egate to the Constitutional
Convention of 1875. For the eight years from 1886 to 1894, White
served as prosecuting attorney for the second judicial district of the
State, while Cheatham, the fourth member of the North Carolina
delegation, had held but one office, that of Register of Deeds for
Vance County.

It is especially significant that each one of the Negro Reconstruction
Congressmen from South Carolina, namely Cain,[28] De Large,[29]
Elliott,[30] Rainey,[31] Ransier,[32] and Smalls[33] were members of
the State Constitutional Convention of 1868. Two of them, Cain and
Rainey, had been formerly State Senators; Smalls had served two terms
in the Senate and four in the House; while each of the others had been
members for one term or more in the lower branch of the legislature.
Ransier, moreover, had held, prior to his election to Congress, the
high office of lieutenant-governor of the State; Elliott had served as
adjutant-general, and Smalls had held successively the offices of
lieutenant-colonel, brigadier-general and major-general in the State
militia.

Of the two South Carolinians who served in Congress after the
Reconstruction, Thomas E. Miller[34] was for four terms a member of
the lower chamber of the State legislature and for one term a member
of the Senate. Furthermore, he was for one term a school commissioner
of his county, and received also his party's nomination for the office
of lieutenant-governor of the State. Indeed, of the entire South
Carolina group, Murray, alone, seems to have been elected to Congress
without previously having held public office.[35] Jefferson F.
Long,[36] of Georgia, was not unlike Mr. Murray in that the former had
never held public office. In this, his experience differed from that
of Walls, of Florida, who had been a member of the Florida State
Senate.

Alabama sent to Congress three Negroes, Turner,[37] Rapier,[38] and
Haralson.[39] Of these men Haralson alone had had experience in the
legislature prior to his election to Congress, having served in both
branches of that body. Turner was elected in 1868 to the city council
of Selma. Later he became tax collector of Dallas County, but because
of his inability to secure honest men as assistants, resigned the
office. The third member of this group, James T. Rapier, served as an
assessor and later as a collector of internal revenue in his State.

The two Negro United States Senators, Hiram R. Revels[40] and B. K.
Bruce,[41] bo