“A Hot Municipal
Contest”: Prohibition and
Black Politics in
Greenville, South Carolina,
after Reconstruction1
Stephen A. West, Catholic University of America
During the late nineteenth century, contests over prohibition gripped hundreds of American towns and cities, nowhere with greater consequences
than in the post-Reconstruction South. This article examines those effects
in Greenville, South Carolina, a small marketing and manufacturing center
in the white-majority upcountry. During the 1880s, prohibition split white
Democrats who had “redeemed” Greenville’s town government just a few
years before and led to a surge in voter registration and participation
among African Americans. The liquor question’s repercussions for politics
in the Gilded Age South have been largely neglected, both by social historians of prohibition and by political historians, who have failed to see it as
one of the issues that roiled the region’s politics between Reconstruction
and the Populist rebellion. This article also emphasizes the overlooked
importance of municipal elections and governance—even in so small a
place as Greenville—as an arena for African Americans’ political activity.
Greenville’s black voters used their influence during the 1880s to achieve
modest but tangible gains in education and municipal services and to
erect at least a partial bulwark against the tide of white supremacy.
These developments were part of a region-wide revival in African
1
An earlier version of this article was presented at the Wiles Colloquium on
“Rethinking Reconstruction: Race, Labor and Politics after the American Civil
War,” Queens University, Belfast, UK, in October 2008. For their suggestions and
assistance, the author thanks: his fellow participants in the Wiles Colloquium,
especially Bruce Baker and Brian Kelly; the anonymous reviewers of this journal;
Fred Holder; Sidney Thompson of the Greenville County Historical Society; Ruth
Ann Butler; Penelope Forrester; and Allen Stokes, Henry Fulmer, and Beth
Bilderback of the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina.
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era | 11:4 Oct. 2012 doi:10.1017/S1537781412000382
519
Americans’ municipal power, which Southern Democrats were careful to
target in their disfranchising campaigns as the century drew to close.
The fall of 1883 found a “decided boom” for prohibition at work in
Greenville, South Carolina, an upcountry marketing and manufacturing town of about 7,000 inhabitants. In early November, residents
successfully petitioned municipal authorities to hold a referendum
on whether to continue licensing the town’s eighteen barrooms.
For the next month, prohibitionists organized ward committees
and held rallies around town, culminating in a series of four meetings in the five nights before the election. African Americans, who
made up about 45 percent of the town’s population, played an integral role on both sides of the contest. Two black men served on the
prohibitionists’ six-member executive committee, and three of the
town’s black churches opened their doors for “no-license” rallies.
On election day, black children marched through the streets singing
hymns, while their mothers and sisters served lunch to prohibition
supporters. Black men turned out in large numbers to vote both for
and against the referendum, although, according to one observer, “a
greater proportion . . . supported the License side.” When the final
tally showed a narrow margin of eighty votes in favor of granting
liquor licenses, “a mixed crowd of ill-behaved whites and blacks”
took to the streets to celebrate, setting off fireworks and parading
past the houses of leading prohibitionists in “the most riotous manner.” The campaign had failed in its immediate object, but in the
process achieved something else: Half a dozen years after the end
of Reconstruction, it had put African Americans back at the center
of town politics.2
The contest in Greenville was part of a wave of prohibitionist agitation that roiled politics in the South and around the nation during
the 1880s. Eighteen states held referenda on the issue during that
decade, including North Carolina in 1881 and Tennessee and
Texas in 1887. Because the authority to license barrooms generally
lay with local authorities, prohibitionists focused much of their
effort on municipal governments. In 1883, Greenville was one of
almost twenty towns and cities to hold no-license elections in
South Carolina alone. Between 1881 and 1888, the liquor question
dominated four different elections and referenda in Greenville. As
2
Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, Nov. 14, 21, 28, Dec. 5, 1883, and Jan. 2, 1884;
Charleston News and Courier, Dec. 2, 4, 1883; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistics of
the Population of the United States . . . 1880 (Washington, 1883), 424.
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| “A Hot Municipal Contest”
an upcountry town that boomed with the growth of railroads and
later of industry, Greenville had much in common with Charlotte,
Atlanta, and larger New South cities that likewise experienced
sharp fights over liquor. In those places and elsewhere, prohibition
cut across party and racial lines, finding supporters and opponents
among Republicans as well as Democrats, and among black as
well as white southerners. As a student at Fisk University, a
nineteen-year-old W. E. B. Du Bois “labored in the cause” of
Tennessee’s failed prohibition referendum in 1887 and saw how
white politicians “who hitherto had seldom deigned to ask [for
African Americans’] votes . . . were suddenly so very anxious for
their suffrages.” For Du Bois, the prohibition campaign served as
yet another reminder of the unsettled state of southern politics.
“The South will not always be solid,” he noted, “and in every division
the Negro will hold the balance of power.”3
The article that follows has two goals: first, to examine how the contest over prohibition in one locale fit into the broader context of
post-Reconstruction southern politics; and second, to emphasize
the importance of municipal elections and governance as a field
for African Americans’ political activity between Reconstruction
and disfranchisement. In both respects, the findings here reassess
aspects of earlier scholarship. A number of historians have explored
how the temperance movement in the late nineteenth-century South
mobilized ideas about religion, gender, and respectability and how
the rise of Jim Crow complicated but, at least for a time, did not prevent cooperation across the color line. Although recognizing the
importance of electoral politics for prohibition, however, these historians have been less attentive to the converse: that is, how, by
making demands on state and local governments, the foes of liquor
took part in and affected the already turbulent political currents of
the era. Historians of southern politics, for their part, have examined
a variety of groups that challenged white Democrats’ power
between Reconstruction and the Populist rebellion—Greenbackers,
3
Ann-Marie E. Szymanski, Pathways to Prohibition: Radicals, Moderates, and Social
Movement Outcomes (Durham, NC, 2003); John Hammond Moore, “The Negro
and Prohibition in Atlanta, 1885–1887,” South Atlantic Quarterly 69 (Winter 1970):
38–57; Harold Paul Thompson, “Race, Temperance, and Prohibition in the
Postbellum South: Black Atlanta, 1865–1890” (PhD diss., Emory University, 2005);
James D. Ivy, No Saloon in the Valley: The Southern Strategy of Texas Prohibitionists
in the 1880s (Waco, TX, 2003). On the number of referenda in South Carolina, see
Charleston News and Courier, Dec. 8, 1883; on Du Bois, see W. E. B. Du Bois, “An
Open Letter to the Southern People” in Against Racism: Unpublished Essays, Papers,
Addresses, 1887–1961, ed. Herbert Aptheker (Amherst, MA, 1985), 1–4.
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521
Readjusters, and the Knights of Labor, to name some of the most
studied—but have seldom accorded prohibitionists a spot on that
list or looked closely at cities and towns as a site for such conflicts.4
This focus on municipal elections and governance also departs from
much recent scholarship on African American politics after
Reconstruction. As part of his work on urban race relations more
than thirty years ago, Howard Rabinowitz devoted close attention
to black southerners’ participation in municipal politics. With a
few notable exceptions, historians over the past generation have
left behind not only Rabinowitz’s questions about the timing and
origins of segregation, but also his emphasis on the importance of
the municipal arena for black southerners.5 Although local studies
of individual southern towns and cities abound, they often focus
on the social history of the black community and de-emphasize electoral politics. Labor historians have examined issues of importance
to white and black workers in southern cities, but they too have
not paid great attention to the more general course of municipal
politics. Some of the most innovative recent work has come from
4
On temperance and prohibition in the South, see, in addition to the works cited
above, David M. Fahey, Temperance And Racism: John Bull, Johnny Reb, and the
Good Templars (Lexington, KY, 1996); Janette Thomas Greenwood, Bittersweet
Legacy: The Black and White “Better Classes” in Charlotte, 1850–1910 (Chapel Hill,
1994); Joe L. Coker, Liquor in the Land of the Lost Cause: Southern White Evangelicals
and the Prohibition Movement (Lexington, KY, 2007). On the unsettled state of
southern politics during the 1880s, see Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern
Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850–
1890 (New York, 1983); Laura F. Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion: The
Political Culture of Reconstruction (Urbana, 1997); Jane E. Dailey, Before Jim Crow:
The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia (Chapel Hill, 2000); Joseph Gerteis,
Class and the Color Line: Interracial Class Coalition in the Knights of Labor and the
Populist Movement (Durham, NC, 2007); Matthew Hild, Greenbackers, Knights of
Labor, and Populists: Farmer-Labor Insurgency in the Late-Nineteenth-Century South
(Athens, GA, 2007). This inattention to municipal politics generally—and to local
battles over prohibition specifically—stands in sharp contrast to many works on
the Gilded Age North; see, for example, Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What
We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (New York, 1983);
and Richard Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics: Class Conflict and the Origins of
Modern Liberalism in Chicago, 1864–97 (Urbana, 1998).
5
Howard N. Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865–1890 (New York,
1978); and Rabinowitz, Race, Ethnicity, and Urbanization: Selected Essays (Columbia,
MO, 1994). The importance of municipal politics during Reconstruction has received
more attention of late; see Jacqueline Jones, Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil
War (New York, 2008); Kate Masur, An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and
the Struggle Over Equality in Washington, D.C (Chapel Hill, 2010); and esp. Michael
W. Fitzgerald, Urban Emancipation: Popular Politics in Reconstruction Mobile, 1860–
1890 (Baton Rouge, LA, 2002).
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historians seeking explicitly to broaden the definition of the political, looking beyond the ballot box to other sites—including voluntary organizations, kinship networks, and the streets—where
politics were practiced, and by a broader range of political actors,
including women. Steven Hahn, in his acclaimed Nation Under
Our Feet, has done the best job of integrating this broader conception
of politics with the study of African Americans’ involvement in parties and elections. Even Hahn, however, regards black southerners’
real political accomplishments as coming outside the electoral
sphere and devotes much of his attention elsewhere. Moreover,
his focus on the rural South leaves urban dwellers out of the story
altogether.6
Greenville might seem an unlikely place to begin a reappraisal of
black southerners’ participation in urban politics. However, small
as it was, the town stood in the broad middle of what passed for
the urban South during the late nineteenth century. Its 1890 population of 8,600 made it the third largest incorporated place in
South Carolina, and it lay very close to the median among southern
towns and cities that met the Census Bureau’s definition of urban at
the time.7 Although no single place was representative of the whole,
recovering black political activism in one locale suggests the range
of places where municipal politics mattered. And in Greenville,
6
Exemplary works of these different approaches include: Wilbert L. Jenkins, Seizing
the New Day: African Americans in Post-Civil War Charleston (Bloomington, IN, 1998);
Leslie Brown, Upbuilding Black Durham: Gender, Class, and Black Community
Development in the Jim Crow South (Chapel Hill, 2008); Eric Arnesen, Waterfront
Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class, and Politics, 1863–1923 (New York, 1991);
Daniel Letwin, The Challenge of Interracial Unionism: Alabama Coal Miners, 1878–
1921 (Chapel Hill, 1998); Elsa Barkley Brown, “Negotiating and Transforming the
Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to
Freedom,” Public Culture 7 (Fall 1994): 107–46; and Brown, “To Catch the Vision
of Freedom: Reconstructing Southern Black Women’s Political History, 1865–
1880” in African American Women and the Vote, 1837–1965, ed. Ann D. Gordon
(Amherst, MA, 1997), 66–99; Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow:
Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel
Hill, 1996); Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the
Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA, 2003).
7
In 1890, the U.S. Census Bureau counted as “urban” those towns and cities with
populations of 4,000 or more. The eleven states of the former Confederacy had
103 such places that year; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Compendium of the Eleventh
Census: 1890, Part 1, Population (Washington, 1892), lxxi, 442–52, 736–37.
Although designated a city by its 1869 charter, Greenville was much closer in size
to what contemporaries and certainly modern Americans would consider a town.
This article uses both terms, generally referring to Greenville as a city in discussing
its municipal government and as a town in most other contexts.
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523
matter they certainly did. When prohibition burst on the scene
during the early 1880s, it reversed a steady decline in African
Americans’ electoral strength that had followed Reconstruction.
Black voter registration and participation rebounded as wets and
drys vied for support, and African Americans used their influence
to win a greater share of government services and resources.
Measured by the full scope of black southerners’ aspirations, these
were small accomplishments, of a sort that historians have largely
neglected in search of more dramatic or heroic displays of political
agency. Black residents, nonetheless, eagerly seized the opportunity
for local influence and, for a time, achieved gains that made a tangible and daily difference in their lives. The ultimate significance
of even that modest power became clear only with its loss. The revival of black municipal power in Greenville was part of a regionwide trend that Southern Democrats were careful to target in their
stepped-up assault on black voting rights. South Carolina’s 1895
constitution not only imposed new disfranchising measures but—
for the first time—extended them to municipal elections. With the
near total elimination of African Americans from the electorate,
the town’s white Democrats reversed the gains black voters had
achieved during the 1880s and codified a rigid system of Jim
Crow laws that would remain in place for decades.
A Freedmen’s Bureau officer described Greenville as he found it in
1866: “It boasted an old and new courthouse, four churches and several chapels, a university (not the largest in the world), a female college (also not unparalleled), two or three blocks of stores, one of the
best country hotels then in the South, [and] quite a number of comfortable private residences.” The place was not greatly changed—at
least in its physical aspects—from what it had been before the Civil
War, when it served as a marketing center and seat of local government in South Carolina’s northwestern corner. In the surrounding
district, about 70 percent of families owned no slaves in 1860.
Some plantations could be found south of town, but the area to
its north quickly give way to the foothills of the Blue Ridge
Mountains, where small farms predominated and cotton was
rare.8 Although the area was spared the direct ravages of combat
during the Civil War, Confederate defeat and the destruction of
slavery triggered a thorough transformation of social and economic
8
John William De Forest, A Union Officer in the Reconstruction, ed. James H.
Croushore and David Morris Potter (New Haven, 1948), xxix; Archie Vernon
Huff Jr., Greenville: The History of the City and County in the South Carolina Piedmont
(Columbia, SC, 1995), 112–44.
524
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life. Like other parts of the upcountry South, Greenville County was
drawn rapidly into the cotton economy after 1865, and within just
fifteen years, cotton production had climbed to six times its antebellum level. The town of Greenville flourished with the cotton trade,
especially after the completion during the 1870s of the Air-Line
Railway, part of a rail corridor stretching from Georgia to Virginia
and points beyond. The commercial profits of Greeenville’s merchants helped finance the building of the Camperdown and
Huguenot textile mills, which by the mid-1880s employed about
400 hands, most of them white women and children. The
Greenville Coach Factory employed another fifty workers, and a
handful of smaller concerns—an iron foundry, a lumber mill, a
cottonseed mill, and a machine works—each counted ten to
twenty-five wage earners during the early 1880s. On the whole,
nonetheless, Greenville remained more a commercial than an industrial town as its population rose from 2,800 in 1870 to 6,200 in 1880.9
Greenville’s black residents performed much of the paid labor in its
stores, workshops, and homes. Domestic service was the chief occupation among wage-earning black women, whereas men reported a
wider range of occupations. The 1880 federal census listed 30 percent of black men aged eighteen and older simply as “laborers”;
when servants, restaurant and hotel workers, and other unskilled
laborers are added, that figure increases to more than 60 percent.
About 20 percent of black men worked in skilled trades. A few
blacksmiths, shoemakers, and others operated their own shops or
businesses, but most worked as wage earners for white employers.
Atop black society stood a handful of ministers, teachers, and storeowners. The wealthiest of their number was Wilson Cooke, a former
slave artisan who operated a general store and tannery and owned
property worth $5,000 in 1870. Although, as in other southern cities
and towns, no rigid pattern of residential segregation was in evidence during the 1870s and 1880s, Greenville had several areas of
concentrated black settlement, including a neighborhood called
Bucknertown on its northern edge and the black-majority sixth
ward to the south.10
9
Stephen A. West, From Yeoman to Redneck in the South Carolina Upcountry, 1850–1915
(Charlottesville, VA, 2008), 110–16; Historical and Descriptive Review of the State of
South Carolina (Charleston, 1884) 3: 49–120; Lacy K. Ford, “Rednecks and
Merchants: Economic Development and Social Tensions in the South Carolina
Upcountry, 1865–1900,” Journal of American History 71 (Sept. 1984): 294–318.
10
Huff, Greenville, 162. Figures on occupation and residential patterns compiled from
the 1880 federal manuscript census.
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525
Figure 1. This Sanborn fire insurance map shows central Greenville during the
early 1890s. Bisecting the town, the Reedy River provided water power for two
textile mills, a coach factory, and several small shops. The town’s saloons—as
many as eighteen during the 1880s—clustered in its two main retail districts:
one along Main Street, north of the central courthouse square, and the second
across the river, in West Greenville. Source: Detail of 1893 Sanborn Fire
Company map, courtesy of the South Caroliniana Library, University of
South Carolina.
Black men’s enfranchisement transformed politics as thoroughly
and quickly in Greenville as it did throughout the South. The
Union League appeared locally as early as July 1867, and the
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| “A Hot Municipal Contest”
Figures 2–3. Wilson Cooke (left) sat in the state constitutional convention of
1868 and in the state legislature from 1868–70 and remained a prominent
Republican afterwards. C. C. Scott (right) served as principal of the segregated
Allen School and as head of the African American state lodge of the
Independent Order of Good Templars in 1884–86. Sources: Detail of “Radical
Members of the First Legislature after the War, South Carolina,” courtesy of
the Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsca-30572 (Cooke); Caldwell, History of
the American Negro (Scott).
Republican Party followed shortly thereafter. From the beginning,
Republicans in this white-majority county won support from most
black men but from only a small fraction—perhaps 20 percent at
most—of white voters. That coalition was enough to triumph in
elections for delegates to the state constitutional convention in
October 1867 and for state offices in April 1868. However, those successes would prove difficult to sustain once Democrats began organizing in earnest and turned to intimidation and violence through
the Ku Klux Klan and other means. “Conservatives” swept elections
for county and federal offices in the summer and fall of 1868 and
retained control of the county thereafter. Despite their losses, the
county’s Republican leaders continued into the 1870s to nominate
county and legislative tickets that received 40 percent or more of
the vote. Although African Americans sometimes chafed at white
Republicans’ disproportionate receipt of state and federal patronage, they remained active as Republican voters and organizers.
Wilson Cooke, the only African American from Greenville to win
election to the constitutional convention in 1867 and to the state
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527
legislature in 1868, continued to chair the county Republican Party
after being defeated for re-election in 1870.11
African Americans wielded political power longer and more successfully in the city of Greenville, where they constituted over 40
percent of the registered electorate. Under its 1869 charter, the
municipal government consisted of a mayor and six aldermen.
Each alderman represented a specific ward but was elected—
annually through 1875 and biennially thereafter—by the voters of
the city at large, a system that curtailed the strength of the blackmajority sixth ward. City elections were open to all men twenty-one
and older who had lived in South Carolina for at least a year and in
the town for at least sixty days prior to the election.12 The pattern
that would prevail into the early 1870s emerged in November
1868, in the first municipal election after black men’s enfranchisement. That election was carried by a slate of candidates nominated
by the Neptune fire company. Formed in 1867 by black volunteers,
the Neptunes served the combination of civic and social functions
characteristic of nineteenth-century fire clubs. The Neptune company provided sick benefits and burial insurance, paraded on
civic occasions, and offered a space for members to congregate,
socialize, and politick. Although the company included some of
the town’s leading black Republicans, the tickets it nominated
during the late 1860s and early 1870s were not explicitly identified
as Republican. Indeed, only a few times did the Neptunes nominate
active Republicans (including Wilson Cooke, who lost a race for
alderman in 1870). Instead, the Neptune or “Firemen’s” tickets
were typically composed of white men not strongly associated
with either party. Through the early 1870s, Firemen’s nominees
usually won the mayor’s race and at least half of the council seats.13
11
Huff, Greenville, 161–68; Greenville Enterprise, June 26, Oct. 23, 1872; Columbia
Daily Phoenix, Nov. 5, 1874. On Republican politics in South Carolina during
Reconstruction, see Thomas C. Holt, Black Over White: Negro Political Leadership in
South Carolina during Reconstruction (Urbana, 1977); Julie Saville, The Work of
Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina 1860–1870 (New York,
1994); Hyman Rubin, South Carolina Scalawags (Columbia, SC, 2006).
12
14 Statutes at Large (1868–69): 242–45; 15 Statutes at Large (1874–75): 896–97.
13
Greenville Southern Enterprise, Nov. 4, 11, 1868; Greenville Mountaineer, Aug. 10,
Sept. 14, 1870; Greenville Enterprise, July 20, Aug. 10, Sept. 14, 1870, Aug. 16, 23,
Sept, 6, 13, 1871, and Aug. 28, Sept. 11, 1872; William D. Browning Jr., Firefighting
in Greenville, 1840–1990 (Greenville, SC, 1991), 4–35. On volunteer fire companies
in nineteenth-century America, see Amy S. Greenberg, Cause for Alarm: The
Volunteer Fire Department in the Nineteenth-Century City (Princeton, 1998). Despite
historians’ recent interest in the significance of voluntary associations and other
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A number of issues dominated city politics during the late 1860s and
early 1870s. The 1870 Firemen’s ticket bore the label “Hog Out” to
express their opposition to a city ordinance that operated as an
urban equivalent of the fence law, requiring hogs to be penned up
rather than allowed to roam freely. The ordinance was repealed in
October 1870 but the issue remained controversial, and in 1872
the Neptunes petitioned the council in protest after the old ordinance was temporarily restored. Another issue was the building of
a bridge across the Reedy River. Two of Greenville’s six wards,
home to half of its black population, lay southwest of the river,
but they had no direct link other than a footbridge to the town’s
main commercial district until the building of a substantial bridge
for horse and vehicle traffic in 1871. During the early 1870s, a city
council dominated by Firemen’s nominees also began the practice
of appointing black policemen—usually, one or two men on a
force of three to six officers. A black Republican also regularly
served on the three-member board that supervised city elections.14
Greenville’s Democratic leaders chafed at the success of the
Firemen’s tickets but struggled to find an effective response.
Insisting that municipal elections represented “no political contest,”
they eschewed party labels and organized “Citizens” and
“People’s” tickets, sometimes trumpeting the participation of a
few black men at their public meetings.15 Those efforts, however,
bore only limited success. A “conservative or ‘Low Tax’” slate carried the 1873 election, but voters returned a “split municipal ticket”
to office the following year. By 1875, Greenville’s Democrats were
ready to drop their claims to non-partisanship and elect a party-line
ticket. They organized ward meetings to select nominees and
exhorted “every Conservative and Democrat in our city [to] sustain
this ticket.” The Democratic slate triumphed over a bipartisan ticket
advertised in the city’s Republican newspaper. The new Democratic
council discharged the police force’s one black officer and appointed
civic institutions among African Americans, fire companies have received little scrutiny to date.
14
Huff, Greenville, 193–94; Greenville Enterprise, Aug. 16, 1871; City Council
Minutes, Oct. 6, 1870, Sept. 11, 1871, and May 7, Sept. 11, 1872 (hereafter cited as
Council Minutes). The minutes are available on microfilm at the South Carolina
Department of Archives and History, Columbia, SC. I have generally followed the
transcripts produced by Penelope Forrester, which are available at the Greenville
County Public Library, Greenville, SC.
15
Greenville Southern Enterprise, Nov. 11, 1868; Greenville Enterprise, Sept. 14, 1870,
Aug. 23, 1871, and Aug. 28, 1872.
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an all-white board of election managers; it also reinstituted an ordinance that required the fencing of livestock.16
Democrats’ takeover of the state government after the 1876 election
left Greenville Republicans with even bleaker prospects. With no
more access to state patronage, leading white Republicans left the
area or drifted into third-party politics by the early 1880s.
Prominent black Republicans abandoned neither the area nor the
party; but black voting in county and state elections fell sharply,
and after 1880 county Republicans ceased making party nominations. In municipal elections as well, Democrats faced less opposition and rolled up larger margins of victory after 1876. The only
opposition to the Democrats’ municipal candidates in 1879 came
from a “Workingmen’s ticket” organized with little apparent support from Greenville’s black Republicans. Many of the nominees
declined to run, and Democrats easily carried the election as voter
turnout fell to its lowest level since black men’s enfranchisement.
Greenville’s redemption, like that of the state as a whole, seemed
complete.17
But counterrevolutions, too, can sometimes go backwards, and it
was the liquor question that set municipal politics spinning in the
early 1880s. Temperance advocates led a successful drive for
municipal prohibition during the 1850s. The movement fell moribund during the Civil War, and city officials in search of revenue
returned to the issuing of liquor licenses during the late 1860s. By
1876, Greenville drew about a quarter of its revenue from the annual
license fees paid by twelve barrooms.18 Those saloons served a number of different clienteles and purposes. Hotel barrooms catered to
guests and other patrons. The Mansion House, located on the courthouse square, was the town’s finest hotel and had a barroom to
match, with the “first cut-glass chandelier that was ever brought
to Greenville.” Most saloons were less ornate affairs and catered
to farmers and town working men. For them, the saloon functioned
as a commercialized leisure space where a homosocial culture of
16
Carolina Spartan, Sept. 25, 1873; Columbia Daily Phoenix, Sept. 16, 1874; Greenville
Enterprise and Mountaineer, July 28, Aug. 4, 11, 1875; Council Minutes, Aug. 16, 20,
1875, Nov. 10, 1876, and Jan. 8, Aug. 14, 1877.
17
Huff, Greenville, 169–71; Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, Aug. 6, 13, 1879.
18
Stephen A. West, “From Yeoman to Redneck in Upstate South Carolina, 1850–
1915” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1998), chs. 3, 8; Charles Emerson’s
Greenville Directory, 1876–77 (Greenville, SC, 1876), 114; Council Minutes, Oct. 6,
1874; Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, Aug. 22, 1877.
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| “A Hot Municipal Contest”
treating, gambling, and occasional fighting prevailed. Along the
commercial blocks north of the courthouse, and across the river in
West Greenville, barrooms were interspersed among the cotton brokerages, hardware stores, and other places where farmers came to
trade. The saloons of West Greenville also provided a convenient
resort for men from the nearby Camperdown mills.19
Some degree of racial segregation prevailed among Greenville’s barrooms, but it was far from absolute during the 1870s and 1880s.
White men operated most saloons, but at least two were under
the control of black proprietors. Zion Collins—a free person of
color before the Civil War and a substantial property owner and
occasional Republican organizer afterwards—received a tavern
license as early as 1870 and operated a bar in West Greenville
well into the 1880s.20 Richmond Williams, also an active
Republican during the 1870s, ran a saloon with his brother Henry
on Washington Street, a few doors off Main Street. Black men
were the chief and perhaps only patrons of those barrooms; a
white resident described the Williamses’ barroom as “an intolerable
nuisance” that attracted a “boisterous crowd of negroes.”21 Some
white saloonkeepers, such as John Freel, served both white and
black customers; others regarded their barrooms as places for
white men only. When a black man entered N. B. Freeman’s saloon
in 1881 and asked for a drink, the barkeeper demanded twenty cents
—twice the usual price—“he being a colored individual, and that
being a white bar.”22
19
Charles A. David, Greenville of Old, ed. Suzanne J. Case and Sylvia Lanford
Marchant (Greenville, SC, 1998), 7–10. For examples of mill workers patronizing
Greenville’s saloons, see Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, Jan. 5, 1881, and
Greenville Daily News, Nov. 19, Dec. 2, 1881. On the Gilded Age saloon generally,
see Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will; Perry R. Duis, The Saloon: Public
Drinking in Chicago and Boston, 1880–1920 (Urbana, 1983); Madelon Powers, Faces
along the Bar: Lore and Order in the Workingman’s Saloon, 1870–1920 (Chicago, 1998).
20
1860 federal manuscript census, Greenville District, SC, 417B; 1870 federal manuscript census, Greenville County, SC, 641B; Council Minutes, Oct. 4, 1870; Charles
Emerson and Co.’s Spartanburg and Greenville Directories, 1880–81 (Atlanta, 1880),
86; City Directory of Greenville, 1883–84 (Atlanta, 1883), 193; Greenville City
Directory, Spring 1888 (Greenville, SC, 1888), 75; “Important real estate owned by
colored people,” no date, Elias B. Holloway Papers, South Caroliniana Library,
University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC (hereafter cited as SCL).
21
Spartanburg and Greenville Directories, 1880–81, 86; Greenville Daily News, Aug. 21,
1881.
22
Greenville Daily News, July 13, 1880, and Apr. 5, 19, 1881; Greenville Enterprise and
Mountaineer, Nov. 18, 1885.
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531
Figure 4. 1888 advertisements for two Greenville saloons, showing the variety
of attractions available. Source: Greenville City Directory, Spring 1888.
The temperance movement in Greenville, dormant through the late
1860s, began to stir as the number of saloons rose dramatically with
the town’s commercial growth during the 1870s. Organizationally,
the movement’s chief vehicle was the Independent Order of Good
Templars. Founded in New York in the early 1850s, the group
spread widely in the South after the Civil War. The Grand Lodge
of South Carolina was organized in 1872, and a lodge of white
Templars appeared in Greenville a year later. By 1876, black residents had formed a separate lodge. Both the black and white lodges
operated as fraternal organizations for their members and also
engaged the public at large. Greenville’s white Templars helped
organize lodges in the county’s smaller towns and rural areas and
532
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| “A Hot Municipal Contest”
held joint meetings with the county Grange. For their part,
Greenville’s black Templars organized a “Temperance Picnic” in
the spring of 1876 and paraded along Main Street, complete with
“music, banners and appropriate regalia.”23
Who joined the Templars? The white and black lodges were open to
both sexes and to members as young as fifteen. Greenville’s white
lodge drew its membership chiefly from a middling stratum of the
commercial classes. Among forty-five white Templars active
between 1873 to 1880, roughly three-quarters were men. About 40
percent of identified male members were clerks and salesmen, and
another 20 percent were merchants; artisans, lawyers, teachers,
and a minister accounted for most of the rest. Of the eleven identified female members, three were wives of male members, and a
fourth was a widow; the seven unmarried women included two
dressmakers and two teachers.24 The region’s black Templars, by
comparison, were drawn much more heavily from the ranks of artisans and unskilled laborers. Among twenty officers of the Templars
lodges in Greenville and nearby Spartanburg in 1879–80, five were
women, including the teen-aged daughter of a huckster and her sister—a teacher—as well as the wives of two black laborers. Male
members included three laborers, a shoemaker, a harnessmaker,
two carpenters, a hotel waiter, and a domestic servant, as well as
a minister, a grocer, and a teacher. In membership, at least, the
Templars were hardly the sole preserve of what some historians
have called the black “better classes,” that is, of ministers, teachers,
and others distinguished by their education, occupation, and
wealth.25 Such members did, however, play a disproportionate
role as organizers and public speakers. Greenville’s most prominent
black Templar was Cornelius C. Scott, who served as head of the
state lodge from 1884 to 1886. Born a free person of color near
Charleston, he graduated from South Carolina College in 1877
and served as principal of Greenville’s one black public school.26
23
Greenville Republican, May 6, 1873; Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, Sept. 19,
1875, Apr. 26, 1876. On the Templars in the South more generally, see Fahey,
Temperance and Racism, chs. 1–2; Szymanski, Pathways to Prohibition, 39–40.
24
The list of active Templars was taken from: Greenville Republican, May 6, 1873;
Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, Feb. 16, 1876, Feb. 21, 1877, and Mar. 24,
Aug. 4, 1880; Carolina Spartan, May 21, 1879; Charles Emerson’s Greenville Directory
1876–77, 125; Spartanburg and Greenville Directories, 1880–81, 92, 98. Identification of
members from city directories and the 1870 and 1880 manuscript federal censuses.
25
Greenwood, Bittersweet Legacy; Thompson, “Race, Temperance, and Prohibition.”
26
On Scott, see Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, Feb. 4, 1880, May 28, 1884,
May 13, 1885, and Aug. 28, 1889; A. B. Caldwell, ed., History of the American
Negro: South Carolina Edition (Atlanta, 1919), 729–34.
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era | 11:4 Oct. 2012
533
Figure 5. Greenville’s Main Street, looking north from the courthouse square, in
the early 1890s. The Mansion House, on the left, was Greenville’s finest hotel
and home to an ornate saloon. Across the street, the building marked
“Restaurant” housed a more modest barroom. At various times, another six
to eight saloons dotted the blocks to the north and the immediate side streets.
Source: Courtesy of the Greenville County Historical Society.
Like Scott, many white and black Templars were active members of
the upcountry’s Baptist and Methodist denominations. For evangelicals of both races, the fight against liquor was part of a wider commitment to righteous personal conduct and social reform. In other
ways, however, white and black Templars drew on distinct sets of
ideas. White Templars relied heavily on a sentimentalized domestic
ideal, casting the saloon as a threat to the home that enticed men
away from the moral oversight of wives and mothers and undermined their role as providers and loving fathers and husbands.
Those claims complemented more practical arguments that money
and time spent in the saloon were better devoted to selfadvancement through savings and hard work. Although black
Templars sometimes made such arguments as well, they laid a heavier emphasis on temperance as a collective means of racial
advancement. Thus, when Scott addressed an Emancipation Day
celebration in 1880, his hour-long speech ranged from a discussion
534
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| “A Hot Municipal Contest”
of civil rights and emigration to exhortations about the importance
of “being sober, industrious, and economical.”27
Although Templars had been active in Greenville since the mid-1870s,
the liquor question became a serious political issue only after 1880. A
number of factors—many of them part of broader developments in
the state and region—pushed it to the fore. An 1880 state law banned
the sale of liquor outside incorporated towns and cities, putting the
focus squarely on municipal officials as the last obstacles to total prohibition. In early 1881, Frances Willard, head of the Woman’s
Christian Temperance Union, embarked on a fourteen-week, fifty-city
tour through every state of the former Confederacy. Willard packed
Greenville’s white Methodist church for two meetings in March
and met privately with a group of women who later founded the
town’s first WCTU chapter. Its all-white membership, although
small, included the wives and daughters of a number of the town’s
business and political elite. Simultaneously, prohibitionists made
their influence felt elsewhere as well. In South Carolina, prohibitionist
tickets triumphed in Laurens, Lancaster, and a number of other
upcountry towns. Across the state line, prohibitionists narrowly
gained control of the Charlotte city council in the spring of 1881,
and voters throughout North Carolina went to the polls for a prohibition referendum that August.28
In cities and states throughout the country, prohibition often upset
existing party alignments. In the Northeast and Midwest, much of
its support came from Republicans; in the South, Democrats were
its main backers. However, in neither region was either party united
on the issue—a fact that created opportunities for the minority
party. Thus, in 1881, North Carolina’s Republican Party resolved
to lead opposition to the statewide prohibition referendum there,
hoping to build support toward state elections the following year.
When prohibitionists in Greenville talked of running a dry ticket
for the city council in 1881, they incited an editorial panic from
A. B. Williams, editor of the Greenville Daily News. Williams
opposed prohibition, largely for fiscal reasons. He had no kind
27
Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, Jan. 7, 21, 1880. On differences between
white and black temperance workers, see also Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow, 45–52.
28
17 Statutes at Large (1880) 459–61; WCTU Records, 1880–1939, typescript volume,
SCL; Greenville Daily News, Mar. 31, Apr. 1, 1881; Ruth Bordin, Woman and
Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873–1900 (Philadelphia, 1981), 76;
Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, May 18, 1881; Greenwood, Bittersweet
Legacy, 80–99.
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era | 11:4 Oct. 2012
535
words for the saloon but argued that the loss of barroom license fees
would require a sharp rise in property taxes. His chief worry, however, was that the liquor question threatened the “preservation of
the Democratic party in State, county and city.” Prohibition would
divide white Democrats and produce an “unholy alliance of liquor
dealers, Radicals, and negroes”; the final result would be “woe,
ruin, and general destruction and desolation that must follow the
loss of the Democratic organization.” Williams’s language was overwrought, but the context for his fears was real enough. Prohibition
was being pressed simultaneously in other parts of the South, and at
both state and municipal levels. Although its consequences for partisan alignments remained unclear, it coincided with other challenges to white Democrats, including the threat of William
Mahone’s Readjuster Party in Virginia—a connection that
Williams, a native Virginian, was quick to draw.29
Greenville’s white prohibitionists took those concerns to heart. In
early June, “the friends of temperance” met to discuss the upcoming
municipal election. The sixteen men present included no African
Americans and only two white Templars; many were part of the
town’s political and economic elite. The meeting convened at the
office of the town’s leading commission merchant, J. C. Smith,
and included the president of the Camperdown Mills and the
co-owner and superintendent of the Greenville Coach Factory.
Four of the men were past or current aldermen. Initially, the
group asked that the city hold a referendum on prohibition separate
from the council election. When the city attorney advised that the
municipal charter granted no authority for such a referendum,
white prohibitionists decided to make their stand within the
Democratic Party, running a slate of candidates in the party’s
ward meetings. The result was a ticket of three wet and three dry
nominees for aldermen; the renomination of the incumbent mayor,
a wet, gave the ticket an anti-prohibition majority. Democrats in
the fourth ward, home to many workers from the Camperdown
Mills, voted against prohibition by a margin of two to one, and
the meetings there and elsewhere generated levels of excitement
that worried some Democrats. James T. Williams, a hardware merchant and future mayor (and no relation to the Daily News editor),
was a dry but “not as crazy on the subject as some.” When his
name was proposed as a candidate for alderman, he declined to
run, confiding to his wife, “I do not care to make any enemies.”
Williams—who had ridden as a paramilitary “Red Shirt” in 1876
29
536
Greenville Daily News, Apr. 2, 6, May 10, 11, June 12, and July 2, 1881.
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| “A Hot Municipal Contest”
and served as a Democratic poll watcher—did not think the issue
belonged in the ward meetings at all. “I think it was very wrong
to have anything to say about ‘Wet or Dry’ for it was a democratic
nomination & politics had nothing to do with it nor did ‘Wet & Dry’
have anything to do with it.”30
If white Democrats were split on the issue, so too were black
Republicans. Even before the Democrats’ ward meetings,
twenty-eight African Americans published a notice in a local newspaper, promising “that no Republican ticket shall be run . . . provided a ticket of men who will pledge themselves to stop liquor
selling, be put in the field.” The signers included former state legislator Wilson Cooke, teacher and leading Templar C. C. Scott, and
Frank A. Williamson, a harnessmaker and long-time Republican
who had run for the state legislature in 1872. Fourteen of the signers
were artisans or skilled wageworkers, and five were draymen or
wagon drivers. At least eight owned real property. As with the
white “friends of temperance” who met at J. C. Smith’s office, the
liquor question attracted the attention of more politically prominent
and economically established men now that it threatened to infringe
on partisan politics.31
Other black leaders, however, not only took a different view of prohibition but also saw a political opportunity in the split among
Democrats. Shortly before election day, reports began to circulate
that “a meeting of colored voters was held . . . at one of the [fire]
engine houses” to nominate several challengers to the Democratic
ticket. The organizers were not named, but they likely included
Benjamin F. Donaldson, a hotel worker, Republican activist, and president of the Palmetto fire company, Greenville’s second company of
black volunteers. Donaldson later addressed a similar meeting held
above the saloon of black barkeeper Richmond Williams. Working
quietly in conjunction with a group of wet Democrats, they decided
to nominate white men to oppose two of the dry Democratic nominees. The move caught Democrats by surprise, and the pro-license
challengers won by comfortable margins. Editor A. B. Williams
reported that black men “solidly” voted the opposition ticket, but by
his own calculations at least 30 percent of white voters did so as well.32
30
Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, June 1, 8, 1881; Council Minutes, June 27,
1881; Greenville Daily News, July 14, 15, 1881; James T. Williams to wife, June 26,
July 12, 14, 1881, James T. Williams, Sr., Papers, SCL.
31
Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, July 6, 1881.
32
Greenville Daily News, Aug. 7, 9, 17, 1881.
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era | 11:4 Oct. 2012
537
The “hot municipal contest” of 1881 shattered the Democratic Party’s
short-lived dominance of city government and reoriented the course
of politics in Greenville for the rest of the decade. The day after the
election, A. B. Williams declared that the result was not a victory of
“Wet or Dry” but “of Bolters—Independents—Deserters—the name
is immaterial—combined with Radical negroes over the organized
Democratic party.” The success of the opposition ticket produced
acrimony and recriminations among Greenville’s Democrats. One
member of the party’s executive committee resigned in anger over
the bolt. Other Democrats wanted to expel from the party those
who had voted for the independent nominees. Fearing that the rift
in town elections might provide a cause and a precedent for splits
at the county and state levels, party leaders decided the safer course
was to stop making nominations for municipal offices altogether. A
few months later, the South Carolina legislature authorized towns
and cities across the state to hold the kind of municipal no-license
referenda proposed in Greenville in 1881, providing a “safety
valve” for “disseminating prohibition views without bringing the
question into State politics.”33
The first such election in Greenville came in December 1883 and
entailed a degree of cooperation among black and white prohibitionists that was notable for both its extent and its limits. White prohibitionists reached across the color line in ways they had been
reluctant to do while the issue was entangled with partisan politics.
Two African Americans—Templar C. C. Scott and barber Thomas
Mims—joined four white men on the prohibitionists’ executive committee. An election-eve rally at the courthouse featured addresses by
two black and two white ministers. African Americans, nonetheless,
remained distinctly junior partners in the effort. When they were
invited to appear before audiences that included white men and
women, they spoke less as moral authorities—with standing to
instruct their white listeners—than as emissaries from the black
community, present to assure white prohibitionists of their support.
Thus, at the prohibitionists’ first mass meeting, C. C. Scott spoke “in
behalf of the colored people [and] heartily endorsed the resolutions”
proposed by a white speaker. If those mass meetings included both
white and black members, the more frequent gatherings at
Greenville’s churches occurred before racially segregated audiences
—and while white prohibitionists spoke at black churches, the
33
Pickens Sentinel, June 9, 1881; Greenville Daily News, Aug. 9, 17, 19, 21, 1881;
Council Minutes, Aug. 12, 1881; Charleston News and Courier, Dec. 8, 1883; 17
Statutes at Large (1881–82): 893–95.
538
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| “A Hot Municipal Contest”
reverse does not appear to have been true. This pattern continued on
election day, when black and white Sunday school children paraded
separately down Main Street, and the WCTU and “colored temperance women” hosted separate lunches.34
The opposition to prohibition came from a cross section of white
and black residents. Editor A. B. Williams reprised his earlier arguments, apparently aimed at property owners and businessmen,
about the loss of license fees and rents paid by saloons.
Greenville’s saloonkeepers prepared quietly for the referendum
through the Liquor Dealers Association. To circumvent the mayor’s
order closing their barrooms at six p.m. the night before the election,
they rented halls and—in a counterpoint to the temperance
women’s hot lunches—provided free food and drink to their supporters. On election day, several white bar owners were present to
monitor the voting. Also active around the polls was Benjamin
F. Donaldson, the Republican activist who had helped engineer
the successful challenge to prohibitionist city council nominees in
1881. Sentiment among white and black workingmen appeared to
run strongly against prohibition. One prohibitionist claimed that
“the main part of the better class of whites supported the
No-License ticket,” suggesting what he thought of those who
voted otherwise. Such condescension was consistent with the stigmatizing of the saloon and its denizens in prohibitionist rhetoric,
and on election day, working-class voters repaid the prohibitionists’
self-conscious propriety with their own assertive rowdiness. Shortly
after the polls opened at six a.m., two large columns of men— many
of them African American and reportedly “boisterous and rude,
seeming to be intoxicated”—marched to the polls to vote the license
ticket. The day ended with another rowdy procession to celebrate
prohibition’s defeat. White and black men paraded together past
the white Good Templars’ lodge and the houses of white and
black prohibitionists, draping fences and doors in black crepe and
making a mock display of “burial performances.”35
Greenville’s prohibitionists petitioned for another referendum in
1884 and with much the same outcome: a defeat for prohibition,
34
Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, Nov. 14, Dec. 5, 1883; Charleston News and
Courier, Dec. 2, 1883. On cooperation between white and black prohibitionists more
generally, see Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction
(New York, 1992), 180–81; Greenwood, Bittersweet Legacy, ch. 3; Gilmore, Gender and
Jim Crow, ch. 2; and Thompson, “Race, Temperance, and Prohibition.”
35
Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, Dec. 5, 1883; Charleston News and Courier,
Dec. 4, 1883.
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era | 11:4 Oct. 2012
539
by a slightly wider margin. After three elections in four years, the
town remained stubbornly wet.36 Similar battles played out across
the New South, especially in rapidly growing towns and cities.
Spartanburg and Anderson, the next largest towns in the South
Carolina upcountry, each experienced at least four elections over
prohibition from 1881 to 1886. Outside South Carolina, battles
over the issue raged from Richmond and Charlotte to Jackson and
Waco. More often than not, those contests ended in defeat for prohibition; in some cases, a place that voted the barroom out one
year might reverse course at the next election. Atlanta, for example,
adopted prohibition in an 1885 referendum only to abandon it two
years later. However, everywhere those elections occurred and
whatever the result, they engaged African Americans and worried
white Democrats. During Tennessee’s statewide referendum in
1887, an opponent of prohibition declared that the movement threatened “to super annuate the Democratic party.”37
In Greenville as elsewhere, African Americans made the most of the
split among white Democrats. Their political influence had waned
since Democrats’ redemption of the city government in 1875, but
that changed as black voters and leaders found themselves actively
courted by both wets and drys during the early 1880s. Fearful of
worsening the split within their ranks, Greenville’s Democrats
stuck to their policy of making no nominations for mayor and city
council. White politicians—freed from demands for Democratic
unity and racial solidarity—formed rival tickets in the general election and courted black voters with “much ardor.” The percentage of
African Americans among registered municipal voters rebounded
from a low of 30 percent in 1879 to 44 percent in 1887, and turnout
increased from just over 70 percent to almost 90 percent over the
same period.38
Events in Greenville were part of a pattern of persistent and, in some
cases, resurgent black political power in the urban South during the
1880s, a pattern whose scope and significance historians have yet to
fully appreciate. The extent of that power and the forms it took varied from place to place, typically depending on local issues and
36
Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, Nov. 12, 19, 26, and Dec. 3, 1884.
West, “From Yeoman to Redneck,” ch. 8; Don H. Doyle, Nashville in the New South,
1880–1930 (Knoxville, TN, 1985), 134; see also footnotes 3–4.
38
Greenville Daily News, July 8, 15, Aug. 9, 1881; Greenville Enterprise and
Mountaineer, July 18, Aug. 15, 1883, Sept. 16, 1885, and Aug. 17, 1887; Charleston
News and Courier, Sept. 15, 1887.
37
540
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| “A Hot Municipal Contest”
circumstances that brought a split among white residents. In
Virginia, the Readjuster movement provided the occasion for
black voters to claim a greater share of influence in towns and cities
across that state during the early 1880s. Later in the decade, the
Knights of Labor organized municipal tickets that drew biracial support around the region, from Richmond to Jacksonville, Florida, and
Vicksburg, Mississippi. In New Orleans, a city dominated by a
Democratic “ring” since the 1870s, African American voters backed
a slate of reform Democrats who carried the municipal election of
1888. Closer to Greenville, the nearby town of Spartanburg also
experienced a series of sharp contests over prohibition, and in
1883 voters there elected a wet ticket that included one white and
one black Republican. A black Republican would continue to
serve on Spartanburg’s council for the next eight years.39
In all of these places, African Americans’ influence in municipal politics was often tenuous and always contested; it seldom approached
the levels of Reconstruction and was constrained in various ways.
Thus, in Greenville the 1880s brought no return to the Firemen’s tickets of a decade before, nor did black men’s influence in municipal
politics lead to a revival of their strength at higher levels. Even a
modest and local resurgence, however, was a remarkable development in South Carolina, where white Democrats suppressed the
kind of challenges at the state level that threatened their counterparts
elsewhere in the region. Suffrage in South Carolina had been sharply
circumscribed by the Eight Box Law of 1882, which operated as a de
facto literacy test and prevented the use of a single party ballot by
requiring that votes for various county, state, and federal offices be
deposited in different boxes. Because municipal elections were held
separately, however, they were unaffected by the notorious law,
and town and city politics remained a realm where African
American voters preserved some degree of influence.40
Limited though it was, that influence brought tangible rewards. For
black residents of Greenville and other places, the gains typically
came not on great matters of policy or principle, but rather in
39
William D. Henderson, Gilded Age City: Politics, Life and Labor in Petersburg,
Virginia, 1874–1889 (Lanham, MD, 1980), 113; Melton A. McLaurin, The Knights of
Labor in the South (Westport, CT, 1978), ch. 5; Joy J. Jackson, New Orleans in the
Gilded Age: Politics and Urban Progress, 1880–1896 (Baton Rouge, 1969), 96;
Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, Oct. 24, 1883, Oct. 21, 1885, Oct. 26, 1887,
Oct. 23, 1889, and Oct. 21, 1891.
40
J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the
Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880–1910 (New Haven, 1974), 84–92.
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era | 11:4 Oct. 2012
541
Figure 6. The Neptune volunteer fire company, shown in this 1894 photograph,
was a fixture of black social and civic life in Greenville from the late 1860s until
its dissolution in 1905. Source: courtesy of Mrs. Ruth Ann Butler.
securing better treatment in the quotidian but vital services of local
government. In New Orleans, the reform mayor who won election
in 1888 appointed African Americans to the police force; in
Nashville, black city councilman J. C. Napier secured a new fire
company and better schools for African Americans. Gains in
Greenville were along similar lines and on matters that generally
found black residents united, whatever their stance in the contest
over prohibition. Dissatisfaction was widespread, for example,
with the town’s “colored burial ground,” which had been allowed
to languish during the late 1870s, even as the city council acted to
enlarge the white Springwood Cemetery. After years of petitions
and protests, the city in 1884 purchased a twelve-acre plot for a
“colored cemetery” later known as Richland Cemetery. Black firefighters also found the city council newly attentive. For years, the
Neptune and Palmetto companies used the cast-off equipment of
Greenville’s white firefighters. The city council promised the
Neptunes a new engine shortly before the 1883 municipal election,
and it arrived that fall. A year later, the city secured the company
a new station, something the Neptunes had likewise sought for
542
| West
| “A Hot Municipal Contest”
years. Also revealing are the choices that Greenville’s white leaders
made for the position of second assistant fire chief—an appointive
office reserved for a senior black firefighter charged with authority
over both black companies. For years, the post was held by Thomas
Lewis, a respected but relatively apolitical figure. In 1884, Lewis was
succeeded by John D. Buckner, who took an active part in the 1885
municipal campaign. Later in the decade, the city council bestowed
the position on Thomas Briar, a blacksmith, former chairman of the
county Republican Party, and president of the Neptune company at
the height of its political influence during Reconstruction. Although
town officials did not return to their former practice of hiring black
police officers, Briar was employed on at least one occasion as a
“secret detective” at a salary of $30 per month.41
Black residents also fought to win their share of improvements
made to Greenville’s schools during the 1880s. The meager revenue
available under state law was enough only to fund two racially segregated schools for a term of four to five months. Both schools were
located on the north side of town; the absence of schools in West
Greenville fell heavily on an area whose population was
disproportionately black. Amidst hopes that the city council might
supplement the schools’ budget, a meeting of black residents—
including both supporters and opponents of prohibition—resolved
before the 1885 municipal election to back no candidate “who will
not pledge his support to all the public free schools.”42 The council
later ruled that it had no authority to fund the public schools, and
the state legislature stepped in to expand the powers of the local
school district and authorize a property tax to provide additional
funding. In the spring of 1886, a black minister was elected to the
newly constituted school board of trustees, which approved an
increase in the school term to nine months and the opening of
two new schools in West Greenville—one for white and one for
black students. Within two years, the West End Colored School
41
Jackson, New Orleans in the Gilded Age, 109–10; Doyle, Nashville in the New South,
138; Council Minutes, Mar. 14, 1876, June 27, Sept. 6, 1881, June 7, Dec. 5, 1882,
June 6, July 3 and 20, Nov. 6, 1883, Feb. 5, 1884, Jan. 7, Feb. 3, 1885, Feb. 2, 1886,
and Dec. 6, 1888; Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, Nov. 21, 1883; Browning,
Firefighting in Greenville, 15–18. On Briar—whose surname was often spelled
“Brier”—see Greenville Enterprise, July 27, 1870, Greenville Enterprise and
Mountaineer, Oct. 18, 1876, and Greenville Daily News, Sept. 13, 1920.
42
Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, Sept. 2, 1885; Charleston News and Courier,
Aug. 22, 1887; Marion T. Anderson, “Some Highlights in the History of Education in
Greenville County,” Proceedings and Papers of the Greenville County Historical Society 5
(1971–75): 12–33.
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era | 11:4 Oct. 2012
543
enrolled more than half the black students in Greenville. From 1887
to 1889, average school attendance among black children more than
doubled—about twice the rate of increase for white students.43
Although labor organizations and issues did not figure prominently
in Greenville politics for most of the 1880s, that threatened to change
in 1886–87, amid the southern organizing drive and political successes of the Knights of Labor. The Knights formed their first assembly in Greenville in late 1886, but it played little discernible public
role. A few months later, however, a former Knights organizer
named Hiram Hover caused a stir when he traveled through the
area on behalf of his own group, modeled on the Knights, called
the “Cooperative Workers of America” (CWA).44 Hover stayed in
Greenville only briefly, but within weeks of his appearance, the
CWA claimed fifteen clubs there with as many as 500 members,
“most of the members being colored people.” Hover’s most dedicated local follower was an African American barber, Lee Minor,
who began organizing a network of CWA clubs among black
farm laborers in the lower part of the county later that spring.
Those efforts quickly provoked a violent response from local planters, who organized vigilante bands that seized and interrogated
suspected CWA members and effectively quashed the rural clubs.
The violence did not reach town but nonetheless seems to have
chilled the CWA’s public activities. Minor’s last reported public
appearance on the group’s behalf was a speech in Greenville on
July 4, which attracted an audience of about 150.45
The CWA appeared in Greenville just as residents began to prepare
for the 1887 municipal election. Former mayor Samuel Townes
announced his plan to return to politics and challenge his successor,
E. F. S. Rowley. A third candidate, William T. Shumate, was a longtime prohibitionist who ran on a platform of “decency in elections
43
Council Minutes, Oct. 6, 1885; 19 Statutes at Large (1885): 382–84; Greenville
Enterprise and Mountaineer, Sept. 21, 1887, and Sept. 11, Oct. 15, 1889; Charleston
News and Courier, July 8, 1889; “The History of Negro Education in Greenville,”
no date, Holloway Papers, SCL.
44
Bruce E. Baker, “The ‘Hoover Scare’ in South Carolina, 1887: An Attempt to
Organize Black Farm Labor,” Labor History 40 (Aug. 1999): 261–82; and Baker,
“‘The First Anarchist That Ever Came To Atlanta’: Hiram F. Hover from
New York to the New South” in Radicalism in the South Since Reconstruction, ed.
Chris Green, Rachel Rubin, and James Smethurst (New York, 2006), 39–55. On the
Knights, see McLaurin, Knights of Labor in the South; Gerteis, Class and the Color
Line; Hild, Greenbackers, Knights of Labor, and Populists.
45
Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, Mar. 16, 1887; Charleston News and Courier,
July 3, 6, 1887.
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| “A Hot Municipal Contest”
and reform in the city administration.” Both Townes and Rowley
had strong support among African Americans, and interest in the
campaign ran extremely high. “Meetings of negroes” were reportedly “held nightly for weeks” before the election, but the substance
of those gatherings went unreported by white observers. As in 1883
and 1885, reports in the white press instead focused on the “hideous
. . . hallowing and noisy demonstrations” that took place in the
streets afterwards and insisted that the election was “altogether
without issues.” The rowdiness continued on election day, when
both Townes and Rowley were alleged to have “corralled” black
voters and marched them to the polls. When the votes were
counted, Townes edged Rowley by a margin of sixteen votes out
of almost 1,300 cast, and Shumate received less than 10 percent of
the vote. In celebration, the winner’s “colored friends” staged a
torchlight parade, during which Lee Minor, “a big Townes man,”
shot a Rowley supporter in the face.46
The election of 1887 represented a high water mark for African
Americans’ political influence during the 1880s. If prohibition had
opened new opportunities, the fading of that divisive issue would
aid white Democrats in reasserting control. Having failed three
times to oust the barroom in municipal elections, prohibitionists
tried a new tack by securing a countywide referendum in March
1888. Two developments favored their strength in the countryside.
One was the rapid spread of the Good Templars order outside the
city of Greenville during the early 1880s. The second was a growing
tide of rural unrest that led many farmers to look askance at railroads, merchants, and other manifestations of an urban-centered
commercial order—including saloons that “infuse[d] deadly poison
into the life-blood of . . . the yeomanry of the country.” Some of the
early agrarian leaders in Greenville County were ardent prohibitionists, including Milton L. Donaldson, a “capital temperance lecturer”
and future president of the state Farmers’ Alliance. In the March
1888 referendum, prohibitionists overwhelmingly carried the vote
outside the county seat, by a margin of 901 to 199. Turnout was
low, however, and the rural vote was more than overmatched by
results in the city, where prohibition was defeated 1,017 to 161.
City dwellers who had once voted for prohibition were prepared
to vote against it when the city’s autonomy was at stake and
when the liquor question had become enmeshed in a larger struggle
between town and country. That larger struggle also fueled the
46
Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, Sept. 14, 21, 1887; Charleston News and
Courier, Sept. 13, 15, 17, 1887.
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545
political rise of Benjamin Tillman, who, as governor in the early
1890s, pushed for and won legislation that closed barrooms around
the state and replaced them with state-run “dispensaries” that sold
liquor only in sealed packages.47
With the battle over prohibition largely behind them, and no other
major controversies over municipal policy to set them at odds,
Greenville’s Democrats proved more attentive to calls for party loyalty. The election of 1887—with its high black turnout, its disorderly
conduct, and its conjunction with the CWA’s fleeting labor radicalism—heightened concerns that a “return to Democratic organization” was necessary to “redeem [Greenville] from the rule of the
negroes.” “Independentism in a city election,” one leader warned,
“should be repudiated as sternly and strongly as in a County or
State election.” Before the 1889 election, the city’s Democratic
clubs turned to a device increasingly popular with Southern
Democrats as a means of imposing party discipline: the primary system. The county Democratic Party had selected its candidates
through primaries since 1878, and the state party would follow in
the 1890s. Anxious Democrats adopted the primary in other
southern cities and towns as well, including Birmingham in 1888
and Nashville in 1893. In Greenville as elsewhere, Democratic primaries were effectively, if not explicitly, for whites only; to curtail
bolters, Greenville’s primary rules required that losing candidates
pledge not to run independently. Meanwhile, county Democratic
leaders in the state legislature also secured a revision to the city’s
charter, doubling the number of aldermen and thus decreasing the
likelihood that disgruntled office seekers might be tempted to
make an independent bid.48
The results in Greenville were immediate and dramatic. In 1889, the
Democratic nominees triumphed by a margin of almost two to one.
Black residents tried to organize a “Citizens” ticket that included a
number of prominent white men, but many had been named without their consent, and all but one refused nomination. In a pattern
typical after the adoption of the primary system, the general election
47
Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, Mar. 7, 21, 1888; Baptist Courier, May 19,
1881; Huff, Greenville, 222–26; Stephen Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the
Reconstruction of White Supremacy (Chapel Hill, 2000), ch. 5.
48
Charleston News and Courier, Sept. 13, 1887; Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer,
Aug. 21, 1878, and Mar. 20, July 17, 24, 1889; Greenville Mountaineer, July 26, 1893;
Carl V. Harris, Political Power in Birmingham, 1871–1921 (Knoxville, TN, 1977), 58–66;
Doyle, Nashville in the New South, 141; 20 Statutes at Large (1888): 181–83. On white
primaries generally, see Kousser, Shaping of Southern Politics, ch. 3.
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saw a drop-off in voter registration and participation—especially
among African Americans. From its peak in 1887, black voter registration in Greenville fell 10 percent by 1889 and almost 70 percent by
1893. Black political leaders continued their electoral efforts but
found them to be increasingly in vain. In 1891, one newspaper
reported “some idle talk” of an independent municipal ticket, but
none emerged. In 1893, African Americans held a meeting at the
courthouse to try “to get Democrats to run on their ticket” but
again failed.49
Two events in the summer of 1895, nonetheless, gave a new jolt of
urgency to black residents’ political organizing. One was the calling,
at Ben Tillman’s instigation, of a convention to write broad new disfranchising measures into the state constitution. Such changes posed
a graver challenge to black voting than the white primary. The latter
required application at each election, and party discipline was never
assured, as events of the 1880s had demonstrated. Constitutional
disfranchisement threatened to eliminate African Americans from
the electorate altogether. In the election of convention delegates in
August, Greenville’s black voters made a strong showing in support
of a ticket of anti-Tillman Democrats who opposed the most draconian disfranchising proposals; the ticket, nonetheless, went down to
defeat two-to-one countywide.50 The other event to galvanize
African Americans was the first lynching in the town’s history.
The victim was a black man named Ira Johnson, who had shot
and killed a white man in self-defense. Despite reports that a mob
intended to seize Johnson from the county jail, the mayor declined
to call out local militia units and instead ordered the arrest of
armed black men who took to the streets to guard the jail. Only
when Johnson was taken from jail and lynched outside town did
the mayor finally call on the militia—to protect the city from a
rumored attack by black arsonists. African Americans later packed
the courthouse for a “peace meeting” and “ridiculed the idea of violence on the part of the negroes,” declaring that “if the authorities
do their duty the violators of the law can be easily brought to
justice.”51
49
Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, Sept. 11, 18, 1889, Aug. 12, 1891; Charleston
News and Courier, Aug. 19, Sept. 13, 1893; Columbia State, Sept. 8, 1891; Greenville
Mountaineer, Aug. 9, 1893.
50
Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman, ch. 6; Greenville Mountaineer, Aug. 14, 17, 21, 1895;
Columbia State, July 29, 1895.
51
Greenville Mountaineer, July 13, 20, 1895; Columbia State, July 11, 16, 17, 1895.
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547
When the county grand jury failed to indict the lynchers, black leaders began quietly organizing a network of ward clubs in advance
of the coming municipal election. Thomas Briar served as the “presiding genius” at a public meeting where some black residents
“were very bitter against the present city administration” over
Johnson’s lynching and demanded a “fair and impartial enforcement of the laws.” The meeting nominated a ticket of white
Democrats for mayor and city council. As usual, the nominees
had not been consulted in advance and were expected to decline,
but organizers hoped to demonstrate African Americans’ dissatisfaction with the incumbents and to create an organization that
would “poll a much larger vote” at the next election in two years.
Although the regular Democratic nominees easily won, African
Americans cast about 300 votes for the opposition ticket, equal to
a third of the total vote and their largest turnout in a municipal election since 1889.52
It would prove as well to be their best showing in city politics until
well past the midpoint of the next century. On the same day that
Greenville held its municipal election in 1895, the state constitutional convention met for its opening session in Columbia. In
a sign of the importance of municipal elections, their regulation
was taken out of the hands of the Committee on Municipal
Corporations and turned over to the Committee on Suffrage, chaired
by Tillman himself. The new constitution, completed in December,
not only contained new disfranchising measures but also extended
them to the municipal arena. Prior to 1895, requirements for municipal elections were separate from those for state elections. Voters in
municipal elections were not required to register for state elections,
nor to have paid taxes. The 1895 constitution added both requirements and applied literacy and property tests as well. At
Greenville’s next municipal election, only thirty black voters managed to register, down more than 90 percent from two years before
and equal to a mere 3 percent of the registered electorate. Those
figures were a striking, but by no means isolated, example of how
the rising tide of disfranchisement undercut black influence in
municipal politics around the region. The same session of the
Mississippi legislature that called that state’s disfranchising convention in 1890 also revised Jackson’s municipal charter, imposing tax
and lengthy residency requirements for voting and redrawing
ward boundaries to “give perpetual control . . . to the white people.”
52
Greenville Mountaineer, Sept. 11, 14, 1895; Columbia State, Sept. 7, 1895; Charleston
News and Courier, Sept. 11, 1895.
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In 1898, Richmond elected its first all-white city council in almost
thirty years, due largely to a complicated election-procedure law
passed a few years before; disfranchising measures in the state constitution of 1902 would ensure that no African American sat on the
city council again until 1948. In the region’s most brutal assault on
black municipal power, white supremacist Democrats in North
Carolina staged the so-called Wilmington riot of November 1898,
driving from office a biracial “fusionist” city government and killing
ten or more African Americans in the process.53
The loss of municipal power cost black southerners in numerous
ways. Greenville’s six school trustees included one African
American during the late 1880s, when the board approved the creation of a school for black students in the West End. No African
American served on the board after the early 1890s, and the inequalities that had long existed between white and black schools only
grew over time. By the early 1910s, the city’s schools spent almost
three times as much per capita on white as on black students.
Developments in the police and fire departments were hardly
more encouraging. The 1895 lynching of Ira Johnson drove home
in gruesome fashion the importance of police power and the cost
of having it in the hands of unsympathetic officials. Tom Briar,
Greenville’s most prominent black Republican, lost his position as
second assistant fire chief in 1890, and Greenville’s black fire companies—fixtures of civic and social life for decades—were under threat
by 1900. Over the prior decade, the city added several new white
fire companies but no new black ones, and in 1902, Greenville
began a gradual switch from a system of volunteer fire companies
to a paid staff of full-time firefighters. The Neptunes survived as
Greenville’s last company of black firefighters until early 1905,
when the city council voted to decommission the company and
replace it with white firemen. During the early years of the new
century, the city council also turned its attention to codifying Jim
Crow. A 1905 ordinance provided for racial segregation in the
city’s streetcars. Seven years later, another ordinance went further
53
Journal of the Constitutional Convention . . . (Columbia, SC, 1895), 188–91, 259, 297–
99, 313; Section 12, Article 2, 1895 Constitution; Greenville Mountaineer, Sept. 22,
1897; Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 323–27; Steven J. Hoffman,
Race, Class, and Power in the Building of Richmond, 1870–1920 (Jefferson, NC, 2004),
127; Walter McClusky Hurns, “Post-Reconstruction Municipal Politics in Jackson,
Mississippi” (PhD diss., Kansas State University, 1989), 129–30; David S. Cecelski
and Timothy B. Tyson, eds., Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898
and Its Legacy (Chapel Hill, 1998).
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549
still, mandating the color line in residential neighborhoods as well
as in public accommodations and other businesses.54
If these losses and reversals must be included in any reckoning of
racism’s depth at the nadir, they also serve as a reminder of what
black southerners had been able to accomplish through the exercise
of municipal power in the years that came before. The example of
Greenville illustrates two larger but neglected stories in
post-Reconstruction politics: one about the power of prohibition,
along with other issues and movements, to challenge white
Democrats’ hold on power and create opportunities for African
Americans, and a second about the broader importance of black political strength in towns and cities across the region after
Reconstruction. Like their counterparts in larger urban places,
Greenville’s black residents were able, for a time, to exploit divisions
among white southerners and use that power to achieve modest but
meaningful gains. The importance of town and city governments as
an arena for these struggles also suggests a connection between the
late nineteenth century and the “long civil rights movement” of the
twentieth century, when local Jim Crow policies would be a prominent target of grassroots activists, and when black southerners
would ultimately achieve some of their greatest and most lasting
electoral successes in municipal politics.
In Greenville, a more immediate connection to the struggles of the
twentieth century lay in the person of James A. Briar, son of
Republican activist Thomas Briar. The son, born in 1870, received
a teaching certificate in 1885 and served as a teacher and principal
in Greenville’s schools for decades. James Briar ventured into electoral politics as early as 1895, when he served as secretary to the
meeting that nominated a municipal ticket in protest over the Ira
Johnson lynching. Like his father, James held several minor federal
patronage positions and served as a delegate to the Republican
National Convention—the father for the last time in 1912, and the
son for the first time in 1916. In the 1930s, James Briar founded
Greenville’s first chartered chapter of the NAACP, and as its president he led a 1939 voter registration campaign. The drive began
after the city council blocked a federally funded housing project
and park for Greenville’s black residents. In response, the NAACP
54
Unidentified newspaper clipping, Mar. 14, 1935, scrapbook, Holloway Papers,
SCL; Forty-Fifth Annual Report of the State Superintendent of Education of the State of
South Carolina, 1913 (Columbia, SC, 1914), 17, 22; Browning, Firefighting in
Greenville, 30–34; Greenville Daily News, Oct. 4, 20, 1905; Huff, Greenville, 264–66.
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organized voter schools and talked of running independent candidates for mayor and aldermen. Perhaps 200 African Americans
registered for the municipal election in September, apparently the
most since 1895. Police harassment and Klan violence soon quashed
the effort, and Briar himself was forced into hiding and later
arrested. Still, he remained unbowed: “I’ve always been active in
politics because my father before me was active in politics.”55
55
Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, July 27, 1885; “Education of Negroes of City
Not Been Neglected,” Greenville Daily News, undated clipping, scrapbook,
Holloway Papers, SCL; Greenville Daily News, Sept. 13, 1920; Wilhemina Jackson,
“Greenville Notes, S.C.” in Ralph J. Bunche Papers, Schomburg Center for
Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York, NY; Peter F.
Lau, Democracy Rising: South Carolina and the Fight for Black Equality since 1865
(Lexington, KY, 2006), 96–105.
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551