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.