Passage and Ratification: 1911 to 1913, State by State

Lesson 4 ended on the night of June 12, 1911, with the Senate's resolution headed back to a House that did not want it. This lesson covers what happened next: the stalemate, the surrender, the paperwork, the race among the states, the holdouts, and the first elections. It is a lesson about dates and tallies, and it gives you the source for each one, because the dates and tallies are the parts that get repeated wrong. The final section is about Idaho, and it ends with an admission.

Ten months in conference

The two chambers had passed different texts. The House's H.J. Res. 39 carried the clause giving each state legislature exclusive control over the times, places and manner of Senate elections. The Senate's version, after the Bristow substitute, dropped that clause and left Congress's Article I, Section 4 power untouched. The Asheville Citizen's dispatch of June 12, 1911 reported that the amended resolution would go to conference and that "some senators predict that the house will refuse to accept it." The senators were right for ten months. The Daily Kennebec Journal of May 14, 1912 says the resolution had been "in conference since July 5, last year," and that "if the House had not receded from its opposition to granting federal control of senatorial elections it might have met the fate of the others." The Seventh Circuit's survey of the history in Judge v. Quinn (2010) puts it the same way: the question of federal control "kept the proposed amendment tied up in a Conference Committee of the House and Senate for nearly a year."

The House moved on Monday, May 13, 1912. The Evening Star's afternoon edition caught the opening: instead of taking up District of Columbia business, which the calendar provided for that day, the House took up Representative Rucker's motion "to concur in the Senate amendment to the joint resolution calling for the direct election of senators." Representative Bartlett of Georgia, who led the opposition, tried to put District business back in its place and lost the point to Speaker Champ Clark. Bartlett then offered an amendment that would have barred Congress from determining the qualifications of Senate electors, appointing election supervisors, or using federal marshals or troops at Senate elections. The Dakota County Herald's account says it was defeated 189 to 89 (the figures are from imperfect scanning and should be read as approximate) and that Representatives Kahn and Knowland of California were the only Republicans to vote for it.

Then the House voted to recede and concur. The Washington Herald's headline the next morning: "House Accepts Bristow Amendment Tacked On in Senate Providing Federal Regulation. Body Recedes From Its Former Position Despite Warning of Southern Members that Their States Will Refuse to Ratify." The Herald's figure is garbled in the scan (the OCR reads "217 to 33"), but its text goes on to describe "the thirty-nine votes in opposition"; the Dakota County Herald and the Daily Kennebec Journal, carrying the same wire account, both gave 237 to 39, and 238 to 39 is the figure most later accounts use. The 39 nays are consistent across the reports, and the Herald printed them. The nays were southern Democrats, among them Adamson, Bartlett, Flood, Glass, Hardy, Hay, Harrison of Mississippi, Humphreys, Sisson, Slayden and Witherspoon, by the Dakota County Herald's list. "Southern Democrats declare their States will never ratify the amendment in its present shape," the Washington Herald reported. Several of them kept that promise.

The Congressional Record of the House proceedings is at 48 Cong. Rec. 6347 to 6369 for May 13, 1912, per the Seventh Circuit's citation. The vote was the last legislative act required. A joint resolution proposing a constitutional amendment does not go to the President; under Article V it goes from Congress to the states, and the courts have treated the President's signature as unnecessary since the 1790s. The enrolled resolution was signed by Champ Clark as Speaker, James S. Sherman as Vice President and President of the Senate, and South Trimble as Clerk of the House. The Statutes at Large print it at 37 Stat. 646 with the margin note "Election of Senators," the bill number "[H. J. Res. 39.]" and, under the signatures, "Deposited in Department of State May 15, 1912." The page carries no approval date, because there was no approval: the margin where an act's date would go is blank. The House Manual's ratification note uses the May 15 date as the date the amendment was "proposed to the legislatures of the several States." The National Archives dates its enrolled copy May 13, 1912, the day the House concurred. Both dates are correct; they describe different acts.

Date	Step	Vote or action	Source
February 28, 1911	Senate votes on the 61st Congress resolution as amended by Sutherland	54 to 33; fails, four short of two thirds	Morning Oregonian, March 1, 1911 (see lesson 4)
April 13, 1911	House passes H.J. Res. 39 (Rucker) with the race rider	296 to 16	San Francisco Call, April 14, 1911 (see lesson 4)
June 12, 1911	Senate adopts the Bristow substitute	44 to 44; Vice President Sherman votes yea	Asheville Citizen, June 13, 1911; 47 Cong. Rec. 1923
June 12, 1911	Senate passes H.J. Res. 39 as amended	64 to 24	Asheville Citizen, June 13, 1911
July 5, 1911 to May 1912	Resolution in conference	No agreement	Daily Kennebec Journal, May 14, 1912
May 13, 1912	House recedes and concurs in the Senate version	238 to 39 (one report gives 237)	Washington Herald, May 14, 1912; Dakota County Herald, May 17, 1912; 48 Cong. Rec. 6347 to 6369
May 13, 1912	Enrolled joint resolution signed by Speaker Clark and Vice President Sherman	37 Stat. 646	National Archives enrolled copy (date); govinfo, Statutes at Large (text)
May 15, 1912	Deposited in the Department of State; proposed to the states		37 Stat. 646; House Manual note

What the states were asked to ratify

The resolution asked the states to replace the first paragraph of Article I, Section 3 and the vacancy portion of its second paragraph with three new paragraphs. The first gives each state two senators "elected by the people thereof, for six years," each with one vote, and ties the qualifications of Senate voters to those for "electors of the most numerous branch of the State legislatures." The second provides that when vacancies happen, "the executive authority of such State shall issue writs of election to fill such vacancies," with a proviso that a legislature "may empower the executive thereof to make temporary appointments until the people fill the vacancies by election as the legislature may direct." The third says the amendment "shall not be so construed as to affect the election or term of any Senator chosen before it becomes valid as part of the Constitution." Lesson 6 reads each clause in detail. The point here is that the states had one text, with no elections clause of any kind, and a year to argue about it.

The ratification race

Massachusetts moved first, on May 22, 1912, nine days after the House vote. Its legislature happened to be in session; most were not. Arizona, a state for only three months, ratified on June 3, 1912, and Minnesota on June 10. Then nothing for seven months. State legislatures in 1912 mostly met in odd-numbered years, in January, and the amendment had to wait for them. When they met, it moved fast. New York ratified on January 15, 1913, and within a month fourteen more states had acted, Wyoming on February 8 being the fourteenth. Thirty-three states ratified between January 15 and April 8, 1913, an average of one every two and a half days.

Order	State	Date	Order	State	Date
1	Massachusetts	May 22, 1912	19	Arkansas	February 11, 1913
2	Arizona	June 3, 1912	20	Maine	February 11, 1913
3	Minnesota	June 10, 1912	21	Illinois	February 13, 1913
4	New York	January 15, 1913	22	North Dakota	February 14, 1913
5	Kansas	January 17, 1913	23	Wisconsin	February 18, 1913
6	Oregon	January 23, 1913	24	Indiana	February 19, 1913
7	North Carolina	January 25, 1913	25	New Hampshire	February 19, 1913
8	California	January 28, 1913	26	Vermont	February 19, 1913
9	Michigan	January 28, 1913	27	South Dakota	February 19, 1913
10	Iowa	January 30, 1913	28	Oklahoma	February 24, 1913
11	Montana	January 30, 1913	29	Ohio	February 25, 1913
12	Idaho	January 31, 1913	30	Missouri	March 7, 1913
13	West Virginia	February 4, 1913	31	New Mexico	March 13, 1913
14	Colorado	February 5, 1913	32	Nebraska	March 14, 1913
15	Nevada	February 6, 1913	33	New Jersey	March 17, 1913
16	Texas	February 7, 1913	34	Tennessee	April 1, 1913
17	Washington	February 7, 1913	35	Pennsylvania	April 2, 1913
18	Wyoming	February 8, 1913	36	Connecticut	April 8, 1913

The dates come from the official ratification note printed with the Constitution in the House Manual (Constitution, Jefferson's Manual and Rules of the House of Representatives), which the Government Publishing Office republishes each Congress; the 117th Congress edition is the one checked for this lesson. Some state records give a different day for the same ratification, because a state may date it by the second chamber's vote, by the governor's signature, or by the certificate's arrival in Washington. When the dates differ, say which one you are using.

The margins inside the legislatures were lopsided. Michael Dimino's essay in the Heritage Guide to the Constitution reports that 72 state legislative chambers voted to ratify, that 52 of those votes were unanimous, and that across the 36 ratifying states there were 191 negative votes in all, 152 of them cast in Vermont and Connecticut. Two New England states supplied four fifths of the recorded opposition inside the ratifying states. Everywhere else, the amendment passed the way the House had passed it five times in the 1890s: easily, and with few people on record against it.

Connecticut's ratification on April 8, 1913 made 36, three fourths of 48. The Senate's page on the amendment marks that date as the moment the amendment became part of the Constitution, and the House Manual's note says "ratification was completed on April 8, 1913."

The states that voted no, and the states that never voted

The official note records two rejections: Utah on February 26, 1913 and Delaware on March 18, 1913. Utah's is the one usually remembered, partly because Utah's Senator Sutherland had done so much to shape the amendment and Utah's Senator Smoot had voted against it in February 1911. Delaware's rejection is less often mentioned, perhaps because Delaware's legislature had spent 114 days and 217 ballots failing to elect a senator in 1895 and had left the state without full representation for years, as lesson 3 describes; a legislature with that record voting to keep the power to itself is awkward for everyone's narrative.

Four states "did not complete action," in the note's phrase: Florida, Georgia, Rhode Island and South Carolina. Maryland's 2012 resolution, discussed below, recites that in Florida the amendment never reached the state Senate. Georgia and South Carolina were two of the states whose representatives had warned the House that their legislatures would not ratify without the race rider; they were as good as their word. Rhode Island, the smallest state, had also rejected the Sixteenth Amendment in 1910.

Then there are the states the note does not mention at all. Thirty-six ratified, two rejected, four did not complete action, two ratified later in the note's own text (Louisiana and Alabama). That is 44. The other four, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi and Virginia, appear nowhere in the official note for this amendment. The note is not saying they rejected it. It is saying nothing. Maryland's own 2012 joint resolution confirms it: "The General Assembly of Maryland has not taken action to either ratify or reject the 17th Amendment." For the other three, this course found no official record of action either way and does not assert one.

State	Status in the official note	Later action	Source
Utah	Rejected, February 26, 1913	None found	House Manual note
Delaware	Rejected, March 18, 1913	Ratified by Senate Concurrent Resolution 30, 145th General Assembly, passed in 2010 (the General Assembly's record shows status "Passed 7/1/10"; Maryland's 2012 resolution recites June 25, 2010)	House Manual note; Delaware General Assembly
Florida	Did not complete action	None found; Maryland's 2012 resolution says the amendment never reached the Florida Senate	House Manual note; Maryland JR 4 (2012)
Georgia	Did not complete action	None found	House Manual note
Rhode Island	Did not complete action	None found	House Manual note
South Carolina	Did not complete action	None found	House Manual note
Louisiana	Ratified later, June 11, 1914		House Manual note (Maryland's 2012 recital gives 1913; the official note's 1914 date is used here)
Alabama	Ratified later, April 16, 2002		House Manual note
Maryland	Not mentioned	Ratified by Joint Resolution 4 (House Joint Resolution 3), signed by the presiding officers May 22, 2012	Maryland General Assembly
Kentucky, Mississippi, Virginia	Not mentioned	None found	House Manual note (silent)

The late ratifications are symbolic, since an amendment ratified by three fourths of the states binds all of them. They still matter as records. Delaware's resolution, sponsored by Senator Sokola with Representative B. Short, is titled "Formally Ratifying the 17th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States Providing for the Popular Election of Senators to the United States Senate," and its synopsis says plainly that the amendment was already in force and the resolution "formalizes Delaware's ratification." Maryland's 2012 resolution recites the congressional votes of June 12, 1911 and May 13, 1912, Connecticut's completing ratification, and requests the Governor to send authentic copies under the Great Seal to the Secretary of State, the Senate Majority Leader, the Speaker and the Acting Administrator of General Services. A reader checking those recitals will find three slips in Maryland's text: a 1913 date for Louisiana, a June 25 date for Delaware, and the statement that Utah "was the only state to reject" the amendment, when the official note records Delaware's rejection too. That is a useful reminder that even a ratifying resolution is a secondary source for someone else's history.

The proclamation of May 31, 1913

In 1913 the Secretary of State kept the count. Under the statute then in force the Secretary received the states' certificates and, when three fourths had ratified, issued a proclamation that the amendment had become part of the Constitution. (That duty passed to the Administrator of General Services in 1951 and to the Archivist of the United States in 1984. Maryland's 2012 resolution, written a generation after the second transfer, still addresses its copy to the Acting Administrator of General Services.) Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, in office since March 5, 1913, issued the proclamation for the Seventeenth Amendment on May 31, 1913. The House Manual's note describes it as a proclamation "dated May 31, 1913" declaring the amendment ratified "by the legislatures of 36 of the 48 States." The Capitol Visitor Center displays the Senate's copy of the notification, dated the same day, from the Records of the U.S. Senate at the National Archives, and the National Archives' Center for Legislative Archives dates the "ratification notification" to May 31 as well.

The proclamation did not make the amendment effective. Ratification by the thirty-sixth state did that, on April 8. The proclamation announced it. The distinction matters for the savings clause, discussed below, and for any question about which senators were "chosen before it becomes valid."

Bryan had a busy spring. His predecessor, Philander Knox, had proclaimed the Sixteenth Amendment, the income tax, on February 25, 1913, after Delaware, Wyoming and New Mexico completed its ratification on February 3. The two amendments were ratified by many of the same legislatures in the same sessions, and the House Manual's two notes show states acting on both within days of each other. Idaho had ratified the income tax amendment on January 20, 1911 and ratified the Senate amendment on January 31, 1913. Lesson 8 takes up the argument that the two amendments together changed the federal balance; for now the point is only that 1913 delivered both.

The first elections

The amendment's effect was immediate for vacancies and gradual for everything else. Augustus O. Bacon of Georgia is the test case. His term expired on March 3, 1913 with no successor chosen, because Georgia's legislature did not meet until June; the Senate's own list of Georgia senators records that in 1913, as in 1907, Bacon "was appointed by the governor for the interim between Mar. 4 (when his term ended) and June, when the state legislature was scheduled to meet again, and could elect him." Ratification on April 8 intervened, and the seat was filled instead by a popular election on July 15, 1913, which Bacon won. The Senate's Seventeenth Amendment page calls him "the first senator directly elected under the terms of the Seventeenth Amendment," and the irony that the first popularly elected senator was the man who had fought the Bristow substitute hardest is not lost on the Senate's historians either. (The Senate's Georgia timeline, counting from the regular election of November 1914, gives the "first directly elected" label to Thomas Hardwick instead; both are on senate.gov, and the difference is whether a special election counts.)

The first general election under the amendment was November 3, 1914. The Senate's state timelines record the firsts: in Idaho, James H. Brady, the incumbent, "became Idaho's first directly elected senator under the Seventeenth Amendment"; in Oregon, George E. Chamberlain, whose 1909 election by a Republican legislature is told in lesson 4, was elected by the voters he had already won once. The Senate Historical Office says that 1914 "marked the first time all senatorial elections were held by popular vote."

Everyone else kept the seat they had. The third paragraph, the savings clause, provides that the amendment "shall not be so construed as to affect the election or term of any Senator chosen before it becomes valid." A senator elected by his legislature in January 1913 for a term beginning March 4, 1913 served the full six years. William E. Borah, re-elected by the Idaho legislature on January 14, 1913, did not face Idaho's voters until November 1918, and then won four more times. The clause meant that the Senate elected under the old system and the Senate elected under the new one overlapped for six years, and that the last senator chosen by a legislature did not leave until March 1919. It also meant there was no sudden turnover to measure, which is one reason the empirical studies in lesson 9 have trouble finding a sharp break at 1913.

Idaho, January 1913

Idaho's ratification date is January 31, 1913, twelfth in order, between Montana on January 30 and West Virginia on February 4. The source is the official note. That much is certain.

The context is better than the date. The twelfth Idaho legislature convened in January 1913 with two Senate elections to conduct under the old system, because the amendment was not yet in force. The first was easy. On January 14, 1913, the two houses balloting separately re-elected Borah to a second six-year term, with 75 votes, "without the loss of a single Republican vote in both branches," the Salt Lake Tribune reported, and the joint session confirmed it at noon the next day. The second was not easy at all. Heyburn had died on October 17, 1912, and Governor James H. Hawley had appointed Kirtland I. Perky, a Democrat, on November 18, 1912 to serve until the legislature met. The legislature had to fill the two years left in the term. On the first day's separate ballots the Republican vote split among Chief Justice James F. Ailshie, former Governor Brady, Thomas R. Hamer, Burton L. French and others, with Ailshie two votes ahead of Brady and no one near the 43 needed. The Tribune's Boise correspondent called it "an uncertain" contest. It stayed uncertain for ten days.

On January 24, 1913, on what the Tribune counted as the thirty-first ballot, a Republican caucus agreement broke the deadlock and Brady received 43 votes, "two more than the necessary number to elect," to seven for Ailshie. (The Tribune's own arithmetic shifted during the contest: its January 15 dispatch had said "it takes forty-three votes to elect," which under the 1866 Act would be a majority of all members elected to both houses; its January 25 dispatch treated 41 as enough. The journals would settle which figure the joint assembly used.) The northern Idaho members who had been Ailshie's base deserted him; the Tribune tied the collapse to a recent state Supreme Court contempt proceeding in which Ailshie had been involved and to the court's ruling that had barred the Progressive Party's electors from the November 1912 ballot. The day had a scene. Representative A. S. Dickenson of Blackfoot, an Ailshie supporter, passed when his name was called, then took the floor to denounce Brady "amidst hisses" and cast his ballot for William Courtney, the janitor of the House of Representatives. Brady was elected without him. Perky telegraphed congratulations. Brady was sworn in Washington on February 6, 1913, and, the Evening Star noted, cast a vote within fifteen minutes that carried a Republican motion 37 to 34, a motion that would have failed on a tie had Perky, a Democrat, still held the seat.

One week after the thirty-first ballot, this same legislature ratified the amendment that would take the power to hold such contests away from it. The timing is the whole argument of lesson 3 compressed into seventeen days in one capitol: a legislature that could re-elect a popular senator in one ballot and needed thirty-one to fill a vacancy, voting to let the voters do both.

Now the admission. The brief for this course asked for the chamber votes on Idaho's ratification. This course could not find them. The Idaho Legislature's website carries the Idaho Code and the session laws and journals for recent decades, but not the 1913 session laws or the 1913 House and Senate journals, and the newspaper archives searched for this lesson (the Library of Congress's Chronicling America collection) returned the Borah and Brady elections but no account of the ratification vote. The votes exist, in the 1913 Idaho Senate and House Journals and in the 1913 Session Laws, which the Idaho State Archives and some university libraries hold in print. Until someone reads them, the honest statement is: Idaho ratified on January 31, 1913, and the margins in each chamber are not reported here. Lesson 7 covers Idaho's full history with the amendment, and repeats the same gap rather than filling it with a guess.

Questions and answers

Why did the House hold out for ten months and then give in?

The House's version carried the race rider, which its southern members wanted and which the Senate had struck twice. The Daily Kennebec Journal's judgment on May 14, 1912 was that the resolution "might have met the fate of the others" if the House had not receded, and that "this danger" led the House to agree not to press its views. Put plainly, a majority of the House decided it wanted the amendment more than it wanted the rider, and the 39 members who disagreed were nearly all from the South.

Why is the proposal dated both May 13 and May 15, 1912?

May 13 is the day the House concurred and the enrolled resolution was signed; the National Archives dates its copy that day. May 15 is the day the resolution was deposited in the Department of State, as the Statutes at Large note at 37 Stat. 646 records, and the House Manual uses that date as the day the amendment was "proposed to the legislatures." Either is defensible with the explanation attached.

Did the President sign the amendment?

No, and he did not need to. Article V sends a proposed amendment from Congress to the states, and the enrolled resolution at 37 Stat. 646 carries the signatures of the Speaker, the Vice President as President of the Senate, and the Clerk. President Taft's name does not appear. The Daily Kennebec Journal's remark that earlier resolutions died "never to receive the President's signature" was a newspaper's error about procedure, not a description of the law.

Which states cast the most votes against ratification?

Vermont and Connecticut, which both ratified anyway. Dimino's essay in the Heritage Guide counts 191 negative votes in all 72 chambers of the 36 ratifying states, with 152 of them in those two. Fifty-two of the 72 chambers were unanimous. So the recorded opposition inside the ratifying states was concentrated in two small New England legislatures, and most of the country's legislators did not vote no at all.

What is the difference between Utah's "rejection" and Georgia's "did not complete action"?

A rejection is a recorded vote against ratifying in at least one chamber, reported to Washington. Utah's legislature voted the amendment down on February 26, 1913. "Did not complete action" means the legislature took the resolution up but never finished; Maryland's 2012 resolution recites that in Florida the amendment never reached the state Senate. Both categories are in the official note; the four states not mentioned at all are a third category the note does not name.

Why does the course give Louisiana's ratification as 1914 when Maryland's resolution says 1913?

Because the official federal note says June 11, 1914, and Maryland's resolution is a 2012 recital of other states' history, written by legislative staff and not checked against the Statutes at Large. The same resolution gives Delaware's 2010 ratification a June 25 date while Delaware's own record shows passage on July 1, 2010, which probably reflects the two chambers acting on different days. When a primary source and a secondary recital conflict, use the primary and say so.

Did the Seventeenth Amendment change the Senate overnight?

No. The savings clause protected every senator chosen before April 8, 1913 for the rest of his term, so the last legislature-chosen senators served until March 1919. The first direct election was Georgia's special election of July 15, 1913, which Bacon won, and the first general election under the amendment was November 3, 1914, for one third of the seats. The Senate changed one class at a time over three elections.

Why were Borah and Brady elected by the Idaho legislature in January 1913 if Idaho ratified the amendment that same month?

Because the amendment was not in force until the thirty-sixth state ratified on April 8, 1913, and even then the savings clause protected senators already chosen. In January 1913 the Constitution still said "chosen by the Legislature thereof," and the 1866 Act still set the procedure. Idaho's legislature did what the law required, elected two senators, and then ratified the amendment that would end the practice. Borah's first popular election came in 1918 and Brady's in 1914.

Hard questions

If 36 states ratified within eleven months, wasn't the outcome a foregone conclusion, and isn't the "race" framing overdone?

The speed came from the calendar more than from enthusiasm: 33 of the 36 acted in the three months after legislatures convened in January 1913, because that is when legislatures met. The margins inside those legislatures were lopsided, which supports the "foregone" view. Against it stand two rejections, four incomplete actions, four silences, and the fact that the southern members who voted no in the House had predicted their states would refuse, and several did. Thirty-six was reached with eight states to spare. That is comfortable. It is not unanimous, and the holdouts were not random.

Utah rejected the amendment even though Utah's own senator, Sutherland, had done so much to shape it. Doesn't that show the amendment was imposed on unwilling states?

It shows Utah's legislature disagreed with Utah's senior senator, which legislatures are allowed to do. It also shows that "shaping" an amendment and supporting it are different things: Sutherland's February 1911 amendment was about keeping Congress's existing power over elections, and his vote for the resolution does not tell you what his state's legislators thought about direct election. The amendment was "imposed" on Utah in exactly the way Article V imposes any amendment on a state that votes no: by the ratification of three fourths of the others. Utah has sent its senators to Washington by popular vote since 1914, and its legislature's complaint came a century later: in 2016 it passed a memorial urging repeal, which lesson 10 covers.

Why should anyone care that Delaware and Maryland ratified a century late?

Legally, no one should; the amendment bound them from April 8, 1913. Historically, the late ratifications are evidence about how state legislatures regard the amendment now. Both resolutions passed without recorded controversy in the records this lesson found, in the same years that repeal resolutions were being introduced in other legislatures (see lesson 10). Two states choosing to put their names on the amendment in 2010 and 2012 is a data point on one side of that debate. It is a small one, and this course does not inflate it.

The course admits it could not find Idaho's chamber votes. Why publish without them?

Because the alternative was to invent them or to copy a number from a source that did not show its work, and this course does neither. The ratification date is established by the official note. The votes are in the 1913 Idaho journals, which exist in print and were not online to this course. Saying "not found" tells a reader exactly where the gap is and how to close it. A confident number with no source would tell the reader nothing true.

Isn't it misleading to call Bacon "the first directly elected senator" when he was already sitting in the seat?

The phrase is the Senate Historical Office's, and it describes the first popular election held under the amendment, which was Georgia's on July 15, 1913. Bacon was sitting under a governor's interim appointment made on March 4, 1913, when his old term ran out before the legislature could meet; the Senate's Georgia senators list records that the same thing had happened in 1907. Once the amendment took effect on April 8, the vacancy was filled the new way, by a popular election, and Bacon won it unopposed. So he was the last Georgia senator to hold a seat by legislative election and gubernatorial appointment and the first chosen by Georgia's voters, which is a better illustration of the transition than a cleaner case would be.