As an illustration of the character of the men sent to the convention, Samuel Hale, a brother of United States Senator Hale, one of the few Union men and later Republicans resident in Sumter county, wrote Senator Wilson in January, 1868, a letter protesting against recognition by Congress of radicals in the south, in which he said that the men who sat in the convention and framed the constitution were, "so far as I am acquainted with them, worthless vagabonds, homeless, houseless, drunken knaves"; that the Sumter delegates were a negro and two whites--Yordy and Rolfe. Rolfe, he said, left his family in New York and had not seen them for four years, during which period he had led an immoral life with negroes; that he was known as the "Hero of Two Shirts," having left at a hotel in Selma, as security for an unpaid hotel bill, his carpetbag containing only two shirts: that his name was not signed to the constitution which he helped to frame because he was too drunk to write it. These men and Hays and Price, all strangers, were the only white men in Sumter county who took part in the election for delegates. As an early indication of future leadership, at that election Price ordered the negroes to secure their arms and prevent expulsion from the booth of one of their members who was vauntingly flourishing a gun. Only intervention by cool-headed whites prevented trouble. Mr. Hale, in the letter quoted from, stigmatized the election thus: "As shameless a fraud as was ever perpetrated upon the face of the earth." Rolfe and Hays were wheelwrights, but their talents found employment in more lucrative occupations. Rolfe's first "get-rich-quick" scheme was the selling to negroes of badges, which he said he was engaged in by order of General Grant. While agent of the Freedmen's Bureau Hays defrauded negroes of a thousand dollars derived from sales of cotton with which they had entrusted him. That was his disappearing act. That convention deprived of the right to vote all men who were proscribed by the fourteenth amendment from holding office. The constitution framed called for an election in February, 1868, to which it was to be submitted for ratification, and at which time officers were to be elected. It was submitted under a solemn congressional provision that if it should not receive in its favor the ballots of a majority of the registered voters, it was to be considered as rejected.