reason of circumstances over which he had no control. The few representative men who got into these mixed assemblies had difficulty in making themselves felt. Judge Simonton, of the United States Circuit Court (once President of the Charleston Library Association, Chairman of the Board of School Commissioners, bearer of many civic dignities besides), was member of a reconstruction legislature. He has said: "To get a bill passed, I would have to persuade a negro to present it. It would receive no attention presented by me." Negroes were carried by droves from one county to another, one State to another, and voted over and over wherever white plurality was feared. Other tricks were to change polling-places suddenly, informing the negroes and not the whites; to scratch names from registration lists and substitute others. Whites would walk miles to a registration place to find it closed; negroes, privately advised, would have registered and gone. When men had little time to give to politics, patriotism was robust if it could devote days to the siege of a Registration Board, trying to catch it in place in spite of itself. The Southerner's loathing for politics, his despair, his inertia, increased evils. "Let the Yankees have all the niggers they want," he was prone to say. "Let them fill Congress with niggers. The only cure is a good dose!" But with absolute ruin staring him in the face, he woke with a mighty awakening. Taxpayers' Conventions issued "Prayers" to the public, to State Governments, to the Central Government; they raised out of the poverty of the people small sums to send committees to Washington; and these committees were forestalled by Radical State Governments who, with open State Treasuries to draw upon, sent committees ahead, prejudicing the executive ear and closing it to appeal.