Lewis Smith: A communist "punk" from Iowa

Lewis Smith
Harvard University Yearbook 1939

 

 

 

 

 

Of the seven professors that the governor of South Carolina accused of being communist workers, the most mysterious was Benedict College professor, Lewis Smith. Smith only taught briefly at Benedict, and with nothing more than a common name to go on, I had a hard time tracking down information about him.

The governor only offered the slightest details in his speech accusing Benedict of harboring communists. While the other professors had lengthy records of political activity, the governor dismissed Lewis as "still a punk but given time may develop." The governor claimed that he had been dishonorably discharged from the US Navy as a security risk and had been a member of the Communist Party from 1949 to 1951. For a long time, this was all the information I had to go on.

Just today I stumbled into more information. Smith earned a PhD from the University of Iowa, and the catalogue entry includes both Smith's birth year and his full name: Aleck Lewis Smith. This information made it possible to connect Smith with a number of other records and helped sketch out a remarkable life.

Aleck Lewis Smith was born on August 14, 1916 to Jane Laura and Aleck Smith Sr. Records are conflicting as to whether he was born in Iowa City, Iowa or in White Plains, New York. In any case, his family was living on Long Island by 1930. It's not entirely clear what the father did for work. The 1920 census describes him as a producer for moving pictures, his World War I draft card says he was an advertising manager, and the 1930 census describes him as a credit manager for a dry goods store. 

It appears that Lewis's parents divorced in the early 1920s. In 1923, his father married another woman (Katherine McKeever). Lewis moved to Iowa and first lived with his uncle, Roy Leslie Smith. The father remained in New York City, but his mother moved to Iowa a few years later. She and Lewis lived together in Sioux City where she found work as a public school teacher.

For college, Lewis attended Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa for three years. Before completing his degree, he transferred to Harvard University. He graduated with an English degree from Harvard a year later (in 1939).

The year after he graduated college (on August 12, 1940), Lewis joined the US Navy. Although he joined before America entered the Second World War, the Navy was trying to expand in anticipation of armed conflict. As part of that effort, it created an expedited naval officer training program, the US Navy Reserve Midshipmen's School. Lewis attended the school and then was commissioned as a lieutenant. He spent the duration of the war in the Pacific on surface warships such as the USS Indiana and the USS North Carolina.

While the governor of South Carolina claimed that Lewis was dishonorably discharged from the Navy in 1955, it appears that Lewis had left the Navy before then. By 1948, he had moved back to Iowa. While in the Navy, Lewis had married a woman named Harriet Ruth Cannon. However, the marriage failed, and they were divorced by 1950. Later that year, he was married a second time, this time to a woman named Claire Bradley. However, this marriage failed as well, and they divorced a year later. 

While in Iowa, Lewis began pursuing a PhD in English at the University of Iowa. He also worked at the Gary Division of the University of Indiana as a research assistant in the Home Study Department. He may have also taught at the University of Chicago (he and Claire were married in the city). Lewis graduated in 1953 with a dissertation titled Changing conceptions of God in colonial New England.

After graduating, Lewis was hired as an associate professor by Knoxville College. His employment there is interesting. The college is a small historically Black college in Knoxville, Tennessee. Lewis had never lived in the South before, and it's unclear how much interaction he would have had with African Americans prior to teaching at the college.

Lewis's time at Knoxville was brief but very significant. It was there that he met his third wife, Kiyoko Nagai. Kiyoko was a Japanese woman who had made the remarkable decision to travel overseas to study  at Knoxville College. Kiyoko had a difficult time when she first arrived on campus. She had learned English by working with a tutor from London who taught her proper British English. The tutoring left her wholly unprepared to understand the thickly accented speech of Black students in the south. Lewis was asked to help her by tutoring her, and it was during those tutoring sessions that they fell in love. Unlike Lewis's earlier marriages, this one was a long-lasting success. 

It's unclear what Lewis did immediately after leaving Benedict College. Kiyoko pursued a masters degree from Adelphi University (in New York City) and worked as a researcher at the University of Texas, so Lewis may have found employment there.

Around 1970, Lewis made the adventuresome decision to move to Hiroshima, Japan and work as a teacher. Kiyoko had lived in the city before moving to the United States, and around 1970, she and Lewis traveled there to visit Kiyoko's mother, who was in poor health. Lewis fell in love with the county, so they decided to stay there and teach. He remained there for eighteen years.

Lewis left Japan in the early 1990s to move to Canada. He first lived in Ontario and then in Victoria. He remained in Victoria until his death on March 15, 2012.

Sources

1. Year: 1920; Census Place: Hempstead, Nassau, New York; Roll: T625_1128; Page: 1B; Enumeration District: 39

2. Year: 1930; Census Place: Sioux City, Woodbury, Iowa; Page: 3A; Enumeration District: 0067; FHL microfilm: 2340425

3. National Archives at Washington, DC; Washington, D.C.; Seventeenth Census of the United States, 1950; Year: 1950; Census Place: Sioux City, Woodbury, Iowa; Roll: 2314; Page: 17; Enumeration District: 103-71

4. State Historical Society of Iowa (via Heritage Quest); Microfilm of Iowa State Censuses, 1856, 1885, 1895, 1905, 1915, 1925 as well various special censuses from 1836-1897

5. "New Professors." The Knoxville Journal Sun, Jun 14, 1953 ·Page 20.

6. "Knoxville C. Names 5 New Staff Members." New Pittsburgh Courier

Sat, Jun 20, 1953 ·Page 11

7. New York City Department of Records & Information Services; New York City, New York; New York City Marriage Licenses; Borough: Manhattan; Year: 1941

8. State Historical Society of Iowa (via Heritage Quest); Microfilm of Iowa State Censuses, 1856, 1885, 1895, 1905, 1915, 1925 as well various special censuses from 1836-1897

Juries in Reconstruction-era South Carolina

We have carefully and earnestly investigated the circumstances of the killing of Robert Melton and his wife and the severely wounding of his daughter by a party of armed men on the night of the sixteenth [unreadable] but are sorry to say that our efforts so far have been failures. but hope o'er long the peace officers of the County may be more successful in ferreting out all pertaining to this outrageous and terrible crime. We think it however due to the people of the county to say that our investigations in the matter have only strengthened our convictions that this murder was not caused by political prejudice but rather the effect of a personal malice and revengeful feeling.

This statement was part of a grand jury report, and it marked the end of legal efforts to bring Robert Melton's killers to justice. The report is remarkable. Many in the community completely disagreed with the grant jury's assertion that the killings were an act of "personal malice and revengeful feeling." Melton's neighbors, Henry J. Fox and S. E. Lane, said that crime was the culmination of campaign of Ku Klux Klan harassment. Fox felt so concerned about his safety that he took to sleeping in the woods. Ultimately, he voted with his feet and left the county.

What is going on here? A natural reaction is to dismiss the grand jury report as yet another example of "southern justice." The history of the civil rights movement is filled with examples of all-white juries who refused to convict white men for violent crimes against black men. Yet this phenomenon was a twentieth century phenomenon. The criminal justice system looked very different during the 1870s. In this post, we will take a look at the Chesterfield grand jury and speculate on why they were so ineffective in bringing justice to the Melton family.

the law as it now stands virtually opens the way to ignorance and wholly restricts the power to prevent incompetent persons from becoming jurors. . . . It can only be characterized as a depraved prejudice seeking to uproot the foundations of society, and wishing to break down every barrier of common sense in the administration of justice. Verily, we have fallen upon evil times!

-The Anderson Intelligencer newspaper, April 8, 1869 

The South Carolina criminal justice was completely rebuilt in the first years after the Civil War. As the above quote shows, white conservatives were horrified at the changes that took place. 

As a precondition to restoring civilian government, Congress required the state to revise its constitution and, among other changes, grant Black men the right to sit on juries. The specifics of jury selection were determined by laws passed by South Carolina's pro-Black Republican party. 

Under the 1868 constitution, jury selection functioned differently than how it does today. Jury duty was not regarded as an obligation for all voters. Rather, it was a responsibility for the county's leading citizens. Jury members were chosen at random from a list drawn up by township selectmen (the smallest governing body). The selectmen were instructed to choose people who were "of good moral character" and had "sound judgement," and at most one-tenth of voters could be chosen.

Selectmen were locally elected, so communities exhibited significant control over the jury selection process. Recognizing that former enslavers and ex-Confederate soldiers could not be expected to protect the rights of freedpeople, the state legislature amended the laws governing the jury selection process in March 1869 so that the racial composition of a jury had to match the relative populations of the county. In Chesterfield County, this meant that a jury needed to be approximately one-third Black and two-thirds white. 

The requirement that juries include Black members drew the greatest condemnation from conservatives. Articles in conservative newspaper questioned whether there were enough men of good moral character among the Black population to fill the jury pool. Several of the writers suggested legal strategies for getting around the new law (arguing that it violated civil rights guaranteed by the state constitution, for example).

The Republicans who designed the new jury selection process seemed to have mixed feelings about its success. Several Republican lawyers and judges were asked about the legal system as part of Congress's 1871 investigation into Ku Klux Klan activity. The answers given should be viewed critically: Republicans hoped that the investigation would demonstrate the need for federal intervention, conservatives for the opposite. James Orr, a former conservative governor who was then serving as a circuit judge, told Congress that he found no fault with the "experiment" of racially mixed juries. His expressed opinion might reflect conditions in his circuit, but a more likely explanation is that it was a disingenuous effort at dissuading Congress from intervening in state affairs.

Most of the legal officials who testified said that the court system was unable to curb political violence. They attributed the problem to mixed juries, although not because of any inadequacies of Black jurors. Rather, political tensions were so high that jurors of a given political party would not vote for conviction for political violence against the opposing party. Like Orr, these legal officials were not disinterested parties, but their testimony is supported by the bare fact that not a single person was convicted for Ku Klux Klan violence despite its endemic nature. 

"hearty Republicans, & as individuals & families, kind & friendly to all around us – but Sir, we are in terror from Ku-Klux threats & outrages– there is neither law or justice in our midst."

-letter from Robert Melton's neighbor, Louise Lane, to President Grant

Who made up the grand jury that deliberated on the murders of Robert and Harriet Melton? Consistent with state law, the grand jury was two-thirds white. The white jurors were drawn from the class that had long led the county: affluent smaller farmers. Most of the white jurors were not wealthy enough to have been members of the planter class, but most owned their own land and at least four were from slave-owning families. The exception was James H. Powe who came from one of the wealthiest families in the county. His father was a former state senator who had enslaved over one-hundred people before the Civil War. Powe himself was a graduate of both South Carolina College and the Charleston Medical College, a rare distinction. 

Most of the white jurors were veterans of the Confederate army. The Confederate government used conscription, so military service did not necessary indicate support for the Confederacy, but at least some served with enthusiasm. Powe volunteered as soon as the war broke out, and he even helped finance the war by purchasing uniforms for his unit. Powe was very proud of his military service and was active in Confederate veterans organizations. 

Powe also appears to have had a deep hatred for the Reconstruction government. Certainly, he had reasons to be upset. Not only had the defeat of the Confederacy ruins his family financially, but it had also ruined Powe physically. He had been seriously injured during war, and while serving on the jury, the injury still left him still partially paralyzed. Other white jurors likely also bore deep financial, physical, and psychic wounds from the war. 

Information about the Black jurors is harder to come by. I haven't been able to find any information about two of the jurors (Edward Pegues and Miller Robinson). Two others, Horace Chapman and Ambrose Robertson, appear in the record as farmers, but this isn't notable as it was the profession of the overwhelming majority of residents. None of these people appear in the historical record until after the war, so they were very likely born enslaved.

The best documented juror is Wade Floyd. Floyd appeared to have been active in the local Republican party as he was an election manager in 1870 (the position was a gubernatorial appointment, likely at the recommendation of Chesterfield's state legislators).  Floyd worked as a schoolteacher, initially for the Freedmen's Bureau. This is very significant since it means that he was educated. In particular, he was literate. In contrast, all the other Black jurors as well as some of the white jurors were illiterate, so Floyd was the only Black juror who could read the report that the Grand Jury produced. 

How should we view the Grand Jury report in light of the jury makeup? With men like Powe on the Grand Jury, it was hardly surprising that the Grand Jury failed to bring Robert Melton's killers to justice. Powe almost certainly felt the killings were justified and, viewing the state government as illegitimate, felt no compulsions about lying to protect the killers. He may have even known the killers and had personal knowledge of their plans. 

It is surprising that the Grand Jury report offered such a strong statement about the killing. I would have expected jurors like James H. Powe to have been balanced by the presence of jurors like Wade Floyd with the consequence that any official statement by the Grand Jury would have avoided making a clear statement either way. 

One possibility is that white jurors were able to dominate the Grand Jury proceedings. Certainly, men like Powe would have felt more comfortable in a courtroom, and with his college education, Powe would have been far better equipped to understand the legal system and express himself in writing than the Republican jurors. He and his conservative allies might have been able to wield economic power over the Republican jurors. Several of the jurors, such as Horace Chapman and Ambrose Robertson, farmed on rented or sharecropped land, making them vulnerable to threats of kicking them off the land. 

Another possibility is that everyone on the jury had it out for Robert Melton and his allies. By 1871, anger over political corruption had split the county Republican party into two factions. Robert Melton had been allied with state senator R. J. Donaldson who was strongly opposed by the faction committed to fighting corruption. Jurors like Wade Floyd might have been allied with the Donaldson's opposition, and they could have decided that allying themselves with conservatives and tacitly condoning the murder of Melton was preferable to allowing the corruption of Donaldson's administration to continue unabated. 

Ultimately, we only have the thinest evidence to evaluate the Grand Jury's activities. The Grand Jury's statement that Robert Melton's killing was not politically motivated is absurd and certainly worth a close inspection, but I don't see how to reach any definitive conclusion about why they issued their report. Perhaps the only clear conclusion is that Louise Lane was certainly correct that for her and other Republicans in Chesterfield County they could expect "neither law or justice in our midst."

May 1871 Grand Jury

Black Jurors

1. Wade Floyd (b. 1840)

2. Horace Chapman (b. 1826). illiterate. 

3. Edward Pegues (b. 1850)

4. Ambrose Robertson (b. 1842). illiterate. 

5. Miller Robinson (?)

White Jurors

1. William Jeptha Gaddy (b. 1828). Jury foreman. 

2. Colin Campbell (b. 1830)

3. Jeremiah M. Funderburk (b. 1844)

4. Calvin Massey (b. 1813)

5. James H. Powe (b. 1835)

6. Stephen Purvis (b. 1840)

7. Alexander Anderson Pollack (b. 1832)

8. Nevins Stewart Smith (b. 1827)

9. Thomas Threatt (b. 1809)

10. J. H. Villaneuse (b. 1836)

Sources

1. "Items – Editorial and Otherwise." The Anderson intelligencer. [volume], April 30, 1874, Image 2

2. "The New Jury Law." The Anderson intelligencer. [volume], April 08, 1869, Image 2.

3. "The New Jury Law." The Charleston daily news. [volume], April 10, 1869, Image 2.

4. "The New Jury Law – Its Legal Interpretation." The Anderson intelligencer. [volume], April 15, 1869, Image 2.

Godfrey L. Loudner: An early American Indian mathematician

Godfrey Lambert Loudner (b. September 30, 1942, d. August 2, 2012)

In this blogpost, we will take a look at Godfrey L. Loudner Jr., one of the first American Indians who earned a PhD in mathematics. 

Godfrey was born on September 30, 1942 in Fort Thompson, South Dakota to Claudiana Gladys Prue and Godrey L. Sr. Both parents were American Indians who were raised on reservations, Claudiana on the Rosebud Reservation and Godfrey Sr. on the Crow Creek Reservation. Godrey's family ran their own farm. Claudiana's early life is not as well documented and may have been marked by difficulty. By 1940, she was living in Fort Thompson with the family of her father, Chief of Police Guy W. Lambert. Godrey Sr. himself had left the farm and was working as a truck driver for a dam construction company.

Claudiana and Godrey Sr. married in 1941, the year before Godfrey Jr. was born. Likely seeking the greater opportunities offered by an urban environment, the family moved to Rapid City and Godfrey Sr. found welder. 

Socially, the move was a huge one for the family. Claudiana and Godrey Sr. had been living in rural South Dakota among a predominately American Indian population for most of their lives. In Rapid City, they were the only Indians in their neighborhood.

Godfrey Jr. appears to have flourished in Rapid City. The attended a local school, and after graduating high school in 1961, he was awarded a scholarship to attend South Dakota Tech, Rapid City's main four-year university. He remained at the school to complete a M.S. degree in mathematics. He submitted his thesis, Selberg's Trace Formula, in 1869, and that May he presented the results at a sectional meeting of the Mathematical Association for America.

Its unclear what Godrey did immediately graduation, by within a year or two, he began pursuing a PhD at Notre Dame University. He completed a dissertation on functional analysis,  Trace class operators on Banach spaces, under the supervision of Ronald A. Goldstein. 

After graduating, he returned to South Dakota as faculty at the newly opened Sinte Gleska University. This was a return to Godrey's roots as the university is a tribal college located on the Rosebud Indian Reservation. Godrey stayed at the university for the remainder of his career. He died in 2012 at his home on the Rosebud Reservation.

Sources

1. National Archives at Washington, DC; Washington, D.C.; Seventeenth Census of the United States, 1950; Year: 1950; Census Place: Rapid City, Pennington, South Dakota; Roll: 729; Page: 6; Enumeration District: 52-25

2/ Year: 1940; Census Place: Buffalo, South Dakota; Roll: m-t0627-03850; Page: 5B; Enumeration District: 9-6

3. "Marriages." The Republican [Valentine, South Dakota]. November 14, 1941. p. 1. 

4. "Indians Get 20 Extra Scholarships." Daily Plainsman [Huron, South Dakota]. August 24, 1961. p. 7.

5. "Center of a group: E1909.” The American Mathematical Monthly 75, no. 1 (1968): 80–80. 

6. "Finite Rings and Fields: 5462.” The American Mathematical Monthly 75, no. 2 (1968): 203–4. 

7. “May Meeting of the Rocky Mountain Section.” The American Mathematical Monthly 76, no. 8 (1969): 986–87.

8. “Another way to be Catalan: 10357.” The American Mathematical Monthly 104, no. 2 (1997): 177–78.

9. “On the Number of Ties between Players of Equal Strength: 10355.” The American Mathematical Monthly 104, no. 2 (1997): 175–76.

10.  “More Binomial Coefficients: 10364.” The American Mathematical Monthly 104, no. 2 (1997): 179–179. .

11. “A Sequence of Squares: 10356.” The American Mathematical Monthly 104, no. 2 (1997): 176–77. .

12. “Introducing the Eigenvalue 1: 10362.” The American Mathematical Monthly 104, no. 2 (1997): 178–178.

13. “A Diophantine Polynomial Equation: 10376.” The American Mathematical Monthly 104, no. 3 (1997): 276–77.

14. “A Recurrence with a Harmonic Solution: 10375.” The American Mathematical Monthly 104, no. 3 (1997): 275–76.

Congressman Robert Smalls: War hero and convicted criminal

In this post, I want to take a look at the criminal conviction of South Carolina congressman Robert Smalls. Smalls is a celebrated figure in American history. Born enslaved in South Carolina, he not only freed himself during the Civil War, but also he stole a Confederate gunboat and sailed it to Union lines. After the war, he entered politics and became one of the most successful politicians in the state. Recently, the South Carolina government has recently decided to honor him by installing a statue of him on the statehouse grounds. An awkward issue that I have rarely seen discussed is that Smalls is a convicted criminal! In 1877, Smalls was sentenced three years in the state penitentiary for taking a bribe while a state congressman.

Certainly, nobody wants to condemn such a celebrated war hero, and Smalls's conviction is easy to dismiss. He was convicted only months after South Carolina's Reconstruction government had been overthrown by one dominated by conservative white supremacists. Smalls's prosecution was just one of a number of measures that the new government took to eliminate the power of their hated political opponents. The members of the conservative government are hardly sympathetic figures. They had won the 1876 election through political fraud and violence that resulted in the death of scores of Black men. It takes little imagination to see Smalls's conviction as the groundless outcome of a kangaroo court. However, I want to go beyond imagining and look at the details of the trial. 

The legal process

Most members of the public first learned about the prosecution of Robert Smalls during the first week of October 1877. That week, a sheriff's deputy, acting on a grand jury indictment, arrested Smalls and brought him to the state capital of Columbia. On October 8, the presiding judge held a preliminary investigation which resulted in Smalls being released on bond and ordered to appear before the court at the end of the month for a jury trial.

Smalls's arrest made national news. South Carolina had captured the county's attention for months. The presidential election had been held a year earlier, and the outcome hinged on how disputed votes in South Carolina (and a few other states) were counted. Deliberations dragged out for months, and the dispute threatened to explode in mass violence. At one point, Union soldiers were sent to defend the statehouse against an armed paramilitary group organized by conservative Democrats. The issue was ultimately decided in April 1877. South Carolina's electoral votes were given to the Republican candidate (Hayes), but conservatives won many important state offices including the governorship after the Republican candidate conceded defeat. 

The newly elected conservative government was committed to permenently rolling back all the political changes that had taken place since the Civil War. A major source of anger was the conduct of elected officials. The men who had held office, conservatives alleged, were totally corrupt and had robbed the state blind. The office of attorney general was among those won by conservatives, and the new A.G, James Conner, was presented with a laundry list of former politicians to prosecute. The Post and Courier newspaper published an article advocating that dozens of former politicians (listed by name) should be arrested and punished as criminals.

Smalls was on the Post and Courier's list, and he was an especially attractive target. Not only was Smalls a prominent Republican politician, but he was one of the few Republicans to win in the 1876 election, making him a sitting U.S. Congressman. A criminal conviction would potentially remove him from office and discredit the state Republican party. In contrast, most of the Republicans that conservatives wanted to prosecute were no longer in office (having lost the election), and in many case, they had left the state entirely.

The Facts of the Case

Robert Smalls's trial began on Thursday November 8. The legal facts were straightforward and had largely been established at the preliminary hearing in early October. State prosecutors claimed that Smalls had accepted a bribe of $5000 (a huge sum of money, comparable to one or two years's salary for a state employee) in December 1872. That month, the state legislature was considering a bill that would grant a lucrative printing contract to a company partially owned by the clerk of the senate, Josephus Woodruff. The day after the bill was introduced to the senate (on December 18), prosecutors alleged that Woodruff invited Smalls to his office and offered him money in exchange for his support of the bill. Smalls accepted and voted in favor of the bill on the next day. The bill passed and was ratified into law. 

The day that the bill was ratified was the last day before the senate adjourned for the winter vacation. The senate reconvened on January 7, 1873, and approximately a week later (on January 16), Woodruff allegedly presented Smalls with a check for his services. Smalls deposited the check at a local bank on the 18th, and he withdrew the funds in cash a month later (on February 8).

The prosecution's evidence consisted on testimony from Woodruff himself as well as a bank clerk, L. N. Zealy, as well as physical evidence that the two men provided. Woodruff provided the account of bribing Smalls, and he supported his recollections with the physical check he gave Smalls and written records from his personal memorandum book. The bank clerk testified that the bank transactions had occurred as Woodruff had described them.

Smalls did little to defend himself before the court. His lawyer presented no evidence of his own, and he waived the right to cross-examine witnesses. His closing argument was simply that the evidence presented was insufficient to convict. He did point to some weaknesses with the evidence. For example, Woodruff's memorandum book was written in a specialized short-hand that was decipherable only to him, so the jury had to take him at his word as to what it said. 

The entire trial took four days, and on Sunday morning, the jury returned the verdict of "guilty." The outcome wasn't really in doubt. The evidence was stronger than the evidence offered in the first of the corruption trials, and that trial had resulted with a guilty verdict only two days before Smalls's trial. His own Republican Party appears also to have doubted Smalls's innocence. Smalls' had asked President Hayes to have his case transferred to a (more favorable) federal court, but he declined. 

Smalls was allowed to remain on bond until he was sentenced. He and the two other men who had been convicted of corruption charges were sentenced on November 26. Smalls' sentence was the harshest: three years hard labor in the state penitentiary. (The others were fined and sentenced to shorter terms in county jails.)

The outcome

Despite the sentence, Smalls' legal problems ultimately just petered out. After the conviction, he was allowed to remain on bond while he appealed the conviction. The appeals process continued until the summer of 1879. On April 23, the whole matter became moot as the governor pardoned him. 

Smalls's pardon appears to have had little to do with the law and everything to do with politics. The governor seems to have used Smalls and the other two men convicted on corruption charges as bargaining chips in negotiations over criminal charges against conservatives. In 1872, the federal government had launched a major prosecution effort against the South Carolina Ku Klux Klan, and several of the men convicted were still in a federal penitentiary in 1878. Conservatives feared further legal prosecutions for the violence and fraud they had engaged in during the 1876 election. 

Smalls's pardon appears to have been part of a (possibly tacit) quid pro quo between the governor of  South Carolina and the president. In the summer of 1878, the president pardoned everyone who had been convicted in the South Carolina Ku Klux Klan trials, and the next year, the U.S. attorney for South Carolina non prossed all pending election fraud cases against white conservatives. 

The ultimate consequences for Smalls's appear to have been small. He was never imprisoned for a significant amount of time. His public reputation does appear to have declined, but he was still able to return to U.S. Congress in 1882 (albeit by a very narrow margin). He remained active in elected politics until 1895 when a revision to the state constitution almost entirely removed Black men from political life, but even then he was able to secure important federal appointments. 

Was he guilty?

Was Smalls guilty of the bribery charges? As a matter of law, I'll defer to people trained in the subject. The law professor W. Lewis Burke has argued that one of the other men convicted on corruption charges (Francis L. Cardozo) was innocent. The crux of his argument is a legal one. At the time of trial, the allegations were several years old, and they were being pursued for political reasons. Not just in South Carolina but throughout the country, political corruption was rampant during the 1870s, but the attorney general of South Carolina only prosecuted three people (all influential state Republicans) of the crime. If I understand correctly, Burke's reasoning is that a state prosecutor can't be selective in charging people with crimes. If he turns a blind eye to corruption by conservatives, then he can't prosecute a prominent Republican for the same conduct. Burke's argument applies just as well to Smalls.

What about as a matter of fact? Did Smalls take a bribe? By all accounts, bribery and corruption was pervasive in the South Carolina legislature during the 1870s, so we shouldn't ask for a particularly high burden of proof. (The bank records produced during the Smalls' trial appear to show that twenty-some legislators accepted bribes in spring 1873.) In Smalls's situation, the evidence against him was strong. The main witness, Josephus Woodruff, testified to personally having given Smalls a bribe. Woodruff was not the perfect witness (he admitted under oath to having participated in "great many fraudulent transactions"), but this is not uncommon in corruption cases, and his testimony was consistent with other evidence that was produced. Smalls himself offered no evidence in his defense, and his lawyer simply argued that the prosecution's evidence was not sufficient to convict.

Certainly, Smalls' conviction shouldn't erase his remarkable positive accomplishments, although it does complicate his legacy. The years after the Civil War were a time of tremendous political upheaval, and this created major opportunities for politicians to engage in corruption, an opportunity that far too many took advantage of. Keeping corruption in check was major challenge, and the failure to do so played a major role in the collapse of the Reconstruction government. Smalls should be criticized for be behavior. It is perhaps fitting that South Carolina is creating a statue of Smalls on the statehouse grounds because the other men so honored too left a record marked by both remarkable accomplishments and shocking personal failures.

Sources

1. "In the Meshes of the Law." Yorkville enquirer. [volume], August 09, 1877, Image 2

2. "Arrest of Rob't Smalls" The Beaufort tribune and Port Royal commercial. [volume], October 04, 1877, Image 3

3. "Lessons for Bribe-Takers." The New York herald. [volume], October 09, 1877, Page 4, Image 4

4. "South Carolina News." Yorkville enquirer. [volume], October 11, 1877, Image 2

5. "The Charge of Bribery." The Beaufort tribune and Port Royal commercial. [volume], October 11, 1877, Image 2.

6. "The Downfall of Smalls." The Pickens sentinel. [volume], October 18, 1877, Image 1

7. The Anderson intelligencer. [volume], November 01, 1877, Image 2

8. The Beaufort tribune and Port Royal commercial. [volume], November 08, 1877, Image 3

9. "The Works of Josephus" The Newberry herald. [volume], November 14, 1877, Image 2

10. Green-Mountain freeman. [volume], November 14, 1877, Image 2

11. "Robert Smalls Convicted." The Beaufort tribune and Port Royal commercial. [volume], November 15, 1877, Image 2

12. "South Carolina." The New York herald. [volume], November 27, 1877, Page 7, Image 7

13. Yorkville enquirer. [volume], December 06, 1877, Image 2

14. "Pardon of Cardozo and Smalls." Yorkville enquirer. [volume], May 01, 1879, Image 2

15. Burke, W. Lewis (Fall 2001). "Reconstruction Corruption and the Redeemers' Prosecution of Francis Lewis Cardozo". American Nineteenth Century History. 2 (3): 67–106.

16. Burke, W. Lewis (2002). "Post-Reconstruction Justice: The Prosecution and Trial of Francis Lewis Cardozo". South Carolina Law Review. 53 (2). 6

17. Report of the Joint Investigating Committee on Public Frauds and Election of Hon. J.J. Patterson to the United States Senate

18. Journal of the Senate of the State of South Carolina, 1872/73.

Robert Singleton: the last carpetbagger of Chesterfield County

In the years after the Civil War, the Methodist minister Henry J. Fox worked with New York City-based financiers to develop land in the area that is now the town of Pageland, South Carolina. His plan was to purchase plantations, ideally cheaply from debt-ridden planter, and then subdivide the land into plots that would be sold to small farmers. This was a popular idea among northerners. Many believed that small farming would be a more productive use of the land than maintaining large plantations as had been done under slavery. An additional benefit was that it would uplift the poor who otherwise would be landless and living idle in poverty.

Rev. Fox was originally from England, and he appears to have drawn heavily on his connections to the county in promoting his land development. He began selling land in 1868, and all of the buyers appear to have been from England. 

Rev. Fox's project proved to be short-lived. Farming in northwestern Chesterfield County had always been difficult, and the crops failed in the late 1860s. An even worse problem was the behavior of white farmers in the area. Many white farmers hated the newcomers, and they launched a campaign against them that started as petty harassment and then escalated to death threats and even an actual murder.

Only a small number of families, perhaps ten, had tried to set-up farms on the Fox land. By the summer of 1870, all but two – the family of fifty-year old John Woodcock and the family of twenty-seven year old Robert Singleton – were gone. Woodcock had fled by the time of the murder, but Singleton displayed remarkable bravery and remained for several more years. In this blogpost, I will explore what we can find out about Singleton's experience.

Singleton in 1870

Robert Singleton and his wife Sarah first appears in the 1870 census where they are recorded as small farmers in Chesterfield County. They likely had recently moved to South Carolina as the census indicated that they had not planted any crops the previous year. John Woodcock also appears to have been a new arrival as he too is recorded as not having planted crops the previous year. 

Singleton had little more than the proverbial 40-acres and a mule. He was farming on approximately fifty acres of land, all of which needed to be cleared, and the only help he and his wife had was that offered by the lone ox they owned.

In a deed, the farm is described as lying on the headwaters of Hills Creek, west of the Charlotte and Camden Road, and adjacent to "the Crossly place." I haven not been able to identify the Crossly place, but Hills Creek still exists, and the Charlotte and Camden road appears to have been approximately at the location of highway Route 601. This puts it somewhere to the northwest of the modern town of Pageland. The plot was probably part of two large farms that Fox had purchased from two planter families (Edgeworths and the Blakeneys). 

Biographical details about Singleton are hard to come by. The only information comes from the 1870 census, and there he was recorded twice by two different census-takers. The two records are contradictory, but the more accurate one is likely the one written by a neighbor, Rev. Fox's son Gil Dixon Fox. That record describes Singleton and his wife as newlyweds from England who gotten married in August 1869. Intriguingly, Singleton is listed as a US citizen, but his wife is not. 

For Singleton and his wife, life in Chesterfield became especially difficult in the fall of 1870 because it was an election year. The 1868 enfranchisement of formerly enslaved men had swept into power a Republican government, and the 1870 election was conservatives' first chance to regain control. The outcome of the election was disputed with conservatives credibly alleging that the state senator, R. J. Donaldson, had engaged in election fraud. Seen as part of Donaldson's political machine, Singleton and other recent arrivals were targeted for harassment which culminated with the murder of the Republican official Robert Melton in August 1871. By the time of Melton's murder, Singleton's neighbor John Woodcock had left the area. Henry J. Fox left a few years later, and by 1874, Singleton was the only one remaining the area.

In 1870, Singleton was likely renting his farm from Henry J. Fox or the company that he was representing (the South Carolina Plantation Company), but he became a homeowner in December 1871. That month, Fox sold the land to him for $1, probably token payment to make the land transfer valid. This was a time when Rev. Fox would have been desperate to unload the land he had purchased. He was moving to the state capital of Columbia, and the longer he delayed the move, the greater the risk of the suffering a fate similar to that of the murdered Robert Melton.

Robert Singleton must have been made of sterner stuff because he remained on his farm for all of Reconstruction, the only one of the new arrivals to do so. He finally sold the land in April 1876. The timing was fortunate as only a few months later the state descended into chaos and political violence. 

Singleton made a good profit off the sale. The farm sold for $475, approximately the farm's estimated value in 1870. The land was bought by William Augustus Evans. Evans was a member of the county's traditional elite. His father had been one of the wealthiest planters in the area before the war, and he had recently been elected to state senate. It would be fascinating to know the details of the negotiations over the sale. Did W. A. Evans purchase the land as a magnanimously gesture to a fallen political opponent? Or was the act a final way of humiliating a hated foe? 

Whatever it was, the sale brought an end to efforts to reconstruct Chesterfield County. Robert Singleton and his wife Sarah had left the county by 1880, and they were the last of the immigrants who had moved to Chesterfield to start a new life. For generations, political and economic power would remain in the hands of the descendants of the planter elite, men like W. Augustus Evans, and life in Chesterfield would continue largely as it had before the Civil War only under diminished conditions.

What's in a name: the surnames of Spartanburg's freedmen

Inspired by Sarah Zureick-Brown's substack article "A Juneteenth reflection on surnames," I took a look into the surnames of formerly enslaved people in Spartanburg County, South Carolina. A valuable source of information is the 1869 militia enrollment lists. 

After Civil War, South Carolina was placed under military rule for several years. Civil government was restored in 1868, and one of the first actions of the new state government was to re-establish the state militia. As part of this effort, the governor had state census takers create a list of all men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five. In the present content, enrollment records are really valuable as they are one of the first records of the names of formerly enslaved people. (Enslaved people had been recorded in the federal census, but only by age and gender.)

As data, the enrollment records have their flaws. The census takers efforts were patchy, so and they missed a number of people. There also are a few clerical efforts. Several lists have two people with the except same age and name, so it looks like a careless clerk copied the same name twice. Errors of this nature really skew the data because a given surname is fairly uncommon. Most surnames only occur once or twice, so accidentally repeating an entry makes the surname appear much more likely than it actually was. Another issue is spellings. Some surnames appear with different spellings, like "Bollinger" versus "Ballinger." Most people in Spartanburg were illiterate and unable to spell their own name, and some surnames might not even have had a standardized spelling. Despite this, we'll see some interesting patterns.

Slavery in Spartanburg County

To orient things, let's recall some demographic features of Spartanburg. The Spartanburg County of 1869 was actually larger than modern Spartanburg County. It comprised both that county and the modern county of Cherokee. This region is part of the "Upstate." The area had been populated since before the Revolutionary Way, but it had long been a primitive and isolated region, populated by poor white farmers. The county center was the town of Spartanburg, then a simple courthouse village. 

Like much of the Upstate, the development of the cotton industry both drove an economic boom and promoted an increase in the use of enslaved labor. Economically, the county was largely split between the northern half and the southern half, with Spartanburg village in the center. The southern half supported a larger cotton industry and was wealthier. Even after the cotton-boom, Spartanburg County remained one of the poorer parts of the state, but the southern part of the county included men who had established themselves as wealthier planters. John C. Zimmerman and John Winsmith each enslaved approximately one-hundred people, placing them among the wealthiest people in the United States. 

The northern half of the county was poorer with many residents running small farms, struggling to grow enough food to freed themselves. The region also had somewhat of a reputation for lawlessness, home to illegal alcohol distilleries and bandits. 

In a development that was unusual for the south, the regional economy began to diversity in the antebellum. Businessmen established several iron foundries and cotton mills, all of which were largely run with enslaved labor. 

What does this mean in terms of freed people in 1869? Approximately nine-thousand people or one-third of the twenty-six thousand of the county population had been enslaved before the war. A typical person lived on a family farm consisting of, perhaps, their enslaver's family and one or two enslaved families. Everyone on the farm lived and worked closely together, and largely performed the same work. In particular, enslaved people regularly interacted with white people and had a personal relationship with their enslavers. After Emancipation, many of the newly freed people living family farms had considerable freedom. If they found themselves in conflict with a former enslaver or a new employer or if they simply wanted to seek new opportunities, they could simply leave and seeking farm work elsewhere. 

A small but significant minority, close to one-thousand or one-eighth of the Black population, had lived on large cotton plantations. They lives were similar to people enslaved on family farms, but their labor tended to be regimented and specialized, and they had less interaction with their enslavers, and with white people in general.

Another group of formerly enslaved people were people who labored in industry, in the cotton mills or iron foundries. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any information about them, although their experience freedom likely had been quite different from people enslaved on farm.

A final important group was enslaved people living in towns or villages. This was a small group of people. In 1860, only twenty-nine Black people were recorded as living in Spartanburg village, the region's largest population center. However, these people played a large role during the years after the war. Most had worked as skilled laborers or domestic servants. They also had considerable experience interacting with the white residents of Spartanburg village The personal relationships they developed were valuable as the white residents of Spartanburg village included region's economic and political leaders. 

The names

So what do we see from statistical data? Freedpeople do not appear to have chosen surnames to signal their new status or their African-descended identity. Although the surname "Freeman" certainly would be an appropriate surname for someone recently freed from bondage, the only people with this surname were white. 

This appears to contradict claims made by an NBC news article I found, "Many African American last names hold weight of Black history." That article reports that common surnames were Freeman or Freedman as well as Washington, Williams, Brown or Johnson. This was not the case for Spartanburg. The surnames "Freedman" and "Washington" do not appear. The other surnames do appear, and both "Brown" and "Williams" were common, but these were also common surnames for white people.

There are surnames associated with Black identity. The most common surname was "Anderson." This was the surname of twenty-one Black men (approximately 2.8% of the population) but only six white people. Most of these people were living in Reidville township. My guess is that these people are members of a prominent white family and people who had been enslaved by them. A likely candidate is the family of David Anderson, a Reidville planter who had enslaved almost forty people in the antebellum.

Another common surname was "Shippy." This surname was only recorded for Black men. A close look shows a pattern to that with "Anderson." Everyone with the "Shippy" surname was living in the township of White Plains. Although they were not recorded on the militia rolls, White Plains was home to several white families who had enslaved people in the antebellum. For example, the woman Jeanetta Shippy had enslaved sixteen people on her farm. As a woman, she would not have been recorded on the rolls. 

I found a similar pattern with all the "Black" surnames I found: most of the people with the surname were living in the same township, and the surname was shared with someone who enslaved a large workforce in the antebellum. No such pattern is seen with surnames that are just generically popular. The most common surnames were "Smith" and "Foster," and these surnames are found throughout the county.

Some surnames are notable absent. The largest enslaved workforce, over one-hundred people, was on the plantation of John C. Zimmerman. Nobody with the "Zimmerman" surname appears on the rolls. (John C. was too old to have been registered.) Also absent are anyone with the surname "Winsmith" even though John Winsmith enslaved approximately one-hundred people. 

Other missing surnames of interest are names that were common among white men. Examples are "Lanford" (held by fifteen people), "Cash" (thirteen people), and "Bishop" (twelve people). None of these names are found among Black men. These surnames appear to be the names of people in one or more families (all the Landfords were living in Woodruff township). Looking at census records, people in these families appear to have enslaved few people. In some cases, the families were too poor, but in other cases, the families were involved in other professions. For example, Fieldon Hayden Cash was quite prominent: he served as a postmaster and founded a cotton mill.

Any occupation other than farming was very unusual. Farmers made up over 90% of the men listed on the militia rolls. Only forty-three people had a different occupation, with milling, shoemaking and blacksmithing being especially common. There does not seem to be any special feature with the surnames of people in these professions.

Unfortunately, it seems to be impossible to use the militia rolls to take a closer look at the villages and towns. The clerks recorded the township but more precise location information. I took a quick look at Spartanburg township and was unable to identify more than one or two people living in Spartanburg village.

Some statistical information is displayed below. The "Black Name Index" of surname is the percentage of Black people with the name divided by the percentage of people with that name. The index will be 100 if the surname is only found among Black people, 0 if it is only found among white people. The vertical axis is the percentage of people with a surname with an index in the corresponding x-axis. For example, approximately one-quarter of all Black people had a surname with index 90 or greater. I dropped all names that only appeared once or twice.

What do we see from this? Approximately one-third of the white population had a distinctively white surname, i.e. a surname with an index of at most 10. The remaining two-thirds appear to be normally distributed around 50. The

The chart for Black surnames is similar. Approximately one-quarter of the Black population had a distinctively Black surname. The remaining three-quarters is normally distributed around 60. The standard deviation is smaller. No Black person had a surname with index below 20.

I speculate that these statistical features we are seeing reflects class differences among white people. The surnames of poor whites are distinctively white; the surnames or wealthy planters are distinctively Black; the surnames for mid-range slave-owning farmers are in between.

Summary

What are we to make of this analysis of surnames? At least in Spartanburg County, nobody who had been enslaved took a surname like "Freeman" to assert their new free status. At the same time, nobody took surnames to mark a connection to the region's wealthiest planters. Instead, the surnames chosen are those of enslavers who ran smaller farms. The militia rolls don't speak to why people made these choices, but we can speculate and look at what other sources say.

In her substack essay, Sarah Zureick-Brown quoted a white woman in Georgia who observed that many formerly enslaved people abandoned their enslaver's surname as a way of casting off a "badge of servitude." Instead, they tended to select the surname of the first person to have enslaved them. This was a way to assert their free status without losing too much of their identify or wholly inventing a new tradition. 

I only found one personal account where a freedmen in Spartanburg explained his surname. The freedman Daniel Lipscomb was interviewed by a congressional subcommittee as part of Congress's investigation to Ku Klux Klan activities. In sharing his basic biography, he explained that he had gone by several different surnames: in addition to Lipscomb, he also went by "Linder" and "Bobo." "Linder" was the surname of his former enslaver, the planter Lee Linder, and  "Lipscomb" was the maiden name of Lee Linder's wife, Mary. Daniel had original been enslaved by the Lipscomb family, but they "gave" him to Lee Linder as a wedding gift. These two choices of surnames are consistent with what the Georgia woman observed. However, the surname "Bobo" is different. This surnames was occasionally used because Daniel had worked as a foreman at an ironworks owned by a man named Simpson Bobo.

There's certainly more that one could do to look into this topic. The 1870 federal census includes the surnames of men and women of all ages as well as more personal information. This larger pool of names would be useful. I didn't use it because getting the data into a spreadsheet would be a very onerous task. 

Locations in Pine Bluff

What did Pine Bluff, the home of Arkansas's public HBCU the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, look like in 1880? Probably not too unlike the small Arkansas town that Huck Finn and Jim visited with the King and a Duke in Mark Twain's novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

Then we went loafing around the town. The stores and houses was most all old shackly dried-up frame concerns that hadn’t ever been painted; they was set up three or four foot above ground on stilts, so as to be out of reach of the water when the river was overflowed. The houses had little gardens around them, but they didn’t seem to raise hardly anything in them but jimpson weeds, and sunflowers, and ash-piles, and old curled-up boots and shoes, and pieces of bottles, and rags, and played-out tin-ware. The fences was made of different kinds of boards, nailed on at different times; and they leaned every which-way, and had gates that didn’t generly have but one hinge—a leather one. Some of the fences had been whitewashed, some time or another, but the duke said it was in Clumbus’s time, like enough. There was generly hogs in the garden, and people driving them out.

All the stores was along one street. They had white domestic awnings in front, and the country people hitched their horses to the awning-posts. There was empty drygoods boxes under the awnings, and loafers roosting on them all day long

When writing my article about J. C. Corbin, the nineteenth century mathematician and founding president of the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, I was curious about where the college and other buildings were located. I found that it is challenging to figure out where nineteenth century buildings stood. Only a handful of buildings are still standing. Most of Pine Bluff was simple wooden frame houses that have long been torn down (although there are some notable exceptions like the historic courthouse). Worse, addresses weren't numbers in the 1880s, and most of the streets were renamed around 1900. Thankfully, the town layout remains largely the same. With work, I was able to match street names and create the following Google Maps.

What does the map show? First, Pine Bluff has grown a lot over the past hundred-some years. The second location of the college (one of the left-most pinned locations) was the outskirts of the town in 1880. Now this is deep within city limits. 

For the college's first five years, it was run out of a rented home. No dormitories were available to students, so most found private accommodations. Unfortunately, I was only able to identify the home of one student, George W. Bunn. Many of the other student lived at the intersection of "Bell and River," but these streets that I have not been able to identify.

What else? The town had little to offer in terms of culture. There was no library, and while town directory lists three or four bookstores, these were really stores that sold books. Three of the stores, Nelson & Dewoody, Young & Kite and J. H. Scull & Bro., were druggists shops that also school books and stationary along with other items. The closest thing to a bookstore was Samuel Mayer's News Depot. All four businesses advertise that they sell school books (rather than books in general), so presumably their customers were students from local high schools in need of textbooks.

Advertisements from the 1876 Pine Bluff town directory

Another advertisement from the 1876 Pine Bluff town directory 

An advertisement from the 1881 Pine Bluff town directory