Military occupation of the South was all that saved the freedmen from destruction. Under it, they were able to take part in the various Constitutional and Legislative elections, and to hold seats in those bodies. As South Carolina had been the most conspicuous in the Rebellion, so she was the first to return to the Union, and to recognize the political equality of the race whom in former days she had bought and sold. Her Senate hall, designed to echo the eloquence of the Calhouns, the McDuffies, the Hammonds, the Hamptons, and the Rhetts, has since resounded with the speeches of men who were once her bond slaves. Ransier, the negro, now fills the chair of President of the Senate, where once sat the proud and haughty Calhoun; while Nash, the tall, gaunt, full-blooded negro, speaks in the plantation dialect from the desk in which Wade Hampton in former days stood. The State is represented in Congress by Elliott, Rainey, and De Large. South Carolina submitted quietly to her destiny. Not so, however, with Georgia. At the election in November, 1867, for members to the State Convention, thirty thousand white and eighty thousand colored votes were polled, and a number of colored delegates elected. A Constitution was framed and ratified, and a Legislature elected under it was convened. After all this, supposing they had passed beyond Congressional control, the Rebel element in the Legislature asserted itself; and many of those whose disabilities had been removed by the State Convention, which comprised a number of colored members, joined in the declaration which was made by that Legislature, that a man having more than one-eighth of African blood in his veins was ineligible to office. These very men to whom the Republican party extended all the rights and privileges of citizenship, of which they had deprived themselves, denied political equality to a large majority of their fellow-citizens. Twenty-eight members were expelled on December 22, 1869; an Act of Congress was passed requiring the re-assembling of the persons declared elected by the military commander, the restoration of the expelled members, and the rejection of others, who were disqualified. The expulsion of the ex-rebels from the Georgia Legislature, and the admission of the loyal colored men, whose seats had been forcibly taken from them, had a good effect upon all the Southern States, for it showed that the national administration was determined that justice should be done. The prompt admission of Hiram R. Revels to a seat in the United States Senate from Mississippi, showed that progress was the watch-word of the Republican party. The appointments of E. D. Bassett as Minister to Hayti, and J. Milton Turner as Consul-General to Liberia, set at rest all doubt with regard to the views of President Grant, and the negro’s political equality.