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“A Hot Municipal Contest”: Prohibition and Black Politics in Greenville, South Carolina, after Reconstruction1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 October 2012

Stephen A. West
Stephen A. West*
Affiliation:
Catholic University of America
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

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 Americans’ municipal power, which Southern Democrats were careful to target in their disfranchising campaigns as the century drew to close.

Type
Essays
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 11 , Issue 4 , October 2012 , pp. 519 - 551
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2012

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Footnotes

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.

References

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), 424Google Scholar.

3 Szymanski, Ann-Marie E., Pathways to Prohibition: Radicals, Moderates, and Social Movement Outcomes (Durham, NC, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Moore, John Hammond, “The Negro and Prohibition in Atlanta, 1885–1887,” South Atlantic Quarterly 69 (Winter 1970): 38–57Google Scholar; Harold Paul Thompson, “Race, Temperance, and Prohibition in the Postbellum South: Black Atlanta, 1865–1890” (PhD diss., Emory University, 2005); Ivy, James D., No Saloon in the Valley: The Southern Strategy of Texas Prohibitionists in the 1880s (Waco, TX, 2003)Google Scholar. On the number of referenda in South Carolina, see Charleston News and Courier, Dec. 8, 1883; on Du Bois, see Du Bois, W. E. B., “An Open Letter to the Southern People” in Against Racism: Unpublished Essays, Papers, Addresses, 1887–1961, ed. Aptheker, Herbert (Amherst, MA, 1985), 1–4Google Scholar.

4 On temperance and prohibition in the South, see, in addition to the works cited above, Fahey, David M., Temperance And Racism: John Bull, Johnny Reb, and the Good Templars (Lexington, KY, 1996)Google Scholar; Greenwood, Janette Thomas, Bittersweet Legacy: The Black and White “Better Classes” in Charlotte, 1850–1910 (Chapel Hill, 1994)Google Scholar; Coker, Joe L., Liquor in the Land of the Lost Cause: Southern White Evangelicals and the Prohibition Movement (Lexington, KY, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the unsettled state of southern politics during the 1880s, see Hahn, Steven, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850–1890 (New York, 1983)Google Scholar; Edwards, Laura F., Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction (Urbana, 1997)Google Scholar; Dailey, Jane E., Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia (Chapel Hill, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gerteis, Joseph, Class and the Color Line: Interracial Class Coalition in the Knights of Labor and the Populist Movement (Durham, NC, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hild, Matthew, Greenbackers, Knights of Labor, and Populists: Farmer-Labor Insurgency in the Late-Nineteenth-Century South (Athens, GA, 2007)Google Scholar. 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, Rosenzweig, Roy, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (New York, 1983)Google Scholar; and Schneirov, Richard, Labor and Urban Politics: Class Conflict and the Origins of Modern Liberalism in Chicago, 1864–97 (Urbana, 1998)Google Scholar.

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6 Exemplary works of these different approaches include: Jenkins, Wilbert L., Seizing the New Day: African Americans in Post-Civil War Charleston (Bloomington, IN, 1998)Google Scholar; Brown, Leslie, Upbuilding Black Durham: Gender, Class, and Black Community Development in the Jim Crow South (Chapel Hill, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Arnesen, Eric, Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class, and Politics, 1863–1923 (New York, 1991)Google Scholar; Letwin, Daniel, The Challenge of Interracial Unionism: Alabama Coal Miners, 1878–1921 (Chapel Hill, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brown, Elsa Barkley, “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom,” Public Culture 7 (Fall 1994): 107–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar; 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. Gordon, Ann D. (Amherst, MA, 1997), 66–99Google Scholar; Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill, 1996)Google Scholar; Hahn, Steven, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA, 2003)Google Scholar.

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.

8 De Forest, John William, A Union Officer in the Reconstruction, ed. Croushore, James H. and Potter, David Morris (New Haven, 1948), xxixGoogle Scholar; Huff, Archie Vernon Jr., Greenville: The History of the City and County in the South Carolina Piedmont (Columbia, SC, 1995), 112–44Google Scholar.

9 West, Stephen A., From Yeoman to Redneck in the South Carolina Upcountry, 1850–1915 (Charlottesville, VA, 2008), 110–16Google Scholar; Historical and Descriptive Review of the State of South Carolina (Charleston, 1884) 3: 49–120Google Scholar; Ford, Lacy K., “Rednecks and Merchants: Economic Development and Social Tensions in the South Carolina Upcountry, 1865–1900,” Journal of American History 71 (Sept. 1984): 294–318CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Huff, Greenville, 162. Figures on occupation and residential patterns compiled from the 1880 federal manuscript census.

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 Holt, Thomas C., Black Over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina during Reconstruction (Urbana, 1977)Google Scholar; Saville, Julie, The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina 1860–1870 (New York, 1994)Google Scholar; Rubin, Hyman, South Carolina Scalawags (Columbia, SC, 2006)Google Scholar.

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; Browning, William D. Jr., Firefighting in Greenville, 1840–1990 (Greenville, SC, 1991), 4–35Google Scholar. On volunteer fire companies in nineteenth-century America, see Greenberg, Amy S., Cause for Alarm: The Volunteer Fire Department in the Nineteenth-Century City (Princeton, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Despite historians’ recent interest in the significance of voluntary associations and other 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.

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.

19 David, Charles A., Greenville of Old, ed. Case, Suzanne J. and Marchant, Sylvia Lanford (Greenville, SC, 1998), 7–10Google Scholar. 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; Duis, Perry R., The Saloon: Public Drinking in Chicago and Boston, 1880–1920 (Urbana, 1983)Google Scholar; Powers, Madelon, Faces along the Bar: Lore and Order in the Workingman's Saloon, 1870–1920 (Chicago, 1998)Google Scholar.

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), 86Google Scholar; City Directory of Greenville, 1883–84 (Atlanta, 1883), 193Google Scholar; Greenville City Directory, Spring 1888 (Greenville, SC, 1888), 75Google Scholar; “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.

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; Caldwell, A. B., ed., History of the American Negro: South Carolina Edition (Atlanta, 1919), 729–34Google Scholar.

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; Bordin, Ruth, Woman and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873–1900 (Philadelphia, 1981), 76Google Scholar; Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, May 18, 1881; Greenwood, Bittersweet Legacy, 80–99.

29 Greenville Daily News, Apr. 2, 6, May 10, 11, June 12, and July 2, 1881.

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.

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.

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 Ayers, Edward L., The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction (New York, 1992), 180–81Google Scholar; 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.

36 Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, Nov. 12, 19, 26, and Dec. 3, 1884.

37 West, “From Yeoman to Redneck,” ch. 8; Doyle, Don H., Nashville in the New South, 1880–1930 (Knoxville, TN, 1985), 134Google Scholar; 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.

39 Henderson, William D., Gilded Age City: Politics, Life and Labor in Petersburg, Virginia, 1874–1889 (Lanham, MD, 1980), 113Google Scholar; McLaurin, Melton A., The Knights of Labor in the South (Westport, CT, 1978), ch. 5Google Scholar; Jackson, Joy J., New Orleans in the Gilded Age: Politics and Urban Progress, 1880–1896 (Baton Rouge, 1969), 96Google Scholar; Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, Oct. 24, 1883, Oct. 21, 1885, Oct. 26, 1887, Oct. 23, 1889, and Oct. 21, 1891.

40 Kousser, J. Morgan, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880–1910 (New Haven, 1974), 84–92Google Scholar.

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; Anderson, Marion T., “Some Highlights in the History of Education in Greenville County,” Proceedings and Papers of the Greenville County Historical Society 5 (1971–75): 12–33Google Scholar.

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 Baker, Bruce E., “The ‘Hoover Scare’ in South Carolina, 1887: An Attempt to Organize Black Farm Labor,” Labor History 40 (Aug. 1999): 261–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; 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. Green, Chris, Rubin, Rachel, and Smethurst, James (New York, 2006), 39–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar. 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.

46 Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, Sept. 14, 21, 1887; Charleston News and Courier, Sept. 13, 15, 17, 1887.

47 Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, Mar. 7, 21, 1888; Baptist Courier, May 19, 1881; Huff, Greenville, 222–26; Kantrowitz, Stephen, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (Chapel Hill, 2000), ch. 5Google Scholar.

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; Harris, Carl V., Political Power in Birmingham, 1871–1921 (Knoxville, TN, 1977), 58–66Google Scholar; 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.

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.

52 Greenville Mountaineer, Sept. 11, 14, 1895; Columbia State, Sept. 7, 1895; Charleston News and Courier, Sept. 11, 1895.

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; Hoffman, Steven J., Race, Class, and Power in the Building of Richmond, 1870–1920 (Jefferson, NC, 2004), 127Google Scholar; Walter McClusky Hurns, “Post-Reconstruction Municipal Politics in Jackson, Mississippi” (PhD diss., Kansas State University, 1989), 129–30; Cecelski, David S. and Tyson, Timothy B., eds., Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy (Chapel Hill, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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, 22Google Scholar; Browning, Firefighting in Greenville, 30–34; Greenville Daily News, Oct. 4, 20, 1905; Huff, Greenville, 264–66.

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; Lau, Peter F., Democracy Rising: South Carolina and the Fight for Black Equality since 1865 (Lexington, KY, 2006), 96–105Google Scholar.