Gathering in November 1889 for the second annual meeting of the 1888 legislative biennium, South Carolina House Speaker James Simons greeted his colleagues by celebrating that “not a single vacancy has been occasioned by death.” While American legislators still die in office today, the apparent ubiquity of death in the post-Reconstruction South Carolina House hints at broader differences between the state legislatures of that period and the more contemporary congressional and state legislative arenas in which modern political science has honed its theories and measurement strategies.