"A Hot Municipal Contest":
Politics and Prohibition
in Greenville, South Carolina, 1868-1895
Stephen A. West
Wiles Colloquium
Queen's University Belfast
October 2008
West - "Hot Municipal Contest"
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On a late fall night in 1883, a raucous crowd assembled for a parade in Greenville, South
Carolina, an upcountry marketing and manufacturing center. A few hours before, polls had
closed in a municipal referendum over the sale of alcohol. By a narrow margin, voters had
decided to keep the city's eighteen saloons open, and the crowd--their enthusiasm buoyed by
victory as well as a steady stream of the barkeepers' wares--had taken to the streets to celebrate.
Marching behind a band and setting off rockets, the "mixed crowd of ill-behaved whites and
blacks" wound past the local lodge of the Good Templars and the houses of white and black
prohibitionists. At each place, they stopped to make a mock display of mourning for the
prohibitionist cause, draping fences and doors in black crepe. The crowd went through various
"burial performances" outside the drugstore of F. A. Walter, a leader of the prohibitionists'
executive committee, and then proceeded to his house, where his wife--the head of the local
chapter of the Women's Christian Temperance Union--was alone that evening. "They halted,
ordered a deep silence, and began a succession of deep groans," Mrs. Walter recalled. "Where's
your dead?" "Bring out your dead!" the men called repeatedly, before one ordered " 'Play the
dead march to Dr. Walter,' and they played it and went off playing it."1
That rowdy parade was a testament to the sharp divisions created by political battles over
prohibition. The contest in Greenville was part of a wave of prohibitionist agitation that roiled
politics in the South and throughout the nation during the 1880s. Eighteen states across the
country held referenda on the question during the 1880s, 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
1
Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, December 5, 1883, and January 2, 1884; Charleston
News and Courier, December 4, 1883.
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Carolina alone. Prohibitionists lost those elections more often than they won, and in many
places multiple elections on the issue were not uncommon. In Greenville, the liquor question
was the subject of four elections in eight years, and of three elections over the same period in
Charlotte, North Carolina. Atlanta held prohibition referenda in the 1885 and 1887. In those
places and elsewhere, prohibition cut across party and racial lines, finding both supporters and
opponents among Republicans as well as Democrats, and among black as well as white
Southerners--as events in Greenville demonstrated. 2
This study examines those events by bringing together two strands in the historical
literature. One is the historiography of politics in the late nineteenth-century South, and
especially the large and still growing number of works that focus on the challenges to Democrats'
power in the period between the end of Reconstruction and the Populist rebellion of the 1890s.
Those challenges came from a variety of groups--Greenbackers, Independents, Readjusters, and
the Knights of Labor, to name some of the best known--and over a range of issues--from national
monetary policy and state finance to the politics of the fence law. Few studies, however, have
examined prohibition as one of the issues that kept Southern politics at a simmer during the
1880s.3 The second relevant strand in the historiography is the substantial literature on
2
Ann-Marie E. Szymanski, Pathways to Prohibition: Radicals, Moderates, and Social Movement
Outcomes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). On Atlanta, see John Hammond Moore,
"The Negro and Prohibition in Atlanta, 1885-1887," South Atlantic Quarterly 69 (Winter 1970):
38-57, and Harold Paul Thompson, “Race, Temperance, and Prohibition in the Postbellum
South: Black Atlanta, 1865-1890” (Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University, 2005); on Texas, see
James D. Ivy, No Saloon in the Valley: The Southern Strategy of Texas Prohibitionists in the
1880s (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2003).
3
Steven Hahn, The Roots Of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of
the Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); Michael R.
Hyman, The Anti-Redeemers: Hill Country Political Dissenters in the Lower South from
Redemption to Populism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991); Laura F.
Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction (Champaign:
University of Illinois Press, 1997); Jane Dailey, Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in
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prohibition and temperance in the New South. A growing number of historians have examined
the role of white women and the black "better classes" in the temperance movement, and
explored how that movement both reflected and helped shape evolving ideas about religion,
gender, and race. What many of these works lack, however, is a clearer sense of the context of
partisan politics into which temperance advocates interjected themselves when they made
demands on state and local governments, and how, in doing so, their actions affected that
political dynamic.4
This study provides that perspective through a study of Greenville, South Carolina. Like
Charlotte, Atlanta, and many other Southern cities and towns that experienced no-license
elections during the 1880s, Greenville was a place that boomed after the Civil War with the
spread of the cotton economy and the growth of railroad networks in the Southern upcountry. In
Greenville as elsewhere, black residents actively participated on both sides of the prohibition
campaigns, bringing them into political alliances that took different forms with different
segments of the white population. Black prohibitionists--many but not all of them members of
what some historians have called the black better classes--actively cooperated with white
Postemancipation Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); John C.
Rodrigue, Reconstruction in the Cane Fields: From Slavery to Free Labor in Louisiana's Sugar
Parishes, 1862-1880 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001); Rebecca J. Scott,
Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2006); Joseph Gerteis, Class and the Color Line: Interracial Class Coalition in the Knights
of Labor and the Populist Movement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Matthew
Hild, Greenbackers, Knights of Labor, and Populists: Farmer-Labor Insurgency in the LateNineteenth-Century South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007).
4
David M. Fahey, Temperance And Racism: John Bull, Johnny Reb, and the Good Templars
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996); Janette Thomas Greenwood, Bittersweet
Legacy: The Black and White "Better Classes" in Charlotte, 1850-1910 (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2001); Thompson, “Race, Temperance, and Prohibition in the
Postbellum South: Black Atlanta, 1865-1890”; Joe L. Coker, Liquor in the Land of the Lost
Cause: Southern White Evangelicals and the Prohibition Movement (Lexington: University Press
of Kentucky, 2007).
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reformers to create formal organizations and hold public meetings. African Americans often
found themselves the junior partner in those coalitions, and participated in them for reasons
somewhat different from those of their white counterparts; nonetheless, the openness and
coordination of their efforts were remarkable for the time and place. The opponents of
prohibition included many of the city's white and black working class men, for whom its saloons
served as a commercialized leisure space and the site of an often competitive and occasionally
violent masculine culture. White and black men drank separately more often than not, and their
political efforts in the saloon's defense were likewise more racially segregated and independent
of one another than the collaborative efforts of their opponents--save at exceptional moments,
like the rowdy celebration in which white and black men together marked their success in the
1883 referendum. At the same time that the prohibition movement divided African Americans in
Greenville, however, it also brought a resurgence of their power in municipal politics: both
because wets and drys alike sought their support, and because the city's Democrats--in a panic
over how prohibition had split their own ranks--for a time ceased making party nominations for
the city council. Divisions over prohibition did not prevent the city's black residents from
cooperating in pursuit of other goals. For a time during the mid-1880s, black voters had become
"the balance of power" in city politics--until they were confronted by a determined
counteroffensive from the city's Democrats, and ultimately, by the adoption of statewide
disfranchisement in 1895.
With a population of just over 2,700 in 1870, Greenville barely rated a spot on a list of
national urban centers but nonetheless ranked as South Carolina's third largest incorporated
place, behind only Charleston and the state capital, Columbia. A Freedmen’s Bureau officer
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stationed at Greenville described the town as he encountered 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 town was
not greatly changed--at least in its physical aspects--from what it had been before the Civil War,
when Greenville served as a marketing center and seat of local government for the whitemajority, non-plantation region around it. For Greenville District as a whole, about 70 percent of
families owned no slaves in 1860; some large 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. Tucked away in the state's northwestern corner,
Greenville lay far from the lines of major combat for the war's duration; the first blue-coated
Yankee soldiers did not arrive until May 1865, when a cavalry detachment passed through the
town in pursuit of the fleeing Jefferson Davis.5
If the war itself left few physical marks on the area, Confederate defeat and the
destruction of slavery triggered a thorough transformation of class relations and economic life.
Greenville County belonged to the broad Southern upcountry region that lay outside plantation
belt before the Civil War and was drawn rapidly into the cotton economy afterwards. The
changes began during the late 1860s and accelerated over the decade that followed. By 1880,
cotton production in Greenville County stood at six times that of the late antebellum era. The
city of Greenville flourished with the rise in the cotton trade. The number of stores there leapt
5
U. S. Bureau of the Census, Ninth Census, vol. 1, Statistics of the Population of the United
States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1872), 259; John William De Forest, A
Union Officer in the Reconstruction, ed. James H. Croushore and David Morris Potter (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1948), xxix; Archie Vernon Huff, Greenville: The History of
the City and County in the South Carolina Piedmont (Columbia: University of South Carolina
Press, 1995), 143-44.
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from 23 in 1860 to 161 in 1880, as merchants bought cotton--35,000 bales in 1880--and in return
took liens on farmers' crops and sold them provisions and hardware. The building of the Air
Line Railway in the mid-1870s aided the town's commercial development by providing a rail
link to the North that bypassed the factors and middlemen of Charleston. Profits from the cotton
trade helped finance the building of two textile mills within city limits during the late 1870s and
early 1880s; together, the Campderown and Huguenot mills by mid-decade employed about 400
hands, most of them white women and children. A handful of smaller manufacturing concerns-a coach factory, a lumber mill, an iron foundry, a cotton seed mill, and a machine works-employed perhaps ten to twenty-five hands each during the early 1880s. On the whole,
nonetheless, Greenville remained more a commercial than an industrial city as its population rose
to more than 6,000 in 1880 and 8,500 in 1890.6
Black residents made up a substantial part of that population. In 1870, African
Americans accounted for nearly 50 percent of the city's residents, but only 32 percent of the
population of the county as a whole. That disproportion reflected the attractiveness of urban life
to freed slaves; in a pattern familiar elsewhere in the post-emancipation South, Greenville's black
population consisted disproportionately of women and children, reflecting the greater demand for
black men's labor in the rural economy. Although the town exhibited little residential
segregation by race during the 1870s and 1880s, there were several areas of concentrated black
settlement. After the Civil War, freedpeople established a settlement later called "Bucknertown"
on the city's northern edge; in the southeastern part of Greenville, the sixth ward--across the
6
Stephen A. West, From Yeoman to Redneck in the South Carolina Upcountry, 1850-1915
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 110-16; Historical and Descriptive Review
of the State of South Carolina (Charleston, SC: Empire Publishing Co., 1884) 3: 49-120; Lacy
K. Ford, Jr., "Rednecks and Merchants: Economic Development and Social Tensions in the
South Carolina Upcountry, 1865-1900," Journal of American History 71 (September 1984): 294318.
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Reedy River from the central business district--was 63 percent African American in 1870.
Wherever they lived, a majority of the city's black residents worked in menial jobs--chiefly
domestic service for women, and a wider array of occupations for men, especially as laborers in
the city's stores and warehouses. 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 workers are added, that figure increases to more than 60 percent. About 20 percent of
black men reported skilled occupations. A few blacksmiths, shoemakers, and others operated
their own shops or businesses, but most worked as wage earners for white employers. A handful
of black residents were more distinguished still by their property holding and occupation. The
town’s wealthiest black resident during the 1870s and 1880s was Wilson Cooke. As an enslaved
artisan before the Civil War, Cooke saved $1,500 to buy his freedom from a master who refused
to sell; afterwards, he operated a general store and tannery and reported owning $4,000 in real
property in the 1870 federal census.7
In both the city and county of Greenville, black men took an active role in partisan and
electoral politics after the Civil War. The Union League appeared in Greenville as early as July
1867, and the Republican party organized there a few months later. From the beginning, the
Republican party in this white-majority county won support from nearly all of its black residents
but only a fraction--perhaps 20 percent at most--of white voters. That fragile coalition was
enough to triumph in elections for delegates to the state constitutional convention in October
1867 and for the state legislature in April 1868. Greenville's Republicans benefited in the first
case from white Democrats' decision to boycott the elections, and in the second from their
opponents' desultory campaigning. But in a county where white residents outnumbered African
7
Ninth Census, 1: 259; on Cooke, see Huff, Greenville, 162. Figures on occupation compiled
from the 1880 federal manuscript census.
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Americans two to one, those successes would prove difficult to sustain. Democrats threw
themselves into organizing by the late spring of 1868; their efforts included the first appearances
of the Ku Klux Klan in Greenville. Democrats swept elections for local and federal offices in
Greenville in the summer and fall of 1868, and the county remained consistently Democratic for
the duration of Reconstruction. Despite their losses, the county's Republican leaders continued
to actively contest those biennial elections, nominating tickets for local offices and the state
legislature and regularly getting 40 percent or more of votes countywide. Although African
Americans sometimes chafed at white Republicans' disproportionate receipt of state and federal
patronage, they remained active as voters and organizers. Wilson Cooke, the only African
American from Greenville to win election to the constitutional convention in 1867 and to the
state legislature in 1868, continued to chair the county Republican party after being defeated for
re-election to his house seat in 1870.8
African Americans wielded political power longer and more successfully in the city of
Greenville, where they constituted over 40 percent of the electorate. Under its post-war 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 as a whole.9 The pattern that would prevail into the early 1870s emerged in November
8
Huff, Greenville, 161-68; Greenville Enterprise, June 26, and October 23 and 30, 1872 (Cook
as chair; Republican vote). On Republican politics in South Carolina during Reconstruction, see
Thomas C. Holt, Black Over White: Negro political leadership in South Carolina during
Reconstruction (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1979); Julie Saville, The Work of
Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina 1860-1870 (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1996); Hyman Rubin, South Carolina Scalawags (Columbia:
University of South Carolina Press, 2006).
9
14 Statutes at Large (1868-69): 242-45. The 1869 charter opened city elections to all men
twenty-one and older who had lived in the town for at least sixty days prior to the election. In
1875, the General Assembly made municipal elections in Greenville biennial rather than annual;
15 Statutes at Large (1874-75): 896-97. In a new charter issued for the city in 1885, aldermen
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1868, in the first municipal election held after black men's enfranchisement. That election was
carried by a slate of candidates nominated by the black Neptune Fire Company. Although the
Neptune company included some of the city'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 white Republicans for the city council, and never any black
ones. Instead, the Neptune candidates were typically white men not strongly associated with
either party. Through the early 1870s, the Firemen's tickets usually won mayor and at least half
of the council seats.10
A number of issues dominated city politics during the late 1860s and early 1870s. The
1870 Firemen's ticket bore the label "Hog Out," a slogan expressing their opposition to a city
ordinance that operated as a kind of 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
remained a point of controversy, and in 1872 the Neptunes petitioned the council after the old
ordinance was temporarily restored. Another issue was the building of bridge across the Reedy
River. Two of the city’s six wards--including the black-majority sixth ward--lay across the river,
but they had no direct link other than a footbridge to the city's main commercial district until the
were required to reside in the wards they represented, but remained subject to election by voters
of the city as a whole. Provisions for suffrage and elections otherwise remained largely the
same; 19 Statutes at Large (1885): 106-16. An 1888 revision expanded the council from one to
two aldermen for each of the city's six wards; 20 Statutes at Large (1888): 181-82.
10
Greenville Southern Enterprise, November 4 and 11, 1868; Greenville Enterprise, July 20,
August 10, and September 14, 1870; Greenville Mountaineer, August 10 and September 14,
1870; Greenville Enterprise, August 16 and 23, September 6 and 13, 1871, and August 28 and
September 11, 1872. On the Neptunes, see William D. Browning, Jr., Firefighting in Greenville,
1840-1990 (Greenville, SC: Southern Historical Press, 1991), 4-35. The company was
incorporated by an act of the General Assembly in 1869; see 14 Statutes at Large (1868-69):
179-80.
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building of a substantial iron bridge in 1871.11 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 that numbered three to six officers--and naming one African American to the
three-member board that supervised city elections.12
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 “Citizen’s” and “People’s” tickets,
sometimes trumpeting the participation of a few black men at their public meetings.13 Those
efforts bore only limited success, and Democrats changed their strategies by the mid-1870s.
Earlier that decade, the city had voted to issue more than $65,000 in bonds to help finance the
building of the Air-Line Railroad; that and other expenses ballooned the city budget during the
early 1870s and led to growing calls for retrenchment and tax reduction, especially after the
beginnings of the 1873 depression. Before the 1875 city election, Greenville Democrats dropped
their claims to non-partisanship and set out to elect an explicitly Democratic ticket. They
organized ward meetings to select nominees and called on “every Conservative and Democrat in
our city [to] sustain this ticket.” The Democratic nominees triumphed unanimously over a
bipartisan ticket advertised in the pages of the city’s Republican paper. The new Democratic
council ended the hiring of black police officers and election managers; it also reinstituted an
ordinance that required the fencing of livestock.14
11
Huff, Greenville, 193-94.
Ninth Census, 1: 259; City Council Minutes, September 11, 1871.
13
Southern Enterprise, November 11, 1868 (quote and “People’s” label); Greenville Enterprise,
September 14, 1870 and August 23, 1871 (use of label “Citizen’s” ticket); Greenville Enterprise,
August 28, 1872 (black men at nominating meeting).
14
The new Democratic city council resolved to appoint one black and two white police officers
shortly after its election in August 1875. Three days after the disputed election of November 7,
12
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Greenville Democrats had, in effect, anticipated the "straight out" policy that Democrats
statewide would adopt in the election of 1876. The state campaign, however, would add another
element as well--the organized violence and intimidation of paramilitary groups. Greenville
County had experienced some Klan activity in 1868 but been spared the extreme violence that
erupted elsewhere during 1870-71; such violence had never been a feature of municipal elections
in Greenville. But leaving nothing to chance, Democrats in Greenville joined their counterparts
throughout the state by donning red shirts and organizing rifle companies for a coordinated
display of intimidation that would help them carry the state elections of 1876. With the end of
Republican control of government--and patronage--at the state level, many of Greenville's white
Republican leaders left the area or turned their energy to third-party politics by the early 1880s.
Prominent black Republicans abandoned neither the area nor the party but their electoral efforts
paid fewer and fewer rewards, and after 1880 they ceased running tickets for the legislature and
county offices. 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 “Workingman’s ticket” organized with little apparent support
from Greenville's black Republicans. Many of the men named to the ticket refused nomination,
and Democrats easily carried the election as voter turnout fell to its lowest levels since black
men's enfranchisement. Greenville's Redemption, like that of the state as a whole, seemed
complete.15
1876, however, the council discharged the city's one black policeman and later replaced him with
a white officer; see City Council Minutes, August 18, 1875, November 10, 1876, and January 8,
1877.
15
Huff, Greenville, 169-71; Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, August 6 and 13, 1879.
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But counter-revolutions, too, can sometimes go backwards, and it was the liquor question
that set municipal politics spinning in the early 1880s. Under state law, the city council held the
authority to issue licenses for the sale of liquor, beer, and wine by the drink to taverns that kept
sleeping accommodations for at least two overnight guests. That authority had been a point of
contention in town politics before the Civil War, when temperance advocates pushed for and
won the election of "no-license" tickets by the late 1850s. Immediately after the Civil War,
military authorities temporarily banned the sale of liquor, but by 1868 the city council had
returned to the issuing of licenses. That move generated little apparent controversy, in part
because the organized temperance movement had fallen moribund, and also because the
financially pressed city government was desperate for revenue from liquor licenses. In 1874, the
state legislature authorized municipal governments to license "drinking saloons and eating
houses" to sell alcohol on the same basis as taverns. By 1876, Greenville had twelve saloons for
a population of perhaps 5,700, and their annual license fees of $365 apiece collectively provided
about a quarter of the city's revenue.16
Those saloons served a number of different purposes and clienteles. Several of the city's
large hotels included saloons that catered to their guests and other patrons; the Mansion House,
located on the court house square, was the city's finest hotel and had a barroom to match, with a
billiard parlor and the "first cut-class chandelier that was ever brought to Greenville." Most
saloons were less ornate affairs and catered to farmers and city working men; for them, the
saloon functioned as a commercialized leisure space where a homosocial culture of treating,
16
On temperance and prohibition before and immediately after the Civil War, see Stephen A.
West, "From Yeoman to Redneck in Upstate South Carolina, 1850-1915" (Ph.D. dissertation,
Columbia University, 1998), chaps. 3 and 8. The 1874 law that authorized the licensing of
saloons appears at 15 Statutes at Large 797 (1874); number of saloons in 1876 from Charles
Emerson's Greenville City Directory 1876-77 (Greenville, SC.: Daily News Job Office, 1876),
114; revenue estimates from Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, August 20, 1879.
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gambling, and fighting prevailed. During the late 1870s and early 1880s, half a dozen saloons
dotted the Main Street north of the court house and the commercial blocks immediately adjoining
it. Another three or four operated along Augusta and Pendleton Streets in West Greenville. In
both places, barrooms were interspersed among the cotton brokerages, hardware stores, and other
merchant houses that lined the same blocks, and they attracted farmers who came to trade on
Saturdays and salesdays and during slack times in the agricultural season. One Greenville
resident later remembered the exodus that occurred "along about sundown," when farmers exited
the bars and "the roads leading out of town echoed to the whooping and yelling of the homeward
bound." The saloons of West Greenville provided a convenient resort for men from the nearby
Camperdown mill village. Mill hands Samuel Rothsbotham and John Gregory were arrested for
a fight that occurred after they had been "drinking together in a bar room" with a third man.
After one payday, three young "residents of Factory Hill ... were flush and invested too largely in
the potent draught"; they took to the streets cursing and boasting and landed themselves before
the mayor's court as well. On another occasion, a livery stable hand went "on a spree" with a
painter and several other white men, treating them to drinks and chipping in to buy a harmonica
that one of the group played as they made their way from barroom to barroom.17
Some degree of racial segregation prevailed among Greenville's barrooms, but it appears
to have been fluid and never absolute during the 1870s and 1880s. Most saloons were operated
17
Charles A. David, Greenville of Old, ed. Suzanne J. Case and Sylvia Lanford Marchant
(Greenville, SC: Historic Greenville Foundation, 1998), 7-10; Greenville Daily News,
November 19 and December 2, 1881 (Rothsbotham and "flush" workers"); Greenville Enterprise
and Mountaineer, November 18, 1885 (treating and harmonica). On the culture of late
nineteenth century saloons, see Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and
Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Perry
Duis, The Saloon: Public Drinking in Chicago and Boston, 1880-1920 (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1983); Madelon Powers, Faces Along the Bar: Lore and Order in the
Workingman's Saloon, 1870-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
West - "Hot Municipal Contest" 14
by white men, 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 for much of the 1880s. 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 newspaper editor
described the Williams' barroom in 1881 as "an intolerable nuisance" that attracted a "boisterous
crowd of negroes."18 Some white saloonkeepers regarded their barrooms as places for white men
only; others served both white and black customers. An example of the former lay just across
the street from the Williams' barroom. When a black man entered the saloon of N. B. Freeman
and asked for a drink, the barkeeper demanded that he pay twenty cents--twice the usual price-"he being a colored individual, and that being a white bar." On the other hand, John Freel served
both white and black men at his saloon and restaurant on Main Street. An 1881 trial elicited
testimony about the mix of patrons inside another Main Street saloon at the time of a robbery
there--those present included a white carpenter and his brother; a white farmer; a black carpenter;
and a black drayman.19
18
On the Williams brothers' barroom, see Charles Emerson and Co.'s Spartanburg and Greenville
Directories, 1880-81 (Atlanta, GA: H. H. Dickson, 1880), 86 and Greenville Daily News,
August 21, 1881; on Collins, see City Council Minutes, October 4, 1870; Spartanburg and
Greenville Directories, 1880-81, 86; City Directory of Greenville, 1883-84 (Atlanta, GA: H. H.
Dickson, 1883), 193; Greenville City Directory, Spring 1888 (Greenville, SC: J. R. Shannon,
1888), 85; "List of Substantial Negro Property Owners," Elias B. Holloway Papers, SCL. The
1860 federal manuscript census listed Collins as an "engineer" living in the town of Greenville
and owning $400 in real property, and in 1870 as the operator of a cake shop and owner of real
property worth $950; 1860 federal manuscript census, Greenville District, SC, 417B; 1870
federal manuscript census, Greenville County, SC, 641B.
19
Greenville Daily News, July 13, 1880 (Freel), and April 1, 5 and 19, 1881 (1881 robbery trial;
Freel; overcharge to black customer); Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, November 18,
1885 (Freel).
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The temperance movement in Greenville, dormant through the late 1860s, showed signs
of life again as the number of saloons rose dramatically 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 to the South in a serious way only after the Civil War. The
Grand Lodge of South Carolina was organized in 1872. The first lodge of white Templars in
Greenville appeared in 1873; by 1876, black residents had formed a separate lodge.20 Both the
black and white lodges operated as fraternal organizations for their members--with initiation
rituals, passwords, and regular meetings--and also sought to address themselves to a wider
public. Greenville's white Templars helped organize lodges in the county's smaller towns and
rural areas and held joint meetings with the county Grange. Both white and black Templars
sponsored amusements and speeches for the public at large. In the spring of 1876, for example,
Greenville's black Templars organized a "Temperance picnic" and parade along Main Street,
complete with "music, banners, and appropriate regalia."21
Who joined the Templars? The white and black lodges were open to both sexes, and to
members as young as age fifteen. The white Templars lodge in Greenville drew its membership
chiefly from a middling stratum of the city's commercial classes. Among forty-five active
members of the lodge between 1873 to 1880, roughly three-quarters were men, and one-quarter
women. Clerks and salesmen accounted for 40 percent of the male members who could be
identified in census records and city directories. Another 20 percent were merchants, with the
remainder composed mostly of artisans, lawyers, teachers, and one minister. Among 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. Although not members of
20
21
Fahey, Temperance and Racism, chaps. 1-2; Szymanski, Pathways to Prohibition, 39-40.
Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, April 26, 1876 (black Templars parade).
West - "Hot Municipal Contest" 16
the city's wealthy elite, several of the more ambitious men successfully established themselves in
business. Templars C. D. Stradley and G. T. Barr, for example, clerked together as young men
in a successful dry goods store; together, they later bought out their employer and operated the
store in partnership for the next twenty years.22
The region's black Templars, by comparison, appear to have been drawn much more
heavily from the ranks of artisans and unskilled laborers. Among twenty officers of the Templars
lodges in Greenville and the nearby city of Spartanburg in 1880, 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. The fifteen male members included a minister, a grocer, a teacher, two carpenters, a
shoemaker, three laborers, two hotel waiters, and a domestic servant.23 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 occupation, education,
and property holding.24 Such members did, however, play a disproportionate role in organizing
the movement and articulating its ideas. During the early 1880s, for example, the most active
black Templar in Greenville was Cornelius C. Scott. Born a free person of color near
Charleston, he graduated from South Carolina College in 1877 and within a few years was
principal of Greenville's one black public school, the Allen school. Scott served as head of the
black Templars state lodge for South Carolina from 1884 to 1886 and later became a minister in
22
List of active Templars taken from: Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, March 31,1875,
February 16, 1876, February 21, 1877, March 24 and August 4, 1880; Charles Emerson's
Greenville Directory ... 1876-77, 125; Spartanburg and Greenville Directories, 1880-81, 92.
Identification of members from city directories and the 1870 and 1880 manuscript federal
censuses.
23
List of Templar officers from Spartanburg and Greenville Directories, 1880-81, 92, 99.
Identification of members from city directories and the 1870 and 1880 manuscript federal
censuses.
24
Greenwood, Bittersweet Legacy; Thompson, “Race, Temperance, and Prohibition."
West - "Hot Municipal Contest" 17
the Methodist Episcopal Church. 25
Like Scott, many white and black Templars were active members of the upcountry's
Baptist and Methodist denominations; for evangelicals of both races, their emphasis on
temperance was part of a wider commitment to righteous personal conduct and to reform of
social conditions. In other ways, however, white and black Templars drew on distinctly separate
sets of ideas. White Templars, for their part, 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 that undermined their role as providers and loving fathers and husbands.
Those claims complemented more practical arguments that the money and time spent in the
saloon were better devoted to saving and hard work as a means of personal self-advancement.
While such arguments were not absent from the rhetoric of black Templars, they lay a heavier
emphasis on temperance as a means of collective advancement for African Americans, and of
overcoming the obstacles that they faced in Southern society. Thus, when Scott addressed an
Emancipation Day celebration in 1880, his hour-long speech ranged from a discussion of "social
equality" and emigration to exhortations about the importance of "being sober, industrious, and
economical."26
Although Templars had been active in Greenville since the mid-1870s, the liquor
question became a serious issue in municipal politics only after 1880. A number of factors-many of them a part of broader developments in the state and region--combined to push it to the
25
On Scott, see Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, February 4, 1880, May 28, 1884, May
13, 1885, and August 28, 1889; A.B. Caldwell, ed., History of the American Negro: South
Carolina Edition (Atlanta: A. B. Caldwell Publishing Co, 1919), 729-34.
26
Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, January 7 and 21, 1880.
West - "Hot Municipal Contest" 18
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 Women's Christian Temperance Union, embarked on a fourteenweek, fifty-city tour through every state of the former Confederacy. When she visited Greenville
in March, audiences packed the white Methodist church on two consecutive nights to hear her
speak. Willard also met privately with a group of women who then formed Greenville's first
WCTU chapter; its membership, although small, included the wives and daughters of a number
of the city's business and political elite. Simultaneously, prohibitionists were making their
influence felt elsewhere in the South as well. In March 1881, North Carolina's Democratic
legislature enacted a measure for statewide prohibition but made it contingent on approval in a
popular referendum to be held that summer. In a closely contested municipal election in
Charlotte, North Carolina, that spring, prohibitionists narrowly gained control of the city council.
Dry tickets also triumphed in Yorkville, Lancaster, Laurens and a number of other towns in the
South Carolina upcountry.27
In cities and states throughout the country, prohibition often upset existing party
alignments. In the North, the majority of its support came from Republicans; in the South,
Democrats were more typically the moving force in the fight against liquor. But in neither
region was either party united on the issue--a fact that created opportunities for their opponents.
Thus, in 1881, the state Republican Party in North Carolina resolved to lead the opposition to
statewide prohibition referendum there, hoping to build support in advance of the state election
the following year. When prohibitionists in Greenville talked of running a dry ticket for the city
27
17 Statutes at Large (1880) 459-61; WCTU Records, 1880-1939, typescript volume, SCL;
Greenville Daily News, March 31 and April 1, 1881; Anne Firor Scott, From Pedestal to Politics,
1830-1930 (1970; reprint, Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 1995), 144-50; Greenwood,
Bittersweet Legacy, 80-99.
West - "Hot Municipal Contest" 19
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 words for
the saloon but argued that the loss of barroom license fees would require a sharp rise in property
taxes. But the "preservation of the Democratic party in State, county, and city," he insisted in a
series of editorials, was far more "important than the abolition or continuance of liquor selling."
The liquor question would divide white Democrats and produce an "unholy alliance of liquor
dealers, Radicals, and negroes"; the damage would not be limited to local politics, but would
lead to a "radical ascendancy" throughout the state and "woe, ruin, general destruction and
desolation" for all of South Carolina. Williams's language was overwrought, but the context for
his fears was real enough. The liquor question 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' hold on
power, including the threat of William Mahone's Readjuster party in Virginia--a connection that
Williams, a native Virginian, was quick to draw.28
Greenville's prohibitionists were not unmindful of those concerns. In early June, "the
friends of temperance" convened a meeting to discuss strategy for the upcoming municipal
elections in August. All of the invitees were white men; although two active members of the
Templars attended, the sixteen men present included several whose political and economic
standing far exceeded that of most Templars. The meeting convened at the office of J. C. Smith,
Greenville's leading commission merchant; it also included Hamlin Beattie, president of the
Camperdown Mills and the Greenville National Bank, and H. C. Markeley and G. W. Sirrine, coowner and superintendent, respectively, of the Greenville Coach Factory. Beattie was a sitting
28
Greenville Daily News, April 2 and 6, May 10 and 11, June 12, and July 2, 1881.
West - "Hot Municipal Contest" 20
alderman, and three other attendees had previously served on the city council. After some
deliberation, the group resolved to ask the city council to hold a referendum on prohibition at the
same time as the city council elections. Removing the issue to a referendum would leave "party
organizations ... perfectly untrammeled" and reveal the "popular will actually expressed," which
the winning candidates "would of course feel themselves morally bound to respect." The city
council, however, soon rejected that proposal, after the city attorney advised that the municipal
charter granted no authority for such a referendum.29
Prohibitionists, after some debate, chose to make their stand within the Democratic party,
running a slate of candidates in the ward meetings that would pick nominees for the city council
and delegates to a city-wide meeting that would nominate a candidate for mayor. The result was
a ticket of three wet aldermen and three drys; delegates to the city-wide meeting were also
evenly split, and chose to renominate the incumbent mayor, a wet. Greenville's wards tended not
to be strongly segregated by class at the time, so that the results revealed no strong pattern of
opinion along class lines--with one exception. The fourth ward was home to one of the villages
that housed workers from the Camperdown Mills and had, proportionately, the largest white
working class population in the city; the Democratic ward meeting there voted against
prohibition by a margin of two to one. Overall, the ward meetings attracted wide participation-the number of votes cast equaled more than 70 percent of the number of registered white voters-and generated a level of excitement that continued to worry 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 because, as he confided to his wife, "I do not care to make any
29
Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, June 8 and 29, 1881; Greenville Daily News, June 28
and 29, 1881; City Council Minutes, June 27, 1881.
West - "Hot Municipal Contest" 21
enemies." Williams--who had ridden as a Red Shirt in 1876 and served as a poll watcher for the
Democrats--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--it soon developed--were black
Republicans. The first to act were African American supporters of prohibition, who chose to
weigh in even before the Democratic nominations. About ten days before the Democrats' ward
meetings, a group of twenty-eight black Republicans published a notice in a local newspaper,
promising "that no Republican ticket shall be run at the approaching Municipal Election ...
provided a ticket of men who will pledge themselves to stop liquor selling, be put in the field."
The signers included Wilson Cooke--the sole black Republican elected to the state legislature in
1868; C. C. Scott, the black Templar and principal of the Allen school; 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 wage workers, and five were draymen or
wagon drivers. At least eight owned real property. Like the white "friends of temperance" who
had met at J. C. Smith's office, these men were on the whole more politically prominent and
economically established than their black counterparts in the Templars.31
Other black leaders, however, not only took a different view of prohibition but also saw a
political opportunity in the split among the city's Democrats. A few days before the municipal
elections, reports began to circulate that "a meeting of colored voters was held at one of the [fire]
engine houses" to nominate independent candidates for several wards. The organizers of the
30
James T. Williams to wife, June 26 and July 12 and 14, 1881 James T. Williams, Sr., Papers,
SCL.
31
Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, July 6, 1881.
West - "Hot Municipal Contest" 22
meeting were not named, but they likely included Benjamin F. Donaldson, a hotel worker,
Republican activist, and president of the Palmetto fire company. Donaldson later addressed a
similar meeting held over the saloon of black barkeeper Richmond Williams. Working quietly in
conjunction with a group of wet Democrats, they decided to make nominations for two wards
that had been carried by no-license men in the ward meetings a month before. The two
independent candidates were both white Democrats--W. E. Rowland, a livery stable owner and
incumbent alderman who had declined to run for renomination in the first ward, and W. P.
Sudduth, a bartender who had run for the city council as an independent in the past and who
would leave the party to run as Greenbacker for the state legislature in 1882. The appearance of
the independent nominees caught the city's Democrats by surprise, and both men carried their
races by margins of more than 10 percent. Williams reported that black men "solidly" voted the
opposition ticket, but by his own calculations at least 30 percent of white voters had done so as
well.32
The "hot municipal contest" of 1881 shattered the Democratic party's short-lived
dominance of city government in Greenville and reoriented the course of politics there 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--with
Radical negroes over the organized Democratic party." In the face of that defeat, the "first thing
to be done here now is to dissolve the Democratic organization." Greenville's Democrats did not
go quite that far. But when W. E. Rowland refused to take his seat as alderman for the first
ward--on the grounds that he had not accepted the independent nomination for it--the Democratic
party declined to make a nomination for the empty seat in the special election scheduled to fill it.
32
Greenville Daily News, August 7, 9, and 17, 1881.
West - "Hot Municipal Contest" 23
Rowland then ran again and easily won. Greenville's Democrats would forego making
nominations at each of the next three biennial city council elections as well. And to separate the
liquor question from city council elections in the future, the state legislature in 1882 passed an
act authorizing the city hold the kind of referendum that it declined to order in 1881.33
The first referendum under the law came in December 1883. To prepare for the vote,
prohibitionists held a mass meeting at the city's largest hall, the Opera House, in early November
and appointed a city-wide executive committee that included five white men--a lawyer, a
druggist, two merchants and an editor--and two African Americans--C. C. Scott and Thomas
Mims, who co-owned a barbershop in Greenville's West End. Over the next three weeks, they
organized a network of ward committees and a series of public speaking events. Much of the
work of the campaign was done by ministers and through their churches. In the five days before
the election, separate meetings were held at three of the city's black churches, with addresses at
each by both white and black prohibitionists; on election eve, two black and two white ministers
addressed another mass meeting at the court house.34
The cooperation between black and white prohibitionists was noteworthy both for its
extent and for its limits. White prohibitionists recognized the need to win black votes and felt
free to reach out to their black counterparts in a way they had been reluctant to do while the issue
was entangled with partisan politics. 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 seemed to speak less as moral authorities--with the standing to instruct
their white listeners--than as emissaries from the black community, present to assure white
33
Pickens Sentinel, June 9, 1881; Greenville Daily News, August 9, 13, 19, and 21, 1881; City
Council Minutes, August 12, 1881; 17 Statutes at Large (1882) 893.
34
Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, November 14 and December 5, 1883 (Scott's speech at
mass meeting; election day events).
West - "Hot Municipal Contest" 24
prohibitionists of their support. Thus, at the prohibitionists' first mass meeting, C. C. Scott rose
to speak "in behalf of the colored people [and] heartily endorsed the resolutions" proposed by a
previous white speaker. If those mass meetings included both white and black listeners, the
more frequent meetings at Greenville's churches occurred before all white or all black audiences--and while white prohibitionists spoke at black churches, the reverse does not appear to have
been true. This pattern of coordinated but separate efforts continued on election day, when black
and white Sunday school children paraded separately down Main Street, and when the WCTU
and "colored temperance women" hosted separate hot lunches for their supporters.35
Anti-prohibitionists engaged in little of the kind of public organizing that marked their
opponents' campaign. As in 1881, A. B. Williams used the pages of the Greenville Daily News
to editorialize against prohibition; his arguments--about city finances and the loss of thousands
of dollars in commercial rent paid annually by barowners--were likely to appeal chiefly to the
businessmen and property owners among his readers. Owners of the city's eighteen saloons
stood to lose the most from prohibition, and they acted through the city's Liquor Dealers'
Association to prepare for the referendum. The full extent of their efforts became apparent only
on election day. The mayor had ordered the barrooms to close at six p.m. the night before, but
some barrowners had rented halls and--in a kind of counterpoint to the temperance women's hot
lunches--provided free food and drink to their supporters over night and into the day. When the
polls opened at six a.m., two white barowners were present to monitor the voting; within the next
hour, two large columns of men--both headed by white barowners, and one proceeded by a
drummer--marched to the polls to vote the license ticket. Most of the men in each procession
35
Charleston News and Courier, December 2, 1883 (election day). On the extent and limits of
cooperation between white and black prohibitionists, see also Ayers, Promise of the New South,
180-81; Greenwood, Bittersweet Legacy, chap. 4; and Thompson, “Race, Temperance, and
Prohibition."
West - "Hot Municipal Contest" 25
were black, and many were reported to be "boisterous and rude, seeming to be intoxicated."
After that early morning excitement, the rest of the day's voting passed comparatively quietly.
When the ballots were tallied, prohibition had been defeated by 80 votes of almost 1,250 cast.36
Because anti-prohibitionists conducted their organizing before election day quietly and
out of the public eye, it is difficult to judge whether they practiced the kind of interracial
cooperation that characterized prohibitionists' efforts. Six barkeepers--all white--were identified
in newspaper reports as active at the polls on the day of the referendum; the only prominent
African American among the "most active ralliers of the License party" was Benjamin F.
Donaldson, the Republican who helped organize the successful challenge to two dry Democratic
aldermen in 1881. What did seem clear--from both the 1881 and 1883 elections--was that
sentiment among white and black working class men ran strongly against prohibition. The vote
for license exceeded the total number of registered black voters by more than 50 percent, and
thus depended on substantial support among the white electorate; describing the divide in white
opinion, one prohibitionist claimed that "The main part of the better class of whites supported the
No-License ticket," suggesting what he thought of those white men who voted otherwise. Such
condescension was consistent with the stigmatizing of the saloon and its denizens that was
typical of prohibitionist rhetoric, and on election day, working class voters met the
prohibitionists' self-conscious propriety with their assertive rowdiness--as they marched to the
polls to vote on behalf of the saloon, and as they commemorated their victory that night in
boisterous street celebrations.37
Greenville's prohibitionists were not ready to give up, and they petitioned for another no-
36
Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, December 5, 1883; Charleston News and Courier,
December 2, 1883.
37
Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, December 5, 1883.
West - "Hot Municipal Contest" 26
license referendum the following year. They organized in much the same way as a year before,
and with an only slightly different set of leaders. The result was another defeat, except with a
smaller turnout and a larger margin of victory for the license side. After three elections in four
years, Greenville remained stubbornly wet. Other towns in South Carolina experienced a similar
series of contests--with generally similar results--during the mid-1880s. The two closest cities to
Greenville of any size during the 1880s were Anderson to the south and Spartanburg to the
northeast, with populations of 1,850, and 3,253, respectively, in 1880. The liquor question was
the subject of two city council elections and two referenda in Anderson from 1881 to 1886;
Spartanburg exceeded that total, with a third referendum over the same period. Although both
cities went dry at least once over that stretch, both returned to license by the end. Greenville, in
short, was unique in neither the contentious nature of the prohibition issue nor the outcome.38
Prohibitionists failed to achieve their intended result, but their agitation had another
consequence they had not foreseen--it provided an opening for black voters and political leaders
to renew their flagging influence in municipal politics, which had declined steadily after the
Democrats' redemption of the city council in 1875. Between 1872 and 1881, black voter
registration in Greenville's municipal elections increased less than 50 percent, at the same time
the number of registered white voters more than doubled. With the rise of prohibition
movement, however, black voters found themselves actively courted by both wets and drys in the
city's no-license referenda of 1883 and 1884. Perhaps even more important was the decision of
local Democrats, after the 1881 election, to forego making nominations for aldermen and mayor,
38
Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, November 12, 19, and 26, and December 3, 1884.
West - "Hot Municipal Contest" 27
a policy they stuck to in coming years.39 No longer confronted with calls for party unity and
racial solidarity, white Democratic politicians felt free to form rival slates of candidates in the
general election and appeal for the support of black as well as white voters. Between 1881 and
1887, black voter registration in Greenville rose more than 85 percent, several times faster than
the rise in the number of registered white voters. By the latter year, black men accounted for
over 44 percent of the registered electorate, approaching levels not seen since the early 1870s.
Turnout in municipal elections rebounded as well, from a low of about 70 percent in 1879 to
about 88 percent in 1887.40
This resurgence in black men's electoral power was all the more striking because it
coincided with their declining power in state politics, especially after the enactment of the
notorious eight-box law of 1882--a measure that applied to state and federal but not municipal
elections. That political power, nonetheless, had clear limits. During Reconstruction, African
Americans in Greenville had taken a hand in publicly nominating their own tickets, even if their
candidates were always white men, and often Democrats. The 1880s saw no return to the
"Firemen's tickets" of the late 1860s and early 1870s; instead, black leaders threw their support
to one of the rival tickets organized by white Democrats. And with the franchise in South
Carolina restricted and the county and state Republican party in shambles, black men's power in
39
Before the 1883 election, the Democrats' city executive committee voted 5-2 not to call the
ward meetings that nominated aldermen. Both of the "yes" votes came from men who had
supported license in 1881. Four of the five men who voted "no" had been drys in 1881; the fifth
had been elected to the executive committee as a wet but had denounced the running of
independent wet candidates. Greenville Daily News, July 15 and August 9, 1881; Greenville
Enterprise and Mountaineer, July 18, 1883.
40
Voter registration and election turnout figures from: Southern Enterprise, November 11,
1868; Greenville Enterprise, August 14 and September 11, 1872; Greenville Daily News, July 8
and August 9, 1881; Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, September 16, 1885, August 17,
1887; Charleston News and Courier, September 15, 1887.
West - "Hot Municipal Contest" 28
municipal politics did not translate to any revival of their influence in county or state politics.41
Nonetheless, some Democrats expressed profound alarm that black men had come to
hold "the balance of power" in city elections by the mid-1880s. John C. Bailey, editor of the
weekly Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, officially took no position in the municipal
elections of 1883, declaring that both tickets in the field were composed of Democrats, and that
"There is no political significance in the contest, or any issue of any kind"; the "only point of
interest," he insisted, was the "personal popularity of the aspirants." Bailey made similar
complaints in 1885, when he objected as well to the boisterous conduct of popular politics.
Voters yelled the names of their favored candidates and jostled, argued, and sometimes fought
around the polls; some traveled to their voting places in rowdy groups or celebrated in the streets
afterwards. Bailey--a strict prohibitionist--also expressed disgust at the sight of "many of the
negroes" and "several white men" who "seemed to be greatly under the influence of whisky."
For him, the lack of important issues at stake was directly related to the campaign's "unseemly,
unorderly" conduct--and to the large number of black men who participated.42
To Greenville's black residents, however, municipal politics during the mid-1880s did not
appear nearly so issueless as Bailey claimed. One of those issues was occasioned by the city's
rapid growth during the 1870s and early 1880s, which had increased the number of the dead as
well as the living within its boundaries. Since the antebellum era, Greenville's white residents
had buried their dead in Springwood Cemetery, to the north of the city's center; the council acted
several times to enlarge Springwood after the Civil War but allowed the adjoining "colored
burial ground" to languish. In the months leading up to the 1883 city council election, black
41
Holt, Black Over White, chap. 9; J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics:
Suffrage Restriction and the Making of the One-Party South 1880-1910 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1974).
42
Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, August 15, 1883.
West - "Hot Municipal Contest" 29
citizens twice petitioned the council to enlarge their cemetery. After the re-election of mayor
Samuel A. Townes, a Democrat who "sought and courted" black voters "with much ardor," the
council voted to purchase a twelve-acre plot northeast of the city's center for a "colored
cemetery" later known as Richland Cemetery.43
Education was another issue of crucial importance, and one where African Americans
made important gains in the mid-1880s. Under an 1878 law, public schools in South Carolina
were financed solely by the poll taxes collected in each school district. In Greenville, that
revenue was enough to finance only two public schools--one for white students and one for
African Americans--and a school year of four to five months. Both schools were located in the
northwestern part of the city; the absence of schools across the Reedy River, in West Greenville,
fell heavily on an area whose population was disproportionately black. To fund new schools and
a longer school year, the district’s school trustees began to look for other sources of revenue; one
proposal called for the city to make an appropriation on the schools’ behalf. In August 1885, a
group of black leaders met at the hall of the Colored Workingmen’s Benevolent Society to
discuss which of three rival tickets of Democrats to support in the upcoming municipal elections,
and resolved "to support no candidate who will not pledge his support to all public free
schools."44
43
Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, August 15, 1883; City Council Minutes, June 6, July
3, and November 6, 1883.
44
16 Statutes at Large (19877-78): 571-86; Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, September 2,
1885; Charleston News and Courier, August 22, 1887; Marion Thomas 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 [ck terminal page #]. The list of
attendees at the 1885 meeting suggests that the controversy over prohibition did not cause any
lasting schism among the city's black Republican leaders: the twelve-member committee
included one signer of the 1881 address by no-license Republicans as well as B. F. Donaldson,
an active anti-prohibitionist, and Zion Collins, a saloonkeeper. Thomas Brier, the meeting's
chair, played no prominent role on either side.
West - "Hot Municipal Contest" 30
A month after the election, the trustees of the city school district petitioned the city
council for supplemental funds, but the council rejected the request on the grounds that it was
“not authorized by the city charter.” At the next session of the state legislature, the county
delegation secured passage of a special act that expanded the powers of the local school district
and authorized a property tax to help fund the city schools. One black man was elected to the
newly constituted school board of trustees in the spring of 1886, and in 1887 two new schools
opened in West Greenville--one for white and one for black students. The West End Colored
School operated in leased quarters, in a building that formerly housed Greenville’s AME church.
Within two years, enrollment there equaled or exceeded that of the Allen school in the
northwestern part of the city, and was double that at the West End school for white students.
From 1887 to 1889, average school attendance for black students in Greenville more than
doubled--about twice the rate of increase for white students.45
Labor organizations and issues did not figure prominently in Greenville politics for most
of the 1880s, but that threatened to change in 1887-- the year that the Knights of Labor achieved
their greatest successes in municipal politics in the South by creating coalitions of white and
black voters. Although the Knights formed an assembly in Greenville in late 1886, 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 group he had founded
called the "Cooperative Workers of America," and which declared its allegiance to goals ranging
45
City Council Minutes, October 5, 1885; 19 Statutes at Large (1885): 382-84; Greenville
Enterprise and Mountaineer, September 11, 1889 (enrollment figs by school), October 15, 1889
(enrollment figs by year); Charleston News and Courier, July 8, 1889 (enrollment figures by
school). In an account written more than forty years later, Elias Holloway--who briefly served as
principal of the West End school--dated its founding to "about 1885," but other sources first
mention it in 1887; see "The History of Negro Education in Greenville," no date, Elias B.
Holloway Papers, SCL, and Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, September 21, 1887.
West - "Hot Municipal Contest" 31
from abolition of the poll tax to the creation of "cooperative institutions such as will tend to
supercede the wage system."46 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." Several black men figured prominently as members and
organizers of the group, including Lee Minor, a barber, and Tom Briar, a blacksmith who had
been active in Republican politics for two decades. Minor began organizing a network of CWA
clubs among black farm laborers in the southern 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 quickly squashed the rural clubs. The
violence did not reach the city but nonetheless seems to have chilled the public activities of the
CWA. Lee 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 150.47
Just as the CWA seemed to disappear from public attention in the summer of 1887,
however, Greenville found itself consumed by the campaign for the coming municipal elections.
Former mayor Samuel Townes, who had declined to run for re-election in 1885 after four terms,
announced plans to challenge his successor, E. F. S. Rowley. A third candidate, William T.
Shumate, was a long-time prohibitionist and ran on a platform of "decency in elections and
reform in the city administration." Both Townes and Rowley had support among the city’s
46
On Hover and the CWA, see Bruce E. Baker, "The 'Hoover Scare' in South Carolina, 1887: An
Attempt to Organize Black Farm Labor" Labor History 40 (August 1999): 261-82, and idem, "
'The First Anarchist That Ever Came To Atlanta' : Hiram F. Hover from New York to the New
South” in Chris Green, Rachel Rubin, and James Smethurst, eds., Radicalism in the South Since
Reconstruction (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2006), 39-56. On the Knights in the South
more generally, see Melton A. McLaurin, The Knights of Labor in the South (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1978); Gerteis, Class and the Color Line; Hild, Greenbackers, Knights of
Labor, and Populists.
47
Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, March 16, 1887; Charleston News and Courier, July 6,
1887.
West - "Hot Municipal Contest" 32
African Americans, and interest in the campaign ran extremely high. When the city’s voter
registration books closed in mid-August, black voters accounted for over 44 percent of the
electorate, approaching the highest levels during Reconstruction. "Meetings of negroes" were
reportedly "held nightly for weeks" before the election, but the substance of those gatherings
went unreported by white editors and other observers. Instead, consistent with reporting of the
1883 and 1885 elections, they 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 in the streets and around the polls on election day, when more
than 85 percent of the registered electorate turned out to vote. Both Townes and Rowley were
alleged to have "corralled" black voters and marched them to the polls. Townes edged Rowley
by a margin of 16 votes out of almost 1,300 cast; Shumate received less than 10 percent of the
vote. After his victory was declared official, Townes's "colored friends" staged a midnight
procession with torches through much of the city; during the course of the parade, Lee Minor, the
CWA organizer and a "big Townes man," shot a black supporter of the opposing candidate in the
face.48
The 1887 election--with its high black turnout and disorderly conduct--brought a sharp
backlash from many of Greenville's white residents and left them determined to prevent its
recurrence. The solutions they foresaw addressed the two factors that had been intertwined in
city politics since 1881--the issue of prohibition and the organization of the Democratic party.
William Shumate, the third-place finisher in the 1887 mayoral race, accused his opponents of
48
Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, August 17 and September 14, 1887 (registration;
"hallowing"); Charleston News and Courier, September 13, 15, and 17, 1887 (Shumate's
platform, "altogether without issues," "nightly meetings"; turnout; Minor).
West - "Hot Municipal Contest" 33
using whiskey to buy votes; editor John C. Bailey blamed the "corruption and demoralization" of
the campaign on "the presence in our midst of the bar-room." If complaints of the link between
saloons and electioneering were not a surprise from two long-time prohibitionists, they did point
to an essential truth about the role of saloons in male sociability and political life. Saloons were
places where men--potential voters--regularly congregated, and had long been sites of political
gatherings; the prohibitionist campaigns of the 1880s had politicized those spaces even further
and drawn barkeepers more deeply into politics. By 1887, the difficulty for prohibitionists like
Shumate and Bailey was that Greenville's voters had rejected their efforts to close the city's
barrooms three times over the past six years. To find new supporters in their battle, they looked
to a new source --the countryside. The state legislature had authorized county-wide (as opposed
to municipal-only) no-license referenda for a number of other counties in the mid-1880s.
Legislators had failed to act on similar requests from Greenville County in 1885 and 1886, in
part because the city council in Greenville--the only place where barrooms remained legal in the
county--had weighed in strongly against the incursion on its authority and the loss of revenue
that would result.49
But just three months after the municipal elections of 1887, the General Assembly
authorized a referendum throughout Greenville County, and one quickly followed in March
1888. Two developments favored prohibitionists' 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 farmers to look askance at railroads, town
merchants, and other manifestations of an urban-centered commercial order--an order in which
49
Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, December 9 and 23, 1885, December 8 and 15, 1886
(earlier bills for county-wide referendum), and September 14, 1887 (Bailey on 1887 election);
City Council Minutes, December 7, 1886.
West - "Hot Municipal Contest" 34
the barroom, to some, appeared as just another means to steal farmers' dimes and dollars. The
Farmers Alliance began to organize widely in Greenville County in 1888; among its early leaders
were planters Milton L. Donaldson and James L. McCullough, both of whom had been active on
behalf of the Templars for more than a half dozen years. In the March referendum,
prohibitionists overwhelmingly carried the vote outside the city of Greenville, by a margin of
901 to 199. But turnout was low, and the rural vote was more than overbalanced by the results
from the city of Greenville, where prohibition was defeated 1,017 to 161. The scope of the wets’
victory in the city suggested that many who had formerly voted against license were prepared to
vote for it when the city's autonomy was at stake, and the question of prohibition had become
subsumed in a larger political conflict between city and countryside.50
If the attack on the barroom fell short, another proposal for change in the wake of the
1887 election met with more success. Even before that year's campaign was over, white
Greenville residents had begun to grumble that a "return to Democratic organization" was
desperately needed, and that "the city will never redeem itself from the rule of negroes until it is
secured." That sentiment remained strong in the spring of 1889, when the city's Democratic club
voted to resume the system of party nominations for municipal office that it had abandoned after
the 1881 elections. With the return to party nominations came entreaties to Greenville's
Democrats about the importance of holding the party line. "Independentism in a city election
should be repudiated as sternly and strongly as in a County or State election," warned John C.
Bailey, who declared the party "strong enough ... without seeking alliances with its opponents."
Greenville's black leaders worked with disgruntled Democrats to organize an opposition ticket
for the 1889 municipal elections, but with little success. Many of the candidates on the
50
Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, March 21, 1888.
West - "Hot Municipal Contest" 35
"Citizens" ticket were Democrats who had been nominated without their approval; when the
ticket was made public at the last moment, all but one of the men refused nomination. The
Democratic ticket won easily, by a margin of about two to one. For the first time since the early
1880s, black voter registration declined, down more than 10 percent from its peak two years
before.51
Although the 1889 election represented a setback for African Americans in Greenville,
after the ups and downs of the 1870s and 1880s they had little reason to view the result as a
permanent blow to their political influence. A public meeting held in early 1890 yielded a wideranging address that gave some idea of their priorities and concerns. The meeting came on the
heels of a number of notable events, including the lynching of nine black men in two separate
incidents in Barnwell County, and the introduction of a bill in the United States Senate, by South
Carolina's M. C. Butler, for the federally financed colonization of African Americans outside the
country. After speeches by "various leading citizens of the race," a committee of ten men was
appointed to write and publish an address. Only one of those men, Tom Briar, was a longtime
Republican leader; on the whole, the signers--including two ministers, two teachers, several
artisans, and at least one black laborer--represented a younger group of leaders but one still
committed to many of the principles and policies that had guided an earlier generation. The
address mixed a celebration of African Americans' accomplishments--the spread of
landownership; the activities of the Colored Farmers Alliance; the growth in schools and
churches--with demands for "equality before the law" and the full "rights of free citizens." The
signers criticized disparities in school funding, and as step towards "equal justice before the law"
proposed the appointment of black policemen for the city and of black trial justices for rural
51
Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, March 20, July 24, and September 11, 1889.
West - "Hot Municipal Contest" 36
areas.52
The address was "peaceable but firm" in its demands, and critical but optimistic in tone.
That optimism, however, would soon be sorely tested. By the end of the year, Ben Tillman had
won election as governor at the head of a white "Farmers Movement," and made the defense of
white supremacy one of the hallmarks of his two terms in office. Tillman's legacy as governor is
a familiar one--his strident defense of lynching, his promotion of segregation, and his oversight
of the 1895 constitutional convention that wrote disfranchisement into the state's fundamental
law. Less well known, perhaps, is how the 1895 constitution's disfranchising provisions applied
not only to state and federal but also to municipal elections, and thus closed an arena where black
voters had remained active and influential during the 1880s. Prior to 1895, the registration
procedures for municipal elections were wholly separate from those for state elections. Any man
twenty-one and older who had been resident in Greenville for at least sixty days was qualified to
vote in city elections; suffrage did not depend on payment of taxes, nor were voters in municipal
elections required to register for state elections. The 1895 constitution added both requirements
and extended the literacy and property tests that disfranchised black men in state elections to the
municipal sphere as well.53
Tillman's governorship reoriented municipal politics in Greenville in a second
fundamental way as well, by putting an end to the decade-long struggle over the saloon. Tillman
himself was no prohibitionist and recognized that his white rural supporters were divided on the
question. As an alternative and a compromise, Tillman in 1892 pushed for the creation of a
52
Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, January 22, 1890.
Section 12, Article 2, 1895 Constitution; on earlier voting provisions, see the sources in
footnote 9; on Tillman, see Francis Butler Simkins, Pitchfork Ben Tillman, South Carolinian
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1944), and Stephen David Kantrowitz, Ben
Tillman & the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2000).
53
West - "Hot Municipal Contest" 37
statewide Dispensary system that outlawed the sale of liquor by the drink and created a network
of state-run liquor stores--or dispensaries--that were permitted to sell alcohol only in sealed
packages. The advantage of the Dispensary, Tillman argued, was that it outlawed the
"enticements and seductions" of the saloon without committing the state to the "impossible" task
of enforcing an absolute ban on the sale of liquor. Greenville's eighteen saloons closed their
doors permanently on June 30, 1893, and a single dispensary opened there the next day. The
Dispensary would itself be the object of ferocious battles in coming years. City officials bitterly
resented the loss of in bar license fees, while prohibitionists saw it as making the state complicit
in a sinful trade. Nonetheless, it altered the terms and locus of the debate by banning the saloon
and by taking the issue out of the purview of municipal government. Ben Tillman had, in effect,
eliminated both the saloon and black suffrage from South Carolina. In doing so he eliminated
the two factors that had done so much to shape municipal politics in Greenville for most of the
1880s and brought an era to an end.54
54
On the Dispensary, see John Evans Eubanks, Ben Tillman's Baby: The Dispensary System of
South Carolina, 1892-1915 (Augusta, GA: n.p., 1950), and West, "From Yeoman to Redneck,"
chap. 9.