Wicked Danville: Liquor and Lawlessness in a Southside Virginia City

By Frankie Y. Bailey and Alice P. Green

Prostitution, gambling, moonshine and drugs could all be found behind closed the closed doors of Danville, VA from 1919 to 1933. During Prohibition, the "Law and Order League," of Danville was, of course, "dry," but the city's mayor was personally was known to be "personally wet," and in 1911 citizens were shocked to discover that the police chief was a fugitive from a murder conviction in Georgia. That same period saw lynching, murders and the wreck of the Old '97. HP authors Frankie Bailey and Alice Green will examine the law and disorder of Prohibition era Danville with Wicked Danville: Crime, Justice, and Prohibition in a Southside Virginia City.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Apr 22, 2011
• ISBN: 9781625841223

Frankie Y. Bailey

Frankie Bailey is a professor of criminal justice at SUNY at Albany. She has published numerous books with Overmountain Press, including several books in the Lizzie Stuart Mystery Series and Silver Dagger Mysteries Series. Her research interests are geared towards criminal justice and how it relates to American sociology, particularly race/ethnicity, class and gender. Dr. Alice P. Green is known for her work as a criminal justice activist in New York State. Dr. Green is currently the executive director of The Center for Law and Justice. She served as legislative director for the New York Civil Liberties Union before being appointed to the Citizens Policy and Complaint Review Council of the New York State Commission on Corrections in 1985 and then to the position of deputy commissioner for the New York State Division of Probation and Correctional Alternatives. From 1975 through 1979, Dr. Green served as the executive director of Trinity Institution, a youth and family services center in Albany's South End neighborhood. Dr. Green currently lives with her husband, Charles Touhey, in Albany.

Book preview

Press.

CHAPTER 1

Danville in Time and Place

THE DEATH OF REVEREND MOFFETT

In November 1892, Reverend John R. Moffett, a local minister and the editor of a prohibitionist newspaper, was shot by J.T. Clark, a former storekeeper, attorney and Democratic politician. Ambitious and dedicated, Moffett had been strong in his work for the prohibition cause. As he sought converts, he expanded his activities beyond his church in North Danville. In doing so, he made personal and political enemies.

In August 1889, Moffett had given a speech in nearby Chatham, the county seat of Pittsylvania County. To express his extreme distaste for drinking men, Moffett had declared that he would rather be subject to good Negro rule than to that of the alcoholic devil. This statement drew a swift and pointed response from local Democratic newspapers. For white Democrats, such language recalled the outraged assertion that they themselves had made only six years earlier that Southside Virginia was, in fact, under the rule of Negro officeholders. During a brief period after the Civil War, blacks and whites in Virginia and elsewhere in the South had formed coalition governments. In Virginia, the Readjuster Party had given blacks their first opportunity to participate in state and local government as officeholders and appointees. This ended when a race riot erupted in Danville in 1883.¹

Although they had regained control of the state, white Democrats in the late 1880s remained uneasy. Prohibitionists such as Reverend Moffett were perceived by the Democratic Party as threats to its political agenda. Moffett and his fellow prohibitionists deepened the divide between wets (drinkers) and drys (nondrinkers) and thereby threatened the white solidarity necessary to achieve Democratic rule and white dominance of social and political institutions.

In 1891, the year before his death, Reverend Moffett had been involved in the election battle over local option in Danville. In an eerie foreshadowing of his later encounter with Clark, Moffett experienced a close call when a man put a pistol against Moffett’s chest and pulled the trigger. The gun misfired and Moffett was unharmed. In the election, the city of Danville went wet by eighteen votes, but Moffett continued to agitate for prohibition.

In October 1892, Moffett preached a prohibition sermon in which he argued that solving the liquor problem would also solve the so-called Negro problem.² Moffett asserted that liquor was the root cause of the difficulties between blacks and whites, as well as black crime and corrupt voting by blacks. But Moffett himself was accused of corruption when he tried to subvert the procedure that required voters to obtain tickets from ticket holders at the polls (and thereby reveal how they intended to vote). Moffett attempted to distribute Democratic tickets in the community, but because of what he described as an error by the printer, he ended up handing out bogus tickets. When J.T. Clark encountered Moffett on the street, he accused him of fraud. Enraged, Moffett struck Clark. Moffett also accidentally struck a police officer who attempted to intervene. Both he and Clark were arrested and fined.³

In an attempt to defend his reputation, Moffett went to the local newspaper, the Danville Register, and placed a card (a public statement). Moffett’s defense of his honor appeared in the Register the day after he was shot by Clark. Earlier, in his own prohibitionist newspaper, Moffett had lashed out at Clark, calling him a one-horse lawyer and expressing his contempt for him. Although it was true that he had no law office, Clark did attempt to use the legal system against Moffett. Before the shooting, Clark had sought advice from two other attorneys. These two lawyers later represented Clark, but they were not in their offices on the day he went in search of them. The lawyer Clark did speak to would later prosecute Clark for Moffett’s murder.

Clark had been out of town when Moffett’s newspaper came out with the attack on his character. When he returned to Danville and to his work for the Democratic Party, Clark was praised by party members for his stance against Moffett. Later he learned about the article concerning him in Moffett’s newspaper. He apparently went about town looking for a copy. He saw Moffett in the print shop office and left. But the two men met in the street, and a scuffle ensued. Four shots were fired. Moffett was hit in the abdomen by one of the bullets. The chief of police and a prominent citizen witnessed the encounter and rushed to restrain Clark. Both Moffett and Clark were arrested. Clark was taken to jail; Moffett was taken to a doctor.⁴

The downfall of a political enemy was celebrated by some local Democrats. Other Democrats, including the editor of the Register, rallied to Moffett’s bedside. At this point, Moffett was at the mercy of late nineteenth-century medicine. The attending physicians opened his abdomen, looking for the bullet. They took out his intestines and ran them through their hands. Unable to find the bullet, the physicians sewed him up, even though they thought that he was bleeding from the liver. Moffett, who had been given chloroform, was revived with an enema of whiskey mixed with strychnine. When Moffett regained consciousness, he was informed that he was going to die. Indeed, he was dead within twenty-four hours after he had been shot by Clark. His death probably was attributable to both the shock and trauma of the bullet wound and an infection from the operation to repair the damage.⁵

Before he died, Moffett was visited by the mayor of Danville. He spoke to the mayor and other officials and to the friends who had gathered. He made a dying declaration in which he said that his nemesis, J.T. Clark, had shot him without warning.⁶

Even though a minister had been shot by a politician, the case did not receive widespread coverage by the media. A New York prohibition newspaper, the Voice, asserted that there was little chance that Moffett would receive justice. The Virginia Baptists, who viewed Moffett as a martyr to the prohibition cause, shared this sentiment. However, the Democratic newspapers portrayed the shooting as a private affair, unrelated to the prohibition fight.

In February 1893, Clark went to trial before Judge Archer Aiken. He was represented by five of Danville’s best lawyers. Since Clark was not wealthy, it is possible that the Democratic Party paid for his defense. On the other side, the prosecutor of the case had been in office less than a year. A member of the Democrat machine, he was conducting his first big trial. He was joined at the prosecution table by a lawyer from outside the city who was being promoted as a candidate for lieutenant governor. In addition to this lawyer, Moffett’s brother joined the team. However, the prosecutor resisted the attempts by out-of-state prohibition lawyers offering their assistance as well.

Because political feeling surrounding the case was strong, it was difficult finding jurors. Finally, one Danville man and eleven from Lynchburg were seated as the jury. As might have been expected, Clark claimed that he had acted in self-defense. His attorneys focused on the attack by Moffett, the editor of a newspaper, on Clark’s honor. Clark’s lawyers also blamed Moffett’s doctors for their part in the minister’s demise. On the other side, the prosecution argued that Clark had cold-bloodedly killed his nemesis. Those who believed that Clark had been a part of a conspiracy claimed that Clark, who the prohibitionists alleged was an ex-barkeeper, had acted as a tool of the whiskey ring.

However, rather than viewing Clark as a part of a political conspiracy, the jury apparently gave some credence to his assertion—one of five lines of defense offered by his attorneys—that he had acted in self-defense when he shot Moffett. To the outrage of the Moffett family and the prohibitionists, Clark was found guilty of voluntary manslaughter rather than first-degree murder. However, Clark’s appeal of his five-year sentence failed.⁷

Virginia newspapers had treated the Danville trial as a human interest story rather than a political saga.⁸ However, the case highlighted the multiple threads of a debate about alcohol that involved not only politics but also religion and race relations. It was not until the turn of the century, with black disenfranchisement, that the tensions would lessen between prohibitionists and those who were focused on achieving white political solidarity.

By the turn of the century, Danville had attracted notice as an Old South tobacco town that was now moving aggressively to become a New South industrial phenomenon. To understand Danville in the early twentieth century requires a look back at Danville’s history.

FROM TRADING POST TO MILL TOWN

Laid out along the banks of a river, Danville, like other cumulative communities, drew its settlers from other areas. The area was surveyed by Colonel William Byrd of Westover Plantation during a 1728 exploration to establish the exact boundary line between Virginia and North Carolina. Byrd gave the territory the name Dan from a Biblical passage referring to from Dan to Beersheba. Ten years later, William Wynne purchased two hundred acres on the south side of the Dan River and later moved his family into this new country. The settlement was known as Wynne’s Falls. Shortly after the Revolutionary War, war-impoverished families from the eastern part of Virginia migrated to the sparsely settled area.⁹

In 1793, a tobacco warehouse was established at Wynne’s Falls, and the name of the settlement was changed to Danville. Danville was established as a town by an act of the Virginia legislature. This action by the legislature was, at least in part, a response to the need for further commercial development of the site. After John Barnett, the owner of the land on the south side of the river, established a ferry operation, trade in the settlement increased.¹⁰

The evolution of Danville from settlement to city paralleled the growth of Lynchburg and other, older cities in the area. In the Piedmont region of the state, where Danville is located, tobacco was one of the most important staple crops both in terms of farming and of factories. In fact, tobacco grew better in Piedmont Virginia than did some other crops. The tobacco growers relied on the labor of black slaves. Because of this, African Americans were heavily involved in the tobacco industry in the area from the beginning. In fact, a slave is supposed to have accidentally discovered how to consistently produce the bright-leafed tobacco for which the area became famous.

However, it was the planters who wanted to make Danville the market to which farmers in surrounding areas brought their tobacco. They obtained an inspection station in Danville. Then, in 1858, Thomas D. Neal (perfecting an idea of Dr. Stovall of Halifax County) began to display tobacco on the warehouse floor rather than in hogsheads (barrels). This method became associated with the city as the Danville system. The system allowed buyers to see what they were purchasing. The system also provided farmers with higher prices for their tobacco than when it was sold by the hogshead.¹¹

View of the Rebel hospitals, Danville. Courtesy Library of Congress.

Former