the standpoint of both its personnel and its policy, it deserves
to be ranked as the most remarkable political assemblage
ever convened in Mississippi. General Ord, who had brought
it into existence, fixed the number of delegates at one hun-
dred, and apportioned them in such a way, it was charged, as
to give the reconstructionists a large majority. Thus thirty-
two of the sixty-one counties of the state had negro majori-
ties, and were given seventy delegates, while the twenty-nine
white counties were given but thirty. ¹ This was the first
political body in Mississippi in which the negro race was
represented, there being seventeen colored delegates returned.
With the exception of the colored ministers, ² they were with-
out education, and none of them had ever before held pub-
lic office. There were but nineteen conservatives in the
convention. The so-called "carpet bag" element had twenty
odd representatives, nearly all of whom had been soldiers
in the Union army. There were twenty-nine native white
Republicans, derisively called "Scalawags." Four of the
Northern born Republicans had lived in the South before the
war, and two of them had served in the Confederate army.
Among the more prominent ex-Union soldiers in the conven-
tion were General Beroth B. Eggleston, a native of New
York, but who had enlisted as a private in an Ohio regi-
ment; Colonel A. T. Morgan, of the Second Wisconsin Volun-
teers; General W. S. Barry, formerly commander of a negro
regiment raised in Kentucky; General George C. for-
merly a practising attorney at Centralia, Illinois, and a grad-
uate of Knox College; Major W. H. Gibbs, of the Fifteenth
Illinois infantry; Judge W. B. Cunningham, of Pennsyl-
vania; and Captain E. J. Castello, of the Seventh Missouri
infantry. These were among the founders of the Republican
party in Mississippi, and were more or less prominent in the
politics of the state down to 1876. ³

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