South Carolina General Assembly met in Janney's Hall, Columbia, with eighty-five Black representatives and seventy white. There were ten Blacks and twenty-one whites in the senate and seventy-five Blacks and forty-nine whites in the house. This was the first and last American legislature with a Black majority. Robert Somers said later that the South Carolina Assembly was "a proletariat parliament the likes of which could not be produced under the widest suffrage in any part of the world save in some of these Southern states."
