ardent booster, he promoted education, business, and railroad construction. During the Civil War he provided naval supplies and helped build two ships. He opposed Radical Reconstruction inside the state and in Congress, and was scornful of the Yankee carpetbaggers who came in. Historian John Fair concludes that Tift became "more Southern than many natives." His pro-slavery attitudes before the war and his support for segregation afterward made him compatible with Georgia's white elite. This area was developed for cotton cultivation by planters, who used numerous enslaved African Americans to clear lands and process the cotton. As a result of the planters' acquisition of slave workers, by 1840 Dougherty County's majority population was black, composed overwhelmingly of slaves. The market center for cotton plantations, Albany was in a prime location for shipping cotton to other markets by steamboats. In 1858, Tift hired Horace King, a former slave and bridge builder, to construct a toll bridge over the river. King's bridge toll house still stands. Already important as a shipping port, Albany later became an important railroad hub in southwestern Georgia. Seven lines were constructed to the town. An exhibit on trains is located at the Thronateeska Heritage Center in the former railroad station. Carey Wentworth Styles After the war, Carey Wentworth Styles moved to Albany and founded the newspaper Albany News. In the early years following the war, Styles, like Tift, took great exception to the Radical Reconstruction program then in force, and advocated for a more moderate response based on his interpretation of Georgia's rights under the Constitution. Styles backed "constitutional reconstruction" advanced by Benjamin H. Hill and sought support for the idea from the national Democratic party. While on a trip to Atlanta in May 1868, to meet with Democratic party leaders, Styles took measure of the contemporary Atlanta newspapers, and found them lacking. Styles believed them to be little more than organs for the Radical Republican reconstruction agenda. He resolved to bring a paper aligned with the Democratic party viewpoint to the Atlanta market, one supporting his constitutional reconstruction ideals. Styles moved from Albany to Atlanta, and on May 9 he announced that he had obtained the necessary financial backing to purchase the Daily Opinion. On June 16, 1868 the new Democratic daily (as he described it) printed its first edition, under the name The Constitution. Styles' tenure at the Atlanta Constitution would be brief. Unable to pay