CDV on cardstock mount. A composite image featuring portraits of 68 members of the reconstructed South Carolina Legislature, many of whom were African American. Printed caption at bottom of image, subjects identified in print on verso. Copyright printed on mount recto.

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.