In July 1868, Georgia was readmitted to the Union, the newly elected General Assembly ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, and a Republican governor, New York native Rufus Bullock, was inaugurated. The state's Democrats—including former Confederate leaders Robert Toombs and Howell Cobb—denounced the policies of the Reconstruction in a mass rally in Atlanta, described as the largest in the state's history. The principal target of the rally, Joseph E. Brown, Georgia's Governor under the Confederacy, who became a Republican and a delegate to the Chicago convention that had nominated Union general Ulysses S. Grant for president, declared that although the state, reluctantly, had given Blacks the vote, as they were not citizens the state's constitution did not allow them to hold office. In September, white Republicans joined with the Democrats in expelling the Black senators and Black representatives in the lower house from the General Assembly. While Governor Bullock gave the figure of 28, the monument Expelled Because of Their Color, on the grounds of the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta, identifies 33.
