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.