In the debate on the Virginia Bill there was a passage-at-arms between Trumbull and Sumner which came near to overstepping parliamentary rules on both sides and which caused widespread newspaper comment. It was generally believed that a rupture had taken place between them which would never be healed; yet a year later, when the decree went forth (presumably from the White House) that Sumner must be deposed from the chairmanship of the Committee on Foreign Relations, Trumbull was one of his strongest supporters in the fight which ensued. Following close after the reconstruction of Virginia came the re-reconstruction of Georgia. That state ratified her _post-bellum_ constitution on the 11th of May, 1868, and elected Rufus P. Bullock, governor. He represented the radicals, but the conservatives at the same time carried the state legislature. A few negroes had been elected as members, and these were expelled on the ground that the right to hold office had not been conferred upon them by the new constitution. The supreme court of the state a few months later decided that since the rights of citizenship and of voting had been conferred upon them, the right to hold office belonged to them also unless expressly denied. In addition to unseating the blacks, the conservatives had admitted certain members who could not take the oath prescribed in the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. Governor Bullock needed a legislature different from the one which had been elected, in order to accomplish certain ends which he had in view, and he seized upon these irregularities as a means of overturning the majority. He then raised an outcry, which he knew would stir the north,--that the blacks in Georgia were still terrorized by the Ku-Klux Klans.