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11 2 DELEGATES AND LEADERS At this time the “Black and Tan” Convention is holding its sessions in this city. One of the papers calls them the “Bones and Banjo” Convention. A black Negro occupies the chair, and whites and blacks are sprinkled alternately through the house. These are the men who are to frame a new constitution for the state! I think the sooner the Radicals run this race the better. —Mrs. Mary S. Mallard, New Orleans, November 1867 overview This chapter, a survey of all 1,018 Black and Tan delegates, provides a foundation for what is to be developed in the five to follow, each of which compares and contrasts a pair of conventions . But to begin with the basics, we here first offer the most accurate and complete headcount of delegates to date, verifying the numbers of participating southern white, black, and outside white delegates in each convention and overall. We start by documenting two points central to our study: (1) that southern white majorities were elected in most (seven of ten) of the states and (2) that the delegate mix—the respective percentages blacks, carpetbaggers, and southern whites—varied significantly among the conventions, reflecting the distinctive geographic, demographic, economic, political, and historical realities of the states in which they assembled. This established, we then confirm empirically, through careful and systematic quantitative analysis of the racial characteristics of delegate home districts, what has long been assumed: that blacks and carpetbaggers tended to be returned from districts with heavier concentrations of African American voters than was generally the case among those that returned southern whites. After authenticating delegate numbers, the proportions of southern whites, blacks, and outside whites in each of the conventions, and the racial mix of delegate home districts , we turn to the second section of this chapter: a statistical analysis of our collected biographical data, comparing and contrasting (in all cases for which such information is available ) the age, property holdings, and professions of all members of each of these three delegate groups—southern whites, blacks, and outside whites. To an extent this analysis confirms what has long been assumed, that blacks were indeed the poorest delegates in each of the conventions. Such scrutiny, however, also offers new insights of importance: for example, blacks, carpetbaggers, and scalawags 12 southern white delegates—frequently members of their region’s bourgeoisie—were hardly ne’er-do-wells; they were the wealthiest delegate group in six of the conventions (a distinction enjoyed by outside whites in the other four). Finally, we conclude this chapter with an examination of power and leadership, identifying and supplying biographical data on the convention presidents, on the chairs of convention standing committees, and on the rank-and-file members of those committees. Our findings here are among our most important. Even in the conventions in which their percentages of the delegates were the greatest, black delegates possessed only marginal institutional power. Outside whites, in contrast, enjoyed much greater influence than was to be expected, especially given their relatively small delegate numbers. Southern whites, however, not only accounted for a majority of delegates overall in the ten conventions. They also presided over most of them (six out of eleven, counting the two conventions held in Florida) and held over half of all their standing committee chairmanships, in addition to more than half of the rank-and-file appointments to these committees. Consequently, as will become clear in the five chapters to follow, the degree to which Republicans were able to control proceedings in particular conventions was often dependent upon their ability to attract support from southern white delegate majorities as native whites splintered among radicals, swing voters, and conservatives. southern whites, blacks, and outside whites: numbers and home districts Although there is necessarily a degree of irreducible arbitrariness in virtually all classificatory schemes, we have chosen to define southern whites (as opposed to outside whites) as Caucasian residents of a Confederate state before the war. Outside whites (as the name implies) are Caucasians who came from outside the Confederate states after the war began. The classification “black” includes those persons who at the time would have been designated as “mulattoes ” as well as those whom census returns designate as black.1 The clearest evidence that the Black and Tan conventions have hardly received the scrutiny and analysis they merit is the disagreement in the literature over even the fundamental matter of numbers.2 Although 1,027...

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