Six months ago, there were more black Republicans running for Congress than there had been since Reconstruction. On Monday there were a dozen. Today there are but two left, and they're not candidates -- they're congressmen-elect: Tim Scott, from South Carolina's 1st District, and Allen West, from Florida's 22nd. Both are the first African-American Republicans sent to Congress from their states in more than 100 years, and they're both the first black Republicans to join the House or Senate since J.C. Watts retired in 2003.

But while Scott and West share a region, an ethnicity and a political party, their differences reflect the civil war currently taking place within the GOP. To understand them is to understand the problems that lie ahead.

To begin with, Scott is talented enough to have beaten Paul Thurmond -- son of South Carolina's late, beloved Strom -- to win his primary in June. The 45-year-old was also a respected member of the state legislature before ever considering a run at Congress. While he was endorsed by Sarah Palin and various South Carolina Tea Parties, Scott kept his extremism to a minimum throughout the campaign, avoiding the topic of human cloning, which he has said should be illegal, in favor of standard GOP rhetoric: Secure the borders, promote values, defeat terror and so on. Scott says he'd especially like to get rid of the practice of earmarking. He's an insurance-agency owner, and all in all, he's a Republican.

West, on the other hand, is a bit different. He's a 49-year-old career Army colonel with time spent in Iraq, and his military claim to fame is his admission that he once intentionally fired his handgun next to an Iraqi prisoner's head in order to scare the man into giving him information. As a candidate, West took to outright attacking Obama, calling the president "immature" and saying that he needed to "be a man." Once, West plain said that he "can't stand [Obama]." On the policy front, West, who says that "institutional racism is dead," would like to abolish both the Department of Education and the IRS. To put it simply, West is a Tea Partier.

Both men were endorsed by Sarah Palin, but just one of them has the more erratic, angry, somewhat dangerous bent that we've come to expect from Tea Party members.

Agree with him or not, Scott is a run-of-the-mill Republican, someone who might be willing to compromise where he sees fit for the good of the country. West is a zealot who hates the president. The future of our nation belongs, in part, to both men; whose disposition will win out, however, and shape the discourse for the next two years, remains to be seen.

Cord Jefferson is a staff writer for The Root. Follow him on Twitter.

Like The Root on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter.