The GOP Fails in Todd: Part 2
Absent Party Leadership Leaves Opportunity Unfulfilled

This is the second part of a two-part story about the failure of the Republican Party to gain a foothold in Todd County, Kentucky, in the 19th century. The first part of the story can be accessed here.

In Part 1 of this story, we explored how black enfranchisement in 1870 presented the Republican Party an opportunity to organize a competitive cross-racial alliance in Todd County between white Republicans in the north of the county and black Republicans in the south.

In Part 2, we document why that opportunity never came to fruition. We explore how potential sources of Republican leadership and organization, including Whig and Republican lawyers and a progressive newspaper editor never took the party reins. Then we turn to the official leader of the county Republican Party, the County Chairman, who served for over 30 years but never seriously tried to build a local party organization. Finally, we briefly explore the barriers to black Republican leadership in Todd County.

Whig Lawyers Did Not become Republican Leaders

As discussed in the first part of this story, Todd County routinely elected Whigs in the 1850s. Led by, and often electing, members of its lawyer class, Todd County whiggism was based on pragmatism and opposition to the disruption of secession. Todd County’s lawyer class was not particularly opposed to slavery and, after the Civil War, lawyers in Elkton did not take up the Republican cause with particular enthusiasm.

After the War, lawyers in Todd County overwhelmingly aligned with the Democratic Party. Of the 17 Todd County lawyers identified in the 1870 Census, 15 voted at least once in the elections between 1868 and 1874 for which we have pollbooks. Twelve (80%) always voted Democrat, including Willis B. Reeves, a partner in the legal practice of Frances M. Bristow and Hazel G. Petree. Only three (20%) ever voted Republican: Jeptha Gordon Hollingsworth, 1870 congressional candidate John Henry Lowry, and Hazel G. Petree himself.

The absence of politically ambitious young Republican lawyers to play a role equivalent to that played by George Denny Jr., William O. Bradley, or William Sellers in Garrard County is key in explaining why the Republican Party was unable to gain a serious foothold in Todd County. It is not clear that there was any local Republican Party organization in Todd County in the decades after the Civil War.

Most Whig Lawyers Die, Leave, or Realize they are Democrats

Most of the lawyers that formed Todd County’s Whig Party leadership either (1) died before the 15th Amendment came into force; (2) left the county and pursued Republican politics elsewhere; or (3) discovered they were Democrats after all.

An exemplar of a member of the older generation who died before black men were enfranchised was Francis Marion Bristow. A lawyer and a tobacco planter, Bristow was a committed Whig whose son, Benjamin Helm, would become a powerful Republican and civil rights advocate. Francis, who enslaved 10 people in 1850, came to support attempts at preserving the Union, but without addressing slavery. After serving in Congress as a Whig in 1854-55, he became involved in the Opposition Party, the predecessor to the Constitutional Union Party, and was elected to Congress again in 1858. In 1860, he was appointed to the U.S. House Committee investigating ways to avoid descent into war. He did not run for re-election in 1860. Bristow died in 1864 before the end of the War and so never saw the abolition of slavery in Kentucky or the enfranchisement of black men, and we do not know if he would have come to support the Republican cause.

Bristow’s son, Benjamin Helm Bristow, was a committed anti-slavery Whig who might have organized the Todd County Republican Party had he not left the county before the Civil War. A successful lawyer, the younger Bristow moved to Hopkinsville in neighboring Christian County to set up one of the city’s preeminent practices before entering the national scene. Although he owned four people (including a twelve-year-old girl and eight-year-old twin girls) in 1860, Bristow go on to be central in the civil rights movement. He was elected to the state legislature for Christian County in 1863. Bristow was soon appointed district attorney for Louisville, Kentucky, where he actively enforced the U.S. Civil Rights Act. President Ulysses S. Grant appointed Bristow to be the first ever Solicitor General in 1870 and in 1874 appointed him to U.S. Treasury Secretary. Had he stayed in Todd County, Bristow would no doubt have been central to organizing and leading the Republican Party there.

The most common fate of Whig lawyers in Todd County was for them to realign to the Democrats. The path of Jacob Golladay is instructive. A Whig before the Party’s collapse, he joined the Constitutional Union Party, a party formed in 1860 in a failed attempt to sidestep the slavery issue while preserving the Union. He was an elector for the Bell-Everett Constitutional Union presidential ticket in the 1860 election. But, in 1866, Golladay ran for Congress (and won) as a Democrat and was re-elected as a Democrat in 1868. Perhaps it was inevitable that Golladay would turn to the Democrats, for he, like many other Todd County lawyers, were deeply involved in the tobacco trade. Golladay owned a substantial tobacco plantation in neighboring Logan County, where, in 1860, he had enslaved 24 African Americans.

Golladay resigned from Congress in 1870, due to a scandal involving West Point cadetships. This resignation caused the special election held in Todd County, the first in which black men could vote, less than a month after the enactment of the 15th Amendment.

Those Lawyers who do Vote Republican were not dedicated to the Republican Cause

As is the case in modern America, lawyer was the most common occupation and training of party leaders and elected representatives in 19th century Kentucky. And so the only three lawyers to vote for Republican candidates in Todd County between 1868 and 1874—Jeptha Gordon Hollingsworth, Hazel G. Petree Jr. and John Henry Lowry—were the most obvious potential sources of local Republican leadership. However, while these three joined together during the War to petition the Union Army about runaway slaves, they did little to actively develop Republican Party organization in Todd County after the War.

Each of their lives is detailed in another story, which shows that none of them were involved in the Todd County Republican organization and did not actively seek to engage newly enfranchised black voters. Overall, their Republicanism was remarkably weak and isolated.

Their lack of activism in part reflects their age. They were old enough to have lived through many political failures: the collapse of the Whigs, the failure of diplomacy, and the descent into bloody war.

But their lack of activism also reflects a lacking strong commitment to the abolition of slavery and the advancement of black people and the risks of such a commitment. Active support for newly freed former slaves and the Republican cause came with more attendant risks in Todd County than in Garrard County. Racially motivated violence and Ku Klux Klan (KKK) attacks were commonplace in Todd County.

Additionally, the career of the most promising of the three Republican lawyers, John H. Lowry, was cut short by an injury he sustained in a horse accident in 1866. The accident left him partially paralyzed. Without the injury, he may well have been the Todd County equivalent to George Denny Jr, although with less enthusiasm for engaging black voters. He died in 1876, no doubt lamenting a lost opportunity to turn Todd County for the Republican Party.

Josiah Cox: A Journalist (Almost) Fills the Leadership Void

For the second half of 1873 and much of 1874, Josiah W. Cox, the editor of Elkton’s new newspaper, The Witness, looked like he might provide the Todd County Republican Party some spirited leadership. But after the failure of Todd County leaders to denounce KKK violence, Cox retreated from politics and Todd County.

Cox had an eclectic background. He was born in Tennessee in 1822 and, in adulthood, lived in Missouri, eastern Kentucky, and western Tennessee, before arriving in Todd County. Cox had at least 11 children. In 1850, he enslaved three black people and his first partisan position was as a Democrat, serving as the secretary of a Kentucky Democratic Party county organization. But he was known to be “a man of progressive ideas” and The Witness advocated for civil rights under Cox’s leadership.

Cox was deeply religious. He called himself a “Doctor,” but his doctorate was in divinity. He was a devotee of the “Campbellite” Disciples of Christ, part of the Restoration Movement, and joined the Baptist Church when he first moved to Kentucky.

Less than a year into Cox’s tenure as editor of The Witness, Klan vigilantism broke out in Todd County. As retribution for using the court to get her children out of the bondage of her former owner, Mattie Link was abducted, and her husband, Isham, murdered, by a gang of white men. Link testified in court against her abductor and the murderer of her husband.

A few weeks later, the Democratic Party convened at the Elkton Courthouse for its nominating convention. Reflecting the lack of any real Republican Party organization in the county, many Republicans turned out to this Democratic meeting, including Cox. The convention focused heavily on Isham’s murder.

Cox, neither a Democrat nor a local, moved a series of resolutions, the first of which read:

That our people look with indignant horror on KuKluxing murders as no less than midnight assassinations; we denounce the outrage on Isham Link as a cowardly murder, and all unlawful acts as crimes against the peace and safety of society.

Cox’s third resolution took direct aim at the Democratic Party. It read:

That the South must save itself from lawlessness and a reign of terror; no one else can save her, and the Democratic party now in power in this State must support the rigid execution of the laws or fall into merited condemnation.

The convention devolved into “perfect pandemonium,” with claims that the resolutions “did not properly belong in a Democratic convention.” The meeting was moved to the courtyard outside the Courthouse, where it was declared “a mass meeting of the people of the county,” and no longer a Democratic Party convention. Consequently, the Democratic Party did not adopt Cox’s resolutions.

Within two months, Cox had left the county. He retreated into his ministry near Lexington, where he became active in Temperance causes and edited religious publications including The Apostolic Times in Lexington and then a church newspaper, Things Old and New. A Democrat and confederate veteran took over the editorship of The Witness and its stance changed. The Republican Party did not get a vocal leader.

The Leader of the Todd County Republican Party Doesn’t

Elisha B. Edwards, an Elkton dentist, was the formal leader of the county Republican organization, serving as the Chairman of the Todd County Republican Party from the 1860s through 1890s.

A captain in the Union Army and the sole Todd County attendee at the 1868 convention that set up a permanent Kentucky state Republican Party organization, Edwards was the frequent beneficiary of Republican patronage. Beginning with his appointment as a deputy provost marshal in the U.S. Army in 1864 (to investigate recruitment and desertion issues) and soon followed by an appointment to assistant assessor of internal revenue in 1867 (to conduct the annual tax assessment), Edwards was appointed to lucrative federal appointments by Republican administrations. Most notably, he was appointed Elkton Postmaster in 1873, and held that position under all Republican administrations until his retirement in 1893.

While a member of the state party organization and a beneficiary of federal patronage, Edwards did little to develop party organization in the county. We have not uncovered any newspaper reports about the county Republican Party organization or Edwards’ role in it in the 1870s. The Elkton poll books do not suggest that he was actively organizing voters: Edwards was a frequent voter, but he tended to vote alone, surrounded by Democrats and in the middle of the day. In the 1868 gubernatorial election, Edwards voted in a sea of Democrats: over 50 consecutive Democratic voters preceded him and 17 more followed him. He did not vote in the April 1870 special congressional election and in the1872 election, in which no Republican candidates stood, Edwards voted Democrat like everyone else.

Only in the November 1870 congressional election did Edwards vote with other Republicans. It appears to be his one real attempt in those early days of black enfranchisement at mobilizing black voters. On that November day, Edwards was the 107th voter in Elkton. He voted with fellow Republican organization man, Ben Downer, in the middle of a group of 19 Republicans, including 15 black men. Perhaps reflecting the organizational effort, turnout of black men in Elkton was more than 50% higher than for white men. Of the 215 votes cast for the Republican congressional candidate, Dulaney R. Carr, in Elkton, 186 were from black men.

Yet, even with Edwards’ apparent effort at mobilization and the high turnout of black men, the Republican Party still narrowly lost the Elkton precinct: 171 to 175 votes. This was a great improvement from the special congressional election in April, in which the Republican (John H. Lowry) garnered barely 40% of the vote. Nonetheless, defeat was still defeat and it may have been that Edwards and other Republicans saw the failure to take Elkton as a sign of the futility of mobilizing the black vote.

The Barriers to Black Leadership

In this story, we have focused solely on the absence of white leadership of the Republican Party. Newly enfranchised black men, like Moses Penick and his neighbors, provided informal leadership, leading large groups of black men to the polls to vote for Republican candidates, but they did not formally lead the party or develop long-term organization.

The barriers to black leadership of the Republican Party in the absence of a strong protective white leadership were immense in Todd County, where racial violence and animus was widespread. In the absence of an effective white Republican leadership, black political leadership could not thrive. Not only that, black men who turned out to vote in Todd County found themselves in a more vulnerable position than those in Garrard County.

Many of the most politically active black men were tradesmen, who likely relied on white clients to make their living. For example, Sam Mart, a wagon driver in Allensville, voted in all four of the 1870 – 1874 congressional and state elections for which we have poll books as well as 8 of the 11 1874 – 1886 local Allensville elections. Perhaps reflecting concern for his business interests, he voted for the Democratic candidate, Joseph H Lewis, for Congress in both 1870 elections.

Squire Dickinson, a veteran who was captured by the Confederate Army, returned to Todd County to work as a carpenter in Trenton. Dickinson was a highly engaged voter, who voted in all four of the 1870 – 1874 congressional and state elections for which we have poll books. He voted in the November 1870 election just before a group of white Democrats, including two brothers of his former enslaver, Dr. Joseph Sandridge Dickinson. Perhaps he saw these men among the group of wealthy white Democrats in the line behind him and worried about the implications of voting Republican in front of them. He chose not to declare a vote for Congress (but did declare his preference for Circuit Court Judge, a nonpartisan office).

The Republican Party Failure

The 726 votes garnered by John H. Lowry in the special congressional election of April 1870, the first at which black men could vote, was as many as a Republican candidate would win for many years to follow. In that election, black turnout in the south of the county—around Allensville, Guthrie, and Trenton, where the majority of the black population lived—was equal to white turnout (35% to 36%). For Republican candidates to be competitive, they needed high voter turnout among black men in the south of the county. As we noted in another story, the further south one traveled in Todd County in the 1870s, the greater the proportion of the eligible electorate that was black.

In the absence of local Republican leadership and organization, and the protection afforded by it, black turnout in southern Todd County quickly declined. In the November 1870 congressional election, black turnout dropped to about 6 points below white turnout. By the November 1874 congressional election, the last one for which we have pollbook data, black turnout was 9 points below white turnout.

Absent leadership from the lawyer class, an idealistic young reporter, or from the formal party leader, Republican competitiveness never emerged. Democrats won Todd County for decades. The Republican opportunity was never realized.