Street, of Prentiss county, speaker, and Hon. George M. Govan, clerk. It had among its members, such men as W. S. Featherston, W. A. Percy, H. L. Muldrow, W. F. Tucker, W. R. Barksdale, I. T. Blount, J. S. Bailey, J. G. Hall, G. B. Huddleston, G. D. Shands, George H. Lester and Thomas Spight, in the house; and J. M. Stone, R. O. Reynolds, John W. Fewell, R. H. Thompson and T. C. Catchings, in the senate. At the time the legislature assembled, the executive and judicial departments of the government were under the control of the Radical party, made up of and dominated by negroes, disreputable adventurers and carpet baggers. Adelbert Ames was seated in the executive chair. At the close of the war he was in Mississippi as a colonel in the Federal army, and after the State government set up by the white people was overthrown by Federal bayonets he was made military governor. After a new constitution was adopted and Mississippi was re-admitted to the Union, Ames was elected by the legislature to represent the State in the United States Senate. James L. Alcorn was his colleague, and fierce conflict arose between the two over the control of the Republican party in the State. Alcorn was a man of admitted ability. He had been a lifelong Whig before the war, but became a moderate Republican after its close. When the constitution of 1868 was adopted the military government of Ames gave way and was succeeded by Alcorn as the first governor elected by the people after the new organic law went into force. Gov. Alcorn was a large property holder and really desired the peace and prosperity of the State. His plan was to unite the old followers of the Whig party for the control of the negro element, and save the white people from the ruin that would result from negro control. The new governor was soon found to be in the way of the negroes and carpet baggers, and he was sent to Washington as a senator of the United States. Ex-Gov. Robert Lowry thus writes of Alcorn and Ames as Senators from Mississippi, in his history of the State: "Governors Alcorn and Ames were occupying their seats in the United States Senate. The former, a man of high bearing, wealthy, full of courage, proud and imperious, had a supreme contempt for the pretensions of the latter, and asserted in substance, on the floor, of the Senate, that Ames was a fraud, that his poverty of intellect was only equalled by his arrogant assumption of unauthorized powers; that he was not, and never had been a citizen of Mississippi."