Excerpt from "On the Readmission of Georgia to the Union"

Delivered on March 16, 1870; reprinted on U.S. Senate (Web site)

An African American senator speaks up about the readmission of a state

"They bear toward their former masters no revengeful thoughts, no hatreds, no animosities."

In two short years after the American Civil War (1861–65), the African American men of the South had gone from working as slaves to casting ballots as freedmen. It was an astonishing development in Southern society, outmatched only by the fact that African American men could also hold elected office and make laws alongside their former masters. Historians estimate about two thousand African Americans held federal, state, and local offices in the decade after Southern African American men were given the right to vote under the Reconstruction Act of 1867 (see...