Total membership, one hundred and fifteen.  Republicans, sixty-six; Democrats, forty-nine.  Colored members, thirty-eight.  White members, seventy-seven.  White majority, thirty-nine.

Of the sixty-six Republicans thirty-eight were colored and twenty-eight, white.  There was a slight increase in the colored membership as a result of the election of 1873, but the colored men never at any time had control of the State Government nor of any branch or department thereof, nor even that of any county or municipality.  Out of seventy-two counties in the State at that time, electing on an average twenty-eight officers to a county, it is safe to assert that not over five out of one hundred of such officers were colored men.  The State; district, county, and municipal governments were not only in control of white men, but white men who were to the manor born, or who were known as old citizens of the State—­those who had lived in the State many years before the War of the Rebellion.  There was, therefore, never a time when that class of white men known as Carpet-baggers had absolute control of the State Government, or that of any district, county or municipality, or any branch or department thereof.  There was never, therefore, any ground for the alleged apprehension of negro domination as a result of a free, fair, and honest election in any one of the Southern or Reconstructed States.

And this brings us to a consideration of the question, What is meant by “Negro Domination?” The answer that the average reader would give to that question would be that it means the actual, physical domination of the blacks over the whites.  But, according to a high Democratic authority, that would be an incorrect answer.  The definition given by that authority I have every reason to believe is the correct one, the generally accepted one.  The authority referred to is the late Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the State of Mississippi, H.H.  Chalmers, who, in an article in the North American Review about March, 1881, explained and defined what is meant or understood by the term “Negro Domination.”

According to Judge Chalmers’ definition, in order to constitute “Negro Domination” it does not necessarily follow that negroes must be elected to office, but that in all elections in which white men may be divided, if the negro vote should be sufficiently decisive to be potential in determining the result, the white man or men that would be elected through the aid of negro votes would represent “Negro Domination.”  In other words, we would have “Negro Domination” whenever the will of a majority of the whites would be defeated through the votes of colored men.  If this is the correct definition of that term,—­and it is, no doubt, the generally accepted one,—­then the friends and advocates of manhood suffrage will not deny that we have had in the past “Negro Domination,” nationally as well as locally, and that we may have it in the future.