Henry McNeal Turner’s speech to the Georgia legislature in September 1868 was a direct response to the expulsion by that body of twenty-seven African American state legislators. In the fi rst elections initiated by Radical Reconstruction in July 1867, three African Americans were elected to the Georgia Senate and twenty-nine to the Georgia House of Representatives. These black legislators represented a Republican Party that hoped to rise to power in the Reconstruction South by creating a coalition among the newly enfranchised freedmen, sympathetic native southern whites, and northern whites who had come to the South seeking economic prosperity and political opportunities. As in most southern states, Georgia Republicans were riven by factional disputes. Democrats, hoping to take advantage of Republican factionalism, sought means to regain political power for conservative whites.