Quelquechose had resumed his seat, I had ample time to make a study of his facial outline, for there was a window close behind him, against which his profile was defined as sharply as in one of those old black silhouette portraits which they used to take for sixpence on the old chain pier at Brighton. The honourable legislator had a fully developed Ethiopian physiognomy, but when he sat down I found that in hue he was only a mulatto. There were more coloured members in the house, some of them 'bright' mulattoes and quadroons, very handsome and distinguished looking. . . . A Southern gentleman pointed out to us one of the coloured representatives who, prior to the war, had been his, the gentleman's, slave and body-servant." . . .
The returning board appointed by the governor to go over the returns as they came from the commissioners at the polls and count the votes, decided, and it might be said awarded, the elections, or, as the people called it, counted in the candidates. Every year the test oath became less prohibitive, white youths attaining their majority and political disabilities being removed from elders by the pardoning power of the United States. To liberate the state from the machinery of negro and carpet-bag government, to put an end to the plundering of public finances, and to the making of laws and the distorting of courts of justice into political copartnerships with the ruling powers, and to free themselves from the military tutelage forced upon them, became the absorbing ambition of every Southern voter in the Southern state. This ambition effaced the issues of the war and the grinding necessities of the moment, and it united the men into a "Solid South," which
