of the 225,933 registered voters, 169,229 voted on the question, and of these 107,342 voted for holding the convention. [Sidenote: The character of the Convention delegates chosen.] The great mass of those who registered and refrained from voting were the whites who were opposed to the Congressional Acts for Reconstruction, and hence the persons voting were chiefly the newly enfranchised. This was likewise true in the voting for the delegates to the conventions, with the result that radical men were, for the most part, {150} chosen. They were new men to the political society of the South. There were a few of the old Whigs among them, who had remained true to the Union in their sentiments during the rebellion, but the most of them were "carpet-baggers," that is adventurers or new settlers from the North, "poor white trash" and negroes. In the South Carolina convention there were 63 negro delegates to 34 white. No such hideous bodies of men had ever been assembled before upon the soil of the United States for the purpose of participation in the creation of a "State" of the Union, and but for the control exercised over them by the military commanders, and the co-operation between the commanders and the small conservative white element in these bodies, the result of their work would have been the most ghastly travesty of justice, common-sense, and common honesty which the republic had ever been called upon to witness. [Sidenote: The work of the conventions.] During the winter and spring of 1867-68 the work of these conventions went on under the greatest extravagance and incompetence of every kind. The constitutions which came from them provided for complete equality in civil rights and, in some cases, in advantages of a social character, such as equal privileges in public conveyances, etc. They also not only established negro suffrage, as in fact was required by the Reconstruction Acts, but they, in most cases, disfranchised those whites whom the proposed Fourteenth Amendment would disqualify from holding office. In Alabama, Arkansas and Louisiana they went even further than this and disfranchised also, in the case of the first two, all who "had violated the rules of civilized warfare," and in the case of the last, all who had voted for secession, or had advocated treason against the United States in the press or the pulpit. It is true {151} that in most cases ways were provided for removing these disabilities, but they were generally connected with such self-stultifying requirements as to make them worthless. The restrictions upon eligibility to hold office or mandate were in general the same as those imposed on the exercise of the suffrage, and in some cases they went even further, as in the cases of the Mississippi and Virginia instruments, by both of which anybody who had voluntarily participated in the rebellion, or had voluntarily given aid or comfort to those who had, was disqualified. [Sidenote: The vote upon ratification.]