American Historical Ephemera and Photography

CDV on cardstock mount (some toning, uneven clipping to bottom edge of print; mount with some toning, light soiling, and wear to edges/corners). Captioned in print, with copyright statement printed on mount recto. Subjects identified in print on verso.

A composite image featuring portraits of the 68 members of the reconstructed South Carolina Legislature, a majority of whom are black.

Purposed to incite fear and inflame anti-black sentiment among white Americans, some versions of this carte include printed statistics on mount recto (not featured here), including the majority ratio of "negroes or mulattoes" to white legislators, numbers of the men who could read and write, and the number of pictured legislators who did not pay taxes. Though the claims were untrue, they contributed to the anti-black sentiments that were already alive and well in South Carolina, as evidenced, in part, by the prominence and rampant activity of the Ku Klux Klan in the state during Reconstruction.