A Formidable Republican Leader
George Denny, Jr. Leads a Black-White Electoral Alliance to Victory

George Denny Jr. led the development in Garrard County of an unlikely Republican Party alliance of newly enfranchised black voters and white Republicans. An ambitious organizer with a formidable coterie of prominent lawyers, Denny would chair the state Republican Party by the end of the 1870s. He escaped his Democratic roots to lead a cross-racial coalition to consistent Republican electoral successes in Garrard.

A cross-racial alliance was the only way that African American men, who vigorously expressed their political interests after the enactment of the 15th Amendment, could convert their enthusiasm and determined Republicanism into political victories. By themselves, African Americans were nowhere near being a majority of the eligible electorate in Garrard. Indeed, the new African American voters of Garrard were an even smaller part of the electorate than their compatriots in Todd County: 33% of the population in Garrard compared to 42% in Todd County.

Even African Americans who lived in a majority black town or region of the county faced significant institutional barriers to representation. Kentucky’s county court system, with no representational units below the county level, concentrated power in the county judiciary elected at-large. This system was designed both to preserve the power of a slave-holding aristocracy and to limit local influence over county events.

In the face of these barriers, county-level political organization and cross-racial alliances were necessary if African Americans were to taste political victories in Garrard County. Denny’s leadership provides an example of how such an alliance developed and operated, including surviving a steep descent into political violence.

Denny Builds a Republican Network

Denny was born into a wealthy slave-owning family near the village of Paint Lick, named for the colors Native Americans used to mark a nearby salt lick. In 1860, when Denny was 12, the farm covered 683 acres and produced corn, rye, and oats from the enforced labor of 15 African American men and women. Born into the privilege and power that came with membership of the slave-owner class — and married into a prominent Democratic family — Denny looked destined to fall in with a white Democratic Party elite determined to continue its political dominance in the post-Civil War world.

He was a boy of 13 when the Civil War began and grew to maturity and military eligibility during the course of the war. Unlike some of his close friends and local supporters such as William O. Bradley (who would be elected Governor of Kentucky in 1895), Denny never served in the military. Instead, Denny turned to the law, using his family’s position as one of the wealthiest rural families in the county to get for himself a modern legal education, spending five years at Centre College in Danville (1863-1868). After college, he came back to Lancaster for a year to work in Judge George R. McKee’s law office, before finishing his law degree with an additional year at Louisville Law School.

Denny, however, did not take the obvious path to political power through the Democratic Party.

Instead, while temporarily in Lancaster before taking up legal training in Louisville, Denny built a Republican network and began his life-long commitment to Republicanism. Part of this was family inheritance. His uncle, another George Denny, was a local Republican figure; Judge McKee, with whom he read law, was also a Republican.

Garrard also had a long history of anti-slavery sentiment, much of it associated with Allen A. Burton, born in 1820 and a full generation older than Denny. Burton was instrumental in the establishment of a US Army garrison on the outskirts of Lancaster that was a powerful counter force to Klan activity and political disorder.

Denny was in Lancaster for the August 1869 election, the first time he was old enough to vote and the last Garrard County election in which only white men could vote. Denny voted Republican and never strayed from that faith.

When he returned to Lancaster again, law degree in hand, in the summer of 1870, the political world was transformed. The 15th Amendment had been certified on March 30 and the Garrard electorate was suddenly one third larger. The new members of the electorate were all black and almost all men who had been enslaved but five years earlier.

Black voters now appeared at each outdoor polling location as the political equals to their former owners, who almost always chose Democrats just as their former “property” almost always voted for the party of Abraham Lincoln.

This was an opportunity for an ambitious young man to craft a new political order, one that he would lead, and also an order from which he would benefit. It was a pathway filled with high ambition — political and personal — and great danger.

Courtroom violence and election violence were common occurrences and Denny was a central figure in these, as a political organizer, as a judge, and as an aggressive trial lawyer. His imposing physical presence and title — he was always known as “Judge” Denny — no doubt assisted the role he chose. Ultimately, however, Denny’s political career would end with his own participation in the violence his new order stimulated.

His political career began differently. In 1870, and now a full-time resident of Lancaster, Denny expanded his network, boarding with Henry S. Burnam, a prosperous merchant and a Republican member of Lancaster’s Board of Trustees. William Sellers was also a firm friend who, hailing from Scott’s Fork in the northern reaches of Garrard County, was a civil rights advocate, member of the Kentucky House of Representatives, and a key figure in the Kennedy-Sellers election riot in 1874.

Denny and his contemporary compatriots — Bradley, McKee, Burnam, and Sellers — were the leading figures in developing this new political force. Denny is rumored to have been the first white political leader in Garrard to appear before a black audience soliciting their support.

Running and Winning Office

The August 1, 1870 election for Garrard County officials was the first in which African American men could vote. Denny ran as a Republican for County Judge, the most powerful office in the County, and Bradley ran for County Attorney. Two other men in Denny’s network, William McKee Duncan and R. F. Scott, ran for County Clerk and Sheriff. These four offices were the center of county power, controlling the making and administration of justice in the county. Since the demise of the Whig party in the mid-1850s, these offices had been won by Democrats. On the back of new African American voters, Denny and his friends led a well-planned political takeover.

Denny won an outstanding victory, the first of many Republican triumphs in Garrard County, all based on a black-white Republican alliance. At the Lancaster poll, held at the county courthouse, African Americans provided 73 percent of Denny’s vote. African Americans voted a straight party ticket; there were only five black Democrats among 256 black voters. Ninety eight percent of black voters in Lancaster voted Republican. Only 18 percent of white voters did. Every Republican candidate won because, and only because, of the black vote. Without the black vote, none of the white candidates would have been elected; with it, all nine were elected.

Denny must have found his 60% to 40% victory in Brandy Springs, the precinct in which he spent his childhood, particularly satisfying.

Even in Brandy Springs, Ephraim Hammack, the official clerk for the election, like his counterpart in Todd County, began marking each African American voter, in this case with a cross mark. Unlike the Todd County clerks, Hammack soon gave up, perhaps a measure of the far stronger Republican surge in Garrard County than in Todd County.

Denny’s Demise and Retreat

The coalition between black and white Republicans had limits. The Republican Party did not nominate any black candidates until 1882, when, in a tumultuous convention led by Denny, Republicans nominated a black candidate for jailer, and the Republican Party suffered sweeping defeats.

The 1882 convention derailed George Denny’s political aspirations. While he chaired the Kentucky Republican Party state convention the following May, Denny received only a trifling vote in balloting for the party’s candidate for governor. As tensions rose Denny began to consider other possibilities, including political appointments in the Dakota Territory — as governor, attorney general, or even a position on the bench of the Territorial supreme court.

The final act came in 1883, when Denny represented African American victims of the Bryantsville election riot. Denny received death threats, most pointedly from James H. Anderson of Lancaster who was part of a wagonload of Democrats who rode into Bryantsville and, in Anderson’s words, “killed most of those negroes.” In a chance convergence at the center of Lancaster, Denny shot and killed Anderson.

While Denny was found to have acted in self-defense, he and his family left Lancaster and took up residence in Lexington, separating himself from the political organization which he had founded and led. By 1894, Denny and African American political organizers were estranged; time and again black political leaders threatened to run third party candidates for any office which Denny sought. Denny’s last serious political effort was a narrow loss as the Republican candidate for Congress from Kentucky’s 7th District.

Perhaps the most telling measure of Denny’s fall from grace was the decision of William Bradley in his successful run for governor in 1895 to distance himself from Denny to avoid alienating black voters. The two founders of the Republican party in Garrard County stood apart, no longer allies or even friends.