With the imposition of the constitution began the reign of the carpetbagger--"demon of discord and anarchy"--and the negro, and the infliction of "the horrors of reconstruction"; a civil convulsion in which the foundations of society were broken up; "a vast sluice of ignorance and vice was opened; a race which never had evolved anything of its own motion was given the ballot, the highest right of American citizenship," and never regarded it as more than a personal perquisite, while white men of the highest type were disqualified from voting by the constitution of their state; negroes were made eligible to all offices, while the federal Constitution deprived the people of the wisdom, knowledge and experience in office of former leaders at a time when they were most needed. A comment of the time was, that a proscribed white man could not have been bailiff to his former slave if that former slave was a justice of the peace, as he might well have been, if he was not in fact. Democrats had not opposed negro suffrage in order to oppress the negroes, but to prevent negroes from crushing them; and the situation produced by the imposition of the constitution attested the reasonableness of their fear of the effect of the endowment of the negro with the ballot. They realized that "in popular government where two races exist in mass who are from any cause so different that they cannot mingle in marriage and become one, the exercise of political power must be confined to one or the other of those races if there be a wish for security and peace." In the fourth district, the whites were greatly outnumbered by the blacks, and, comparing voting strength, a contest with them at the polls seemed hopeless. The census of 1870 credited Choctaw county with 5,802 whites and 6,872 blacks; Greene county, 3,858 whites and 14,541 blacks; Hale county, 4,802 whites and 16,990 blacks; Marengo county, 6,090 whites and 20,058 blacks; Sumter county, 5,202 whites and 18,907 blacks; Tuscaloosa county, 10,229 whites and 8,294 blacks. Thus, excepting the first- and last-named counties, the whites were outnumbered by more than three to one. All of the towns in the section under review were small, the populations ranging from 1,500 to 2,000. Greensboro in Hale, Eutaw in Greene, Demopolis in Marengo, Butler in Choctaw, Livingston in Sumter, and Tuscaloosa in the county of the same name, were the seats of government of their respective counties, centers of religion, education and sociability. At Tuscaloosa were located the State University and a fine girls' school; in Marion were the Seminary, the Institute, Judson, and Howard College; in Greensboro, the Methodist Southern University and an advanced girls' school. These towns had been founded as the home places of wealthy and cultured planter families whose plantations were in the fertile prairies and canebrakes. Office-holding had always been their honorable distinction, gained by highest merit.