“A Hot Municipal Contest”: Prohibition and Black Politics in

“A Hot MunicipalContest”: Prohibition and

Black Politics inGreenville, South Carolina,

after Reconstruction1

Stephen A. West, Catholic University of America

During the late nineteenth century, contests over prohibition gripped hun-dreds of American towns and cities, nowhere with greater consequencesthan in the post-Reconstruction South. This article examines those effectsin Greenville, South Carolina, a small marketing and manufacturing centerin the white-majority upcountry. During the 1880s, prohibition split whiteDemocrats who had “redeemed” Greenville’s town government just a fewyears before and led to a surge in voter registration and participationamong African Americans. The liquor question’s repercussions for politicsin the Gilded Age South have been largely neglected, both by social histor-ians of prohibition and by political historians, who have failed to see it asone of the issues that roiled the region’s politics between Reconstructionand the Populist rebellion. This article also emphasizes the overlookedimportance of municipal elections and governance—even in so small aplace as Greenville—as an arena for African Americans’ political activity.Greenville’s black voters used their influence during the 1880s to achievemodest but tangible gains in education and municipal services and toerect at least a partial bulwark against the tide of white supremacy.These developments were part of a region-wide revival in African

1An earlier version of this article was presented at the Wiles Colloquium on“Rethinking Reconstruction: Race, Labor and Politics after the American CivilWar,” Queens University, Belfast, UK, in October 2008. For their suggestions andassistance, 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; RuthAnn Butler; Penelope Forrester; and Allen Stokes, Henry Fulmer, and BethBilderback of the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina.

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

The fall of 1883 found a “decided boom” for prohibition at work inGreenville, South Carolina, an upcountry marketing and manufac-turing town of about 7,000 inhabitants. In early November, residentssuccessfully petitioned municipal authorities to hold a referendumon whether to continue licensing the town’s eighteen barrooms.For the next month, prohibitionists organized ward committeesand held rallies around town, culminating in a series of four meet-ings in the five nights before the election. African Americans, whomade up about 45 percent of the town’s population, played an inte-gral role on both sides of the contest. Two black men served on theprohibitionists’ six-member executive committee, and three of thetown’s black churches opened their doors for “no-license” rallies.On election day, black children marched through the streets singinghymns, while their mothers and sisters served lunch to prohibitionsupporters. Black men turned out in large numbers to vote both forand against the referendum, although, according to one observer, “agreater proportion . . . supported the License side.” When the finaltally showed a narrow margin of eighty votes in favor of grantingliquor licenses, “a mixed crowd of ill-behaved whites and blacks”took to the streets to celebrate, setting off fireworks and paradingpast the houses of leading prohibitionists in “the most riotous man-ner.” The campaign had failed in its immediate object, but in theprocess achieved something else: Half a dozen years after the endof Reconstruction, it had put African Americans back at the centerof town politics.2

The contest in Greenville was part of a wave of prohibitionist agita-tion that roiled politics in the South and around the nation duringthe 1880s. Eighteen states held referenda on the issue during thatdecade, including North Carolina in 1881 and Tennessee andTexas in 1887. Because the authority to license barrooms generallylay with local authorities, prohibitionists focused much of theireffort on municipal governments. In 1883, Greenville was one ofalmost twenty towns and cities to hold no-license elections inSouth Carolina alone. Between 1881 and 1888, the liquor questiondominated four different elections and referenda in Greenville. As

2Greenville 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 ofthe Population of the United States . . . 1880 (Washington, 1883), 424.

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an upcountry town that boomed with the growth of railroads andlater of industry, Greenville had much in common with Charlotte,Atlanta, and larger New South cities that likewise experiencedsharp fights over liquor. In those places and elsewhere, prohibitioncut across party and racial lines, finding supporters and opponentsamong Republicans as well as Democrats, and among black aswell as white southerners. As a student at Fisk University, anineteen-year-old W. E. B. Du Bois “labored in the cause” ofTennessee’s failed prohibition referendum in 1887 and saw howwhite politicians “who hitherto had seldom deigned to ask [forAfrican Americans’] votes . . . were suddenly so very anxious fortheir suffrages.” For Du Bois, the prohibition campaign served asyet another reminder of the unsettled state of southern politics.“The South will not always be solid,” he noted, “and in every divisionthe Negro will hold the balance of power.”3

The article that follows has two goals: first, to examine how the con-test over prohibition in one locale fit into the broader context ofpost-Reconstruction southern politics; and second, to emphasizethe importance of municipal elections and governance as a fieldfor African Americans’ political activity between Reconstructionand disfranchisement. In both respects, the findings here reassessaspects of earlier scholarship. A number of historians have exploredhow the temperance movement in the late nineteenth-century Southmobilized ideas about religion, gender, and respectability and howthe rise of Jim Crow complicated but, at least for a time, did not pre-vent cooperation across the color line. Although recognizing theimportance of electoral politics for prohibition, however, these his-torians have been less attentive to the converse: that is, how, bymaking demands on state and local governments, the foes of liquortook part in and affected the already turbulent political currents ofthe era. Historians of southern politics, for their part, have examineda variety of groups that challenged white Democrats’ powerbetween Reconstruction and the Populist rebellion—Greenbackers,

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

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Readjusters, and the Knights of Labor, to name some of the moststudied—but have seldom accorded prohibitionists a spot on thatlist or looked closely at cities and towns as a site for such conflicts.4

This focus on municipal elections and governance also departs frommuch recent scholarship on African American politics afterReconstruction. As part of his work on urban race relations morethan thirty years ago, Howard Rabinowitz devoted close attentionto black southerners’ participation in municipal politics. With afew notable exceptions, historians over the past generation haveleft behind not only Rabinowitz’s questions about the timing andorigins of segregation, but also his emphasis on the importance ofthe municipal arena for black southerners.5 Although local studiesof individual southern towns and cities abound, they often focuson the social history of the black community and de-emphasize elec-toral politics. Labor historians have examined issues of importanceto white and black workers in southern cities, but they too havenot paid great attention to the more general course of municipalpolitics. Some of the most innovative recent work has come from

4On temperance and prohibition in the South, see, in addition to the works citedabove, David M. Fahey, Temperance And Racism: John Bull, Johnny Reb, and theGood Templars (Lexington, KY, 1996); Janette Thomas Greenwood, BittersweetLegacy: The Black and White “Better Classes” in Charlotte, 1850–1910 (Chapel Hill,1994); Joe L. Coker, Liquor in the Land of the Lost Cause: Southern White Evangelicalsand the Prohibition Movement (Lexington, KY, 2007). On the unsettled state ofsouthern politics during the 1880s, see Steven Hahn, The Roots of SouthernPopulism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850–1890 (New York, 1983); Laura F. Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion: ThePolitical Culture of Reconstruction (Urbana, 1997); Jane E. Dailey, Before Jim Crow:The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia (Chapel Hill, 2000); Joseph Gerteis,Class and the Color Line: Interracial Class Coalition in the Knights of Labor and thePopulist Movement (Durham, NC, 2007); Matthew Hild, Greenbackers, Knights ofLabor, and Populists: Farmer-Labor Insurgency in the Late-Nineteenth-Century South(Athens, GA, 2007). This inattention to municipal politics generally—and to localbattles over prohibition specifically—stands in sharp contrast to many works onthe Gilded Age North; see, for example, Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for WhatWe Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (New York, 1983);and Richard Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics: Class Conflict and the Origins ofModern Liberalism in Chicago, 1864–97 (Urbana, 1998).5Howard N. Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865–1890 (New York,1978); and Rabinowitz, Race, Ethnicity, and Urbanization: Selected Essays (Columbia,MO, 1994). The importance of municipal politics during Reconstruction has receivedmore attention of late; see Jacqueline Jones, Saving Savannah: The City and the CivilWar (New York, 2008); Kate Masur, An Example for All the Land: Emancipation andthe Struggle Over Equality in Washington, D.C (Chapel Hill, 2010); and esp. MichaelW. Fitzgerald, Urban Emancipation: Popular Politics in Reconstruction Mobile, 1860–1890 (Baton Rouge, LA, 2002).


historians seeking explicitly to broaden the definition of the politi-cal, looking beyond the ballot box to other sites—including volun-tary organizations, kinship networks, and the streets—wherepolitics were practiced, and by a broader range of political actors,including women. Steven Hahn, in his acclaimed Nation UnderOur Feet, has done the best job of integrating this broader conceptionof politics with the study of African Americans’ involvement in par-ties and elections. Even Hahn, however, regards black southerners’real political accomplishments as coming outside the electoralsphere and devotes much of his attention elsewhere. Moreover,his focus on the rural South leaves urban dwellers out of the storyaltogether.6

Greenville might seem an unlikely place to begin a reappraisal ofblack southerners’ participation in urban politics. However, smallas it was, the town stood in the broad middle of what passed forthe urban South during the late nineteenth century. Its 1890 popu-lation of 8,600 made it the third largest incorporated place inSouth Carolina, and it lay very close to the median among southerntowns and cities that met the Census Bureau’s definition of urban atthe time.7 Although no single place was representative of the whole,recovering black political activism in one locale suggests the rangeof places where municipal politics mattered. And in Greenville,

6Exemplary works of these different approaches include: Wilbert L. Jenkins, Seizingthe New Day: African Americans in Post-Civil War Charleston (Bloomington, IN, 1998);Leslie Brown, Upbuilding Black Durham: Gender, Class, and Black CommunityDevelopment in the Jim Crow South (Chapel Hill, 2008); Eric Arnesen, WaterfrontWorkers of New Orleans: Race, Class, and Politics, 1863–1923 (New York, 1991);Daniel Letwin, The Challenge of Interracial Unionism: Alabama Coal Miners, 1878–1921 (Chapel Hill, 1998); Elsa Barkley Brown, “Negotiating and Transforming thePublic Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery toFreedom,” Public Culture 7 (Fall 1994): 107–46; and Brown, “To Catch the Visionof Freedom: Reconstructing Southern Black Women’s Political History, 1865–1880” in African American Women and the Vote, 1837–1965, ed. Ann D. Gordon(Amherst, MA, 1997), 66–99; Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow:Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (ChapelHill, 1996); Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in theRural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA, 2003).7In 1890, the U.S. Census Bureau counted as “urban” those towns and cities withpopulations of 4,000 or more. The eleven states of the former Confederacy had103 such places that year; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Compendium of the EleventhCensus: 1890, Part 1, Population (Washington, 1892), lxxi, 442–52, 736–37.Although designated a city by its 1869 charter, Greenville was much closer in sizeto what contemporaries and certainly modern Americans would consider a town.This article uses both terms, generally referring to Greenville as a city in discussingits municipal government and as a town in most other contexts.


matter they certainly did. When prohibition burst on the sceneduring the early 1880s, it reversed a steady decline in AfricanAmericans’ electoral strength that had followed Reconstruction.Black voter registration and participation rebounded as wets anddrys vied for support, and African Americans used their influenceto win a greater share of government services and resources.Measured by the full scope of black southerners’ aspirations, thesewere small accomplishments, of a sort that historians have largelyneglected in search of more dramatic or heroic displays of politicalagency. Black residents, nonetheless, eagerly seized the opportunityfor local influence and, for a time, achieved gains that made a tan-gible and daily difference in their lives. The ultimate significanceof even that modest power became clear only with its loss. The revi-val of black municipal power in Greenville was part of a region-wide trend that Southern Democrats were careful to target in theirstepped-up assault on black voting rights. South Carolina’s 1895constitution not only imposed new disfranchising measures but—for the first time—extended them to municipal elections. With thenear total elimination of African Americans from the electorate,the town’s white Democrats reversed the gains black voters hadachieved during the 1880s and codified a rigid system of JimCrow laws that would remain in place for decades.

A Freedmen’s Bureau officer described Greenville as he found it in1866: “It boasted an old and new courthouse, four churches and sev-eral chapels, a university (not the largest in the world), a female col-lege (also not unparalleled), two or three blocks of stores, one of thebest country hotels then in the South, [and] quite a number of com-fortable private residences.” The place was not greatly changed—atleast in its physical aspects—from what it had been before the CivilWar, when it served as a marketing center and seat of local govern-ment in South Carolina’s northwestern corner. In the surroundingdistrict, about 70 percent of families owned no slaves in 1860.Some plantations could be found south of town, but the area toits north quickly give way to the foothills of the Blue RidgeMountains, where small farms predominated and cotton wasrare.8 Although the area was spared the direct ravages of combatduring the Civil War, Confederate defeat and the destruction ofslavery triggered a thorough transformation of social and economic

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


life. Like other parts of the upcountry South, Greenville County wasdrawn rapidly into the cotton economy after 1865, and within justfifteen years, cotton production had climbed to six times its antebel-lum level. The town of Greenville flourished with the cotton trade,especially after the completion during the 1870s of the Air-LineRailway, part of a rail corridor stretching from Georgia to Virginiaand points beyond. The commercial profits of Greeenville’s mer-chants helped finance the building of the Camperdown andHuguenot textile mills, which by the mid-1880s employed about400 hands, most of them white women and children. TheGreenville Coach Factory employed another fifty workers, and ahandful of smaller concerns—an iron foundry, a lumber mill, acottonseed mill, and a machine works—each counted ten totwenty-five wage earners during the early 1880s. On the whole,nonetheless, Greenville remained more a commercial than an indus-trial town as its population rose from 2,800 in 1870 to 6,200 in 1880.9

Greenville’s black residents performed much of the paid labor in itsstores, workshops, and homes. Domestic service was the chief occu-pation among wage-earning black women, whereas men reported awider range of occupations. The 1880 federal census listed 30 per-cent of black men aged eighteen and older simply as “laborers”;when servants, restaurant and hotel workers, and other unskilledlaborers are added, that figure increases to more than 60 percent.About 20 percent of black men worked in skilled trades. A fewblacksmiths, shoemakers, and others operated their own shops orbusinesses, but most worked as wage earners for white employers.Atop black society stood a handful of ministers, teachers, and store-owners. The wealthiest of their number was Wilson Cooke, a formerslave artisan who operated a general store and tannery and ownedproperty worth $5,000 in 1870. Although, as in other southern citiesand towns, no rigid pattern of residential segregation was in evi-dence during the 1870s and 1880s, Greenville had several areas ofconcentrated black settlement, including a neighborhood calledBucknertown on its northern edge and the black-majority sixthward to the south.10

9Stephen A. West, From Yeoman to Redneck in the South Carolina Upcountry, 1850–1915(Charlottesville, VA, 2008), 110–16; Historical and Descriptive Review of the State ofSouth Carolina (Charleston, 1884) 3: 49–120; Lacy K. Ford, “Rednecks andMerchants: Economic Development and Social Tensions in the South CarolinaUpcountry, 1865–1900,” Journal of American History 71 (Sept. 1984): 294–318.10Huff, Greenville, 162. Figures on occupation and residential patterns compiled fromthe 1880 federal manuscript census.


Black men’s enfranchisement transformed politics as thoroughlyand quickly in Greenville as it did throughout the South. TheUnion League appeared locally as early as July 1867, and the

Figure 1. This Sanborn fire insurance map shows central Greenville during theearly 1890s. Bisecting the town, the Reedy River provided water power for twotextile mills, a coach factory, and several small shops. The town’s saloons—asmany as eighteen during the 1880s—clustered in its two main retail districts:one along Main Street, north of the central courthouse square, and the secondacross the river, in West Greenville. Source: Detail of 1893 Sanborn FireCompany map, courtesy of the South Caroliniana Library, University ofSouth Carolina.


Republican Party followed shortly thereafter. From the beginning,Republicans in this white-majority county won support from mostblack men but from only a small fraction—perhaps 20 percent atmost—of white voters. That coalition was enough to triumph inelections for delegates to the state constitutional convention inOctober 1867 and for state offices in April 1868. However, those suc-cesses would prove difficult to sustain once Democrats began orga-nizing in earnest and turned to intimidation and violence throughthe Ku Klux Klan and other means. “Conservatives” swept electionsfor county and federal offices in the summer and fall of 1868 andretained control of the county thereafter. Despite their losses, thecounty’s Republican leaders continued into the 1870s to nominatecounty and legislative tickets that received 40 percent or more ofthe vote. Although African Americans sometimes chafed at whiteRepublicans’ disproportionate receipt of state and federal patron-age, they remained active as Republican voters and organizers.Wilson Cooke, the only African American from Greenville to winelection to the constitutional convention in 1867 and to the state

Figures 2–3. Wilson Cooke (left) sat in the state constitutional convention of1868 and in the state legislature from 1868–70 and remained a prominentRepublican afterwards. C. C. Scott (right) served as principal of the segregatedAllen School and as head of the African American state lodge of theIndependent Order of Good Templars in 1884–86. Sources: Detail of “RadicalMembers of the First Legislature after the War, South Carolina,” courtesy ofthe Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsca-30572 (Cooke); Caldwell, History ofthe American Negro (Scott).


legislature in 1868, continued to chair the county Republican Partyafter being defeated for re-election in 1870.11

African Americans wielded political power longer and more suc-cessfully in the city of Greenville, where they constituted over 40percent of the registered electorate. Under its 1869 charter, themunicipal 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 ofthe city at large, a system that curtailed the strength of the black-majority sixth ward. City elections were open to all men twenty-oneand older who had lived in South Carolina for at least a year and inthe town for at least sixty days prior to the election.12 The patternthat would prevail into the early 1870s emerged in November1868, in the first municipal election after black men’s enfranchise-ment. That election was carried by a slate of candidates nominatedby the Neptune fire company. Formed in 1867 by black volunteers,the Neptunes served the combination of civic and social functionscharacteristic of nineteenth-century fire clubs. The Neptune com-pany provided sick benefits and burial insurance, paraded oncivic occasions, and offered a space for members to congregate,socialize, and politick. Although the company included some ofthe town’s leading black Republicans, the tickets it nominatedduring the late 1860s and early 1870s were not explicitly identifiedas Republican. Indeed, only a few times did the Neptunes nominateactive Republicans (including Wilson Cooke, who lost a race foralderman in 1870). Instead, the Neptune or “Firemen’s” ticketswere typically composed of white men not strongly associatedwith either party. Through the early 1870s, Firemen’s nomineesusually won the mayor’s race and at least half of the council seats.13

11Huff, Greenville, 161–68; Greenville Enterprise, June 26, Oct. 23, 1872; ColumbiaDaily Phoenix, Nov. 5, 1874. On Republican politics in South Carolina duringReconstruction, see Thomas C. Holt, Black Over White: Negro Political Leadership inSouth Carolina during Reconstruction (Urbana, 1977); Julie Saville, The Work ofReconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina 1860–1870 (New York,1994); Hyman Rubin, South Carolina Scalawags (Columbia, SC, 2006).1214 Statutes at Large (1868–69): 242–45; 15 Statutes at Large (1874–75): 896–97.13Greenville Southern Enterprise, Nov. 4, 11, 1868; Greenville Mountaineer, Aug. 10,Sept. 14, 1870; Greenville Enterprise, July 20, Aug. 10, Sept. 14, 1870, Aug. 16, 23,Sept, 6, 13, 1871, and Aug. 28, Sept. 11, 1872; William D. Browning Jr., Firefightingin Greenville, 1840–1990 (Greenville, SC, 1991), 4–35. On volunteer fire companiesin nineteenth-century America, see Amy S. Greenberg, Cause for Alarm: TheVolunteer Fire Department in the Nineteenth-Century City (Princeton, 1998). Despitehistorians’ recent interest in the significance of voluntary associations and other


A number of issues dominated city politics during the late 1860s andearly 1870s. The 1870 Firemen’s ticket bore the label “Hog Out” toexpress their opposition to a city ordinance that operated as anurban equivalent of the fence law, requiring hogs to be penned uprather than allowed to roam freely. The ordinance was repealed inOctober 1870 but the issue remained controversial, and in 1872the Neptunes petitioned the council in protest after the old ordi-nance was temporarily restored. Another issue was the building ofa bridge across the Reedy River. Two of Greenville’s six wards,home to half of its black population, lay southwest of the river,but they had no direct link other than a footbridge to the town’smain commercial district until the building of a substantial bridgefor horse and vehicle traffic in 1871. During the early 1870s, a citycouncil dominated by Firemen’s nominees also began the practiceof appointing black policemen—usually, one or two men on aforce of three to six officers. A black Republican also regularlyserved on the three-member board that supervised city elections.14

Greenville’s Democratic leaders chafed at the success of theFiremen’s tickets but struggled to find an effective response.Insisting that municipal elections represented “no political contest,”they eschewed party labels and organized “Citizens” and“People’s” tickets, sometimes trumpeting the participation of afew black men at their public meetings.15 Those efforts, however,bore only limited success. A “conservative or ‘Low Tax’” slate car-ried the 1873 election, but voters returned a “split municipal ticket”to office the following year. By 1875, Greenville’s Democrats wereready to drop their claims to non-partisanship and elect a party-lineticket. They organized ward meetings to select nominees andexhorted “every Conservative and Democrat in our city [to] sustainthis ticket.” The Democratic slate triumphed over a bipartisan ticketadvertised in the city’s Republican newspaper. The new Democraticcouncil discharged the police force’s one black officer and appointed

civic institutions among African Americans, fire companies have received little scru-tiny to date.14Huff, Greenville, 193–94; Greenville Enterprise, Aug. 16, 1871; City CouncilMinutes, Oct. 6, 1870, Sept. 11, 1871, and May 7, Sept. 11, 1872 (hereafter cited asCouncil Minutes). The minutes are available on microfilm at the South CarolinaDepartment of Archives and History, Columbia, SC. I have generally followed thetranscripts produced by Penelope Forrester, which are available at the GreenvilleCounty Public Library, Greenville, SC.15Greenville Southern Enterprise, Nov. 11, 1868; Greenville Enterprise, Sept. 14, 1870,Aug. 23, 1871, and Aug. 28, 1872.


an all-white board of election managers; it also reinstituted an ordi-nance that required the fencing of livestock.16

Democrats’ takeover of the state government after the 1876 electionleft Greenville Republicans with even bleaker prospects. With nomore access to state patronage, leading white Republicans left thearea or drifted into third-party politics by the early 1880s.Prominent black Republicans abandoned neither the area nor theparty; but black voting in county and state elections fell sharply,and after 1880 county Republicans ceased making party nomina-tions. In municipal elections as well, Democrats faced less opposi-tion and rolled up larger margins of victory after 1876. The onlyopposition to the Democrats’ municipal candidates in 1879 camefrom a “Workingmen’s ticket” organized with little apparent sup-port from Greenville’s black Republicans. Many of the nomineesdeclined to run, and Democrats easily carried the election as voterturnout fell to its lowest level since black men’s enfranchisement.Greenville’s redemption, like that of the state as a whole, seemedcomplete.17

But counterrevolutions, too, can sometimes go backwards, and itwas the liquor question that set municipal politics spinning in theearly 1880s. Temperance advocates led a successful drive formunicipal prohibition during the 1850s. The movement fell mori-bund during the Civil War, and city officials in search of revenuereturned to the issuing of liquor licenses during the late 1860s. By1876, Greenville drew about a quarter of its revenue from the annuallicense fees paid by twelve barrooms.18 Those saloons served a num-ber of different clienteles and purposes. Hotel barrooms catered toguests and other patrons. The Mansion House, located on the court-house square, was the town’s finest hotel and had a barroom tomatch, with the “first cut-glass chandelier that was ever broughtto Greenville.” Most saloons were less ornate affairs and cateredto farmers and town working men. For them, the saloon functionedas a commercialized leisure space where a homosocial culture of

16Carolina Spartan, Sept. 25, 1873; Columbia Daily Phoenix, Sept. 16, 1874; GreenvilleEnterprise and Mountaineer, July 28, Aug. 4, 11, 1875; Council Minutes, Aug. 16, 20,1875, Nov. 10, 1876, and Jan. 8, Aug. 14, 1877.17Huff, Greenville, 169–71; Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, Aug. 6, 13, 1879.18Stephen A. West, “From Yeoman to Redneck in Upstate South Carolina, 1850–1915” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1998), chs. 3, 8; Charles Emerson’sGreenville Directory, 1876–77 (Greenville, SC, 1876), 114; Council Minutes, Oct. 6,1874; Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, Aug. 22, 1877.


treating, gambling, and occasional fighting prevailed. Along thecommercial blocks north of the courthouse, and across the river inWest Greenville, barrooms were interspersed among the cotton bro-kerages, hardware stores, and other places where farmers came totrade. The saloons of West Greenville also provided a convenientresort for men from the nearby Camperdown mills.19

Some degree of racial segregation prevailed among Greenville’s bar-rooms, but it was far from absolute during the 1870s and 1880s.White men operated most saloons, but at least two were underthe control of black proprietors. Zion Collins—a free person ofcolor before the Civil War and a substantial property owner andoccasional Republican organizer afterwards—received a tavernlicense as early as 1870 and operated a bar in West Greenvillewell into the 1880s.20 Richmond Williams, also an activeRepublican during the 1870s, ran a saloon with his brother Henryon Washington Street, a few doors off Main Street. Black menwere the chief and perhaps only patrons of those barrooms; awhite resident described the Williamses’ barroom as “an intolerablenuisance” that attracted a “boisterous crowd of negroes.”21 Somewhite saloonkeepers, such as John Freel, served both white andblack customers; others regarded their barrooms as places forwhite men only. When a black man entered N. B. Freeman’s saloonin 1881 and asked for a drink, the barkeeper demanded twenty cents—twice the usual price—“he being a colored individual, and thatbeing a white bar.”22

19Charles A. David, Greenville of Old, ed. Suzanne J. Case and Sylvia LanfordMarchant (Greenville, SC, 1998), 7–10. For examples of mill workers patronizingGreenville’s saloons, see Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, Jan. 5, 1881, andGreenville Daily News, Nov. 19, Dec. 2, 1881. On the Gilded Age saloon generally,see Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will; Perry R. Duis, The Saloon: PublicDrinking in Chicago and Boston, 1880–1920 (Urbana, 1983); Madelon Powers, Facesalong the Bar: Lore and Order in the Workingman’s Saloon, 1870–1920 (Chicago, 1998).201860 federal manuscript census, Greenville District, SC, 417B; 1870 federal manu-script census, Greenville County, SC, 641B; Council Minutes, Oct. 4, 1870; CharlesEmerson and Co.’s Spartanburg and Greenville Directories, 1880–81 (Atlanta, 1880),86; City Directory of Greenville, 1883–84 (Atlanta, 1883), 193; Greenville CityDirectory, Spring 1888 (Greenville, SC, 1888), 75; “Important real estate owned bycolored people,” no date, Elias B. Holloway Papers, South Caroliniana Library,University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC (hereafter cited as SCL).21Spartanburg and Greenville Directories, 1880–81, 86; Greenville Daily News, Aug. 21,1881.22Greenville Daily News, July 13, 1880, and Apr. 5, 19, 1881; Greenville Enterprise andMountaineer, Nov. 18, 1885.


The temperance movement in Greenville, dormant through the late1860s, began to stir as the number of saloons rose dramatically withthe town’s commercial growth during the 1870s. Organizationally,the movement’s chief vehicle was the Independent Order of GoodTemplars. Founded in New York in the early 1850s, the groupspread widely in the South after the Civil War. The Grand Lodgeof South Carolina was organized in 1872, and a lodge of whiteTemplars appeared in Greenville a year later. By 1876, black resi-dents had formed a separate lodge. Both the black and white lodgesoperated as fraternal organizations for their members and alsoengaged the public at large. Greenville’s white Templars helpedorganize lodges in the county’s smaller towns and rural areas and

Figure 4. 1888 advertisements for two Greenville saloons, showing the varietyof attractions available. Source: Greenville City Directory, Spring 1888.


held joint meetings with the county Grange. For their part,Greenville’s black Templars organized a “Temperance Picnic” inthe spring of 1876 and paraded along Main Street, complete with“music, banners and appropriate regalia.”23

Who joined the Templars? The white and black lodges were open toboth sexes and to members as young as fifteen. Greenville’s whitelodge drew its membership chiefly from a middling stratum of thecommercial classes. Among forty-five white Templars activebetween 1873 to 1880, roughly three-quarters were men. About 40percent of identified male members were clerks and salesmen, andanother 20 percent were merchants; artisans, lawyers, teachers,and a minister accounted for most of the rest. Of the eleven ident-ified female members, three were wives of male members, and afourth was a widow; the seven unmarried women included twodressmakers and two teachers.24 The region’s black Templars, bycomparison, were drawn much more heavily from the ranks of arti-sans and unskilled laborers. Among twenty officers of the Templarslodges in Greenville and nearby Spartanburg in 1879–80, five werewomen, including the teen-aged daughter of a huckster and her sis-ter—a teacher—as well as the wives of two black laborers. Malemembers included three laborers, a shoemaker, a harnessmaker,two carpenters, a hotel waiter, and a domestic servant, as well asa minister, a grocer, and a teacher. In membership, at least, theTemplars were hardly the sole preserve of what some historianshave called the black “better classes,” that is, of ministers, teachers,and others distinguished by their education, occupation, andwealth.25 Such members did, however, play a disproportionaterole as organizers and public speakers. Greenville’s most prominentblack Templar was Cornelius C. Scott, who served as head of thestate lodge from 1884 to 1886. Born a free person of color nearCharleston, he graduated from South Carolina College in 1877and served as principal of Greenville’s one black public school.26

23Greenville 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, 39–40.24The 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 Directory1876–77, 125; Spartanburg and Greenville Directories, 1880–81, 92, 98. Identification ofmembers from city directories and the 1870 and 1880 manuscript federal censuses.25Greenwood, Bittersweet Legacy; Thompson, “Race, Temperance, and Prohibition.”26On Scott, see Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, Feb. 4, 1880, May 28, 1884,May 13, 1885, and Aug. 28, 1889; A. B. Caldwell, ed., History of the AmericanNegro: South Carolina Edition (Atlanta, 1919), 729–34.


Like Scott, many white and black Templars were active members ofthe upcountry’s Baptist and Methodist denominations. For evange-licals of both races, the fight against liquor was part of a wider com-mitment to righteous personal conduct and social reform. In otherways, however, white and black Templars drew on distinct sets ofideas. White Templars relied heavily on a sentimentalized domesticideal, casting the saloon as a threat to the home that enticed menaway from the moral oversight of wives and mothers and under-mined their role as providers and loving fathers and husbands.Those claims complemented more practical arguments that moneyand time spent in the saloon were better devoted to self-advancement through savings and hard work. Although blackTemplars sometimes made such arguments as well, they laid a hea-vier emphasis on temperance as a collective means of racialadvancement. Thus, when Scott addressed an Emancipation Daycelebration in 1880, his hour-long speech ranged from a discussion

Figure 5. Greenville’s Main Street, looking north from the courthouse square, inthe early 1890s. The Mansion House, on the left, was Greenville’s finest hoteland home to an ornate saloon. Across the street, the building marked“Restaurant” housed a more modest barroom. At various times, another sixto eight saloons dotted the blocks to the north and the immediate side streets.Source: Courtesy of the Greenville County Historical Society.


of civil rights and emigration to exhortations about the importanceof “being sober, industrious, and economical.”27

Although Templars had been active in Greenville since the mid-1870s,the liquor question became a serious political issue only after 1880. Anumber of factors—many of them part of broader developments inthe state and region—pushed it to the fore. An 1880 state law bannedthe sale of liquor outside incorporated towns and cities, putting thefocus squarely on municipal officials as the last obstacles to total pro-hibition. In early 1881, Frances Willard, head of the Woman’sChristian Temperance Union, embarked on a fourteen-week, fifty-citytour through every state of the former Confederacy. Willard packedGreenville’s white Methodist church for two meetings in Marchand met privately with a group of women who later founded thetown’s first WCTU chapter. Its all-white membership, althoughsmall, included the wives and daughters of a number of the town’sbusiness and political elite. Simultaneously, prohibitionists madetheir influence felt elsewhere as well. In South Carolina, prohibitionisttickets triumphed in Laurens, Lancaster, and a number of otherupcountry towns. Across the state line, prohibitionists narrowlygained control of the Charlotte city council in the spring of 1881,and voters throughout North Carolina went to the polls for a prohibi-tion referendum that August.28

In cities and states throughout the country, prohibition often upsetexisting party alignments. In the Northeast and Midwest, much ofits support came from Republicans; in the South, Democrats wereits main backers. However, in neither region was either party unitedon the issue—a fact that created opportunities for the minorityparty. Thus, in 1881, North Carolina’s Republican Party resolvedto lead opposition to the statewide prohibition referendum there,hoping to build support toward state elections the following year.When prohibitionists in Greenville talked of running a dry ticketfor the city council in 1881, they incited an editorial panic fromA. B. Williams, editor of the Greenville Daily News. Williamsopposed prohibition, largely for fiscal reasons. He had no kind

27Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, Jan. 7, 21, 1880. On differences betweenwhite and black temperance workers, see also Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow, 45–52.2817 Statutes at Large (1880) 459–61; WCTU Records, 1880–1939, typescript volume,SCL; Greenville Daily News, Mar. 31, Apr. 1, 1881; Ruth Bordin, Woman andTemperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873–1900 (Philadelphia, 1981), 76;Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, May 18, 1881; Greenwood, BittersweetLegacy, 80–99.


words for the saloon but argued that the loss of barroom license feeswould require a sharp rise in property taxes. His chief worry, how-ever, was that the liquor question threatened the “preservation ofthe Democratic party in State, county and city.” Prohibition woulddivide white Democrats and produce an “unholy alliance of liquordealers, Radicals, and negroes”; the final result would be “woe,ruin, and general destruction and desolation that must follow theloss of the Democratic organization.” Williams’s language was over-wrought, but the context for his fears was real enough. Prohibitionwas being pressed simultaneously in other parts of the South, and atboth state and municipal levels. Although its consequences for par-tisan alignments remained unclear, it coincided with other chal-lenges to white Democrats, including the threat of WilliamMahone’s Readjuster Party in Virginia—a connection thatWilliams, a native Virginian, was quick to draw.29

Greenville’s white prohibitionists took those concerns to heart. Inearly June, “the friends of temperance” met to discuss the upcomingmunicipal election. The sixteen men present included no AfricanAmericans and only two white Templars; many were part of thetown’s political and economic elite. The meeting convened at theoffice of the town’s leading commission merchant, J. C. Smith,and included the president of the Camperdown Mills and theco-owner and superintendent of the Greenville Coach Factory.Four of the men were past or current aldermen. Initially, thegroup asked that the city hold a referendum on prohibition separatefrom the council election. When the city attorney advised that themunicipal charter granted no authority for such a referendum,white prohibitionists decided to make their stand within theDemocratic Party, running a slate of candidates in the party’sward meetings. The result was a ticket of three wet and three drynominees for aldermen; the renomination of the incumbent mayor,a wet, gave the ticket an anti-prohibition majority. Democrats inthe fourth ward, home to many workers from the CamperdownMills, voted against prohibition by a margin of two to one, andthe meetings there and elsewhere generated levels of excitementthat worried some Democrats. James T. Williams, a hardware mer-chant and future mayor (and no relation to the Daily News editor),was a dry but “not as crazy on the subject as some.” When hisname was proposed as a candidate for alderman, he declined torun, confiding to his wife, “I do not care to make any enemies.”Williams—who had ridden as a paramilitary “Red Shirt” in 1876

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


and served as a Democratic poll watcher—did not think the issuebelonged in the ward meetings at all. “I think it was very wrongto have anything to say about ‘Wet or Dry’ for it was a democraticnomination & politics had nothing to do with it nor did ‘Wet & Dry’have anything to do with it.”30

If white Democrats were split on the issue, so too were blackRepublicans. Even before the Democrats’ ward meetings,twenty-eight African Americans published a notice in a local news-paper, promising “that no Republican ticket shall be run . . . pro-vided a ticket of men who will pledge themselves to stop liquorselling, be put in the field.” The signers included former state legis-lator Wilson Cooke, teacher and leading Templar C. C. Scott, andFrank A. Williamson, a harnessmaker and long-time Republicanwho had run for the state legislature in 1872. Fourteen of the signerswere artisans or skilled wageworkers, and five were draymen orwagon drivers. At least eight owned real property. As with thewhite “friends of temperance” who met at J. C. Smith’s office, theliquor question attracted the attention of more politically prominentand economically established men now that it threatened to infringeon partisan politics.31

Other black leaders, however, not only took a different view of prohi-bition but also saw a political opportunity in the split amongDemocrats. Shortly before election day, reports began to circulatethat “a meeting of colored voters was held . . . at one of the [fire]engine houses” to nominate several challengers to the Democraticticket. The organizers were not named, but they likely includedBenjamin F. Donaldson, a hotel worker, Republican activist, and pre-sident of the Palmetto fire company, Greenville’s second company ofblack volunteers. Donaldson later addressed a similar meeting heldabove the saloon of black barkeeper Richmond Williams. Workingquietly in conjunction with a group of wet Democrats, they decidedto nominate white men to oppose two of the dry Democratic nomi-nees. The move caught Democrats by surprise, and the pro-licensechallengers won by comfortable margins. Editor A. B. Williamsreported that black men “solidly” voted the opposition ticket, but byhis own calculations at least 30 percent of white voters did so as well.32

30Greenville 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.31Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, July 6, 1881.32Greenville Daily News, Aug. 7, 9, 17, 1881.


The “hot municipal contest” of 1881 shattered the Democratic Party’sshort-lived dominance of city government and reoriented the courseof politics in Greenville for the rest of the decade. The day after theelection, A. B. Williams declared that the result was not a victory of“Wet or Dry” but “of Bolters—Independents—Deserters—the nameis immaterial—combined with Radical negroes over the organizedDemocratic party.” The success of the opposition ticket producedacrimony and recriminations among Greenville’s Democrats. Onemember of the party’s executive committee resigned in anger overthe bolt. Other Democrats wanted to expel from the party thosewho had voted for the independent nominees. Fearing that the riftin town elections might provide a cause and a precedent for splitsat the county and state levels, party leaders decided the safer coursewas to stop making nominations for municipal offices altogether. Afew months later, the South Carolina legislature authorized townsand cities across the state to hold the kind of municipal no-licensereferenda proposed in Greenville in 1881, providing a “safetyvalve” for “disseminating prohibition views without bringing thequestion into State politics.”33

The first such election in Greenville came in December 1883 andentailed a degree of cooperation among black and white prohibi-tionists that was notable for both its extent and its limits. White pro-hibitionists reached across the color line in ways they had beenreluctant to do while the issue was entangled with partisan politics.Two African Americans—Templar C. C. Scott and barber ThomasMims—joined four white men on the prohibitionists’ executive com-mittee. An election-eve rally at the courthouse featured addresses bytwo black and two white ministers. African Americans, nonetheless,remained distinctly junior partners in the effort. When they wereinvited to appear before audiences that included white men andwomen, they spoke less as moral authorities—with standing toinstruct their white listeners—than as emissaries from the blackcommunity, present to assure white prohibitionists of their support.Thus, at the prohibitionists’ first mass meeting, C. C. Scott spoke “inbehalf of the colored people [and] heartily endorsed the resolutions”proposed by a white speaker. If those mass meetings included bothwhite and black members, the more frequent gatherings atGreenville’s churches occurred before racially segregated audiences—and while white prohibitionists spoke at black churches, the

33Pickens 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; 17Statutes at Large (1881–82): 893–95.


reverse does not appear to have been true. This pattern continued onelection day, when black and white Sunday school children paradedseparately down Main Street, and the WCTU and “colored temper-ance women” hosted separate lunches.34

The opposition to prohibition came from a cross section of whiteand black residents. Editor A. B. Williams reprised his earlier argu-ments, apparently aimed at property owners and businessmen,about the loss of license fees and rents paid by saloons.Greenville’s saloonkeepers prepared quietly for the referendumthrough the Liquor Dealers Association. To circumvent the mayor’sorder closing their barrooms at six p.m. the night before the election,they rented halls and—in a counterpoint to the temperancewomen’s hot lunches—provided free food and drink to their sup-porters. On election day, several white bar owners were present tomonitor the voting. Also active around the polls was BenjaminF. Donaldson, the Republican activist who had helped engineerthe successful challenge to prohibitionist city council nominees in1881. Sentiment among white and black workingmen appeared torun strongly against prohibition. One prohibitionist claimed that“the main part of the better class of whites supported theNo-License ticket,” suggesting what he thought of those whovoted otherwise. Such condescension was consistent with the stig-matizing of the saloon and its denizens in prohibitionist rhetoric,and on election day, working-class voters repaid the prohibitionists’self-conscious propriety with their own assertive rowdiness. Shortlyafter the polls opened at six a.m., two large columns of men— manyof them African American and reportedly “boisterous and rude,seeming to be intoxicated”—marched to the polls to vote the licenseticket. The day ended with another rowdy procession to celebrateprohibition’s defeat. White and black men paraded together pastthe white Good Templars’ lodge and the houses of white andblack prohibitionists, draping fences and doors in black crepe andmaking a mock display of “burial performances.”35

Greenville’s prohibitionists petitioned for another referendum in1884 and with much the same outcome: a defeat for prohibition,

34Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, Nov. 14, Dec. 5, 1883; Charleston News andCourier, Dec. 2, 1883. On cooperation between white and black prohibitionists moregenerally, see Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction(New York, 1992), 180–81; Greenwood, Bittersweet Legacy, ch. 3; Gilmore, Gender andJim Crow, ch. 2; and Thompson, “Race, Temperance, and Prohibition.”35Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, Dec. 5, 1883; Charleston News and Courier,Dec. 4, 1883.


by a slightly wider margin. After three elections in four years, thetown remained stubbornly wet.36 Similar battles played out acrossthe New South, especially in rapidly growing towns and cities.Spartanburg and Anderson, the next largest towns in the SouthCarolina upcountry, each experienced at least four elections overprohibition from 1881 to 1886. Outside South Carolina, battlesover the issue raged from Richmond and Charlotte to Jackson andWaco. More often than not, those contests ended in defeat for pro-hibition; in some cases, a place that voted the barroom out oneyear might reverse course at the next election. Atlanta, for example,adopted prohibition in an 1885 referendum only to abandon it twoyears later. However, everywhere those elections occurred andwhatever the result, they engaged African Americans and worriedwhite Democrats. During Tennessee’s statewide referendum in1887, an opponent of prohibition declared that the movement threa-tened “to super annuate the Democratic party.”37

In Greenville as elsewhere, African Americans made the most of thesplit among white Democrats. Their political influence had wanedsince Democrats’ redemption of the city government in 1875, butthat changed as black voters and leaders found themselves activelycourted by both wets and drys during the early 1880s. Fearful ofworsening the split within their ranks, Greenville’s Democratsstuck to their policy of making no nominations for mayor and citycouncil. White politicians—freed from demands for Democraticunity and racial solidarity—formed rival tickets in the general elec-tion and courted black voters with “much ardor.” The percentage ofAfrican Americans among registered municipal voters reboundedfrom a low of 30 percent in 1879 to 44 percent in 1887, and turnoutincreased from just over 70 percent to almost 90 percent over thesame period.38

Events in Greenville were part of a pattern of persistent and, in somecases, resurgent black political power in the urban South during the1880s, a pattern whose scope and significance historians have yet tofully appreciate. The extent of that power and the forms it took var-ied from place to place, typically depending on local issues and

36Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, Nov. 12, 19, 26, and Dec. 3, 1884.37West, “From Yeoman to Redneck,” ch. 8; Don H. Doyle, Nashville in the New South,1880–1930 (Knoxville, TN, 1985), 134; see also footnotes 3–4.38Greenville Daily News, July 8, 15, Aug. 9, 1881; Greenville Enterprise andMountaineer, July 18, Aug. 15, 1883, Sept. 16, 1885, and Aug. 17, 1887; CharlestonNews and Courier, Sept. 15, 1887.


circumstances that brought a split among white residents. InVirginia, the Readjuster movement provided the occasion forblack voters to claim a greater share of influence in towns and citiesacross that state during the early 1880s. Later in the decade, theKnights of Labor organized municipal tickets that drew biracial sup-port around the region, from Richmond to Jacksonville, Florida, andVicksburg, Mississippi. In New Orleans, a city dominated by aDemocratic “ring” since the 1870s, African American voters backeda slate of reform Democrats who carried the municipal election of1888. Closer to Greenville, the nearby town of Spartanburg alsoexperienced a series of sharp contests over prohibition, and in1883 voters there elected a wet ticket that included one white andone black Republican. A black Republican would continue toserve on Spartanburg’s council for the next eight years.39

In all of these places, African Americans’ influence in municipal poli-tics was often tenuous and always contested; it seldom approachedthe levels of Reconstruction and was constrained in various ways.Thus, in Greenville the 1880s brought no return to the Firemen’s tick-ets of a decade before, nor did black men’s influence in municipalpolitics lead to a revival of their strength at higher levels. Even amodest and local resurgence, however, was a remarkable develop-ment in South Carolina, where white Democrats suppressed thekind of challenges at the state level that threatened their counterpartselsewhere in the region. Suffrage in South Carolina had been sharplycircumscribed by the Eight Box Law of 1882, which operated as a defacto literacy test and prevented the use of a single party ballot byrequiring that votes for various county, state, and federal offices bedeposited in different boxes. Because municipal elections were heldseparately, however, they were unaffected by the notorious law,and town and city politics remained a realm where AfricanAmerican voters preserved some degree of influence.40

Limited though it was, that influence brought tangible rewards. Forblack residents of Greenville and other places, the gains typicallycame not on great matters of policy or principle, but rather in

39William D. Henderson, Gilded Age City: Politics, Life and Labor in Petersburg,Virginia, 1874–1889 (Lanham, MD, 1980), 113; Melton A. McLaurin, The Knights ofLabor in the South (Westport, CT, 1978), ch. 5; Joy J. Jackson, New Orleans in theGilded Age: Politics and Urban Progress, 1880–1896 (Baton Rouge, 1969), 96;Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, Oct. 24, 1883, Oct. 21, 1885, Oct. 26, 1887,Oct. 23, 1889, and Oct. 21, 1891.40J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and theEstablishment of the One-Party South, 1880–1910 (New Haven, 1974), 84–92.


securing better treatment in the quotidian but vital services of localgovernment. In New Orleans, the reform mayor who won electionin 1888 appointed African Americans to the police force; inNashville, black city councilman J. C. Napier secured a new firecompany and better schools for African Americans. Gains inGreenville were along similar lines and on matters that generallyfound black residents united, whatever their stance in the contestover prohibition. Dissatisfaction was widespread, for example,with the town’s “colored burial ground,” which had been allowedto languish during the late 1870s, even as the city council acted toenlarge the white Springwood Cemetery. After years of petitionsand protests, the city in 1884 purchased a twelve-acre plot for a“colored cemetery” later known as Richland Cemetery. Black fire-fighters also found the city council newly attentive. For years, theNeptune and Palmetto companies used the cast-off equipment ofGreenville’s white firefighters. The city council promised theNeptunes a new engine shortly before the 1883 municipal election,and it arrived that fall. A year later, the city secured the companya new station, something the Neptunes had likewise sought for

Figure 6. The Neptune volunteer fire company, shown in this 1894 photograph,was a fixture of black social and civic life in Greenville from the late 1860s untilits dissolution in 1905. Source: courtesy of Mrs. Ruth Ann Butler.


years. Also revealing are the choices that Greenville’s white leadersmade for the position of second assistant fire chief—an appointiveoffice reserved for a senior black firefighter charged with authorityover both black companies. For years, the post was held by ThomasLewis, a respected but relatively apolitical figure. In 1884, Lewis wassucceeded by John D. Buckner, who took an active part in the 1885municipal campaign. Later in the decade, the city council bestowedthe position on Thomas Briar, a blacksmith, former chairman of thecounty Republican Party, and president of the Neptune company atthe height of its political influence during Reconstruction. Althoughtown officials did not return to their former practice of hiring blackpolice officers, Briar was employed on at least one occasion as a“secret detective” at a salary of $30 per month.41

Black residents also fought to win their share of improvementsmade to Greenville’s schools during the 1880s. The meager revenueavailable under state law was enough only to fund two racially seg-regated schools for a term of four to five months. Both schools werelocated on the north side of town; the absence of schools in WestGreenville fell heavily on an area whose population wasdisproportionately black. Amidst hopes that the city council mightsupplement the schools’ budget, a meeting of black residents—including both supporters and opponents of prohibition—resolvedbefore the 1885 municipal election to back no candidate “who willnot pledge his support to all the public free schools.”42 The councillater ruled that it had no authority to fund the public schools, andthe state legislature stepped in to expand the powers of the localschool district and authorize a property tax to provide additionalfunding. In the spring of 1886, a black minister was elected to thenewly constituted school board of trustees, which approved anincrease in the school term to nine months and the opening oftwo new schools in West Greenville—one for white and one forblack students. Within two years, the West End Colored School

41Jackson, 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 andMountaineer, Oct. 18, 1876, and Greenville Daily News, Sept. 13, 1920.42Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, Sept. 2, 1885; Charleston News and Courier,Aug. 22, 1887; Marion T. Anderson, “Some Highlights in the History of Education inGreenville County,” Proceedings and Papers of the Greenville County Historical Society 5(1971–75): 12–33.


enrolled more than half the black students in Greenville. From 1887to 1889, average school attendance among black children more thandoubled—about twice the rate of increase for white students.43

Although labor organizations and issues did not figure prominentlyin Greenville politics for most of the 1880s, that threatened to changein 1886–87, amid the southern organizing drive and political suc-cesses of the Knights of Labor. The Knights formed their first assem-bly in Greenville in late 1886, but it played little discernible publicrole. A few months later, however, a former Knights organizernamed Hiram Hover caused a stir when he traveled through thearea on behalf of his own group, modeled on the Knights, calledthe “Cooperative Workers of America” (CWA).44 Hover stayed inGreenville only briefly, but within weeks of his appearance, theCWA claimed fifteen clubs there with as many as 500 members,“most of the members being colored people.” Hover’s most dedi-cated local follower was an African American barber, Lee Minor,who began organizing a network of CWA clubs among blackfarm laborers in the lower part of the county later that spring.Those efforts quickly provoked a violent response from local plan-ters, who organized vigilante bands that seized and interrogatedsuspected CWA members and effectively quashed the rural clubs.The violence did not reach town but nonetheless seems to havechilled the CWA’s public activities. Minor’s last reported publicappearance on the group’s behalf was a speech in Greenville onJuly 4, which attracted an audience of about 150.45

The CWA appeared in Greenville just as residents began to preparefor the 1887 municipal election. Former mayor Samuel Townesannounced his plan to return to politics and challenge his successor,E. F. S. Rowley. A third candidate, William T. Shumate, was a long-time prohibitionist who ran on a platform of “decency in elections

43Council Minutes, Oct. 6, 1885; 19 Statutes at Large (1885): 382–84; GreenvilleEnterprise and Mountaineer, Sept. 21, 1887, and Sept. 11, Oct. 15, 1889; CharlestonNews and Courier, July 8, 1889; “The History of Negro Education in Greenville,”no date, Holloway Papers, SCL.44Bruce E. Baker, “The ‘Hoover Scare’ in South Carolina, 1887: An Attempt toOrganize Black Farm Labor,” Labor History 40 (Aug. 1999): 261–82; and Baker,“‘The First Anarchist That Ever Came To Atlanta’: Hiram F. Hover fromNew York to the New South” in Radicalism in the South Since Reconstruction, ed.Chris Green, Rachel Rubin, and James Smethurst (New York, 2006), 39–55. On theKnights, see McLaurin, Knights of Labor in the South; Gerteis, Class and the ColorLine; Hild, Greenbackers, Knights of Labor, and Populists.45Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, Mar. 16, 1887; Charleston News and Courier,July 3, 6, 1887.


and reform in the city administration.” Both Townes and Rowleyhad strong support among African Americans, and interest in thecampaign ran extremely high. “Meetings of negroes” were report-edly “held nightly for weeks” before the election, but the substanceof those gatherings went unreported by white observers. As in 1883and 1885, reports in the white press instead focused on the “hideous. . . hallowing and noisy demonstrations” that took place in thestreets afterwards and insisted that the election was “altogetherwithout issues.” The rowdiness continued on election day, whenboth Townes and Rowley were alleged to have “corralled” blackvoters and marched them to the polls. When the votes werecounted, Townes edged Rowley by a margin of sixteen votes outof almost 1,300 cast, and Shumate received less than 10 percent ofthe vote. In celebration, the winner’s “colored friends” staged atorchlight parade, during which Lee Minor, “a big Townes man,”shot a Rowley supporter in the face.46

The election of 1887 represented a high water mark for AfricanAmericans’ political influence during the 1880s. If prohibition hadopened new opportunities, the fading of that divisive issue wouldaid white Democrats in reasserting control. Having failed threetimes to oust the barroom in municipal elections, prohibitioniststried a new tack by securing a countywide referendum in March1888. Two developments favored their strength in the countryside.One was the rapid spread of the Good Templars order outside thecity of Greenville during the early 1880s. The second was a growingtide of rural unrest that led many farmers to look askance at rail-roads, merchants, and other manifestations of an urban-centeredcommercial order—including saloons that “infuse[d] deadly poisoninto the life-blood of . . . the yeomanry of the country.” Some of theearly agrarian leaders in Greenville County were ardent prohibition-ists, including Milton L. Donaldson, a “capital temperance lecturer”and future president of the state Farmers’ Alliance. In the March1888 referendum, prohibitionists overwhelmingly carried the voteoutside the county seat, by a margin of 901 to 199. Turnout waslow, however, and the rural vote was more than overmatched byresults in the city, where prohibition was defeated 1,017 to 161.City dwellers who had once voted for prohibition were preparedto vote against it when the city’s autonomy was at stake andwhen the liquor question had become enmeshed in a larger strugglebetween town and country. That larger struggle also fueled the

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


political rise of Benjamin Tillman, who, as governor in the early1890s, pushed for and won legislation that closed barrooms aroundthe state and replaced them with state-run “dispensaries” that soldliquor only in sealed packages.47

With the battle over prohibition largely behind them, and no othermajor controversies over municipal policy to set them at odds,Greenville’s Democrats proved more attentive to calls for party loy-alty. The election of 1887—with its high black turnout, its disorderlyconduct, and its conjunction with the CWA’s fleeting labor radical-ism—heightened concerns that a “return to Democratic organiz-ation” was necessary to “redeem [Greenville] from the rule of thenegroes.” “Independentism in a city election,” one leader warned,“should be repudiated as sternly and strongly as in a County orState election.” Before the 1889 election, the city’s Democraticclubs turned to a device increasingly popular with SouthernDemocrats as a means of imposing party discipline: the primary sys-tem. The county Democratic Party had selected its candidatesthrough primaries since 1878, and the state party would follow inthe 1890s. Anxious Democrats adopted the primary in othersouthern cities and towns as well, including Birmingham in 1888and Nashville in 1893. In Greenville as elsewhere, Democratic pri-maries were effectively, if not explicitly, for whites only; to curtailbolters, Greenville’s primary rules required that losing candidatespledge not to run independently. Meanwhile, county Democraticleaders in the state legislature also secured a revision to the city’scharter, doubling the number of aldermen and thus decreasing thelikelihood that disgruntled office seekers might be tempted tomake an independent bid.48

The results in Greenville were immediate and dramatic. In 1889, theDemocratic nominees triumphed by a margin of almost two to one.Black residents tried to organize a “Citizens” ticket that included anumber of prominent white men, but many had been named with-out their consent, and all but one refused nomination. In a patterntypical after the adoption of the primary system, the general election

47Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, Mar. 7, 21, 1888; Baptist Courier, May 19,1881; Huff, Greenville, 222–26; Stephen Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and theReconstruction of White Supremacy (Chapel Hill, 2000), ch. 5.48Charleston News and Courier, Sept. 13, 1887; Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer,Aug. 21, 1878, and Mar. 20, July 17, 24, 1889; Greenville Mountaineer, July 26, 1893;Carl V. Harris, Political Power in Birmingham, 1871–1921 (Knoxville, TN, 1977), 58–66;Doyle, Nashville in the New South, 141; 20 Statutes at Large (1888): 181–83. On whiteprimaries generally, see Kousser, Shaping of Southern Politics, ch. 3.


saw a drop-off in voter registration and participation—especiallyamong African Americans. From its peak in 1887, black voter regis-tration in Greenville fell 10 percent by 1889 and almost 70 percent by1893. Black political leaders continued their electoral efforts butfound them to be increasingly in vain. In 1891, one newspaperreported “some idle talk” of an independent municipal ticket, butnone emerged. In 1893, African Americans held a meeting at thecourthouse to try “to get Democrats to run on their ticket” butagain failed.49

Two events in the summer of 1895, nonetheless, gave a new jolt ofurgency to black residents’ political organizing. One was the calling,at Ben Tillman’s instigation, of a convention to write broad new dis-franchising measures into the state constitution. Such changes poseda graver challenge to black voting than the white primary. The latterrequired application at each election, and party discipline was neverassured, as events of the 1880s had demonstrated. Constitutionaldisfranchisement threatened to eliminate African Americans fromthe electorate altogether. In the election of convention delegates inAugust, Greenville’s black voters made a strong showing in supportof a ticket of anti-Tillman Democrats who opposed the most draco-nian disfranchising proposals; the ticket, nonetheless, went down todefeat two-to-one countywide.50 The other event to galvanizeAfrican Americans was the first lynching in the town’s history.The victim was a black man named Ira Johnson, who had shotand killed a white man in self-defense. Despite reports that a mobintended to seize Johnson from the county jail, the mayor declinedto call out local militia units and instead ordered the arrest ofarmed black men who took to the streets to guard the jail. Onlywhen Johnson was taken from jail and lynched outside town didthe mayor finally call on the militia—to protect the city from arumored attack by black arsonists. African Americans later packedthe courthouse for a “peace meeting” and “ridiculed the idea of vio-lence on the part of the negroes,” declaring that “if the authoritiesdo their duty the violators of the law can be easily brought tojustice.”51

49Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, Sept. 11, 18, 1889, Aug. 12, 1891; CharlestonNews and Courier, Aug. 19, Sept. 13, 1893; Columbia State, Sept. 8, 1891; GreenvilleMountaineer, Aug. 9, 1893.50Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman, ch. 6; Greenville Mountaineer, Aug. 14, 17, 21, 1895;Columbia State, July 29, 1895.51Greenville Mountaineer, July 13, 20, 1895; Columbia State, July 11, 16, 17, 1895.


When the county grand jury failed to indict the lynchers, black lea-ders began quietly organizing a network of ward clubs in advanceof the coming municipal election. Thomas Briar served as the “pre-siding genius” at a public meeting where some black residents“were very bitter against the present city administration” overJohnson’s lynching and demanded a “fair and impartial enforce-ment of the laws.” The meeting nominated a ticket of whiteDemocrats for mayor and city council. As usual, the nomineeshad not been consulted in advance and were expected to decline,but organizers hoped to demonstrate African Americans’ dissatis-faction with the incumbents and to create an organization thatwould “poll a much larger vote” at the next election in two years.Although the regular Democratic nominees easily won, AfricanAmericans cast about 300 votes for the opposition ticket, equal toa third of the total vote and their largest turnout in a municipal elec-tion since 1889.52

It would prove as well to be their best showing in city politics untilwell past the midpoint of the next century. On the same day thatGreenville held its municipal election in 1895, the state consti-tutional convention met for its opening session in Columbia. Ina sign of the importance of municipal elections, their regulationwas taken out of the hands of the Committee on MunicipalCorporations and turned over to the Committee on Suffrage, chairedby Tillman himself. The new constitution, completed in December,not only contained new disfranchising measures but also extendedthem to the municipal arena. Prior to 1895, requirements for munici-pal elections were separate from those for state elections. Voters inmunicipal elections were not required to register for state elections,nor to have paid taxes. The 1895 constitution added both require-ments and applied literacy and property tests as well. AtGreenville’s next municipal election, only thirty black voters mana-ged to register, down more than 90 percent from two years beforeand equal to a mere 3 percent of the registered electorate. Thosefigures were a striking, but by no means isolated, example of howthe rising tide of disfranchisement undercut black influence inmunicipal politics around the region. The same session of theMississippi legislature that called that state’s disfranchising conven-tion in 1890 also revised Jackson’s municipal charter, imposing taxand lengthy residency requirements for voting and redrawingward boundaries to “give perpetual control . . . to the white people.”

52GreenvilleMountaineer, Sept. 11, 14, 1895; Columbia State, Sept. 7, 1895; CharlestonNews and Courier, Sept. 11, 1895.


In 1898, Richmond elected its first all-white city council in almostthirty years, due largely to a complicated election-procedure lawpassed a few years before; disfranchising measures in the state con-stitution of 1902 would ensure that no African American sat on thecity council again until 1948. In the region’s most brutal assault onblack municipal power, white supremacist Democrats in NorthCarolina staged the so-called Wilmington riot of November 1898,driving from office a biracial “fusionist” city government and killingten or more African Americans in the process.53

The loss of municipal power cost black southerners in numerousways. Greenville’s six school trustees included one AfricanAmerican during the late 1880s, when the board approved the cre-ation of a school for black students in the West End. No AfricanAmerican served on the board after the early 1890s, and the inequal-ities that had long existed between white and black schools onlygrew over time. By the early 1910s, the city’s schools spent almostthree times as much per capita on white as on black students.Developments in the police and fire departments were hardlymore encouraging. The 1895 lynching of Ira Johnson drove homein gruesome fashion the importance of police power and the costof having it in the hands of unsympathetic officials. Tom Briar,Greenville’s most prominent black Republican, lost his position assecond assistant fire chief in 1890, and Greenville’s black fire compa-nies—fixtures of civic and social life for decades—were under threatby 1900. Over the prior decade, the city added several new whitefire companies but no new black ones, and in 1902, Greenvillebegan a gradual switch from a system of volunteer fire companiesto a paid staff of full-time firefighters. The Neptunes survived asGreenville’s last company of black firefighters until early 1905,when the city council voted to decommission the company andreplace it with white firemen. During the early years of the newcentury, the city council also turned its attention to codifying JimCrow. A 1905 ordinance provided for racial segregation in thecity’s streetcars. Seven years later, another ordinance went further

53Journal of the Constitutional Convention . . . (Columbia, SC, 1895), 188–91, 259, 297–99, 313; Section 12, Article 2, 1895 Constitution; Greenville Mountaineer, Sept. 22,1897; Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 323–27; Steven J. Hoffman,Race, Class, and Power in the Building of Richmond, 1870–1920 (Jefferson, NC, 2004),127; Walter McClusky Hurns, “Post-Reconstruction Municipal Politics in Jackson,Mississippi” (PhD diss., Kansas State University, 1989), 129–30; David S. Cecelskiand Timothy B. Tyson, eds., Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898and Its Legacy (Chapel Hill, 1998).


still, mandating the color line in residential neighborhoods as wellas in public accommodations and other businesses.54

If these losses and reversals must be included in any reckoning ofracism’s depth at the nadir, they also serve as a reminder of whatblack southerners had been able to accomplish through the exerciseof municipal power in the years that came before. The example ofGreenville illustrates two larger but neglected stories inpost-Reconstruction politics: one about the power of prohibition,along with other issues and movements, to challenge whiteDemocrats’ hold on power and create opportunities for AfricanAmericans, and a second about the broader importance of black pol-itical strength in towns and cities across the region afterReconstruction. Like their counterparts in larger urban places,Greenville’s black residents were able, for a time, to exploit divisionsamong white southerners and use that power to achieve modest butmeaningful gains. The importance of town and city governments asan arena for these struggles also suggests a connection between thelate nineteenth century and the “long civil rights movement” of thetwentieth century, when local Jim Crow policies would be a promi-nent target of grassroots activists, and when black southernerswould ultimately achieve some of their greatest and most lastingelectoral successes in municipal politics.

In Greenville, a more immediate connection to the struggles of thetwentieth century lay in the person of James A. Briar, son ofRepublican activist Thomas Briar. The son, born in 1870, receiveda teaching certificate in 1885 and served as a teacher and principalin Greenville’s schools for decades. James Briar ventured into elec-toral politics as early as 1895, when he served as secretary to themeeting that nominated a municipal ticket in protest over the IraJohnson lynching. Like his father, James held several minor federalpatronage positions and served as a delegate to the RepublicanNational Convention—the father for the last time in 1912, and theson for the first time in 1916. In the 1930s, James Briar foundedGreenville’s first chartered chapter of the NAACP, and as its presi-dent he led a 1939 voter registration campaign. The drive beganafter the city council blocked a federally funded housing projectand park for Greenville’s black residents. In response, the NAACP

54Unidentified newspaper clipping, Mar. 14, 1935, scrapbook, Holloway Papers,SCL; Forty-Fifth Annual Report of the State Superintendent of Education of the State ofSouth Carolina, 1913 (Columbia, SC, 1914), 17, 22; Browning, Firefighting inGreenville, 30–34; Greenville Daily News, Oct. 4, 20, 1905; Huff, Greenville, 264–66.


organized voter schools and talked of running independent candi-dates for mayor and aldermen. Perhaps 200 African Americansregistered for the municipal election in September, apparently themost since 1895. Police harassment and Klan violence soon quashedthe effort, and Briar himself was forced into hiding and laterarrested. Still, he remained unbowed: “I’ve always been active inpolitics because my father before me was active in politics.”55

55Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer, July 27, 1885; “Education of Negroes of CityNot 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 forResearch in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York, NY; Peter F.Lau, Democracy Rising: South Carolina and the Fight for Black Equality since 1865(Lexington, KY, 2006), 96–105.


Documents

“A Hot Municipal Contest”: Prohibition and Black Politics in