“On motion of Mr. W. D. Evans, Sec. 34, was recurred to, and trouble began. Mr. Evans proposed to amend the section by providing that the miscegenation law shall not apply to persons of mixed blood, whose status is that of white people. Mr. George Tillman stated, that he was very feeble, but that he felt compelled to say something on this subject. For one, he had felt ashamed when the delegate from Beaufort had clapped his hands, and declared that the coons had a dog up a tree. He was further mortified to see that the gentleman from Newberry (Mr. Sligh) and the gentleman from Edgefield (Mr. B. Tillman) goaded and taunted into putting in the constitution, that no person with any trace of Negro blood should intermarry with a white person and that for such marriage the Legislature should provide punishment even beyond that of bastardizing children and adulterizing marriage. Mr. Tillman said the Mississippi law forbidding marriage between white people with those with more than one-eighth Negro blood is the old South Carolina law. If the law is made, as it now stands, respectable families in Aiken, Barnwell, Colleton and Orangeburg will be denied right to intermarry among the people with whom they are now associated and identified. At least one hundred families would be affected, to his knowledge. They had sent good soldiers to the Confederate Army, and are now landowners and taxpayers. He asserted, as a scientific fact that there was not a full blooded Caucasian on the floor of the Convention. Every member had in him a certain mixture of Mongolian, Arab, Indian or other colored blood. The pure blooded white man had needed and received an infusion of darker blood, to give him readiness and purpose. It would be a cruel injustice and the source of endless litigation, of scandal, horror, feud and bloodshed to undertake to annul or forbid marriage for a remote, perhaps obsolete trace of Negro blood. By the rule of evidence traditional notoriety was admissible in proving pedigree. The doors would be opened to scandal, malice and greed; to statements on the witness stand, that the father or the grandfather, or grandmother had said that A or B had Negro blood in their veins. Any man who is half a man would be ready to blow up half the world with dynamite, to prevent or avenge attacks upon the honor of his mother or the legitimacy or purity of the blood of his father. He moved the restoration of the section to its original form.”[247] Mr. George D. Tillman’s effort was successful, and the section, as finally adopted stands: “Art. III, Sec. 33. The marriage of a white person with a Negro or mulatto or person who shall have one eighth or more of Negro blood shall be unlawful and void.” FOOTNOTES: [232] Bryce, The American Commonwealth, Revised Edition (1910) p. 503, V. 2. [233] _Harper’s Weekly_, January 31st, 1891. [234] _News and Courier_, September 15th, 1890. [235] Ibid. October 16th, 1890.