Yet during the exciting days of 1876 when both houses of representatives were meeting, it was W. H. Thomas upon whom the Republicans depended for brain work. He was made a member of the committee on credentials and, as chairman, reported in favor of the seating of the Republican contestants carrying the majority of the committee with him, although opposed by T. E. Miller, an octaroon or quadroon of considerable intelligence, who asked for fifteen minutes to reply to Thomas. Miller later stated that he had refused to sign the report, because he thought that the Democratic contestees ought to have been heard. When he was beaten, he declared he had changed his mind, stating that it was their own fault, if they were not present, and announcing he was ready to sign the report. It was reported that Thomas had, upon this second utterance, made an inflammatory speech; but no part of it was published by the paper so declaring, which, upon the next day’s report, announced that in the midst of the stormy session, Thomas offered a prayer.[220] Thomas was on the committee of Ways and Means and the Judiciary, and, until the collapse of the Republicans, seems to have been the individual most relied upon by the Speaker for all the serious work of the session. Contemporaneously with the overthrow of the Negro governments of South Carolina and Louisiana, the report opposing admission of colored delegates to the Diocesan Convention was sustained. In 1879 the question came up again in a shape harder to resist and resting upon the example of the diocese of Virginia. The law-making power of South Carolina had, however, meanwhile enacted a statute making it— “Unlawful for any white man to intermarry with any Negro, mulatto, Indian or mestizo; or for any white woman to intermarry with any other than a white man.”[221] Accordingly the lay delegates firmly opposed any union whatever, whether of clerical or lay members, with regard to the two races in the South. Now if it is borne in mind that not only Calhoun, whose influence upon political thought in South Carolina had for many years been all pervasive; but also the profoundest student who has ever studied America, de Tocqueville, had condemned “all intermediate measures” and declared that unless the whites remained isolated from the colored race in the South, there must come either miscegenation or extirpation, at no time could the forecast of the future of that section have been as gloomy as that which appeared in the Census figures of 1880.