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74 4 ALABAMA AND MISSISSIPPI Imposed Victory Pleas let me Hear from you & disfranchise every Rebb & confiscate their property that lies in the south & Hange 2 thirds of them[.] —Henry Springfield, St. Clair County, Alabama, April 1868 We, the carpet-baggist and scalawags from the States of Ohio, Vermont, Connecticutt [sic], Maine, and Africa, do ordain and proclaim this to be the document upon which we predicate all our hopes for the success of the Radical party. . . . —Preamble to the Mississippi bill of rights proposed by Walter Stricklin I resign my seat in the convention because I am totally disgusted with its nonsense. —Walter Stricklin, conservative white delegate to the Mississippi convention overview The members of the Alabama convention, the first Black and Tan delegates to assemble, convened for their initial meeting on November 5, 1867, at the state capitol in Montgomery, ironically the very building that had been witness to the birth to the Confederate States of America early in 1861. They were the most expeditious of all the Black and Tan delegates in framing their constitution. They sat for only 28 days and adjourned on December 6. A month later, on January 7, 1868, Mississippi delegates converged upon the Hall of the House of Representatives in Jackson for their opening meeting. They remained in session for some 114 days before finally completing their deliberations and adjourning on May 18.1 Only Texas delegates, who were to begin their deliberations in Austin in June, would be at the task longer. South Carolina, the first of the Confederate states to secede, had long been the leader of the “states’ rights” cause, dating back at least to its unilateral actions during the nullification crisis of 1831. During the decades following that episode, however, support for decisive action in defense of southern interests became more widespread and especially strong in Mississippi and Alabama. Admitted to the Union at about the same time, December 1817 and December 1819, respectively, these two Deep South states had generally enjoyed flush times, prospering 75 Alabama and Mississippi in the very heart of the emerging cotton kingdom. Mississippi, which had experienced its own abortive secession movement under Governor John A. Quitman just before the Compromise of 1850, quickly followed South Carolina’s lead and became, on January 9, 1861, the second of the eleven Confederate states to secede. Two days later, Alabama, the home of fire-eater William Lowndes Yancey, followed suit (just after Florida), becoming the fourth state to leave the Union. As the secession movement continued to gain momentum, Confederate officials then converged upon Montgomery to create their new republic and to select Mississippian Jefferson Davis as their leader. After its brief appearance at center stage during the birth of the Confederacy, Montgomery, a community of only some 9,000 souls, returned to relative obscurity.2 Although the Yankees made wartime inroads to the north along the Tennessee River, Union strategic planners generally overlooked central Alabama, focusing instead on a more crucial strategic objective: the capture of Vicksburg and control of the Mississippi River. Once those objectives had been achieved by mid-1863, Union offensives in the West then shifted to even more distant operations , most notably the taking of Atlanta and General William T. Sherman’s subsequent March to the Sea. From midwar on, then, except for Admiral David Farragut’s inspiring action against the port of Mobile in August of 1864, it was not until late in 1865, well after hostilities had ended, that either Mississippi or Alabama again received nationwide attention. This renewed notoriety was provoked by legislators in Mississippi (the first of the exConfederate states to complete its Reconstruction under Andrew Johnson), who passed the most infamous of the Black Codes, the intent of which was to place the state’s freedmen in a condition of quasi servitude. This act galvanized northern Republicans, who then initiated a more stringent Reconstruction through congressional action taken during March of 1867. Some seven months later, however, national attention again shifted to Alabama, where the first of the Black and Tan conventions met to initiate the newly mandated program of Congressional Reconstruction. Although Alabama delegates would draft their constitution over a span of a mere four weeks, while those in Mississippi were to labor for some four and a half months to frame theirs, the two conventions had much in common. Their delegate mix was virtually identical : southern whites accounted for a bit over half the members in both, outside whites were only slightly...

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