The following petition was written and signed in 1868 by a committee of white citizens in Alabama, protesting the new Constitution that had just been adopted there.

We are beset by secret oath-bound political societies; our character and conduct are systematically misrepresented and magnified to you and in the newspapers of the North; the intelligent and impartial administration of just laws is obstructed; industry and enterprise are paralyzed by the fears of the white men and the expectations of the black that Alabama will soon be delivered over to the rule of the latter; and many of our best people are, for these reasons, leaving the homes they loved for others in strange lands. Continue over us, if you will do so, your own rule by the sword. Send down among us honorable and upright men of your own people, of the race to which you and we belong, and ungracious, contrary to wise policy and the institutions of the country, and tyrannous as it will be, no hand will be raised among us to resist by force their authority. But do not, we implore you, abdicate your rule over us, by transferring us to the blighting, brutalizing, and unnatural dominion of an alien and inferior race, a race which has never exhibited sufficient administrative ability for the good government of even the tribes into which it is broken up in its native seats; and which in all ages has itself furnished slaves for all the other races of the earth.