Attorneys & Law in Greenville County: A History

By Judith T. Bainbridge

For more than two hundred years, lawyers and judges, many of them colorful and powerful personalities, have practiced law and maintained order in Greenville County. In the nineteenth century, Judges Richard Gantt and Waddy Thompson began the tradition of Upstate justice. At the time of the Civil War, Benjamin Perry and his colleagues argued fiercely about secession. Recently, local attorneys and judges, both black and white, have struggled with integration and civil rights issues. History is dotted with legal dynasties; individual practioners like Miss Jim Perry and John Bolt Culbertson; and judges, including J. Robert Martin and Frank Eppes, who have played significant roles in Upstate law. Author Judith Bainbridge details the impact and personalities of law and lawyers in Greenville County.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Oct 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9781625856593

Judith T. Bainbridge

Judith Bainbridge retired in 2007 from Furman University as professor of English emerita. A Greenville resident since 1976, she is a historic preservationist who has extensively researched local history. She is the author of books on the West End and the Greenville Women�s College, as well as the 2008 chamber of commerce�sponsored Historic Greenville and Greenville�s Heritage, a collection of her articles on local history from the Greenville News.

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patience.

Chapter 1

Law and Order in the Wild West

1786–1820

South Carolina legislators chartered Greenville County on March 22, 1786, in order to bring a semblance of law and order to the untamed western part of the state. Before the American Revolution, the land between the Saluda and the Enoree Rivers in the foothills of the great mountains had been Cherokee hunting grounds, off limits to white settlers. One of the very few exceptions was Richard Pearis, an Irish Indian trader who in 1770 managed to acquire (semi-legally) about twelve square miles of land east of the Reedy River and built a plantation and trading post at the shallowest point of the river near modern-day downtown Greenville.¹ During the Revolution, the backcountry was the site of violent skirmishes between the Patriots and the Loyalists (or Tories), with Pearis included among the latter. Afterward, the new State of South Carolina claimed his plantation and the hunting grounds of the Cherokees, who had also sided with the British during the conflict.

At the conclusion of the war, the state, devastated by seven years of conflict, was in a perilous financial condition. The government, whose primary resource was land, owed money to the men who had fought with the Patriots and those whose property had been confiscated. To cover those debts, starting in May 1784, South Carolina granted or sold the land that would be Greenville County to hundreds of claimants. While most grantees planned permanent settlement, some were speculators looking to make a fast profit. Many settlers were quick-tempered Scots-Irish who settled disagreements with fists, knives or lawsuits.

Because courts were essential to peace and stability on this frontier, two days before they chartered Greeneville County in March 1786,² legislators elected nine members of the first county court. These justices of the peace—including John Ford, James Blassingame, Thomas Jenkins, Ambrose Blackburn, Isaac Morgan, Obediah Hooper, Henry Wood and Lemuel Alston—were large landowners, but only one, Alston, may have had legal training.³ Their landholdings, noted A.V. Huff in his county history, averaged more than one thousand acres each. The first court met two months later, in May 1786, at the plantation of John Ford, the senior justice, who lived at Golden Grove (about two miles northeast of modern-day Piedmont) close to the Saluda River. The county’s first courthouse, as a result, was probably Ford’s parlor. An adjacent outbuilding may have served as a jail.⁴

Greenville was initially assigned to the huge Ninety-Six Circuit Court District, which covered an area that would eventually be divided into fourteen counties, including Abbeville, Edgefield, Newberry, Greenwood, Saluda, Laurens, Anderson, Greenville, Spartanburg, Pickens, Oconee and Union. But the sprawling territory was far too large to control, so Greenville and Pendleton (renamed Pickens in 1826) Counties were transferred into the new Washington Circuit Court District in 1791. The courthouse and jail for that district were located in Pickensville (first called Rockville), near modern-day Easley. The first extant docket is for the April 1793 term, containing forty-two cases; the oldest records of Greenville court cases date to November 1793.⁵ The county court here tried both criminal and civil cases, and between 1792 and 1799, there are records of 101 General Sessions cases, most for assault, bastardy,⁶ larceny and hog stealing.⁷

Justice was rough and tough. There’s a story that may be apocryphal about Colonel Benjamin Cleveland, a judge living near Pendleton, who provided local law and order. On one occasion when he was away from home, neighbors brought a horse thief to his house for judgment. They waited for some time for his return, the story goes, but grew anxious as evening came on. They asked Mrs. Cleveland, who was working around the home, what to do with the prisoner. She inquired about the offense and was assured that it was an unquestioned case of horse stealing. When she asked them what they thought the colonel would do, they replied that he would have the prisoner hanged. Well then, said the old lady, you must hang him. So they did.⁸

Greenville County remained a part of the Washington District until 1800, when legislators abolished the county court system, in part because they considered lay judges untrained, inconsistent or incompetent.⁹ They replaced county jurisdictions with Circuit Court and election districts. Greenville District existed from 1800 until after the Civil War, when the Constitution of 1868 reinstituted counties.¹⁰

Elizabeth Bruce was accused of murder in 1796. This copy of her indictment is one of our earliest legal records. Photograph by Jennifer Stob, courtesy the Registrar of Deeds.

County justices heard most civil cases and all criminal ones except those involving capital crimes, which were heard in the General Sessions Court. Local courts had administrative functions as well: they licensed taverns and supervised roads, rivers and bridges. The justices—who according to the charter met on the third Monday in February, May, August and November—elected a sheriff and a clerk, who registered deeds and drew jury lists. Justices were also authorized to erect a courthouse, as well as a jail, pillory, whipping post and stocks.

The location of the permanent courthouse became a political issue. In order to serve the more than six thousand people who had moved into the county between 1784 and 1790, a central location was essential. Settlers in the northern part of the county commissioned a survey, which showed that Ford’s Plantation in Golden Grove was ten miles away from the geographical center of Greenville County’s sprawling 750 square miles. The location was inconvenient for the subsistence farmers who lived in and near the mountains since it would take at least two days to travel from Gowensville near the North Carolina line to Golden Grove.

The location was relatively convenient, however, for the much larger planters who lived in the southern part of the county near the Laurens border. Obviously Ford and those judges who lived near him along the Saluda River had no reason to encourage legislators, who tended to act only when pressured, to select a new location.

The General Assembly ignored two petitions from people living in the northern part of the county asking that the court be moved until December 1793, when legislators grudgingly agreed to find a more central location. Two sites near the falls of the Reedy River were then considered. One belonged to Elias Earle, who owned some seven thousand acres of land in Greenville and Pendleton Counties. The other, the one chosen, was the property of Lemuel Alston, who had served in the South Carolina House between 1789 and 1790 and who owned more than eleven thousand acres around the river. Greeneville Courthouse became the county seat.

Its first post office was authorized in February 1795. Dr. Huff wrote that by the time it began receiving mail in April, a new one-story log courthouse was probably complete. It was surely finished the following December, when the legislature made it the county polling place.¹¹ The courthouse stood in the middle of Pearis’s Wagon Road about 350 yards up the hill north of the Reedy River. The jail, a two-story building with chimneys at either end, was located about a block to the east on modern-day Falls Street, adjacent to what became the town spring and was generally referred to as the jail spring.

In 1797, Lemuel Alston platted his land around the courthouse, laying out a village he called Pleasantburg. He created fifty-two lots on the street from the river to the head of the avenue, showing the location of the courthouse in the middle of Court Square. That configuration still determines the shape of modern-day Main Street. Although the first sale of his platted land was recorded as Greenville C.H., Village of Pleasantburg, the name did not stick. The village was already known as Greenville Courthouse, and it would continue to have that designation until about the time of the Civil War, when it was more generally shortened to the simpler Greenville.

When Lemuel Alston laid out the plat for Pleasantburg on his land north of the Reedy River in 1797, the courthouse and gaol were already a part of the village that was known as Greenville Courthouse. Courtesy Greenville County Library.

It was in this log cabin courthouse (or the one that succeeded it) that some of early Greenville’s most colorful early cases were heard. Among them were those of Elizabeth Bruce, who in 1796 was indicted for murdering her newborn illegitimate child because she had been seduced by the devil; James Hornbuckle, tried for assault and battery for biting off John Dempsey’s right ear during a fight in 1806; and James Harrison, one of the richest men in the county, accused of stealing $5 from the breeches of John Hawkins during a militia drill in 1816. Harrison immediately sued Hawkins for $3,000, charging slander. A note by Clerk of Court George Washington Earle on the case file, however, indicates that all was settled satisfactorily. Hawkins was found "not guilty with accord and satisfaction and did drink grogg [sic] together."¹²

One case that was not tried at the log courthouse was the 1797 murder of Robert Maxwell, one of Greenville’s earliest sheriffs. He was killed on his way to testify at court, but no one was ever indicted for the crime. Cases of horse and hog theft, assault and fornication were, however, frequently heard.¹³

All that is known about the county attorneys who prosecuted these cases is their names: James Yancey, Zachariah Taliaferro and Thomas P. Carnes. Abstracts of General Sessions court rolls indicate that neither they nor other court officials got rich from legal work: prosecuting attorneys’ fees (recorded in pounds and shillings until about 1815) were consistently one pound. Constables’ fees varied from two shillings to more than a pound, depending on the distance traveled to serve writs. The clerk of court was paid slightly more than the prosecutor, while the sheriff seems generally to have been paid about twice the attorney’s fee. Defense attorneys earned more: their fees varied from four to fourteen pounds.¹⁴

Waddy Thompson and Samuel Farrow were the only defense attorneys listed in the abstracts. Although Thompson lived in nearby Pickensville, he had begun buying land around Golden Grove in Greenville County in 1799, and within eight years he had accumulated nearly four thousand acres. He was solicitor of the Chancery Court for the Western District, but that was not a fulltime position; in major cases, he sometimes represented defendants. Farrow was a Spartanburg native who defended the accused (once in partnership with Thompson) in a few Greenville trials. He, too, was a wealthy man who later served in the General Assembly and as lieutenant governor.

Lemuel Alston’s house, known as Prospect Hill, was the finest seat in the upcountry according to an early visitor. Built in about 1797, Vardry McBee and his family later lived there, as did attorney Edward Stokes in the 1880s. It was located on Westfield Street where the Water System building is today. Courtesy the Greenville County Library.

In 1806, Edward Hooker, a twenty-year-old graduate of Yale College and a tutor at Ninety-Six, visited Greenville and stayed at Alston’s mansion, Prospect Hill.¹⁵ His diary is a primary source for Greenville life at the beginning of the nineteenth century. He described the village as being quite pretty and rural: the streets covered with green grass and handsome trees growing here and there, with six houses and two or three stores. He also comments that the courthouse is a decent two story building. The jail is three stories, large and handsome.

Given his comment, it seems likely that the original log buildings had been replaced by larger and more polished structures.¹⁶ That decent two-story courthouse, later described by Benjamin Perry as framed, sealed, weather-boarded, and covered with shingles,¹⁷ may have already been erected on a small plot on the eastern side of the square. That at least seems to be a reasonable interpretation of Robert Mills’s comment in 1820 that the courthouse lot is too small to admit of enclosure.¹⁸ It seems likely that a fence could have easily surrounded a site in the middle of Court Square, while the later courthouse lot on the east side of the street is extremely narrow.

Hooker went on to say that the little settlement was not the seat of much business, that there was only one attorney and that the law business was dull.¹⁹ This comment is one of the earliest references to Greenville lawyers (judges got more attention). Hooker mentioned that a Mr. Henderson, an attorney who was Lemuel Alston’s half-brother, introduced him to Clerk of Court George Washington Earle and merchant Jeremiah Cleveland during a stroll through the town. Huff conjectured that Henderson may be the single Greenville attorney to whom Hooker refers, but since there is no other legal reference to him, the lawyer in question may have been, as Joseph Earle suggested, Alston himself.²⁰ Another possibility is that Hooker may have been referring to Judge (later Chancellor) Waddy Thompson, who had moved to the village in 1805.

The scarcity of lawyers in Greenville is understandable. Requirements for admission to the bar, established in 1796, were rigorous: three years of reading law with a practicing South Carolina attorney (most of whom, immediately after the Revolution, would have been trained at the Inns of Court in London) with college graduation or, alternately, four years of reading law without a college degree. In 1801, that law was expanded to admit lawyers who had been admitted in other states.²¹

Reading law was expensive: candidates paid fees generally averaging about one hundred pounds (over three years) to the attorneys who directed their reading. Few young men with the time and money to follow that procedure would choose to practice in a tiny remote village on the western edge of nowhere. Somewhere, of course, was Charleston, nearly three weeks away by irregularly scheduled stagecoach, where most of the state’s attorneys practiced and which then had a population of about twelve thousand.²² Several attorneys had also settled in the new capital city of Columbia. Other towns with far more active legal practices (and more people) than Greenville were Edgefield and Newberry.

The legal lethargy Hooker mentioned refers to the twice-yearly meetings of the Circuit Court, each one of which, he said, lasted for only two or three days. The judges who presided over these hearings, however, were far from dull. The most important was former Pickensville solicitor Waddy Thompson, who had moved to Greenville after the Washington District was abolished and whom the legislature had elected a judge in the Court of Equity in 1805. In 1817, he was elected chancellor, one of the state’s two senior judges, a position he held until 1828.²³

Thompson (1769–1845), a native of Virginia, had just been appointed judge when Hooker met him. The younger man described him as a sleek, beauish man of about 30²⁴ who took, in Hooker’s opinion, an all-too-active and partisan role in the hot and boozy congressional election between Lemuel Alston and Elias Earle that was then underway.

In later years, however, Benjamin Perry described Thompson’s appearance as noble and distinguished and said that he was a convivial acquaintance who enjoyed being with his friends and who, if he had properly cultivated his talents…might have been one of the great men of America. He was a quick study, known for making up his mind about a case before reading lawyers’ briefs and for having a sharp and sarcastic tongue. According to Joseph Earle, Thompson retired from office in 1828 under some pressure from the legislature, which was involved in a temperance campaign directed principally at the judiciary.²⁵

A second highly individualistic judge was Richard Gantt, a Maryland native who came in 1794 to Edgefield, where he was admitted to the South Carolina bar. After a highly profitable career as an advocate, he was elected to the Circuit Court in 1818. In about 1824, according to John Belton O’Neall, he secluded himself in the woods of Greenville.

Judge Gantt was criticized as being too lenient with criminals and was once accused of being the advocate of rascality. In one charge to a Greenville jury about a case of street fighting during a Fourth of July celebration, for example, he argued that the defendants ought to be freed because the anniversary of American independence was a proud day for patriots and a day when every American had a right to fight.

Gantt was, according to contemporaries, benevolent and kindhearted but equally fickle and whimsical. He disliked being bothered by small cases. In one, a controversy over sixteen dollars, he remarked that a judge should always carry some change with him so that he could pay off such cases and get rid of them.²⁶

By the time Gantt had become a judge, Greenville was more than a rough settlement in the woods. While it was still something of a frontier village, it had become a resort for Lowcountry planters fleeing the heat and disease of coastal summers. By 1820, the village boasted about 450 residents and nearly a dozen stores. In 1815, Lemuel Alston was attracted by the dark soil of newly opened land in Alabama and sold his Greenville holdings to Vardry McBee of Lincolnton, North Carolina. The first stirrings of industry were beginning along county rivers, and new roads linked the backcountry to Columbia and distant Charleston. In the village of Greenville Courthouse (as it was generally called), academies for boys and girls were being built, and there was talk of constructing a larger and more elegant courthouse. Times were beginning, slowly, to change. Greenville was evolving from a frontier outpost to a village—one welcoming a few more lawyers.

Chapter 2

Perry, Politics and Passions

1820–1860

On the evening that Benjamin Franklin Perry arrived in Greenville in 1823 to complete his education at the new Male Academy, he observed two drunks quarreling and throwing stones at each other across the public square. No one stopped them; the village did not have a policeman. Nor did it have much else. Its luxuries consisted of one sofa, two carpets, three pianos and a few silver spoons.²⁷ It did have, however, two notable hostelries, three lawyers and an almost-completed new courthouse.²⁸

Crittenden’s Hotel at Court Square had been built several years earlier to serve the wealthy Lowcountry families who were beginning to spend May to October in the Upstate. It also served bachelor lawyers and traveling judges. Other boardinghouses and hotels were patronized by drovers, who led swine, steer, horses and wild turkeys out of the mountains and down the newly completed Buncombe Road on their way to markets in Augusta. The newest hotel—it may have been under construction when Perry arrived—was the Mansion House, which, owner William Toney bragged, would excel any house in the upper part of the State in appearance and accommodation.²⁹

With a ballroom so large that it needed fireplaces at either end to warm customers, a bar with the first chandelier in Greenville and a tariff of $1.50 per day, it was an inn for the elite, including John C. Calhoun from nearby Fort Hill. The U.S. senator—soon to be vice president of the United States—always stayed in a balconied second-story room. The Mansion House had the L-shape configuration created by Court Square that can be seen in the Poinsett Hotel, built a century later on the same site.

Dr. Joshua Tucker, an itinerant doctor and artist, painted this watercolor image of the rural village of Greenville Courthouse in about 1825. The Mills Courthouse is in the center of the drawing, which also shows the rear of the Mansion House, where visiting judges and prosperous local attorneys lived. Here it has a simple pediment; more than fifty years later, a cupola with a clock face was added to the building during renovations. Courtesy the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Gift of Arthur Shurcliff.

The three attorneys then in residence were Tandy Walker, William Choice and Baylis J. Earle. Walker (1793–1873), probably born in Laurens District, was, according to early Greenville historian S.S. Crittenden, a very early settler of Greenville³⁰ who had been admitted to the South Carolina bar in 1819. He probably had substantial family wealth, as he pledged fifty dollars to the building of the Greenville Academies in 1819, began buying substantial acreage in 1822 and was elected to the General Assembly in 1824.

A thirty-something bachelor with money in his pocket, Walker lived at Crittenden’s Hotel while he wooed Sarah Toney, the daughter of the Mansion House proprietor. Just a few years after they married, he retired from the practice of law and sold his library to Benjamin Perry. Pleasant, kind and amiable, a fluent speaker and popular in his manner, according to Crittenden, Walker was a nullifier who ran for the U.S. Congress in 1833 but withdrew when John C. Calhoun backed his opponent.

William Choice (1796–1877) was Greenville’s first homegrown attorney. Born in Greenville District, when he died in 1877 he was probably the county’s oldest native-born citizen, according to local historian Joseph Earle. Choice was educated at the Pendleton Academy, studied law under D.T. Tillinghast and was admitted to the state bar in 1819. He began his practice in Greenville and was soon known as the best and most prompt collecting lawyer in the Circuit.³¹ He formed a partnership with Baylis Earle, who was then solicitor of the Western Circuit, and when Earle was elected to the Circuit Court in 1830, he went into practice with David Wardlaw of Abbeville.

Choice was later elected the first commissioner in equity³² for the Greenville Circuit, an office he held for many years. According to Earle, chancellors—the highest-ranking equity judges in the state—complimented him on the neatness of his dockets, the correctness of his reports, and the promptness with which he paid over the funds in his hand.