Chapter 5

“The Most Enthusiastic Election Ever Held in This Country”

Atlanta’s 1885 Local Option Election

Look away, Look away,

Look away, sunny land;

To duty they are waking, oh yes, oh yes!

In Dixie’s land they’ll take the stand,

To live and die for Temperance.

The South, brave South, the South will

Stand for Temp’rance.

The South, brave South, the South will

Stand for Temp’rance.

—“Look Away, Look Away,” third stanza

Prohibition is the political expression of the temperance movement.1 Ever since the 1830s, there had always been some temperance reformers pushing for a ban on the sale of all alcoholic beverages. Some arguments were as specific as trying to help inebriates who could not help themselves, while others were more abstract, claiming that public attitudes toward liquor would, over time, be transformed by the law’s hostility toward it. But the public also dreamed of more lofty goals, such as removing liquor industry money from the political process and “advancing” the Kingdom of God. Whatever argument was employed, prohibition was part of a grand scheme to reform, purify, and Christianize not only individuals but the nation.2 Those who genuinely anticipated these results viewed contrary votes as having grave moral implications for society. The almost infinite number of variables impacting individual voting decisions meant that it was not unusual for drinkers to vote for prohibition and for teetotalers to vote against it. These variables split both black and white voters during the South’s many local option elections.

In the wake of Reconstruction, prohibition emerged as one of the most talked-about public policy issues of the 1880s. The times created a space where the ideas of temperance could rise to an unprecedented level of political prominence. During this decade, 19 states held statewide prohibition referenda.3 In the South, Texas, North Carolina, and Tennessee held statewide referenda, and hundreds of counties and municipalities across the old Confederacy either sponsored local option elections or petitioned their legislators for special prohibitory legislation. Some efforts failed, some succeeded, and some “dry” areas reverted to “wet” after a year or two. Prohibition was a “wave . . . going over the Southern country,” observed one journalist. It was almost impossible to pick up a secular or a religious newspaper without finding a reference to prohibition somewhere, and most African American publications—whether religious, like the Southern Recorder or Georgia Baptist, or secular, like the Savannah Tribune or African Expositor—openly endorsed temperance and prohibition. Virtually every white and black denomination had a “standing” temperance committee. In this brief period of African American enfranchisement before the nineties, black votes were hotly contested.4

Many black and white teetotalers supported legal prohibition in principle, but voting for it was politically tricky, at best. The Georgia Press Association probably summed up the thoughts of the majority of teetotaling American voters when it announced that it endorsed prohibition “without any intention to disturb the party lines.” A lot of prohibitionists were Republicans, and because of their party’s abolitionist heritage they argued it was “naturally” the party of temperance, but not all Republicans agreed. Prior to 1888 national party leaders refused to take a stand either way on prohibition because when state and local Republican parties took a position it usually backfired on them in subsequent elections. Teetotalers in the Democratic Party had to contend with their national party’s “personal liberty” plank, which simply maintained that drinking was a strictly personal matter and prohibition would be an unnecessary sumptuary law. Turning to a third party was also problematic. Supporting the Prohibition Party, founded in 1869, had strong negative political ramifications for both whites and blacks. Although some blacks joined the party because of its strong reform agenda and connection to the Republicans (in the 1880s two-thirds of its leaders were former Republicans), these factors were not sufficient to move most blacks from the party of Lincoln. Both the fiercely competitive two-party system in the North and West and Southern whites’ commitment to a “solid” Democratic South prevented most white temperance people from voting for the Prohibition ticket. Also, many Southern evangelicals who were otherwise attracted to the Prohibition Party could not support its endorsement of women’s suffrage. These various political alignments consigned the Prohibition Party to a decade of slowly increasing, but always insignificant, popular vote totals. Political allegiances rooted in deep-seated regional, racial, and economic attitudes and institutions forced prohibitionists to develop extra-party tactics.5

By the eighties, many reformers had come to believe that the local option election was the best way around the political obstacles to prohibition. During these referenda the only issue decided was the retail sale of liquor, thus removing party politics from the discussion. Local option elections could be held at the county or municipality level. Many prohibitionists supported local option laws because they understood, as modern political scientists do, that “political movements always require manifestations of societal support.” As Reverend Theodore Cuyler, the NTS president from 1885 to 1893, argued, “Law can rise no higher, nor can it go beyond popular sentiment.” Only a community that voted for prohibition could be expected to demand its enforcement subsequently and thus ensure its success. If prohibition won an election, that would be proof positive that the masses were “ready” for it. The social arm of the movement first had to educate the masses through moral suasion (evangelical reform nexus organizations). When a critical mass of voters supported abstinence, a local option vote could be called for. If their side won, the social arm of the movement would then continuously need to educate citizens about the need for vigilant law enforcement. This is how the components of the temperance movement were theoretically interrelated. Since the war, Georgia’s legislature had permitted counties to hold a local option vote if they requested one, but the WCTU and other activists desired a “general” local option bill that would standardize and simplify the process, and they agitated annually until they got one in September 1885. Atlanta’s presence in Fulton County made the county’s local option vote the center of national attention. Blacks, prohibitionists, and the Northern and Southern press closely followed the campaign and editorialized extensively on its course and outcome. Prohibitionists praised Atlantans for drying out the city without using party machinery, and for a brief moment many thought prohibition would spread rapidly throughout the South.6

Against this backdrop of national temperance resurgence and political jockeying, two decades of rising temperance sentiment among black Atlantans converged with rising local white temperance sentiment to produce the city’s first local option vote. Although these were two separate movements, they were both largely instigated by Northerners. Four Northerners organized Atlanta’s white temperance movement: James G. Thrower, John W. Drew, “Mother” Eliza Stewart, and Frances Willard. While Thrower came to stay, brief visits by the last three individuals between 1879 and 1881 politicized white reformers, resulting in Atlanta’s hosting the organizing convention for the state WCTU (1883) and the Georgia Prohibition Association (1884), as well as hosting state temperance conventions in 1881 and 1885. Atlantans were also briefly able to support the publication of a temperance newspaper called Temperance Watchman. Prominent Methodist and Baptist clergymen increasingly spoke out for the cause, yet a significant number of white laypeople remained uncomfortable with prohibition into the nineties. Finally, the 1880s witnessed the rise of the “New South” ideology, whose leading proponents included a unique mixture of businessmen, politicians, and clergymen. This regional “civic nationalism” embraced a variety of initiatives deemed essential to a strong, diversified Southern economy, and prohibition was one of them. Georgia’s spokesmen for this new vision of Southern life included Atlanta Constitution editor Henry Grady, famed for his “New South” speech; Methodist minister Atticus G. Haygood, president of Emory College; Methodist evangelist Sam Jones; and Alfred Colquitt, governor (1877–1882) and U.S. senator (1883–1894). Combined with two decades of black temperance growth, this white movement made Atlanta a veritable hotbed of temperance activism. By the mid-eighties Atlanta was primed for a prohibition vote.

During the campaign, the prohibition rhetoric targeting black voters reflected both the virtuous and the pragmatic themes of classic black temperance discourse. Black clergy accepted the standard evangelical prohibitionist arguments and frequently reminded voters in no uncertain terms that this was a “moral” crusade. This line of argument was particularly effective in facilitating cooperation with white clergy. But probably more effective with the average black voter were race-based arguments, which directly or indirectly promised improved race relations with the “best class” of white men. This promise was no small matter to Atlanta’s blacks. Strong interracial cooperation characterized the prohibitionists’ campaign, and this was portrayed as a harbinger of things to come. Both the cooperation and the promises were duly noted by friends and foes of prohibition.

Anti-prohibitionist rhetoric targeting the black voter highlighted the difference between (personal) temperance and (legal) prohibition, stressed the economic costs of prohibition, and offered an alternative critique of race relations. It was a strictly pragmatic approach. The most popular anti-prohibition argument maintained that ending the liquor trade would cripple Atlanta’s economy, especially the service sector jobs on which blacks depended. In addition, white anti-prohibitionists argued that they had been better friends to the black man than the drys, and that prohibition would never work, except against the poor. The complex political, economic, and social implications of outlawing the liquor traffic that voters had to consider meant that one’s personal alcohol use was not a reliable indicator of one’s voting predisposition.

The greatest legislative achievement of Georgia’s temperance movement prior to the creation of state prohibition in 1907 was the governor’s signing of the General Local Option Bill in September 1885, for which white Atlantans justly took much credit. The excitement over the law energized Atlanta’s prohibitionists, but they still had an uphill journey to convince voters to use the power of the state to end the retail liquor traffic, a proposition fundamentally different from personal abstinence and one that an American city the size of Atlanta had never tried. Nearly all black and white clergy backed prohibition, giving it a strong moral tone, but New South businessmen also defended it with purely secular arguments. The prohibitionists’ enthusiasm put the anti-prohibitionists on the defensive, giving them the more difficult task of campaigning against something. Although Northern personalities, ideas, and literature influenced the electioneering, this was an opportunity for Atlantans to debate among themselves the merits of prohibition—a family affair if you will. This was a distinctly Southern prohibition debate that could have occurred only in the 1880s.

This chapter begins with a review of Atlanta’s white temperance movement in the years leading up to the passage of the General Local Option Bill, provides a narrative of the unprecedented rhetoric and events of the election campaign, and concludes with contemporary observers’ predictions about its implications for race relations and politics. Although the 1885 and 1887 votes occurred in the postbellum years, they belonged culturally to the antebellum reform nexus because they were the logical conclusion to decades of temperance activism heavily informed by antebellum sentiments, but conditioned by their Southern context.

Atlanta’s White Temperance Movement and the Local Option Law of 1885

Georgia’s antebellum temperance movement began during the 1827–1828 “Great Georgia Revival” under the preaching of Adiel Sherwood, a Baptist preacher from upstate New York trained in pro-revival theology at Andover Seminary in Massachusetts. Sherwood personally oversaw the organization of scores of temperance societies throughout the state and organized Georgia’s first statewide temperance society in 1828, during the meeting of the Georgia Baptist Convention. While most believed conversion was the best way to ensure one’s abstinence from ardent spirits, some pushed for prohibition. In 1839 and 1853 two unsuccessful attempts were made to petition the legislature for state prohibition, but then the movement fizzled. Prohibition legislation returned in the 1870s, as the state legislature responded favorably to many requests for local dry zones from localities across the state. In some places a “three-mile” law requiring the assent of all landowners or voters within a three-mile radius of a proposed saloon was enough to create a dry county. In other places legislators mandated dry zones around churches, schools, and factories, or authorized counties to conduct local option votes. Some counties set exorbitant retail liquor license fees to create de facto prohibition. This patchwork quilt of laws had effectively “dried up” 108 of Georgia’s 136 counties by the time the 1885 General Local Option Law took effect.7

Although James G. Thrower had established Georgia’s first Good Templars’ lodge in 1866, widespread excitement for the cause did not begin until the fall of 1879. In early November a reformed drunkard and temperance speaker named John W. Drew arrived in Georgia, after having been invited by Sam Small, an Atlanta journalist.8 Originally from Concord, New Hampshire, Drew traveled in the North and Midwest giving speeches challenging moderate drinkers and drunkards to reform their ways and sign the abstinence pledge. He bragged of being able to get more than 500 people to sign the pledge in one day. Before moving on, Drew would organize pledgers into “reform clubs” for mutual support and the perpetuation of the movement. When he turned his attention to the South, he chose to visit Atlanta first because of its central location and belief that it was “representative” of the region. Drew reasoned that his treatment in Atlanta would suggest how the rest of the South would receive him.9 After soliciting and receiving the endorsement of Atlanta’s pastors, Drew held nightly temperance meetings between November 15 and December 18, successfully persuading 4,122 people to sign the pledge, many of whom were known drinkers. His meetings incorporated testimonials from local reformed drunkards and temperance workers. As was his custom, Drew organized a “reform club” before leaving town. He also brought WCTU literature and held meetings with a group of women, including Governor Colquitt’s wife, planting the seeds for the state’s first WCTU chapter. Although Drew reached all classes of whites, press reports give no hint that blacks participated in his meetings.10

Building on this enthusiasm, James G. Thrower and the Good Templars invited “Mother” Eliza Stewart to Atlanta. Stewart was a well-known veteran of the 1873–1874 Woman’s Crusade in Ohio that birthed the WCTU. In April 1880 Stewart visited Atlanta while touring the South in her capacity as chair of the national WCTU’s Department of Southern Work. In the basement of Trinity Methodist Church, Georgia’s largest and most renowned Methodist Episcopal Church (South), Stewart organized the state’s first WCTU with two hundred members and a “who’s who” list of society ladies as officers. James G. Thrower’s wife was an officer, and while Governor Colquitt’s wife declined the presidency, she hosted union meetings in the governor’s mansion. James Thrower also took Stewart to the Storrs School, where she spoke several times and organized the South’s first Colored WCTU. The white teacher Lizzie Stevens was made president, but all other officers were either students or alumni.11

One of the Atlanta WCTU’s first major projects was its 1881 petition campaign for a general local option law. The Good Templars joined the WCTU in sending out thousands of petitions across the state. To bolster their efforts, they invited the WCTU president Frances Willard to visit Atlanta during her 1881 Southern tour. Willard gave several stirring speeches before white and black audiences, including one to more than 1,200 people at DeGive’s Opera House, but the WCTU efforts were for naught, for more than 30,000 signatures failed to sway the state legislators. Subsequent unsuccessful petition drives yielded incremental tactical advances, until eventually the General Local Option Bill passed the legislature in the summer of 1885 and was signed into law in September.12

Georgia’s General Local Option Law stated that “upon application by petition, signed by one-tenth of the voters who are qualified to vote for members of the General Assembly, in any county of this State the ordinary shall order an election to be held . . . to take place within forty days after the reception of such petition, to determine whether or not . . . spirituous liquors . . . shall be sold within the limits of such designated places.” No matter what the outcome, there was a two-year waiting period before a county could hold a second referendum. Some important loopholes existed. For example, the law did not ban the sale of domestic wines or the ordering of liquor by mail, and “domestic” was undefined.

“The Most Remarkable Campaign Ever Waged in the South”: The 1885 Local Option Campaign

Despite the loopholes, Atlanta’s prohibitionists immediately capitalized on the momentum from their legislative victory.13 Four days before the governor signed the bill into law, a group of white Atlanta prohibitionists met in the Good Templars’ Hall to make preliminary plans for a petition drive. By September 19, the day after Governor Henry McDaniel signed the bill, two more meetings had been held, a petition drawn up, racially integrated ward committees established, and a campaign strategy devised. The prohibitionists’ enthusiasm spread like wildfire. The excitement was so extreme that the Atlanta Constitution wildly predicted that almost one hundred local option elections would be held in Georgia by the end of the year. Now a U.S. senator, Alfred Colquitt credited National Temperance Society literature with stirring up the popular support needed for the law to pass, and the Society itself predicted that its Georgia literature distribution would ensure a strong prohibition vote from Atlanta’s blacks. Early in the campaign Bethel’s pastor Wesley J. Gaines announced his confidence in a large dry vote from blacks. The press and black and white leaders from across the nation viewed Atlanta as the bellwether of Southern sentiment and predicted that if Atlanta went dry other Southern cities would follow. The campaign began in earnest on October 23, after the county ordinary had validated the petition signatures and set the election for November 25.14

The growth of Atlanta’s saloon industry gave prohibitionists something to complain about. Between 1880 and 1885 the number of saloons in Atlanta had grown more rapidly than the population. While in 1880 the city had 82 saloons, in June 1884 alone the city council approved over 100 licenses. By January 1, 1885, the Atlanta Constitution reported that one could “get their toddy” in nearly 150 places in Atlanta. By the beginning of 1885 there were approximately 333 people for every saloon in Atlanta, the lowest ratio the city had experienced to date. The city council increased the retail liquor license from $300 to $500 in early 1885, which caused about one-third of the saloons to close, but that was obviously not good enough for prohibitionists (see appendix 2).15

Hastily assembled “prohi” (or “dry”) and “anti” (or “wet”) organizations coordinated the campaign, which revolved around a series of rallies, extensive newspaper coverage, and exciting public displays. The prohis organized ward committees to canvass the city and county for petition signatures and to distribute literature. Each ward organized a white and colored “Young Men’s Prohibition Club.” WCTU members also secured petition signatures, and after the election date was announced they collected thousands more signatures from people pledging to vote dry. Between October 14 and November 9, prohibitionists held at least nine citywide rallies, drawing between one and six thousand people each time. Some blacks attended most, and perhaps all, of these rallies. In addition, the ward committees hosted local meetings, and many churches held their own rallies. Clergy attended planning meetings, held prominent positions in public rallies, and were frequent speakers, adding a heavy religious flavor to an already moral crusade. The prohibitionists’ campaign climaxed in mid-November with the raising of evangelist Sam Jones’s tent in downtown Atlanta for daily meetings. The most frequent tent speaker, ironically, was not Jones but journalist Sam Small, who had just given up drink a few weeks earlier at a Sam Jones revival and begun traveling with the revivalist. Small spoke eleven times to Jones’s three times. The twice-daily integrated tent meetings, which lasted almost two weeks and included local and visiting speakers, created all the excitement of a revival meeting for the prohibitionists’ cause.

The smaller “anti” campaign did not hold its first rally until October 28. They held nine mostly integrated citywide rallies, with attendance ranging from 150 to 2,000. The “Committee of Twenty-Five,” which coordinated the anti efforts, also published a pamphlet explaining its position.

Atlanta had not seen such clearly drawn battle lines since Sherman passed through town. The drys gave out blue ribbons, and the wets distributed red ribbons emblazoned with an eagle and the word “liberty.” The three papers most closely reporting the events held strong editorial positions. The Atlanta Journal openly favored prohibition, the Macon Telegraph opposed it, and because the Atlanta Constitution’s two editors (Clark Howell and Henry Grady) disagreed, it did not run editorials. Instead, the paper allowed partisans from both sides to submit news articles about their campaigns if they paid for publishing them. Such articles were labeled “communicated” and brought in thousands of dollars for the Constitution. Campaign events have been well documented elsewhere, so my goal is to examine the campaign and its implications from the perspectives of black Atlantans generally, and from that of black Atlanta’s temperance reformers specifically.16

The Prohibitionists, or “Prohis,” Organize Their Campaign

The dry campaign was integrated from the beginning. Years of exposure to missionary education and Northern temperance literature, combined with the efforts of their AME and Baptist preachers, had primed many African Americans for this moment. At the beginning, white prohibitionists invited Big Bethel’s Wesley J. Gaines to join them in their efforts to hold a local option campaign in Fulton County. Although white Atlantans understood much less than they thought they did about the black community in their midst, they were not far from the mark in discerning Gaines and his Big Bethel congregation as an influential pro-temperance voice among African Americans. Following his first meeting, Gaines conferred with several black ministers, who decided unanimously to cooperate with the white prohibitionists. The Constitution reported that, at the third organizational meeting, a “good number of the best colored men of the city” participated. The attendees at this meeting finalized the wording of the petition and organized three-person ward committees to coordinate its distribution and plan the rallies. They formally invited the Good Samaritans and Good Templars to help distribute petitions. The committee appointed blacks to four of the six ward committees: a shoemaker and member of Reverend E. R. Carter’s Friendship Baptist church, Nick Holmes; porter R. J. Henry; and ministers Jerry M. Jones and J. G. Yeiser. Gaines joined the finance committee, and he and Reverend Carter worked on the petition drive. William Pledger, former True Reformer and Good Templars’ leader, sent greetings by letter. By this time Pledger was back in Atlanta as the coeditor of the Weekly Defiance.17

Blacks had been involved in Atlanta’s politics since emancipation, but whites always made sure they remained insignificant players. The greatest achievement of Atlanta’s Republican Party had been the December 1870 election of blacks William Finch and George Graham to the city council, a position they held for one year. Although black citizens retained the right to vote throughout the seventies and eighties, whites did away with ward-based elections to prevent neighborhoods with large black populations from electing one of their own to the city council. In lieu of ward elections, there were citywide “general ticket” elections so that whites, because they were always the majority, could be assured of winning. To further complicate matters for blacks, the city’s Republican Party collapsed in the mid-seventies, and its Democratic Party ceased functioning soon after that. Whites claimed to have made peace with the existence of enfranchised freedmen, and they regularly sought black support by including them in political meetings and campaigning in their neighborhoods, but that was the extent of their “acceptance” of black voters. Jackson McHenry and other blacks ran for office, and whites successfully prevented their being elected. On one occasion, a candidate dropped out of the race and urged white voters to cast their votes for other white candidates, thereby consolidating the white vote. Although black voting was normative in postbellum Atlanta, it was consistently rendered ineffectual. This election held out the prospect that, this time, things would be different.18

Men proudly touting the New South provided much of the white leadership for the dry campaign. Urban-focused individuals, New South men sought to diversify the economy beyond its agricultural base, and they did so partly by networking with like-minded Northern investors and industrialists. Hence, William E. Dodge and Alfred Colquitt became good friends. Colquitt and his fellow Bourbon Triumvirate members John B. Gordon and Joseph E. Brown were New South men, although Gordon and Brown did not support prohibition. New South men tried to deemphasize the South’s slave past, praising instead the many benefits of emancipation. New South men generally had either a mercantile or an industrial focus, and they wanted to bring the South into line with the North’s industrial economy and value system as quickly as possible. Since Atlanta’s economy was trade-based, its New South prohibitionists were mostly commercial, professional, and governmental figures, and not industrialists as in other cities. Some of these leaders had spoken in John Drew’s crusade six years earlier. Of the 27 men initially involved in organizing the campaign, only two were industrialists: George Winship, who owned a heavy machinery company, and James W. English, an owner of the Chattahoochie Brick Company and member of the Board of Police Commissioners, among other high profile civic positions. Prominent wholesale and retail merchants, including A. D. Adair, E. P. Chamberlin, and Samuel Inman, participated, as well as journalists (C. W. Hubner of the Journal and W. A. Hemphill of the Constitution), Republican “carpetbagger” politicians (A. E. Buck and John E. Bryant), and various lawyers and realtors. The most prominent governmental officials were the mayor George Hillyer, Judge James A. Anderson of the Recorder’s (police) Court, and Judge W. A. Hammond of Fulton’s Superior Court. The most prominent white clergyman of the campaign was Dr. J. B. Hawthorne, pastor of the First Baptist church. James G. Thrower, a building contractor, had such a long history with temperance in Atlanta that following the election some observers considered his work the chief cause of the prohibition victory.19

The press reported no less than 16 prohibition meetings with black majorities. In fact, the very first public prohibition meeting of the campaign—a Fifth Ward meeting—was mostly black. Jerry M. Jones, the pastor of Macedonia Baptist Church and vice chairman of the Fifth Ward committee, hosted the meeting on October 13. Its sparse attendance of 20 was an inauspicious beginning, but several people spoke, including Judge Anderson, and most attendees signed the petition. The following day witnessed the first citywide rally, with about 1,500 in attendance in the courthouse basement, a site used repeatedly by both sides during the campaign. The highlight of this rally, which undoubtedly had some blacks in attendance, was a speech by Sam Small. The next day Bethel AME was the site of the first citywide rally for blacks. Even though it was specifically organized for blacks, about one-third of the audience was white. (Whites constituted a significant minority at most African American rallies.) Once evangelist Sam Jones set up his tent, organizers reserved four nights for blacks. The first black tent meeting (November 12) drew four thousand blacks and two thousand whites, and the platform was filled with an impressive biracial display of leaders. Over a dozen black pastors and 30 other black leaders sat opposite the mayor and several white prohibition leaders. With only one or two exceptions, Atlanta’s black pastors supported prohibition, and each church formed prohibition clubs to persuade others to vote dry and build enthusiasm for the cause. In addition to tent meetings for blacks, Bethel AME, Friendship Baptist, Mount Pleasant Baptist, Mt. Zion Baptist, New Hope Presbyterian, Macedonia Baptist, and St. Philips AME were among the black churches hosting special meetings. The students from the missionary schools joined in with much enthusiasm. Atlanta and Clark Universities and Spelman Seminary also held meetings, and their students provided music for the tent rallies. Spelman’s girls held daily prayer meetings for the prohibition cause.20

Fig. 18—Spelman High School Class of 1888. Most of these students were likely involved in Atlanta’s 1885 or 1887 local option campaigns. Spelman Archives

Atlanta’s women were also deeply involved in the prohibition campaign. This was the one time that white WCTU members acknowledged and cooperated with their African American sisters, as colored chapters were never welcomed in Georgia’s white state WCTU conventions. Local white WCTU leaders invited Charlestonian Sallie Chapin to return to Atlanta to help organize black women, and her efforts yielded Atlanta’s East Side Colored WCTU. Chapin, the most influential Southern WCTU worker of the 1880s, was Mother Stewart’s successor as chair of the WCTU’s Department of Southern Work and president of the South Carolina WCTU. Chapin gave speeches at Allen Temple, First Congregational, Bethel AME, and Clark University. Unfortunately her Atlanta speeches were not recorded, but if her reports to the national WCTU regarding her other work with blacks are any clue, she came across in the paternalistic manner one would expect from a member of a former slave-holding family, such as she was. Chapin claimed black audiences received her enthusiastically, and other WCTU leaders praised her for her ability to “influence” the freed people.21 The East Side Colored WCTU joined with the Young WCTU of Atlanta University and the other schools to conduct door-to-door literature distribution and various get-out-the-vote activities.

Fig. 19—Clark College Class of 1889. Most of these students were likely involved in Atlanta’s 1885 or 1887 local option campaigns. Clark College Photographs, Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library

Fig. 20—Jackson McHenry, an aspiring Republican politician who sometimes campaigned for prohibition. From The Black Side, Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center

Of course black clergy addressed black voters during the campaign, but so too did white Republican leaders John E. Bryant and Colonel A. E. Buck, and New South men like Samuel Inman. Other local speakers included Sam Small; H. I. Kimball, Northern-born builder of Atlanta’s premier Kimball Hotel; and the African American Jackson McHenry, who migrated to Atlanta following the war, held various jobs as a blacksmith, porter, and janitor, and served as a delegate to several district and state Republican Party conventions. As with other prohibition contests of the eighties, both sides invited speakers from other cities and states to aid their cause. Three Atlanta University graduates returned to stir up voters: the editor of Augusta’s Weekly Sentinel Richard R. Wright, Reverend George V. Clark from Athens, and Edward A. Johnson from North Carolina. From Philadelphia came the AME bishop Jabez P. Campbell and Reverend Benjamin T. Tanner, by this time editor of the AME Church Review.

Prohibition Campaign Rhetoric Targeting Black Voters

The standard prohibitionist argument included the following elements: Saloons existed to sell liquor, which was not a food product, and had only harmful physical and social effects. Since saloon owners wanted to sell all they could, it was in their best interest to violate laws forbidding the sale of liquor on Sundays and to minors and known drunkards. Prohibitionists seized every opportunity to expose violations of these laws. Such behavior indicated a dangerously arrogant attitude, they argued, as did the efforts of saloon owners to influence legislation. Perhaps more persuasively, however, they marshaled statements and statistics from law enforcement officials that demonstrated that liquor was somehow related to a large majority of crimes, although the actual percentage varied according to the source. They would then wax eloquent with extravagant projections about the savings to city government because the police court would need to sit less often and jail expenses would decrease. They could always dig up statistics from some dry community that supported their argument. (This point—that “prohibition prohibits”—was also a direct rebuttal to the anti argument that “prohibition does not prohibit.”) In one of their most emotional appeals, prohibitionists lamented the victimized women and children who lacked proper clothing, shelter, or food because the man of the house squandered his income on liquor. This argument was as old as the temperance movement itself. Finally, the fact that these alcohol-related problems still existed after years of moral suasion and high license was the ultimate “proof” that prohibition was the only recourse left. In the name of self-preservation, society had the right to destroy the otherwise legitimate trade in alcoholic beverages. It was a small step for clergy then to equate saloons, liquor, and the liquor traffic with “evil” or “forces of darkness,” which immediately implied that no self-respecting Christian could possibly oppose prohibition. Portraying prohibition as part of a cosmic struggle between good and evil was as old as the movement itself. Many people agreed with Reverend E. R. Carter when he called the prohibition campaign “the battle of the Lord and of the people” against evil.22 But prohibitionists continued to embrace moral suasion, as the Young Men’s Prohibition Club banner slogan revealed: “Persuasion for the tempted, but law for the tempter.” Finally, as in any heated political contest, this one had its fair share of ad hominem attacks. Opponents of prohibition were regularly accused of being “lovers” of every form of evil, from greed and drunkenness to the Devil himself.

Although all these arguments reached black voters, prohis designed another set of arguments specifically for black consumption. According to press reports, three themes came up repeatedly. One theme was racial uplift through the projected reduction in crime because of reduced numbers of black drunkards. This type of argument had long been used by black temperance workers locally and in the North. Early in the campaign Jackson McHenry pointed out that as a result of blacks drinking in saloons they were doubly taxed for the city’s streets. The city taxed the liquor blacks bought in saloons, he argued, and then drunken blacks were convicted of crimes and given fines they could not afford. As a result they served time on the gang, where they physically built the roads their taxes had just paid for. Bishop Henry M. Turner spoke as though he was providing a modern media sound bite. He proclaimed that those who voted with the wets were voting for “degradation, ruin, chain gangs, lunacy and everything low and degrading.” Sam Small put it this way: “The pathway to the penitentiary leads through the bar-room. [applause] Back of the bar-room stands the sheriff, back of the sheriff the jail, back of that the coal mines. [applause].” Black audiences understood this sequence all too well. They knew liquor was not the sole explanation for most convicts being black, but they also could not deny a connection. By supporting prohibition, many blacks believed they were doing what was within their power to elevate the race, stem the flow of their young men into the quasi-slavery of the convict lease system, and improve the image of the race before white society.23

A second theme aimed at black audiences was that of improved race relations. Like others, Bishop Henry M. Turner believed properly enforced prohibition would greatly reduce drunkenness, and he argued that since whites controlled the levers of power, anything that would keep both races sober and clearheaded would primarily benefit the powerless blacks. But the one who stressed race relations the most was John Emory Bryant. The son of a Methodist minister from Maine, Bryant was a product of the antebellum reform nexus. He had been a teacher before the war and embraced a variety of reforms, including temperance and abolitionism, as was common in New England in the later antebellum years. An early activist in the Republican Party, he was attracted to it for its reform emphasis and volunteered to fight when the war began. He served in the Eighth Maine Infantry Regiment on the South Carolina Sea Islands, where he was known to lecture fellow soldiers on the evils of liquor. Following the war he moved to Atlanta and became a leader in Georgia’s Republican Party, working with such Reconstruction-era black politicians as Henry M. Turner. As recently as 1879, hoping to capitalize on temperance’s resurgence as a political issue, Bryant had claimed his party was “naturally” the party of temperance. In the 1885 campaign, however, he announced that prohibition was neither a Republican nor a Democratic issue but a moral one that, more important, if supported by blacks would improve their relationship with the “better class” of whites. “You have an opportunity,” he announced, “as you have never had before to gain their sympathy, their confidence and co-operation.” Bryant presented this argument at least three times, and at least four other white speakers reinforced it in various ways. But this was not just white rhetoric. On the biracial platform of the first tent meeting for blacks, Reverend Carter’s declaration that “Your friends are men like Dr. Hawthorne and Mr. Anderson, who, forgetting all self-interest, are battling in this cause for God and the right and for you,” received cheers from the crowd. In that heady atmosphere Carter overzealously announced that if prohibition caused an economic downturn as its detractors warned, Atlanta’s businessmen would make sure blacks did not suffer. The eagerness and consistency with which white prohis collaborated with blacks during the campaign made this argument seem all the more plausible but only set blacks up for big disappointments later.24

Although racial uplift and improved race relations were of great importance to blacks, the issue that speakers before black audiences addressed more than any other was more of a warning than an argument. Because early in the campaign word spread that the antis could buy enough black votes to win the election, prohibitionists repeatedly pleaded with blacks not to sell their votes.25 Buying votes with free-flowing whiskey was a time-honored white tradition in the antebellum South, and although it continued sporadically in Atlanta into the late nineteenth century, after emancipation whiskey became increasingly associated with black voters. Historically the candidate who “treated” voters most liberally received the most votes. In 1880, when the state Republican Party split along race lines, whites accused blacks of not being loyal enough to the party. They claimed that blacks sold their votes to Democratic candidates for 50 cents or a pint of whiskey. Although trading votes for whiskey declined, the public nature of voting subjected individuals to the influences of peer pressure and intrusive authority figures. Candidates printed their own ballots that voters carried to the polls and cast in full view of poll watchers from the various campaigns. During the local option vote, citizens received their ballots before election day from the side they planned to support. Prohibitionists feared that on election day—or election eve—the antis would corral large numbers of black voters into one place, fill them with whiskey, and lead them to the polls in a group, making the most of peer pressure and the public spectacle. In fact, on election eve, both sides feted black voters, although the drys obviously did not use intoxicating beverages.26

But liquor was not the only thing used to buy votes, and the poverty of most blacks increased their vulnerability to outright cash offers. Because vote buying was a known characteristic of American politics, and because the wets bragged about the size of their treasure chest, it is likely they made some cash payments, but they received at least two significant public rebuffs. The well-known black building contractor Alexander Hamilton provided one rejection. A white saloon owner and a building contractor jointly offered Hamilton $500 to stump for the anti side. Taking great offense, Hamilton refused the offer, and the white men immediately severed all business relations with him. The mailman James Parker was stumping for the antis until the first prohi tent meeting for blacks. He entered the meeting late, and his presence elicited such cheers from the crowd that the speaker had to pause for several minutes. Invited to sit on the platform, Parker announced that he was switching to the prohibition side. Speaking of his work for the wets Parker said, “I don’t know, but I suppose that the fellows who went with me to those meetings had the money of the liquor men in their pockets. I know I did.” The idea of being directly paid for one’s vote gained wide circulation and had a certain practical appeal to some blacks, for obvious reasons. The press quoted one blue-ribbon-wearing member of Wesley Gaines’s church, who admitted, “I belong to the society of six hundred who wear it, but I haven’t made my arrangements for wood and coal for the winter yet and am liable to change and all the others are about in the same boat.” He evidently held out hope for casting a financially profitable vote. Whether or not Atlanta had saloons was relatively unimportant to a man who could not afford to heat his house for the winter.27

No less than seven speakers of both races pleaded with blacks not to sell their votes. Some, like Wesley Gaines, simply tried to speak positively. During the first rally for blacks, which was held in his church, he announced, “I know of one society of colored people in this city, with a membership of over six hundred who are entitled to vote, and they will march solidly to the polls on election and cast their ballots for prohibition.” Samuel M. Inman, while speaking at Atlanta University, used the positive approach and simultaneously praised the school by declaring his confidence that education and Christian training had done so much for blacks that far fewer of them would sell their votes than some were predicting. On the other hand, Dr. J. B. Hawthorne proposed an aggressive stand against the wets by demanding his listeners report anyone who offered to buy their votes. Hawthorne promised to personally give any such solicitor an “immortality of infamy.” It was an African American minister, J. G. Yeiser, however, who produced the harshest language and starkest metaphor on the matter. He announced, “The man who would buy a vote ought to be put in the penitentiary and the man who would sell his vote ought to be disfranchised. . . . Soldiers never sold their rifles and ammunition. The ballot is the people’s weapon of defense.”28

The most culturally powerful attacks on vote selling were couched in appeals to the voters’ sense of “manhood.” At a black rally on November 5, Bishop Turner told his listeners that if they wanted to vote wet they should at least do it like a man and not be paid for their vote. Two weeks later, in Sam Jones’s tent, E. R. Carter and Richard R. Wright both admonished their listeners along the same lines. The news reporter summarized Wright as having said it was time for “all honest colored men to stand up and assert their manhood, to rise above all bribes and low motives and to vote as their consciences told them.” Carter followed by challenging blacks to “stand up like men” and prove that charges of black vote selling were a “false aspersion.” He mocked black antis by saying every time he saw one wearing the red ribbon he started listening for the auctioneer’s bell. At the same meeting, Wilbur P. Thirkield, dean of Clark University’s Gammon School of Theology, reminded blacks that it was “useless to aspire to a higher social or political station unless they cultivated the virtues of manly character.”29

These appeals played to the century-old assertions that virtue was essential to true independence, and that independence was a central component of black manhood. Embedded within the individual’s vote for prohibition was a manly commitment to the independence of the community. Dry speakers assumed that the conscience of most black men would tell them to vote for prohibition, but they also knew that the exigencies of their economic deprivation and desperation could pull them the other way. Arguing that accepting a bribe was tantamount to surrendering one’s manhood appealed to a powerful and deeply rooted sentiment. A couple of years before the election, the Weekly Defiance ran an editorial titled “Manhood,” which strongly criticized sycophantic blacks in government patronage jobs who did not speak out in defense of abused members of their race. “If colored men appointed to positions would . . . not be the boot-lick of their superiors or employers, they would prove a surer promoter of the race.” True African American manhood, then, was as much about the community’s advancement as it was about the individual. On election eve, Bishop Turner reminded voters that if they voted dry they would be proclaiming the dignity of all black people before the entire country, and that could only have positive results for the race. The fact that such appeals were so frequently used suggests the extent to which black men desired to assert their virtue and independence in opposition to white society’s continuous painful demeaning of their manhood. In a number of ways, then, despite an emphasis on the moral nature of the vote, prohibitionist arguments targeting African Americans turned on issues empowering the race and improving race relations. Prohibition campaign rhetoric clearly reflected the dual heritage of the black temperance movement.30

Organizing the Wet, or “Anti,” Campaign

The goal of the anti-prohibitionists was to defend the status quo of Atlanta’s liquor regulations, but this presented a public image challenge for them. By 1885 Southern temperance reformers had achieved some success in setting the terms of the public debate on alcohol consumption. Claiming to be a “temperance man” (whether or not one meant total abstinence) was increasingly deemed socially respectable, politically desirable, and all but religiously required. Supporters of both personal abstinence and legal prohibition presented their values as the most forward-looking, the most progressive; they sought to improve, even purify, society. They were progressives before the “Progressive era” began. It appeared, then, as though the antis were working against reform, against progress.

To address this image problem, antis frequently announced that they actually were abstainers themselves and then honestly reasoned with voters about the difference between being for abstinence and being for prohibition. Antis charged prohibitionists with unfairly conflating only a vote for prohibition with opposition to intemperance, and only opposition to prohibition with intemperance. For the sake of their image, antis also publicly distanced themselves from saloon owners. Speakers employed all of these tactics at the first wet rally. The person who opened the meeting announced it was “not a liquor men’s meeting,” and the first part of the resolution passed that night declared, “It is the sense of this meeting that all excesses and intemperance, as well in passing laws as in drinking should be avoided.” When the Committee of Twenty-Five published its pamphlet, they wanted to make it clear they had no personal interest in making or selling liquor. Their pamphlet cover read, “This Pamphlet is issued by the Committee of Twenty-Five appointed at the Mass Meeting of Citizens who are Not Interested in the Manufacture or Sale of Liquors.”31

The anti-prohibition campaign held only a third as many meetings as the prohibitionists and attracted fewer people, but the closeness of the vote demonstrated the wets’ disproportionately strong appeal. Formal anti-prohibition rallies began two weeks to the day after the first prohibition rally. The first anti rally occurred on October 28 and attracted about one thousand people, but it is not clear whether blacks attended. The next night, however, a group of black employees of the Kimball House, the Kimball House Employees Committee,32 called a general meeting, and about four hundred showed up. The Kimball House was Atlanta’s hotel of choice for visiting businessmen and dignitaries. The committee issued a resolution condemning, as “citizens of Fulton County . . . the movement of a set of fanatics that will result in the ruin of the prosperous and growing city of Atlanta.” They asked citizens to vote to prevent the “consummation of sumptuary legislation to the end that all men may as prescribed by the Bible be their own free moral agents, eating and drinking what they please and doing as they chose, so long as they do not injure the rest of mankind.” Antebellum reform nexus language had become sufficiently culturally normative and malleable to be drafted into both sides of the fight over alcohol. At their second rally these black antis issued a resolution especially inviting the “co-operation of our colored friends who are employed in the various bars and restaurants . . . and who would, in the event of the closing of such places, be at once deprived of their daily earnings.” Blacks organized three more rallies, on November 5, 13, and 20.33

Fig. 21—Honorable Jefferson Franklin Long, an anti-prohibitionist speaker from Macon. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division [LC-DIG-cwpbh-00556]

Black speakers at anti rallies included both well-known and some not-so-well-known individuals. The officers of the Kimball House Employees Committee were W. E. Thompson and N. C. Robinson, of whom little is known. Other black leaders included dentist Roderick Dhu Badger, the wealthiest black man in Atlanta; lunchroom owner and barber Moses Bently; Weekly Defiance editor Alonzo W. Burnett; and Baptist pastor Alexander S. Jones. Prior to his conversion on November 13, the mailman James Parker was an important black anti speaker. Another important speaker was from Macon, the former slave and former U.S. congressman Jefferson Franklin Long, a merchant-tailor. After 17 years, Long had become disillusioned with party politics and left public life in 1884, but he returned briefly to fight prohibition in Atlanta. Black Atlantans knew Long because of his association with local political leaders such as Henry M. Turner, William Pledger, Alfred Colquitt, and Dr. William H. Felton, a Cartersville-area U.S. and Georgia representative.34

Fig. 22—Dr. Roderick Dhu Badger, an anti-prohibitionist. DeKalb History Center

Black anti-prohibitionists allied their efforts with “respectable” white leaders as much as black prohibitionists did. Among the white anti spokesmen were current and past government officials (former mayor John B. Goodwin and former Republican governor Rufus Bullock35); Julius L. Brown, son of U.S. senator and former governor Joseph Brown; Atlanta Constitution editor Clark Howell; and various lawyers and merchants.36

Surprisingly, the best-known and most frequent black anti-prohibitionist speaker turned out to be William A. Pledger, who had led the state’s True Reformers temperance fraternity in the mid-seventies and had since become a newspaper editor and leader in Georgia’s Republican Party. Touted as the “foremost colored man of the state,” Pledger had, as recently as February, effectively worked with George V. Clark and others to turn out the black vote for prohibition in Athens, Georgia (Clarke County), but a personally unfortunate turn of events seems to have caused him to side with the wets out of spite. By the spring of 1885 Pledger was a coeditor with A. W. Burnett of Atlanta’s Weekly Defiance, known for its non-accommodationist stance on race relations. That same spring, H. A. Rucker, a black man who later became Atlanta’s Internal Revenue Collector, bought a bakery from a white man. Rucker’s white landlord evicted him after a month, forcing him to sell his business at a loss. In June, Pledger wrote an editorial naming the landlord, George W. Adair, and advising blacks not to rent from him, recommending instead two African American landowners by name. Adair brought a libel suit against Pledger, who was convicted on October 27 and given a $200 fine or eight months on the gang. He paid the fine. George Adair happened to be a prohibitionist leader. Rumor had it that Reverend E. R. Carter somehow played a role in Pledger’s conviction. Pledger was such a popular personality in Black Atlanta that during his trial the courtroom could not contain all the spectators. Although Pledger had sent a friendly letter to the September 20 prohibition campaign planning meeting, at the end of October he attended the first black wet meeting and spoke publicly against prohibition. The Macon Telegraph wondered if Pledger’s support might be enough to give wets the edge among blacks. Ironically, the leading black prohibitionist of Clarke County’s February 1885 prohibition campaign had become the leading black anti-prohibitionist of Fulton County’s November 1885 campaign!37

Public opinion forced Pledger to justify his change of heart. He initially claimed that, in Athens, inebriated white college boys at the University of Georgia threatened black girls but since this was not a problem in Atlanta prohibition was not necessary. Pledger then produced letters from individuals in Athens who had supported prohibition there but now said it was ineffective. Finally, he asserted that prohibition would never truly prohibit in Atlanta but that it would hurt Atlanta’s economy. On at least three occasions Pledger’s public comments were laced with personal attacks against Reverend E. R. Carter, portraying him as a morally hypocritical lackey of white prohibitionists and perhaps inadvertently revealing his real reason for switching sides. Pledger’s closing salvo was an open letter to blacks published in the Atlanta Constitution the day before the election.38

Anti-Prohibition Campaign Rhetoric Targeting Black Voters

The anti-prohibitionist rhetorical strategy, like that of a defense lawyer, sought to establish reasonable doubt about the prosecution’s argument in the minds of the jury (voters). Accusations of dishonesty underlay most of their arguments against the drys. The charge worked equally well before white and black audiences. The foremost argument was that prohibition would be economically devastating for Atlanta. Unemployment, vacant properties, and declining rents, property values, and tax and license revenues were the sure fruits of prohibition, they argued, and prohibitionists refused to say how they would address these problems. This even led some to speculate publicly that the wealthier prohibitionists were conspiring to depress property values so they could buy up land, knowing that one day saloons would return and property values rise again. Antis charged that the drys’ moral sensibilities caused them to be reckless with the city’s economic health, but worse still, they were dishonest while hypocritically claiming the high moral ground. Such an argument resonated in a commerce-driven city like Atlanta.

Speakers trotted out other arguments too. They frequently claimed that prohibition could never really prohibit in a city the size of Atlanta (about fifty thousand). Speakers marshaled statistics and quotations from citizens and officials of other cities, such as Springfield, Massachusetts, which had tried prohibition and abandoned it, to argue that it only worked in rural communities and small towns. Attacking prohibition leaders was also a major element of anti arguments. Because prohi leaders presented the campaign as a struggle of good versus evil, and God versus Satan, their every act and association suggesting any degree of compromise received immediate scrutiny, exposure, and condemnation, not unlike what occurs among politicians today. Anti-prohibitionists accused drys of being dishonest about the local option law by talking as if it would only end the sale of whiskey. They pointed out that the law banned the sale of malted alcoholic beverages and prohibited physicians from prescribing drinks such as brandy. Calling prohibitionists and their arguments “fanatical,” the wets identified their own position as the “truly temperate” one. Whatever arguments were used, however, they always concluded with a line declaring the speaker’s goal of only wanting what was best for Atlanta and its people.39

The most popular anti argument, however, was also the one most frequently cited before black audiences, namely, that prohibition was bad for the economy, with the corollary that blacks would be hurt the most. The primary occupational niche of blacks was the service sector—the food, beverage, and hospitality industries. Also, a disproportionately large percentage of all draymen and hackmen were black. “The prosperity of the city means plenty of work for the colored people,” asserted James Parker, “and prohibition would drive prosperity from its door.” Atlanta’s largest economic sector—trade and transportation—was absolutely critical to the black economy.40 Since the masses of blacks were beginning to realize the obstacles to their upward economic mobility, they were increasingly desperate to preserve at least their existing employment status. The more people bought and sold, moved around, and transported goods, the more employment opportunities blacks could anticipate. Suggesting that unemployment would hit blacks the hardest, Jefferson Long predicted that 1,500 men would be “without a dollar to support their families.” In William Pledger’s open letter he specifically mentioned jobs vitally important to blacks: “Men will lose employment: hackmen, draymen, hotel waiters, clerks, and others employed, because of the travel induced by the sale of liquors here failing to longer stop here.” Over the course of the campaign at least six different speakers warned blacks of the impending economic decline if the drys won. Combined with the fact that most blacks were unskilled workers, institutionalized white racism made unemployment and underemployment unrelenting facts of life in Black Atlanta. The economic argument played well to blacks afraid of losing the only jobs they were permitted to work—those at the bottom of the occupational ladder. The argument also appealed to the voters’ sense of independence and manhood, for few things undermine men’s self-confidence, dignity, and independence like removing their ability to earn their living from their own labor. The freed people’s felt need for meaningful independence was broad and deep enough to be used by both sides of the liquor debate.41

If the predictions of economic decline proved true, most job loss probably would have occurred outside of the saloon industry, and the 1,500 figure was most likely an exaggeration. According to the 1880 Atlanta City Directory only 177 people were employed in retail liquor sales, 10 percent of whom were black. Only 76 people, including 14 blacks, were directly employed by saloons. But the industry grew rapidly after 1880. Between 1880 and 1884 the number of retail liquor licenses granted annually more than doubled, from over 60 to well over 100, so that by early 1885 the city had 150 licensed retail liquor establishments. In the spring of 1885 the city council increased the license fee from $300 to $500, and this reduced the number of saloons to 95. By the time of the November vote no more than a few hundred people were directly employed by saloons, but the rapid growth during the preceding years probably made the industry seem larger than it was.42

Prohibition was not likely to injure black entrepreneurship in the liquor industry. Only occasionally did blacks hold retail liquor licenses. Usually they were unskilled employees, like George V. Clark had been. Not only did blacks find it difficult to acquire the start-up capital, but the city council was reluctant to approve their licenses. E. R. Carter claimed that no black man in Atlanta owned a saloon “without a white man at his back,” which was probably true. Blacks undoubtedly needed white business partners for both finances and character references. In the ten years leading up to the local option vote, only six blacks owned a saloon (Robert Stephens, William Cummings, Robert Stevenson, William Gaines, Thomas Stafford, and Jackson M. Ryan), and at the time of the vote probably only Robert Stevenson and Jackson Ryan remained owners. Although blacks did not experience much upward occupational mobility, they did experience plenty of occupational mobility, as Thomas Stafford’s life illustrates. A longtime Atlanta resident, Stafford worked as a porter in the state capitol and for a railroad delivery company before purchasing a billiards hall. He had saved up enough money to purchase a saloon by 1881 but was out of business the next year and became a common laborer. In 1883 Stafford went into partnership with a white grocer and opened the “Marion and Stafford” saloon. After disappearing from the directory for a couple of years, Stafford shows up again, as a saloon employee, in 1888. Stafford and other black saloon owners were not stable, successful entrepreneurs and likely were not significant employers. Prohibition, therefore, was more likely to hurt blacks employed in the transportation and hospitality-related sectors because of the presumption that fewer business and pleasure travelers would visit Atlanta.43

The wets’ second-most-frequent argument aimed at black voters was to challenge the suspiciously sudden and cozy interracial dynamics of the prohibitionists’ campaign. Black-white relations in the prohibitionist camp were so close that they blurred traditional social distinctions and raised eyebrows everywhere. At least five black speakers addressed this issue. Some challenged the assumption that white prohibitionists were better friends of blacks than white antis. Jeff Long and Moses Bently claimed that, because black schools received a “large” part of their money from liquor dealers, it would be not only ungrateful to vote against them but actually harmful to one of the most important institutions of racial uplift.44 Wets also exposed the hypocrisy of the apparent racial harmony and predicted its quick collapse. The Reverend Alexander Jones spoke of a prominent prohibitionist who until a week ago had addressed him as “Hello boy!” Now when this gentleman met him it was “How are you today, Brother Jones?”

The antis played on the legitimate fears and distrust blacks harbored toward whites. Robert Hayden, one of the Macon Telegraph’s Atlanta correspondents, became actively involved in the anti campaign. At one meeting he prophesied of the prohibitionists that “when the election is over they will meet in their churches and gather pennies to send to Africa and China, and leave the negro just as ragged as before.” Hayden continued with the following story to expose the prohibitionists’ chronic racism:

I met a negro the other day and asked him to have a drink. He said he felt bad, as he had had a bad dream.

“What did you dream” I inquired.

“I dreamed I died and went to hell.”

“Did you see any prohibitionists down there?”

“Yes, sir; lots of them.”

“What were the prohibitionists doing?”

“Most every one of them had hold of a negro.”

“What were they doing with the negroes?”

“They were holding them between themselves and the fire.”45

Playing to the same fears, Moses Bently applied the title of an old song to the dangers he foresaw in the black-white prohibitionist alliance: “There’s a snake in the hole and that snake won’t bite you till next fall. It will come out then if we are defeated. There used to be an old song: ‘Run, nigger, run,’ and if prohibition carries you all can prepare to hear that song again. The prohibitionist will catch you; you will be his meat—sweet, juicy meat too.”46

These speakers were clearly striking a chord in the black community. Twenty years of concerted efforts to deny the freed people the full extent of their freedoms had undoubtedly taken a toll on their ability to trust local whites. Certainly some thought that whites were too consistently opposed to black progress for prohibition not to be just one more scheme designed to hurt them. Bently further expressed this cynicism when he compared voting for the dry ticket to voting for white Republicans who did not keep patronage promises: “The nigger did the voting and the white men got the money and the offices.”47 He could easily imagine that when nomination and election time rolled around in 1886 prohibitionists would conveniently forget any “alliance” they ever had with blacks. Black antis believed the prohis’ interracialism was developing a hubris in black prohibitionist leaders and inspiring a false hope in rank-and-file voters, setting up both for a big disappointment, so they cautioned voters not to believe what they were seeing or hearing. This kind of warning about race relations was undoubtedly persuasive to many, and it eventually proved to be completely accurate.

Another popular approach taken by black wets was to argue that under prohibition those who had money would still be able to get all the liquor they wanted, and only blacks and the poor would lose that freedom. Alexander Jones, James Parker, and Pledger all made this argument, which appealed to the listener’s sense of obvious class inequities.48

Closely related to the class argument was the idea that prohibition limited personal liberty and was therefore a step backward from the independence of emancipation. “Liberty,” the motto of the anti campaign, was written across their red ribbons and was emblazoned on the banners and sashes used on election day. The press more frequently reported prohis responding to this argument than it did antis using this argument with blacks. It probably was used more before black audiences than press reports indicate. Dentist Roderick Badger was one of the speakers who embraced the personal liberty argument.49

“The Greatest Victory for the Cause of Temperance Ever Won in America”: The Campaign Climaxes

“Literally a craze,” was how the Atlanta Constitution described the disposition of Atlantans on the eve of the election.50 The weeks of debate were anything but dispassionate. “Men of all classes are almost wild on this question,” commented one newspaper, while another editor perceived, “bad blood is brewing.” Atlantans were so caught up in the campaign meetings that even theater attendance dropped to a level where DeGives Opera House operated at a loss for four weeks. On Monday, two days before the election, rival groups of blacks debated prohibition so fiercely that the police dispersed them to prevent a fight.51 The decision about how to vote could emerge from very personal situations and hardly need show deep reflection, as Pledger’s case illustrated, but James Parker’s switch to the dry side, recounted earlier, was just as personal. While stumping for the wets early in the campaign, Parker had accused black ministers of being “sugared” by white prohibitionists. Reverend W. H. Tillman and other dry acquaintances of Parker’s began publicly attacking his character; but the clincher came when Parker’s girlfriend told him she would break up with him if he voted wet. When Parker related the story of his girlfriend’s ultimatum as he publicly switched sides in Jones’s tent, Reverend Yeiser spontaneously called for cheers for the girl, and they were enthusiastically given.52 The ad hominem attacks used by both sides created predictable backlashes. Some activists argued with each other through open letters published in the press, and the press itself was openly partisan, especially the Macon Telegraph and the Atlanta Journal. However, the absence of racist attacks was also a hallmark of the campaign. I could locate only one example, which was when the Telegraph said AME Bishop Jabez P. Campbell “looks like a monkey and talks like an ass.” There were efforts to sabotage the opposing campaign. For example, an anti group posing as a prohi group asked, and received, permission to meet at Ebenezer Baptist church.53 When they printed their flyers they called it an anti meeting. To keep the people out of the church the pastor had to call for police protection.54

This craze came to a head on election eve, Tuesday, November 24, as scores of reporters and spectators descended on Atlanta. People began wagering on the election results. At the Kimball House the odds were three to one in favor of the wets. The headquarters of each camp swarmed with people finalizing the night’s events and get-out-the-vote efforts. Because of expected disturbances at the polls, the entire police force was put on duty.55

The wets and drys produced dramatic spectacles to rally their troops. From seven till ten, antis paraded around town by torchlight, with several bands, and joined spectators in the “wildest enthusiasm.” Perhaps as many as three thousand antis marched, carrying banners depicting empty stores, workers leaving the city, and a mother with a dying child and a doctor unable to administer brandy. The Atlanta Constitution claimed, “No such procession has ever been seen in Atlanta as this one.” After their parade, the antis marched off to the West Point Railroad depot to enjoy a barbecue with plenty of free food and drinks. They danced into the wee hours of the morning.56

Meanwhile, more than 5,000 mostly black prohibitionists gathered for one last tent rally to hear speeches from Bishop Henry M. Turner, John E. Bryant, and Wesley Gaines. More than 1,200 members of the various colored prohibitionist clubs, each with its own band and banners, paraded through the streets to the cheers of onlookers on their way to the tent. Their banners proclaimed: “No more coal mines” and “We can’t be bought.” Before a highly charged crowd Turner reminded blacks one last time that more was at stake for them in this election than for whites. “The negroes are on trial before the country to see whether they will vote as honest, sober men or whether they can be purchased with money and mean liquor [cheers and cries of ‘No! No!’].” Reflecting the nascent class divisions within Black Atlanta, Turner derided the red badge wearers as lower-class, saying he had not seen even half a dozen of them “decently dressed. If I was a liquor man in Atlanta and could not get up a better crowd than that I would quit [cheers].” Drawing on the clout of the Great Emancipator himself, Turner appealed to blacks to vote so that “if Abraham Lincoln looked down from heaven he would not be ashamed of the people whom he set free [great cheering].”

Following their rally, black prohis went to their various churches to eat, listen to music, and pray till morning. The antis tried one last time to sabotage dry efforts by spreading a rumor that the opossums being provided by a black vendor to Friendship Baptist Church were really cats. The rumor caused such a stir that people not only refused to eat the meat but threatened to vote wet, the ultimate threat. The vendor was eventually able to persuade diners that it really was opossum meat. Some people stayed in their church all night while others went home to sleep. Many visited fellow members’ homes to bring them to church for the evening and to make sure they did not go to the depot. The first prohibitionist historian of the election praised the brilliance of this move and revealed his prejudices at the same time by noting that “when a fellow, below the average in intelligence, got into the right crowd in his own church, surrounded by his brethren, and amidst their prayers and songs, and speeches, he was not apt to go out, when he had been provided with a good warm, substantial supper; he generally accepted the invitation to spend the night in the church.” Undoubtedly the celebratory atmosphere did much to turn out the vote.57

On the morning of the election the various ward clubs rounded up their members and marched to the polls. Some churches marched as a group. Nearly all voters arrived with their blue or red ribbon firmly affixed, and those who arrived in groups appeared with banners, uniformed leaders, and rousing marching bands. Most voters cast their ballots according to the badge they wore, but some switched. The largest voting precinct, South Atlanta, early in the day witnessed the most colorful demonstrations. The antis left the depot 322 strong, marching behind a 20-piece band, with Moses Bently leading the way. They marched in companies, with each “officer” wearing epaulets and red sashes inscribed with “Liberty.” Their grand procession arrived at the polls 15 minutes before they opened and before the time the leaders of the respective camps had agreed to go to the polls. The reason the antis came so early was that all night long, church members had been going to the depot and persuading men to come to church and vote with them, causing wet leaders to assume they had already lost about half their crowd. Moments after the wets arrived, the 52 members of the colored Third Ward Prohibition Club marched to the polls behind a band brought in from Macon just for the occasion. They were soon followed by the Reverend E. R. Carter leading the 95 members of his church’s prohibition club to the polls under a large blue silk banner reading “Down with Liquor.” In the North Atlanta precinct two hundred black “Kimball House Boys” marched to the polls carrying banners and flags and shouting cheers for “liberty.” The press reports suggest that only blacks went to the polls in organized groups, but not all blacks went that way, or even with a badge. When the occasional black voter without a badge appeared, there was intense competition for his vote. Longtime teetotaler William Finch, one of the two black Reconstruction-era Atlanta councilmen and an ordained AME minister, urged one such voter to vote the “morality side.”58

Prohibition women were busy all day. Some black and white women spent the day praying together in black churches while others prepared and served lunches from donated food outside polling stations to prohibition voters. Black and white voters ate in separate facilities.59

Given the intensity of the competition, the press was pleased to report no major “incidents.” Fourteen arrests were made Tuesday night through Wednesday, including a couple of blacks arrested for selling their votes and one saloon owner for trying to buy them. Also, one person violated state law by trying to sell liquor on an election day, but these were minor events. Given all the talk of violence at the polls, challenging ballots, and anticipated logistical obstacles, the election transpired more smoothly than expected. Careful planning by city election officials, last-minute “gentlemen” agreements between leaders of the two camps, and a “general good humor” among voters helped assure an orderly election day.60

One indicator of engagement in the election was voter registration—more citizens registered than for any previous election in Atlanta’s history. More than 7,200 voters registered, compared to only 3,947 who had registered the previous year for the annual municipal elections. In addition, 1,753 people from the “country districts” of Fulton also registered (see tables 4 and 5). One reason for such a high registration was the fact that both sides eagerly paid the past due poll taxes of any black who promised to vote for their side.61 Whites from both campaigns literally escorted black voters from the tax office to the registrar’s office. Some claimed the antis were more successful with this tactic than drys, but the competition to register voters remained intense and deceitful. To reduce their costs and simultaneously undermine dry efforts, on one occasion the antis put blue badges on two hundred blacks and sent them to the prohis to pay their back taxes under false pretenses. E. R. Carter encouraged black drys to get wets to pay their back taxes but then turn and vote dry. To justify this behavior, Carter drew on the complex moral imagery of Brer Rabbit tales so familiar to his audience.

Liquor men . . . remind me of a man who told a rabbit he could have all the peas he wanted if he would let the man eat him for breakfast when he got enough. [Laughter] So the rabbit he pitched in. He ate peas, he ate peas, and peas he ate. [Laughter] After a while the man said, “Look here, Brer Rabbit, you done eat up most a patch of peas. Come on; I want you for breakfast.” The rabbit threw up his tail and said, “Good bye, Mr. Man!” [Great laughter] You let them pay your taxes, if they want to, and you do right and vote the dry ticket. [Cheers] And if any man come blowing around you about doing it, you tell him you’d have him indicted for the crime of buying votes. [Cheers and cries “We’ll do it.”]

Adaptations of African trickster tales that obsessed over “reversing the normal structure of power and prestige,” Brer Rabbit tales reflected the moral and ethical complexities inherent in being powerless in a world full of powerful people. Always humorous, Brer Rabbit was known for using his weak body and strong mind to play the “boundary lines of what was defined as right and wrong, good and evil over against each other,” and as such often pushed the limits of traditionally absolutist Christian morality. But this was a language of ethics that resonated with a people trying to make their way in a world that was so limited in opportunities and so liberal with limitations. The audience obviously loved Carter’s story, but there is no way to know how many blacks played the trickster for the drys—or the wets, for that matter. Unsurprisingly, Carter was criticized because as a Christian minister he encouraged dishonesty, but he was not Atlanta’s only black minister to endorse this deception in the name of prohibition. In total, about two thousand voters paid (or had paid for them) back taxes that averaged $3 per person.62

The final count was a majority vote of 229 for prohibition, and blacks, not rural folk, probably gave the drys the victory. The large dry majorities in the county polling stations (550) made it look like the rural voters made the city dry. But because voters could legally vote at any polling station, as many as one thousand were transported from the city to county precincts (to alleviate precinct backlogs), and a few hundred came into the city to vote, creating a situation where more people voted in the rural parts of the county than actually lived or registered there, so county precinct totals do not reveal anything about the sentiments of county voters. The leaders of each camp had predicted from 500- to 2,000-vote margins of victory, revealing either how little they understood public sentiment or how intent they were on encouraging their side. The vote was far closer than anyone predicted and was not carried because of a strong rural prohibition vote. Based on the membership of the colored ward prohibition clubs and reports of poll watchers, prohibition leaders estimated that 1,600–1,800 black Atlantans voted for prohibition, out of a total registration of 3,134. Assuming not all registrants voted, this would be a clear, perhaps significant, majority of the black vote, and this would have given blacks a larger vote spread in favor of prohibition than the overall margin of victory for prohibition. If Atlanta’s whites were evenly divided, the dry margin of victory would probably have been greater, but since the margin of victory was only 229 it is conceivable that a very slim white majority actually voted against prohibition.63

As part of the white prohibitionists’ get-out-the-vote efforts, the WCTU ladies made a banner for each colored prohibition ward club, and a special two-sided satin banner for the club that got the most men to vote dry. The satin banner, displayed for the first time on the eve of the election during the last tent meeting, was blue on one side and portrayed a white dove with an olive branch in its mouth, with the words “Peace on Earth, and Good Will to Man.” The other side was white and had the WCTU motto: “For God, Home and Native Land.” On January 15, about six weeks after the election, Reverend Virgil Norcross, pastor of the Fifth Baptist Church, presented the banner on behalf of the WCTU to the First Ward colored club, which had polled 351 voters. The club also received $100. Atlanta University’s glee club rendered several selections, and E. R. Carter gave the acceptance speech, but it was the Reverend Norcross’s comments that struck most people. Norcross proclaimed that black prohibitionists “erected a monument to your Christian manhood” and proved to those who denied they had a conscience that, “in the soul of the colored man, the spirit of the living God had a temple.” His comments climaxed with a rousing call for interracial unity and opened him up to charges of negrophilia:

Let us make a great pile of all unreasonable race prejudices, all political animosities, all sectional bitterness, and partisan hate, all narrowing and belittling views of public questions; then, with the sacred torch of Christian love, lighted from the pure altars of heaven, set fire to these works of the devil, and, as the smoke rolls up to the skies, shout “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good-will toward men.”

This grandiose imagery capped off several weeks of the most conciliatory racial rhetoric and behavior Atlanta’s blacks had ever witnessed from local whites—or ever would witness for many decades to come. Some blacks believed it, but others remained incredulous.64

“The Importance of This Event . . . Can Hardly be Overestimated”: Implications of the Vote

Atlanta had been truly “torn up from the lowest foundation of her emotions,” and in the immediate aftermath of the election those pent-up tensions burst forth uncontrollably.65 Confrontations arose between the drinkers who voted for prohibition and those who voted against it. The latter believed the former had forfeited their right to drink. The day after the vote Mr. Hughes (a wet voter) accused Mr. O’Neil (a dry voter) of drinking, saying he had no right to do that since he supported prohibition. Hughes threatened and cursed him until O’Neil punched him. Hughes pulled a knife, but O’Neil threw a rock, cutting Hughes badly. The police arrested O’Neil for assault. Students at Emory College, in Oxford, three counties removed from Fulton, organized a celebratory march and were pelted so badly with rocks and rotten eggs that they had to flee for their safety. In another case, two men got into a fight because the one did not permit drys on his property. There were also reports of saloon owners not serving prohibitionists who came in for a drink after the vote. One prohibitionist, Samuel Blackburn literally went crazy. The night after the election Blackburn began ranting and raving, using threatening language toward antis, and his family, fearing he was losing his mind, called a doctor. The doctor immediately administered morphine, but when its effects wore off the next day, and he began chopping down the fence around his house, his family had him arrested. The judge pronounced Blackburn insane and sent him to the state asylum, where he died several months later. The voting even ended marital plans, as one newspaper reported that “not a few engagements and marriages were broken off” on account of the vote.66

The tensions also ran high between family members. The dentist brothers Robert and Roderick Badger had a falling out related to the campaign. During the campaign Robert had used Roderick’s name in an “unwarrantably slanderous way,” so Roderick forbade Robert from ever again speaking to him or about him. Eleven months later Roderick learned of a rumor about his character. Convinced Robert had started it, Roderick confronted Robert on the sidewalk outside of their office. Robert denied any connection with the rumor and punched and stabbed Roderick. Roderick had his brother arrested and charged with stabbing and disorderly conduct. Campaign-related pressures had begun literally to rend the fabric of Atlantans’ social life.67

“The Breaking Up of Party and Color Lines”

Besides generating tension on the street and in homes, the election results also produced a voluminous commentary on its political and racial implications.68 Observers were most passionate about the campaign’s implications for race relations. Atlanta was the nation’s largest city to choose prohibition by plebiscite, and commentators now surmised that theoretically no large city was “safe” from prohibition when done the local option way. The national Republican Party took notice, and local prohibitionists immediately called for wet/dry reconciliation in the best interests of the city. Basically everyone had a reaction and an interpretation. Analyses of the election often attributed its outcome to the vote being kept outside of politics.69 Some wanted to crow about the triumph of righteousness over evil, and Atlanta’s “redemption.”70 However, the most discussed matter was the campaign’s unprecedented violation of traditional racial etiquette and the new political lines that seem to have been drawn.

Blacks quickly took credit for the election results and, very tellingly, praised the interracial nature of the campaign as something of equal importance to the prohibition victory. Even though the AME’s Christian Recorder praised the election results as a “mighty movement in favor of civilization and Christianity,” it also called the union of whites and blacks on both sides of the issue a “hopeful sign.” Beyond prohibition, blacks just wanted to be treated like men, and both wet and dry white campaigners offered black voters unprecedented levels of respect. When Richard R. Wright saw how closely the black and white women associated, he exclaimed he was “not prepared to see the ladies coming so close together . . . as they hadn’t done it in Christianity.” He concluded that “It was the ballot that did it; the ballot is a powerful leveler.” The ballot did level but, unfortunately, not for long. Other blacks called it a “star of hope” and a “happy omen of peace and good will among all our people.”71

Whites also noted the unprecedented interracial cooperation but drew very different conclusions. They were concerned about the ideas one could get from a campaign that “compelled deference to the negro,” as one Northern paper put it. If passing prohibition meant that the races had to relate on “terms of perfect equality,” another paper opined, then whites needed to be much more cautious. The week after the election, the Atlanta Constitution responded to Richard R. Wright’s “leveling” remark with an editorial titled “Was It a Mistake?” It excused Atlanta’s women for acting out of the “purest motives” but announced that, since it was now clear how blacks understood such actions, their “mistake” should “not be repeated by ladies of other Georgia cities where prohibition elections are about to be held.” The blurring of the race lines encouraged by white prohibitionists unsettled many whites but also contributed to making Atlanta the nation’s largest dry city.72

But the campaign’s “most remarkable” feature lay in the fact that it simultaneously blurred both racial and party lines, surprising virtually all political camps: Northerners, Southerners, Democrats, and Republicans. Atlanta’s black voters had been divided before, but it was new for its post-Reconstruction white electorate to be likewise so divided. For years Southern Democrats had been working to consolidate the white vote, and their Georgia successes had been magnified by the internal weakness of the state’s Republican Party, which experienced almost continuous internal feuds. The fact that Democrats and Republicans, blacks and whites, joined forces to win Atlanta’s local option vote challenged this seemingly unassailable Democratic hegemony, as well as the assertion of Southern whites that black voting had declined because blacks were uninterested in the franchise. Although the “Compromise of 1877” signaled the end of the national Republican Party’s commitment to blacks, and what remained of the party’s reforming zeal lay submerged beneath newer economic and industrial priorities, some members still dreamed of restoring the party’s competitiveness in the South, and this victory encouraged them to fight harder within the party for their values.73

While this division of black and white votes was shocking and unsettling to many observers, one group had foreseen at least four years earlier that voting for prohibition held just this kind of potential, and they longed to see it overturn the status quo in American politics. During Frances Willard’s 1881 tour of the South she attended a North Carolina temperance convention, where she said the best speaker was black, and there were 75 black delegates. After returning to Illinois she gave a speech where she declared that the “color-line has been broken from within North Carolina, as it should be, and not by foreign intervention.” She optimistically asserted that a new prohibition party would arise in the South “out of the breaking up of old lines.” In an 1884 speech Willard said she pined for the day when the color line would be broken in the South “by ballots from white hands and black for prohibition.” A year before Atlanta’s election, NTS official Theodore Cuyler ended his opposition to the Prohibition Party and signed an open letter with NTS secretary J. N. Stearns and others, which included the following assertion: “A National Prohibition party will end the ‘solid South’ and ‘solid North’ in our politics. Prohibition made the dominant issue will divide the negro and the white vote in the South, and will force a redivision of the voters in the North. . . . Divide the negro vote, and it will be counted.”

Other writers made similar predictions about the effect that prohibition voting could have on race relations and the suppression of the black vote. These were certainly radical individuals for their day. They envisioned prohibition producing a threefold positive fallout: (1) strengthening the Republican Party in the South, (2) ending the fraud that effectively disfranchised blacks, even though they legally could vote, and (3) reuniting all “moral” Americans around another reform crusade roughly comparable to abolitionism. At a time of declining national interest in the civil rights of blacks, the last thing party leaders were interested in doing was sacrificing the national party structure to guarantee black voting rights. The plan was never seriously considered by the most influential political leaders, but Atlanta’s election was an “I told you so” moment for these prohibition radicals.74

In the wake of the vote other activists belatedly “discovered” this power of prohibition that others had anticipated. One New York editor said the outcome of Atlanta’s local option vote demonstrated that “The true solution of the Negro problem (and there is such a problem) is to so reorganize parties that the Negro vote and the white vote of the South will be divided between the two parties.” The editor went on to claim that prohibition was the only issue that could reshape Southern politics, and he might have been right, at least for a brief moment in the mid-1880s. Another Northern editor proclaimed that it was obvious blacks cared about the franchise, but certain “ordinary and needful” measures were necessary to ensure a large black turnout. Perhaps the editor was referencing the paying of back taxes, although he did not say.75

But it was not just journalists and activists who took note of Atlanta’s blurred color lines. The Republican Party leadership began to get nervous. In the 1884 presidential election the Prohibition Party’s vote tally had increased 1,386 percent over 1880. While that only represented an increase from 0.1 percent to 1.5 percent of the popular vote, when added to the Atlanta victory 12 months later, it raised some eyebrows. These events emboldened the already disgruntled and marginalized Northern prohibitionists within the party. They now made the case more forcefully that a prohibition plank could simultaneously revitalize the party in the South and ensure blacks’ voting rights. The following August, James G. Blaine, former presidential nominee and the most prominent Republican of the 1880s, announced that he was considering urging the national party to add a prohibition plank to its next platform because of its potential to break the solid Democratic South. As it turned out, Blaine never did support prohibition,76 but he was not alone in his ruminations. The following month the Atlanta Constitution reported that a majority of Republican senators and “many” congressmen supported the idea. Among others, a Washington Post editorial and an independent writer in Bishop Turner’s Southern Recorder both predicted that the Republicans would soon have to decide whether to endorse prohibition. The Post further projected that whatever decision the party made, large numbers of Republicans would be upset, and the results from a “vote-getting standpoint” could only be “bad.” The urgency of this matter was only exacerbated by some black clergy who were encouraging blacks to vote for the Prohibition Party. One black Texas clergyman and state legislator said he thought prohibition sentiment was so strong among the better classes of blacks that they would be willing to “break down” both political parties to create prohibition in Texas.77

All this talk, combined with the inaction of party leaders, resulted in several northern and western Republicans organizing the Anti-Saloon Republican National Committee in the spring of 1887. They sought, albeit unsuccessfully, to pressure the national party to insert a “declaration of hostility to the saloon” plank in its platform. The Committee argued that a clear anti-saloon statement that was purposely vague about the method of implementation would give the Republican Party a “fighting chance” in Southern states lacking a “large black belt, and secure three or four for the republican column this year.” The group did not seek a plank endorsing national constitutional prohibition; rather, it wanted the national party to follow the lead of the ten state Republican parties that were already calling for the submission of prohibition to popular votes. In a half-hearted nod to the prohibition lobby and as the last act of platform writing during the 1888 convention, Republicans added a mildly worded clause declaring their support for “all wise and well directed” temperance efforts. The plank remained through the 1896 platform. For a short while following Atlanta’s vote, and largely inspired by it, a vocal group of Republicans argued that the right type of prohibition endorsement could give the party the edge in the South and thus return it to dominance over the Democrats. Their arguments fell on deaf ears.78

The prohibition victory also reverberated through local Atlanta politics. Observers wondered if voters would vote for municipal candidates based on their prohibition stance, as reformers had sometimes done in other places. Some argued that this was the best way to guarantee prohibition’s enforcement, but others condemned this as “dragging prohibition into politics.” Opponents feared that this type of voting might alter local Democratic hegemony and, if successful, spread to other places. The New York Times rejoiced in the possible effects of prohibition spilling over into Georgia politics, which it said “seemed certain”: “It will doubtless help the process of breaking up the old political associations, based upon national issues of a past generation, and of effacing the color line in politics. So far it cannot fail to have a beneficial effect.” But newspaper editors in Baltimore and Augusta perceptively assured readers that prohibition would never undermine the strength of “the Democracy,” as the Democratic Party was often called.79

In a matter of days the facts began to support the hunches of Southern editors. Six days after the local option vote the city held its annual municipal elections, and Atlantans resorted to the common approach of “keeping prohibition out of politics.” First of all, there was very little interest in voting for city officials. Only 66 percent of the whites and 38 percent of the blacks who had registered for the local option vote registered for the municipal elections. White prohibitionists called for carrying the “temperance banner high above politics,” which meant supporting the slate of candidates that had been nominated six weeks earlier and not opposing the anti-prohibitionists among the nominees. Against the warnings of some leaders but in line with the practices of other places that had instituted prohibition by local option, Atlantans by an overwhelming majority elected a “fusion” ticket, and it included several city officials who were personally opposed to prohibition. The ticket had so many antis (a slim majority) on it that the Macon Telegraph announced that the “honor of the victory to-day rests with the anti-prohibitionists” and “conservative” prohibitionists. White prohibitionists accepted anti-prohibitionist municipal leaders because they assumed that once they took the oath of office they would feel bound to execute the law whether or not they agreed with it. White prohibitionist leaders used the election to salve intra-racial divisions created by the local option campaign. How these leaders, and men chosen in subsequent elections during prohibition, implemented the law and treated black residents would greatly impact black Atlantans’ perception of prohibition.80

Why did prohibition win in Atlanta in 1885? A major reason was that so many African Americans voted for it. Atlanta had experienced a historically unique convergence of ideologies, movements, and resources. By December 1885, a well-informed and impartial observer might reasonably have identified four plausible explanations for the outcome of Atlanta’s election and for the extent of black support for prohibition.

Blacks voted for prohibition to the degree they did partly because of the 20 years of temperance work by Northern evangelicals. Also, the relatively high social status of the clergy, combined with their exceptionally cohesive united front, was not unimportant. Early in the campaign the Weekly Sentinel (a black paper from Augusta) astutely discerned that two types of people supported prohibition, those acting on “principle” and those on “reputation.” By “reputation” the writer meant a concern with being perceived as respectable. In 1885 Black Atlanta, “respectable” was still heavily defined by the culture brought by evangelical Northerners and preached by the clergy. Even Reverend J. G. Yeiser, who was accused of frequenting saloons and running up unpaid tabs, campaigned for prohibition. Only one black preacher joined the antis’ campaign. The truth is, for some—perhaps many?—African American voters, framing this as a moral issue was sufficiently persuasive.81

The relative influence of Northern evangelical culture was magnified in 1880s Black Atlanta because of the absence of organized and respected alternate routes to success and respectability. Secular and non-evangelical freedmen’s aid societies never established schools in Atlanta. These societies existed only briefly following emancipation, but they resolutely omitted all religious instruction from their schools, thus offering a different model for “uplift” than evangelical schools run by such organizations as the AMA and ABHMS. Also, Black Atlanta had yet to develop a self-conscious entrepreneurial class whose rise to prominence occurred independent of reform nexus culture. Such a “petit bourgeoisie” class did eventually develop in Black Atlanta, but it would take 10 to 15 more years before it coalesced and offered an alternative route to the better classes. When this group did find its voice in the early 1900s, it espoused a much more pragmatic approach to social, political, and racial matters than those under the influence of the reform nexus organizations.

Of course the mass of black voters already embraced a pragmatic approach to politics, and in 1885 it manifested itself by positively responding to promises (and examples) of better race relations from prohibitionists, which were just too compelling to ignore. The success of this appeal reflected the harsh reality of Southern race relations. No matter how they voted, most black Atlantans at least hoped that their vote would yield better race relations.

The fourth major element of the dry victory would have to be the quantity and quality of the resources and leadership white prohibitionist activists brought to the campaign. Traditional white prohibitionist organizations like the WCTU and the Templars effectively merged their efforts with New South spokesmen, people for whom prohibition was just one of many concerns. But white leaders’ efforts were not focused on, nor successful with, white voters. Historian Joe Coker has persuasively argued that several deeply rooted religious and cultural traditions had yet to be inverted or co-opted by prohibitionists before the masses of Southern white evangelicals could accept their cause; that would take almost 20 more years. In the 1880s, white prohibitionists seem to have brought more resources and enthusiasm to the campaign than they did white votes, but as far as black voters were concerned, they produced a better “get-out-the-vote” effort than the wets. In the end, an ideal alignment of factors had set up Atlanta for an unprecedented two-year “dry” experiment. Some would be surprised by the results; some would not.

Oh, come, let your manhood be plighted,

To help us again to restore

The Freedom with Virtue united

Our forefathers brought to the shore;

When law never licensed temptation,

And Conscience to Right was so true;

Oh, bring back those days to the nation

That gave us the Red, White and Blue.

—“For Home and the Red, White, and Blue,” first stanza