The planter James Lusk Alcorn (1816–1894), a Confederate general, was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1865 but, like other Southerners who had been loyal to the Confederacy, was not allowed to take a seat at that time. He supported suffrage for freedmen and endorsed the Fourteenth Amendment, as required by the Republicans in Congress. Alcorn became the leader of the "scalawags", local residents who comprised about a third of the Republican Party in the state, in coalition with "carpetbaggers" (migrants from the North) and freedmen.