NARRATOR
In North Carolina, the last legislature elected solely by the white vote adjourned. The legislators marked the occasion with a whisky punch party. Before long the state capitol was in a drunken uproar. With the ballot in black hands, many whites expected to give up their seats to former slaves. "We have lost all hope of escaping the vengeance of the Northern people, wrote one senator, "and all are preparing for the worst."

TUNNELL
What Reconstruction does by suddenly enfranchising blacks, it communicates the message that all of a sudden these people who have been part of the background scenery, who've been stage props, they're going to come onto center stage and be actors. And that is deeply disturbing to white Southerners and to many people in the North.

NARRATOR
Across the South, black newspapers exhorted every black man to seize the moment. "He owes it to the martyrs who have fallen to procure his rights," declared a Georgia newspaper. "He owes it to his God, who has wrought his freedom. Let the Republicans of the North know the strength and character of the colored vote in the South. Vote. Vote in spite of every threat." To freedmen, the ballot was sacred proof they were bondsmen no longer, but citizens at last.