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 the offices 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

Dolemite in Indian Territory?!

 

Rudy Ray Moore in Dolemite
From RogerEbert.com

Dolemite! The Human Tornado! Petey Wheatstraw, the Devil's Son-in-Law! The Avenging Disco Godfather! Prince DuMarr! The godfather of rap! Rudy Ray Moore was all of this and more. 

Moore was an inveterate entertainer who tirelessly promoted his self-image. The basic outlines of his self-history are laid out in the Eddie Murphy film Dolemite Is My Name. That film is a love-letter from contemporary Black comedians to beloved, influential mentor. (In addition to Murphy, Keegan-Michael Key, Craig Robinson, Titus Burgess, and Wesley Snipes star in the film.) 

Dolemite Is My Name opens in the 1970s, when Moore was living in Los Angeles and working at Dolphin's, a historic Black-owned record store. In Moore's telling, a wino named Rico frequently performed "toasts," humorous and often obscene rhymed stories. Moore offered to pay him if he performed one of his routines, the story "Dolemite." Impressed with the story, he developed it and incorporated it into a comedy routine which became a successful comedy record, "Eat Out More Often," and the film Dolemite. 

Rudy Ray Moore was in his late 40s when Dolemite came out, and the film was the culmination of decades spent working as a performed. Moore had tried working as a dancer, a singer, and a rhythm and blues musician before finding success as the outlandish "blue" comedian. 

While Moore found success in Los Angles, he spent most of his life in the midwest, in cities like Akron, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Toledo. However, he was born in the south. He was born in Fort Smith and spent his childhood in northwest Arkansas. This in itself is unremarkable. Moore was born at the start of the Great Migration, a time when millions of Black people left the south for midwest seeking social and economic opportunities. 

I recently listened to an interview with Moore's biographer (Mark Jason Murray) and realized that his time in Arkansas is somewhat of a mystery. Talking about himself was one of Moore's favorite actives, but he said almost nothing about his family and his childhood in Arkansas. His biographer said that the topic made him uncomfortable, and it was difficult to get him to discuss it. Intrigued, I decided to poke around the available records, and Moore's family background is almost as interesting as Dolemite's!

Rudy Ray Moore's family background

Rudy Ray Moore doesn't exist. Moore's birth name was Rudolph Frank Moore. He was born in Fort Smith, Arkansas but spent most of his childhood in Logan County. Born in 1927 to Nathaniel and Lucile Smith Moore, Rudy was the oldest of seven children. When Rudy was an infant, his father worked as a farmer, but by 1940, he had turned to coal mining. 

Both parents were young, Nathaniel had been born in 1907, Lucille in 1911. I have not been able to find much information about Lucille's parents, but Nathaniel's parents are well-documented. They were John J. and Della Byrd Moore. Della was born and raised in northwestern Arkansas a few years after the end of the Civil War, in 1868. Her parents, Sugh (or Suggs) and Celia Sheppard Byrd, were born in the 1850s. I can't find any information about their lives before the war, but they were almost certainly enslaved and likely worked on small family farms (there were few large plantations in northwestern Arkansas).

John J. Moore is unusual in that details about his life before the Civil War were recorded. He was born in Oklahoma (then Indian Territory) on the Creek (or Muscogee) nation. He was enslaved by a Creek man named Billie Grayson (or Brayson). After the end of the Civil War, he went by the name John Grayson for a numbers of years. In the first years after the war, he moved to northwestern Arkansas. He moved back and forth between Indian Territory and Arkansas from the late 1860s until the 1880s. It was in the 1880s that he and Lucille met and got married. During this period, John, like many freedmen, worked as a farmer, but by 1891, he became active in the church. In that year, he moved to Fort Smith to serve as a church minister. Three years later, he moved to Missouri to preach. 

Nathaniel was one of the youngest children of John and Della. It's unclear where he was born as the extent records are contradictory. Some records state that he was born in Wagoner County, Oklahoma (a city near the Creek Nation), while others state that the was born in Logan County, Arkansas. In any case, the family had moved to northwestern Arkansas when Nathaniel was young.

Rudy Ray Moore's family

Unfortunately, I haven't gotten a copy of Moore's biography, so I haven't been able to find any details about his childhood. It was doubtlessly difficult. Arkansas as a whole was a poverty-stricken state that was firmly in the grip of Jim Crow segregation. Moore was fortunate that his parents had a stable marriage, but he evidently found Arkansas unbearable, and at age fifteen (in 1942), he left his family and moved to Cleveland, Ohio. In later interviews, Moore said that he wanted to escape the depressing prospect of spending his life working in the fields. However, I suspect that he also had a falling out with his parents. Although his family otherwise appears to have been closely knit, Moore appears to have had a minimal relationship with them. 

As a teenager newly arrived from rural Arkansas, Moore found work as a waiter and bus boy in hotels. Through that work, he became exposed to the entertainment industry. Cleveland, at the time, was a national center for manufacturing that had a booming economy. The Black population had experienced major growth as Black family in south were drawn to the region by the availability of well-paying factory jobs and relatively mild political climate. An exciting Black entertainment district grew out of this environment, and Moore decided that he wanted to become a part of it. He began performing singing, dancing, and comedy routines in clubs. One of the first characters he played was bare-chested, turban-clad man named "Prince DuMarr." Moore would remain working as an entertainer and performed for the remainder of his life. His biographer recounts that, at the end of his life, Moore was living in a nursing home and regularly performing before other residents. 

Moore's family took an entirely different path. In the 1940s, a few years after Moore left for Ohio, his parents and siblings moved to southwestern Wyoming, likely because his father had found work at a coal mine. They were still living there in 1950, but then the records about them becomes thin. It is clear that the family members became close. Moore's sisters (Geraldine and Della) married and moved away to live with their husbands, but his brothers and parents all settled in the area around Spokane, Washington. Moore's brother were active in the Baptist church. Both Louis N. and Gerald were deacons, while Nathaniel Jr. was a reverend. 

While there feelings went unrecorded, his church-going brothers must have been horrified that their sibling was famous (or notorious) for creating some of the most lewd and vulgar Blaxploitation films of all time. 

There are hints that the brothers maintained some contact with Moore. Moore is mentioned by name in the obituaries for both Louis N. and Nathaniel, Jr. But, after Moore left for Ohio, he appears to have been largely forgotten by the people Moore left behind. A November 4, 2019 article in the Arkansas Times reported that there is no indication in Arkansas towns of Fort Smith or Paris that Rudy Ray Moore once lived there. Many residents have no idea who he is. When the reporter asked the Fort Smith Visitors' Bureau about Moore, a bureau official answered, "Was he a marshal?"

Moore's work in entertainment takes on a new dimension in view of his childhood and his lifelong estrangement from his family. The creation of outlandish characters like Petey Wheatstraw and Dolomite appears as an act of self-invention, a life-long effort by a Black teenager from Arkansas to do more with himself than work the cotton fields. That Moore, only two generations removed from slavery, succeeded in crystallizing the storytelling traditions of Black working class men into a series of independent films is perhaps an achievement almost as remarkable as the fantastic acts of Dolemite.

Sources

1. Koch, Stephen. “Straight Outta Westark.” Arkansas Times, November 2019, pp. 62–64, 66–67.

2. Petkovic, John. "Legend of Rudy Ray Moore: How a Cleveland dishwasher became the subject of Eddie Murphy’s "Dolemite Is My Name." The Plain Dealer, October 20, 2019. 

Stopping the Steal in Chesterfield County, 1870

January 1871 was a difficult time in Chesterfield County, South Carolina. The 1868 political enfranchisement of former slaves had resulted in the dominance of the county government by Republicans. This was a horrifying outcome for the country's traditional elites, who were comprised of planters and ex-Confederate officers. The October 1870 election had been their first opportunity to regain control of local government.

At first, it seemed like conservatives had succeeded in sweeping the election. Their victory had been hard won. The Republican state senator (R. J. Donaldson) and his supporters had engaged in ballot misconduct, but these efforts had only narrowed the margin of conservative's victory, and the senator was now facing criminal prosecution. At the statehouse on November 22, the conservative Reform candidates were sworn in as Chesterfield's legislative representatives. Chesterfield, it seemed, had been "redeemed" from "Radical rule." 

Later events showed that celebrations were premature. A week after the conservatives were sworn into office, their Republican challengers contested the election outcome. The state legislature is ultimately responsible for determining outcomes, and conservatives had legitimate fears that the election results would be overturned by the Republican-dominated Legislature. To eliminate Republicans as a political force in the county, Chesterfield conservatives would use all available tools, the legal system, the press, and even political violence.

One of the first steps took place at the end of the January 1871 term of the circuit court. At the end of every term, the county grand jury issues a report. Typically, the grand jury would report on the performance of elected officials and the condition of government facilities. A typical report might describe how the county jail was in a poor state and needed repairs. However, the Grand Jury had the ability to report on potential crimes that they felt should be prosecuted. They did not have the ability to force a prosecution, but a report put pressure on law enforcement and judicial officials as it put the matter on public record. It was in this way that the grand jury appears to have tried to use the legal system to weaken county Republicans. 

In their report, the grand jury stated that six men (Patrick Quilty, Grave Graves, Alfred Thomas, Evander Brayboy, Jim Chavis, and Andrew Marshall) had illegally voted. The grand jury also gave a list of witnesses who could testify. 

The grand jury didn't offer any details about the charges, and I have hard a time tracking down what they specifically the men were accused of doing. (The South Carolina Department of Archives and History might have relevant records if anyone is interested in digging into this.) The only details I can find are about the charge against Alfred Thomas. He had voted in Chesterfield County but was accused of being a resident of Darlington County, where his wife lived. 

One of the accused, Patrick Quilty, was a Black merchant living in Cheraw. Two of the three men listed as witnesses against him were election managers for the Cheraw polling station, so presumably the election managers saw him illegally cast a ballot in Cheraw. Two of the other men accused (Grave Graves and Evander Brayboy) appear also have been connected to Cheraw as some of the suggested witnesses were people who can be identified as Cheraw residents. Legal records did not record the race of the accused men, but I am guessing that they were all Black men. This was one of the first elections in which Black men could vote in, and many white conservatives accused them of abusing their right. 

The legal process

More information is available about how the legal process played out. Then as now, the county solicitor was responsible for deciding whether or not to prosecute. If he decided to prosecute, he first had to make a case before the Grand Jury. If the Grand Jury was convinced, then they would issue a true bill of indictment and there would be a jury trial to determine guilt. The circuit judge presided over both the grand jury hearing and the jury trial.

The solicitor was elected by popular vote, so the solicitor for Chesterfield county was typically a conservative, and the solicitor at the time, Archibald J. Shaw, was very much a product of South Carolina's conservative political class. He had spent his entire life in South Carolina and had worked as a lawyer during the antebellum. When the Civil War broke out, he served as an officer in the Confederate army. I have not been able to find any record of his political views, but he almost certainly was horrified that Black men had been given the right to vote and was more than willing to prosecute them for voting irregularities. 

The circuit judge, James M. Rutland, was from a similar background as Shaw. He too was a native South Carolinian who had worked as a lawyer in the antebellum. However, he held opposing political beliefs. He was one of the very few elite South Carolinians who had openly opposed secession. After the war, he supported Reconstruction and served as a delegate to the 1868 convention held to revise the state constitution. Rutland's politics played an important role in election to a judgeship. Unlike solicitors, circuit judges were elected by the state legislature, which then was dominated by Republicans.

What about the composition of the juries? Unlike today, juries were not formed by randomly selecting voters. Rather, they were respected community members chosen by local government. Each year the selectmen of each town were to make a list of voters who were "well qualified to serve as jurors, being persons of good moral character, of sound judgement" that contained between a tenth and a twentieth of the voter population. Then, at the start of each term of circuit court, the county clerk filled a grand jury and two petit juries by randomly picking from the lists provided. 

Only men could served as jurors, and certain professions (members of state government, lawyers, ministers, teachers, etc) and the elderly were excluded from service. Most significantly, Black men, enslaved only five years earlier, could be jurors. 

Despite the revolutionary political changes, the January 1871 grand jury that reported on the accusations of illegal voting was not that different from antebellum juries. The foreman was J. C. Craig, a fifty-something year old white farmer from Cheraw. In the antebellum, Craig had run his farm with help from eighteen enslaved workers, putting him on the cusp of planter status. I can document that two other jurors (John Henry Perkins and William Freeman) enslaved people. However, the jury was not all white. It included at least one Black man, Edward Blakeney. Blakeney in his fifties and living in Old Store township (approximately the location of modern Pageland). His last name suggests that he had been enslaved by John Blakeney, the largest enslaver in the area.

Both the grand jury and the petit juries formed for the next court of court (in May) were similar. They included two Black men, Wade Floyd and Robert Brewer. Both appear to have been community leaders. Floyd had served as an election manager in 1870, while Robert was a Republican candidate for the state legislature in 1874. However, these men were exceptions. Most jurors were white South Carolinians, many of whom had supported the Confederacy. We have an unusually detailed information about the views of one juror, James Harrington Powe. Powe was a college graduate and a former Confederate army captain. Many years after the war, he wrote down reminiscences of his experiences during the Civil War and Reconstruction, and these were published by his daughter. 

One of the sketches that Powe wrote is a "humorous" account of a political meeting that was held on his farm "during Carpet-Bagger rule." The sketch is a satire that highlights the ignorance and dishonesty of Republican politicians. Two Republican candidates for the state legislature, "Prof. Theodore St. Clair Cobblestone, from Massachusetts" and "Mr. 'Cristofer Hodges'." Hodges is freedman described as "a great dude, his long kinky hair, being parted in the middle, fell over each ear, giving him the appearance of an umbrella. He was attired in a swallow-tail, black trousers, and white vest." Powe has him speaking in thick dialect: "I come for te ax yer tea gib me yo votes, so I kin go ter Kerlumby ter risprisint yer den dat State His, day call de Legislature. I'll wurk fer de eberlastin' good ob all uns, an' I'll do my lebel bes' tea git dat forty akers an' de mule." The meeting ends with Hodges being accused by another freedman, Cuffe Prince, of stealing his watermelons during the antebellum, and the two reconciling and getting elected to the Legislature.

Powe's account bear little resemble to historical fact. There were no legislators named Christopher Hodges or Cuffe Prince. At most two of Chesterfield's legislators, J. P. Singleton and D. J. J. Johnson, were formerly enslaved, and these men were skilled workers who lived in Cheraw (Singleton was a mason). However, it does clearly demonstrate Powe's attitudes towards Black voters. He certainly was not someone to hesitate to convict a freedman for illegal voting.

What happened?

Criminal prosecutions began in May, the first term of court after the Grand Jury reported on the allegations of illegal voting. The solicitor brought changes against seven men, five of the men that were accused in the Grand Jury's report and two other men (Charles Robeson and Ben Hinson). (As far as I can tell, no charges were ever brought against one of the men, Jim Chavis, who was named in the Grand Jury report.)

Of the seven men charged, the Grand Jury only returned a true bill of indictment against three of them. Only one jury trial was held, and it resulted in the criminal conviction of Alfred Thomas. Thomas was sentenced to three months in the county jail. However Alfred did not serve his full sentence. He was pardoned by the governor on June 23, the month after he was convicted. As justification for his decision, the governor explained that the jury had determined that Alfred could only legally vote in Darlington County (where his wife lived), but he had always lived and voted in Chesterfield County.

One additional charge was filed the next year. In the January term of the circuit court, Jack Evans was convicted of illegally voting and sentenced to three months in jail. However, he too did not serve the full sentence as he was pardoned by the governor on March 15 (so Evans likely spent approximately two months in jail). The reasons for Evans's pardon are somewhat curious. The governor wrote that Evans was "ignorant of the offense he was committing, being used as a tool by others." This was a common explanation for misconduct by freedmen, with the "others" typically being white Republican politicians. He also stated that the county probate judge and others had recommended the pardon. The year 1872 was an election year, and it is unclear whether the judge making the recommendation was the outgoing judge or the incoming judge. The incoming judge was W. J. Hanna, a leading conservative figure within the county. The outgoing judge was one "K. Craig." I can't find any information about him (even his first name appears to have gone unrecorded), but he also appears to have been a conservative.

In all, a year of legal proceedings had resulted in two men being imprisoned for a few months. No further prosecutions for illegal voting took place. My guess is that, after the initial grand jury report, conservative leaders in Chesterfield backed away from further political conflict. The month before the grand jury again met (in April), Robert Melton, a Republican official in northwestern Chesterfield, was murdered by Ku Kluxers, who almost certainly had been encouraged by the general anger towards Chesterfield Republicans. This act of violence seems to have been a step too far. Quite generally, political violence against Republicans had exploded in the South Carolina in the months after the election, and conservatives everywhere realized it needed to be stopped. Not only was it provoking a heavy-handed response from the federal government, but it was also empowering violent common criminals who threatened to plunge the state into general chaos. Moreover, violence was not needed. The Republican Party lost all county elected positions except for the two seats in the state's House of Representatives, and they only held onto them because the Republican-dominated Legislature was willing to overturn the election results and act against the will of Chesterfield voters. Republicans' grip on Chesterfield was slipping, and with the county's large white majority, the county was likely to completely slip out of their grasp after the next election. There was no need to prosecute a handful of people for illegally voting. The next election, held in 1872, demonstrated the truth of this. Conservatives spent the county elections. For generations, Chesterfield County would be run white conservatives, and Black voters would be almost wholly excluded from political decisions.

Sources

1. Reminiscences & Sketches of Confederate Times

Klu Kluxers in Northeastern Spartanburg: The Republican Party in Limestone

Chart showing the locations of people in the 1870 census

The Reconstruction-era Klu Klux Klan attacks generally targeted Republican politicians and their supporters. Who represented the Republican party in northeastern Spartanburg County? Not many people! With its large white majority and well-organized political leaders, all elected officials and a majority of voters were conservative. Throughout Reconstruction, the county was a stronghold for state conservatives. Northeastern Spartanburg was twice marginalized. The region was only weakly represented within the county Republican party. Of the four Republican candidates for legislative seats, none came from the northern part of the county.

In the townships of Limestone and Cherokee, the presence of the Republican government was largely limited to officials serving in positions that were appointed by the (Republican) governor. These consisted of the election managers and the trial justices. Election mangers were responsible for the mechanics of voting on Election Day. They set-up the ballot box, monitored voting, and then brought the ballot box (with the ballots) to Spartanburg village for counting. This was an important and often difficult position as Reconstruction was a time when there was widespread election misconduct (voter intimidation, ballot stuffing, etc) by both political parties. 

Trial justices were low-level judicial officials. They handled minor criminal and civil offenses. They also handled the initial stages of major criminal cases. A jury trial for a major offense like murder would be handled by circuit judge, but a trial justice would handle the early stages of the legal process, doing things like issuing arrest warrants and taking bond. 

Trial justices typically were not legal professionals, but they were educated men of some standing in the community. The office of trial justice was only created in February 1870, and it drew heavy criticism from conservatives. The common complaint that the men appointed as trial justices were incompetent men of low character. I'm not sure what to make of this. A position similar to a trial justice, justice of the peace, existed in the antebellum but with the crucial difference that a trial justice was appointed by the governor while a justice of the peace was elected by the local community. For Spartanburg, this meant that the trial justice was a prominent local Republican in a predominantly conservative community. Conservatives generally deplored all Republican officials, but it was also the case that Republicans qualified to serve in legal positions were hard to find as virtually all antebellum legal professionals had supported secession and the Confederacy.

I have not been able to find any information about the election managers and trial justices for Cherokee township, but I think I have a complete list of people for Limestone township. The trial justices were P. Quinn Camp and William Champion. Both were white southerners. Camp was an old man in his mid-sixties who had spent his entire life in Limestone County. He was never a member of the planter class, but he did run a successful small farm. By the time the Civil War broke out, he was farming one-hundred acres of land with help from nine people he enslaved. He appears to have been a respected member of the community served as federal postmaster for several year.

Camp experienced incredible misfortune during the war. His sons John J. and William E. both served in the Confederate army, and William was killed in battle at the tail end of the war. Camp's personal finances also collapsed. When the war broke out, he was in debt, and he lost his farm during the war. 

Despite his family's support of the Confederacy, Camp was allied with the Republican Party during Reconstruction. It is unclear how Camp became involved in politics. In testimony before the Congressional investigative subcommittee, Camp said that he had always been a Republican, but he had never been active in politics. He had accepted the appointment as trial justice, he said, because his neighbors had asked him to take on the position because his predecessor had "abused" it. 

Camp's claim to have been uninvolved in politics seems inconsistent with his actions. He not only served as trial justice, but he was also an active member of the local Republican party, regularly attending party meetings. His Republicanism caused conflict between him and his white neighborhood. He was accused of being a "hidden radical" and treated with contempt.

Camp's son John J. was one of the election managers for the 1870 election. By this time, John was in his late twenties and was working on his father's farm. John turn to the Republican Party is striking in light of his service to the Confederacy. He not only served in the Confederate army for almost the entire war, but he was serious injured in battle.

William Champion was one of the other election managers. He had also served as a trial justice, but he was no longer serving in the position by 1870. (He may have been the man that P. Quinn Camp replaced.) Champion was a white man in his fifties. He was originally from North Carolina, across the state border, but he  had lived in South Carolina for over a decade. He made a living from milling and farming. Like Camp. he had supported the Union during the war and was active in the local Loyal League. 

Champion received a great deal of criticism from conservatives, even more than Camp. One man told a Congressional investigative subcommittee that he was "a very stupid, ignorant creature, and a drunken fellow." A particular complaint was that he was agitating the freedpeople, especially on the issue of landownership. This was a touchy political issue as many freedpeople want to become landowners, and many white landowners feared that their property would be seized by the federal government. Conservatives accused Champion of telling freedpeople who rented farmland that they were entitled to stay after their rental lease expired because they would soon be given a legal title to it. He was also rumored to have told white people that they should extend full social equality to freedpeople because, if they didn't, they would be forced to at "bayonet point" by the federal government.

The other election manager was Clem Bowden. Like Champion and Camp, Clem was an old man; he was sixty years old. Unlike them, he was a Black man who had been enslaved during the antebellum. He had grown up in the area. Clem did not say who had enslaved him before the war, but by 1870, he was leasing a farm near the plantation of Major Lee Linder. 

At the time that Ku Klux Klan violence broke out, the state government was trying to form a state militia that could help curb political violence. On paper, Spartanburg County was the home to two regiments (approximately two-thousand militia members), and the regiments were equipped with almost one-thousand rifle muskets. Conservatives were outraged by all this, but it is unclear if the muskets were even distributed, and certainly the Spartanburg state militia was not anything resembling a functioning military force.

The Republican voters were organized into a local Union (or Loyalist) League. Conservatives accused the Union Leagues of being the Republican counterpart of the Ku Klux Klan, but nobody in Spartanburg made a credible accusation that the Leagues engaged in any political violence. The Union League was, however, a clandestine organization, so it is unclear exactly what they did. The extent records indicate that they socialized freedmen into the voting process and politics more generally. Union leaders certainly promoted political positions that conservatives felt were beyond the pale, but this was hardly justified breaking the organization up.

And breaking up the Union League, and all significant Republican activity, is what was achieved by the Ku Klux Klan. In a later post, we'll take a look at what exactly took place. 

Klu Kluxers in Northeastern Spartanburg: What happened after the war?

Being an isolated, rural area, far away from the battles of the Civil War, the consequence of the Union victory over the Confederacy came slowly to northeastern Spartanburg. Union troops passed through the county in April 1865, in pursuit of Jefferson Davis and other important Confederate political figures. That fall, a small garrison of troops was stationed in the county seat of Spartanburg Court House. By this time, it was obvious to all observers that the Confederacy had lost the Civil War and, with it, the institution of slavery. The official end came that summer when a Union officer issued a public proclamation at Spartanburg Court House that all slaves were now free.

Residents of northeastern Spartanburg had to decide for themselves what the emancipation of slaves meant. Civil institutions had collapsed, and South Carolina was now governed by the Union army, but the army's presence in Spartanburg was minimal. A small garrison (never more than seventy soldiers) was stated at Spartanburg Court House, twenty miles away from Limestone Springs, and in any case, the garrison was removed entirely by the summer of 1866.

The defeat of the Confederacy was a shocking psychic blow for many white southerners, and emancipation was the realization of greatest hopes for many formerly enslaved people, but the practical implications were small. Many newly freed slaves continued to work on the farms of white land-owners, but now they, at least ostensibly, had the choice of who to work for. 

A labor contract signed by the white farmer Saul A. Camp and a freedman described only as "Bill" provides insight into relations. Prior to emancipation, Camp was one of the few planters in the area. He and an enslaved workforce of twenty-seven enslaved people grew food provisions on a three-hundred acre farm.

The contract is undated, but it was probably signed in early 1866, only a few months after emancipation. The terms of the contract were that Bill would farm on part of Camp's land in exchange for one-eighth of the crops he grew as well as eight-dollars for each month when he was not engaged in farmwork. The contract gave Camp considerable authority over Bill. Bill agreed to "obey all reasonable orders" and "not absent himself from the plantation without the permission of S. A. Camp." These were work conditions not that different from those Bill had experienced under slavery.

Census statistics also show that life after emancipation, in many ways, was not that different. The 1870 census did not record the location of residences, but we can still use it to get a sense of the geographic Census-takers created their records as they visited homes, so the numerical order in the census is a rough measure of distance. Families that appear in consecutive entries are usually neighbors, while people who were distant from each other tend to have distant entries in the census.

Most pages of the census contain entries for twenty people, so plotting the number of Black people on a page provides a crude but useful graphic showing the racial distribution. The plots for the townships of Limestone and Cherokee are displayed below. 

Plot of the census page vs. % of Black people in Limestone township

Plot of the census page vs. % of Black people in Limestone township

One thing that is visually clear is that the Black population of Cherokee was smaller than the population in Limestone. Numerical statistics bear this out: approximately one-third of the residents of Limestone are Black, but Black people only make up only 18% of Cherokee. 

The distributions are also different. Cherokee township has two regions where few Black people live (pages 2 to 4 and pages 25 to 31). No similar regions appear for Limestone township. Limestone township has several pages where a majority of people are Black. Some of these pages can be identified with major plantations. For example, the planter Saul A. Camp was recorded on page 30. Black people make up 65% of people recorded on that page of the census, and nearly 50% on the neighboring pages. Most of these people were likely laboring on Camp's land, and many were formerly enslaved by him.

Enlarged display of pages around 30 on Limestone township census

The figures show several regions where a majority of people are freedpeople, for example pages 35 to 37 of the census for Limestone county. Many of these can be identified as the area around a former planter, so the people living there likely had been enslaved by him. 

Similarly, Lee Linder, the largest enslaver during the antebellum, was recorded on page 56. Many Black people were recorded on pages 56 and 57, while the numbers are much lower on pages 55 and 58. 

The densest concentration of Black residents occurs around page 36. I can't identify this location with a plantation, and I'd be interesting to get more information about what is going on here. 

The village of Limestone Springs seems to correspond the location around page 25. The village is not explicitly indicated in the census, but the people recorded around page 25 are disproportionately skilled professionals (rather than farmers).

Another useful graphic is the Lorenz curve of the racial distribution. The curve is generated by first computing the percentage of Black residents on each page and sorting this list from highest to lowest. Then, for each term in the sorted list, compute the cumulative percentage of Black residents and white residents. The Lorenz curve is the plot of these cumulative percentage values. 

Lorenz curve for racial makeup of Limestone township

Lorenz curve for racial makeup of Cherokee township

The Lorenz curve would equal a line with slope +1 if the Black and white populations were equidistributed, so the deviation from this line is measure of how racially segregated the populations are. The all-white regions in Cherokee township show up clearly in the Lorenz curve for Cherokee township. 

Two numerical measures of segregation are the Gini coefficient and the index of dissimilarity. For Limestone township, the Gini coefficient is .52, and the dissimilarity index is .38. The indices are respectively .61 and .44 for Cherokee County. These numbers indicate that Cherokee township was more segregated than Limestone, something also indicated visually by the all-white regions that we saw earlier. To put these numbers in context, the median dissimilarity index for UA metropolitan areas in 2000 was .648. Thus southeastern Spartanburg was less segregated than most of the United States today. This is not a reflection of a lower level racial prejudice but rather a lack of mobility. Under slavery, Black people lived in close proximity to the people who enslaved them, and many people were living in the same places in 1870.

What does the census show about the economic situation? The vast majority of people living in these townships were famers, and the few exceptions were people who provided services to farmers (e.g. medical doctors, teachers, and merchants). The census data about farms provides a closer look at the situation for farmers in the area.

Census-takers recorded fairly detailed information about the farms in Limestone and Cherokee. For each farm, they recorded the acreage as well as the livestock and crops. Below are histograms of the sizes of the farms. The height is the amount of "improved acres" or the number of acres that was cleared and used for farming or grazing. (Many farmers owned a significant of land that was wooded or otherwise unused for farming.) The census data only includes farms larger than two acres.

Many of the farms were run by men who paid rent or were sharecropping. One thing that we see from the histograms is the poverty of the region. The median farm size was 15 acres. This was small. In contrast, the median farm size for both South Carolina and North Carolina was somewhere between 20 acres and 50 acres. 

Even the wealthier farmers were men of relatively modest means. The largest farms were approximately 100 acres. This represented uncommon local wealth (only twenty-three of the nearly seven-hundred farms in the area were 100 acres or larger), but nothing exceptional by state-wide or national standards. The largest farm in northeastern Spartanburg was the size of only an average Upcountry farm during the antebellum. In his book Origins of Southern Radicalism, Lacy Ford computed that the average farm size for the Upcountry to be 136.9 acres in 1860.

These census statistics provide a snapshot of northeastern Spartanburg shortly before Ku Klux violence broke out. The census was recorded in July 1870, and the first major Ku Klux Klan attack took place three months later, in October. 

The statistics reveal northeastern Spartanburg to have been a poor rural area populated by small farmers who simply tried to raise enough crops to feed their families. The Civil War and emancipation had led to limited changes in race relations. While they were no longer legally bound to enslavers, most newly freedpeople were farming land owned by the men who had enslaved them, and they had few prospects of improving their lot.

In the next blogpost, I will give a narrative account of what happened in the townships of Cherokee and Limestone three months after the census, when Ku Klux Klan attacks broke out.

Klu Kluxers in Northeastern Spartanburg: the situation before the war

On January 31, 1872 at 3:20 pm, a train carrying a highly unusual cargo arrived in Charleston, South Carolina. Escorted by thirteen army soldiers were forty-nine Ku Kluxers who were being sent to prison. Approximately half of the them were to be imprisoned in the Charleston jail, while the rest were being sent by ship to the federal prison in Albany, New York.

The fact that these men were facing imprisonment for Ku Klux activities was the outcome of extraordinary efforts by the federal government. Traditionally, responding to criminal violence is the responsibility of state governments, but the government of South Carolina (as well as many other governments in the south) had shown itself incapable of effectively curbing the Ku Klux Klan. Congress, with the support of President Grant, responded by passed new legislation to enable the federal government to act. Only nine months earlier, the president had signed into law the Reconstruction Acts which enabled the Justice Department to prosecute people who denied citizens the right to vote. The idea was that this would allow the Justice Department to prosecute Ku Kluxers without encroaching on the authority of state governments. The prosecution of South Carolina Ku Kluxers was an early test case of the new law, and the imprisonment of the forty-nine Ku Kluxers was a major success.

After they disembarked from the train, the Ku Kluxers were marched under army escort through the city. They attracted a great deal of attention. For years, Americans had heard horrifying and fantastic stories of the activities of the Ku Klux Klan. In South Carolina, Ku Kluxers had terrorized the Upcountry for much of the previous year. In popular imagination, Ku Kluxers were demonic figures who, disguised in elaborate costumes, attacked freed slaves in the dead of night and then disappeared before law enforcement could react. The ex-Confederate general, Nathan Bedford Forrest, claimed the Ku Klux Klan formed a paramilitary force half a million strong that served in defense of white Southerners. For most residents of Charleston, this was their first chance to see a Ku Kluxer.

What did Charleston residents see? A very different sight than the mental image they had formed. A reporter for the Charleston News described the Ku Kluxers as follows:

a more forlorn woe-begone looking crew could hardly be got together. Many were imperfectly clad, some had gaping shoes, and their persons and clothing seemed to have declared eternal war with such domestic appliances as soap and water.

In an upcoming series of blogposts, I will take a look at these Ku Kluxers. I will focus on the men who were from Spartanburg County. While the South Carolina Ku Klux Klan has been the subject of a great deal of study, the focus has largely been on Union County. There is good reason for this. Union County was the site of some of the most ambitious Ku Klux Klan actions: two jail raids that resulted in the murder of twelve Black men who served in the state militia. The Ku Klux Klan did not pull off any comparable operations in Spartanburg, but they were a powerful force that left Black families in many parts of the county paralyzed with fear. 

Northeastern Spartanburg

Let's begin by taking a look at the part of Spartanburg where the Ku Kluxer were active. The 1872 convicts were from two townships: Limestone Springs and Cherokee. This region is now part of Cherokee County. It lies in the Upstate, along the border with North Carolina. The population center is the town of Gaffney, then the small village of Limestone Springs.

Map showing the location of the town of Gaffney
Google Maps

Northern Spartanburg has been populated since the 1700s. The Battle of Cowpens, an important Revolutionary War battle, was fought there. Despite its long history, the area was largely underdeveloped at the outbreak of the Civil War. The village of Limestone Springs was the only population center. The village originally was a resort town which planters from the Lowcounty would visit during the summer to escape the punishing coastal heat and enjoy nearby mineral springs. By the time the Civil War broke out, the village's most prominent feature was the Limestone Springs Female High School. This was a private woman's college run by the Englishman Thomas Curtis. The student body of approximately one-hundred students was a large presence. Beyond their numbers, the students brought a level of culture and sophistication to what was otherwise primitive country backwoods. Most of the students had come from other parts of the South Carolina, although a few were from other southern states, and one student (Elena N. Booth) had come all the way from Cuba. The village also supported a small number of people in the professional and commercial classes, a doctor, a few merchants, a shoemaker, and so forth.

Life was very different away from the village. One freedman described the area as a "pretty wild country." Approximately four-thousand people lived in the area, with somewhat more than had living in Limestone township and the rest living in Cherokee township. The area supported iron manufacturing, but the industry's local impact was limited. The ironworks were largely run by enslaved labor and owned by men living in Spartanburg village. Most people in the area were famers.

Like all of South Carolina, Cherokee and Limestone Springs were slave societies, but the slave population was relatively small, perhaps a quarter of the population. The typical enslaver was not a wealthy planter with a large workforce but rather a small farmer who enslaved a single family. No more than twenty residents had gained planter status by enslaving a large workforce. The largest enslaver was D. B. Ross, a farmer in Limestone Springs who enslaved approximately sixty people. He was exceptional. Most of the planters only enslaved twenty-some people, putting them on the bottom rung of planter society.

D. B. Ross ran a successful cotton farm, but most farmers grew little or no cotton. The planter with the second largest enslaved workforce (forty-two people), Lee Linder, grew no cotton and instead grew food provisions and raised sheep for wool. Others grew tobacco as a cash crop. Compared to planters in other parts of the state, the planers of northeastern Spartanburg were men of modest means, but they and other landowners wielded a great deal of influence. Many small famers were landless and rented land from planters, making them economically dependent on them. 

Life for small farmers was difficult. In other parts of the Upcountry, a farmer of modest means could hope improve his lot by growing cotton, but in northeastern Spartanburg cotton grew poorly and most people were subsistence farmers, growing corn and raising hogs. They could expect a lifetime of struggling to feed their family. 

Map showing the locations of the counties of Cherokee and Limestone in 1887
Spartanburg Public Library

When the war broke out, northeastern Spartanburg was cushioned from the impact by the area's impoverishment. Wartime conditions cut off access to international markets, so cotton growers struggled both to sell cotton and to purchase food provisions.In contrast, subsistence farmers in northeastern Spartanburg could lead lives during wartime that were largely the same as their lives during peace,  especially if their families members were able to avoid military service, 

Nevertheless, the community was presented with a tremendous challenge at the end of the Civil War. A quarter of the population was freed from bondage, and it was unclear how everyone would adjust to their new status. Much of the white male population had served in the Confederate army, and a number had been killed or permanently disabled. On top of this, the state government was being reformed after a few years of military government.

In the following series of blogposts, I will try to unpack what happened in the townships of Cherokee and Limestone in the years after the Civil War.  One thing is clear. Whatever happened, it was a disaster. In 1871, six years after the end of the Civil War, the region was plunged into barbarous violence. Virtually every Black family was subject to horrific violence, most often whippings but also sexual violence and mock executions. Many white families were implicated in the violence, and large numbers of people – including some of the most prominent and influential men – fled the area to escape law enforcement. Rather than recovering from the chaos of war, northeastern Spartanburg sunk further into poverty and disorder.

Map of the townships of Limestone and Cherokee, c. 1875
From South Carolinians Library

Source

1.  "The Convicted Ku Klux." The Anderson intelligencer., February 1, 1872, p. 1.

2. "Editorial Correspondence." Yorkville enquirer. [volume], July 26, 1860, Image 2

3. "Limestone Male Academy." The Carolina Spartan. [volume], December 20, 1866, Image 4