Charleston's First Black Detectives, 1869–1886

Americans love novels and movies that portray detectives following a trail of clues to solve a crime. In our community, the City of Charleston hired its first detectives in 1856, during the era of slavery, but a handful of Black detectives joined the force shortly after the Civil War. The advent of their careers in the late 1860s followed dramatic social changes wrought by the divisive war. Nearly twenty years later, however, the collapse of Federal Reconstruction in South Carolina narrowed the participation of Black police officers for generations to come.

Detective fiction is an extremely popular and lucrative literary genre that entered the mainstream of popular culture in the late 1860s. Thanks to the profusion of novels and movies since that time, we all have a general understanding of what detectives do: they visit crime scenes, search for clues, interview witnesses, follow suspects, and compile reports that grease the creaking wheels of justice. The profession involves a mix of independent and collaborative work that is occasionally dangerous and always stressful.

Both the literary genre and the real-life phenomenon of investigative police work were products of a turbulent age. The rising tide of urbanization and industrialization on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean during the first half of the nineteenth century pressed humans into close contact under tense conditions. Tempers flared and passions erupted as people tried to cope with a quickening and unnatural pace of life. As literacy swelled among the rising urban masses, publishers capitalized on the growing market for sensational stories of crime and punishment.

Coincidentally, these social and cultural developments coalesced at the same moment that the City of Charleston appointed its first Black policemen and Black detectives. To understand the context of these appointments, we have to turn back to the early history of the local police force, born within a community stratified by the practice of chattel slavery.

The evolution of Charleston’s early peace officers followed the same path as contemporary developments in larger cities like London, New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. From the beginning of the English settlement of South Carolina in 1670 to the middle of the nineteenth century, the streets of urban Charleston were patrolled from dusk to dawn by an armed paramilitary guard originally called the Night Watch or the Town Watch (see Episode No. 66). The incorporation of Charleston in 1783 transformed the old watch into the City Guard, a similarly nocturnal force that expanded in size as the urban population continued to grow.

Beginning in 1790, the new City Council hired a lone City Marshal to inspect and investigate as he roamed the urban streets during daylight hours.[1] An ordinance in 1822 appointed four marshals to range across different quadrants of the city, and another ordinance in 1846 replaced the marshals with six men styled “police officers.”[2] Their investigative duties rendered them distinct from the nocturnal City Guard, which officially morphed into a round-the-clock Police Department in the spring of 1856. At that time, the city appointed four men described for the first time as “detective police agents.”[3]

Charleston’s municipal police remained active through the entirety of the Civil War, despite the large-scale civilian evacuation of the city in 1863 and 1864. The arrival of U.S. Army troops displaced the city force in late February 1865, however, and strangers patrolled the streets under martial law for the rest of the year. Federal authorities invited Charleston’s City Council to reassemble in late 1865, and a newly-appointed chief began to rebuild the civil police in early 1866. The force reoccupied the main Guard House or Police Station, an imposing structure erected in 1839 at the southwest corner of Broad and Meeting Streets. Although the department retained its traditional paramilitary structure of captain, lieutenants, and privates, the men patrolling the streets by day and by night no longer carried the muskets and bayonets of earlier generations. An ordinance ratified in August 1866 stamped the department in the robust mold of the late 1850s, with twenty-eight commissioned and non-commissioned officers, 150 privates, and “eight detective police agents,” one of whom held the rank of lieutenant.[4]

In many ways, the Charleston Police Department of 1866 and 1867 reflected a return to the status quo antebellum. That is, a large body of White men maintained order and conducted surveillance within a community where people of African ancestry formed a slight majority. South Carolina’s state government and Charleston municipal leaders had acknowledged the demise of slavery at the end of the war, but they resisted the Federal mandate to allow African Americans to participate in the affairs of local government. To break this habit perpetuated by members of the then-conservative Democratic Party, Federal authorities began removing aldermen from Charleston’s City Council in early 1868 and replacing them with more liberal Republicans, both Black and White. The people of Charleston witnessed a succession of “military mayors,” as they were called, through the remainder of the year, and the complexion of the city’s work force began to change under their influence.

Judging by the reactions voiced in local newspapers, conservative Charleston Democrats were outraged in late July 1868 when Mayor George Washington Clark added the first non-white men to the city’s police roster. Charles Roberts, a formerly enslaved man, was detailed as a police orderly within the mayor’s office, while Benjamin Holloway, son of Republican Alderman Richard Holloway Jr., became doorkeeper of the Main Guard House.[5] These were humble positions, to be sure, but they represented the first step towards a more equitable representation within the city’s police force. The chief, Captain Christian Sigwald, wrote a letter of formal protest over the matter, but he complied with mayor’s instructions.[6]

The contested municipal elections of November 1868, which I described in Episode No. 179, ignited a firestorm of partisan wrangling and litigation that continued for six months. During that period of political paralysis, the incumbent members of Charleston’s City Council managed to ratify a significant reorganization of the police department. The size of the force shrank considerably to eighty patrolmen, and the special detectives disappeared from the ranks. In their place, the police ordinance of February 1869 empowered the Mayor to appoint detectives from among the standing force at his discretion, who were to act under his direction.[7] Days later, local newspapers named four White detectives, one of whom ranked as a lieutenant.[8] Mayor Clark announced no controversial appointments at the time, but the community was prepared for further novelties. As one newspaper predicted at the time, “the colored element will have representation on the police” in the near future.[9]

After the contested election was finally settled in May 1869, a new city administration under Republican Mayor Gilbert Pillsbury began to reward their loyal supporters. City Council ratified an ordinance that month to vacate all appointed offices and began to assemble slates of new candidates. William Viney, for example, formerly an orderly sergeant of the 55th Massachusetts Regiment, was rumored to be a “colored” candidate for lieutenant of police, and Private Benjamin Holloway was “talked of for orderly sergeant.”[10] While liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats jockeyed for positions on the municipal payroll, the police department hired at least three more “colored” men that May.[11] By the end of July, when a series of baseball riots convulsed the city (see Episode No. 121), the Charleston police fielded a small but unknown number of uniformed Black men swinging wooden clubs and rattles like their White colleagues.

Among the rookie police officers in the summer of 1869 was a “colored” man identified only as “Freeman” in the local press. When a Black woman reported the theft of silverware and jewelry from her home in Smith Street that July, the police dispatched “Detective Freeman” to investigate. “Officer Freeman,” as he was described in another report, managed to track down the teenage perpetrator and recover the stolen property, but his deployment as a detective seems to have been somewhat informal.[12] Because the police ordinance of February 1869 empowered the mayor to detach privates on detective duty at will, Mr. Freeman might or might not qualify as Charleston’s first Black detective. In any case, he did not remain long in that position.[13]

Immediately after City Council confirmed a slate of White men to serve as captain and lieutenants of the Police Department in early July 1869, the municipal board considered a bill to re-establish a more formal detective branch.[14] The move garnered public support, especially because it promised to free the detectives from the officious “red tapery” that mired the traditional operations within the Main Guard House.[15] The bill ratified on July 27th created a team consisting of one lieutenant and six men, “who shall be known as and constitute the Special Detective force of the City of Charleston,” and who were “subject to the control and orders of the Mayor” rather than the Chief of Police.[16]

The mayor and City Council elected veteran officer Albert E. Phillippi to head the new detective force, and they assembled a team on the last day of July 1869. From among the police roster, Mayor Pillsbury and Lieutenant Phillippi selected five White men—S. J. Coates, W. T. Lovett, O. Levy, Jos. Truall, N. A. Quinn, and one “colored” man, Benjamin Holloway. The local press expressed some dismay that the mayor did not include Officer Freeman, who was described as “thoroughly competent,” but insiders knew how the system worked. Benjamin Holloway became Charleston’s first “official” black detective because Mayor Pillsbury sought “to retain the influence of Alderman Holloway, colored.”[17]

Owing to the paucity of extant police records from this turbulent era, it’s impossible to determine precisely how long Detective Holloway served with the Charleston Police Department, or to describe any of the cases he investigated. The daily newspapers of his era contain a trove of useful information, but mostly in the form of minute reports and scraps of intriguing details that would require creative minds to elaborate into modern pulp fiction. The roster of the city’s Detective Force evolved in the early 1870s and undoubtedly included other men of African descent. Sam Dickerson, for example, a well-known Black politician and militia officer of the Reconstruction era, resigned from the Detective Force in late 1871, but it’s entirely unclear when he joined that elite team.[18]

In spite of the missing records, sufficient materials survive to confirm that African Americans formed approximately 45% of the Charleston Police Department by the summer of 1870, one year after the appointment of Detective Holloway.[19] A revised police ordinance of 1871 trimmed the detective force to a lieutenant and five men, but the name of just one African American investigator appears in the newspapers of 1872. Detective Primus Green swore out a warrant for the arrest of his commander, Lieutenant Frank Heidt, for maltreatment of a prisoner in the city lockup at the corner of Meeting and Broad Streets.[20] A year later, in December 1873, Black men formed the majority of both the Charleston Police Department and its Detective Force of one lieutenant and six men.[21] Following another reorganization that month, Mayor George Cunningham and City Council elected George Shrewsbury Jr., a man of mixed ancestry, to serve as chief detective, supervising the investigative work of Primus Green, William A. Hord, H. Z. Burkmeyer, and three White men named S. J. Coates, John Nunan, and John Hogan.[22]

The social and political pressures on the Black detectives of post-Civil War Charleston must have been heavy and exhausting. As sworn officers of the law navigating a diverse urban community in plain clothes, they probably witnessed the best and worst aspects of the city’s polarized culture. The story of William Hord provides a case in point. On a busy Saturday night in February 1875, the detective met with Police Chief H. W. Hendricks on King Street and exchanged a few harsh words. Hord threatened the captain and left the scene, and Hendricks obtained a warrant for his arrest on Monday morning. The magistrate allowed Hord a few hours to muster bail before arraignment, and the detective asked a local prosecutor, C. W. Buttz, for credit. Buttz was preoccupied at the County Courthouse at the northwest corner of Broad and Meeting Streets and dismissed the request. Hord, who was under the influence of alcohol, followed the prosecutor outside and fired four shots from a petite five-shooter. One small bullet wounded Buttz in the breast, but he lived to see Detective Hord dragged away to jail.[23]

The number of African-Americans on the Charleston Police Department and detective force peaked in the waning days of Federal Reconstruction.[24] During the political riots of November 1876, the majority Black police failed to maintain public order, and the department’s internal divisions erupted.[25] Chief Detective George Shrewsbury was shot and killed that month by a White police officer during an argument at the Guard House.[26] Conservative White Democrats wrest control of both state and local politics from the hands of liberal Republicans, and Federal forces retreated northward. The political forces that had nurtured the rise of Black policemen and detectives in Charleston during the late 1860s evaporated within a decade.

Black men continued to police urban Charleston in 1877 and beyond, but their numbers steadily diminished. The decline of the Black detectives was more precipitous. Detective William Hord, who remained on the force despite his earlier offence, battered a fellow Black detective, William Elliott, at the old Guard House in June 1877 and drew his pistol again. Both men went to jail that summer and set a poor example for their remaining brethren.[27] Subsequent police reports mention just two more detectives of African descent—John A. Mitchell, who served in the early 1880s, and Stephen Hayne, elected from the ranks in February 1885.[28]

In conjunction with the demise of Reconstruction, a struggling local economy induced Charleston’s City Council to economize the police department during the 1880s. The seven-member detective squad shrank to five men in June 1882, and then to four men in January 1883.[29] Another round of belt-tightening in January 1885 obliterated the office of chief detective and placed the remaining detectives under the direct supervision of the Chief of Police.[30] Finally, in December 1886, City Council eliminated the detective force altogether, as their frugal predecessors had done twenty years earlier.[31] The massive Charleston earthquake of August 1886 had nearly demolished the old Guard House at the corner of Broad and Meeting Streets, and it wrecked the city’s finances. Stephen Hayne, the last of Charleston’s post-Civil War Black detectives, lost his job at the end of a tumultuous year. He rejoined the force as a private in 1887, though, an event that coincided with the literary debut of a fictional detective named Sherlock Holmes.

A handful of African-American men persevered on the Charleston police force through the 1890s and into the twentieth century, but the political climate of the “Jim Crow” era prevented them from advancing beyond entry-level positions. The city’s dismissal of Private Herman Carroll in July 1921 concluded a long era of African-American police service in Charleston.[32] Thirty years later, Mayor William Morrison asked Police Chief Chris Ortmann to hire a few Black men back to the force. Four local men were sworn into service in August 1950, at the dawn of a new struggle for Civil Rights across the United States.[33] Their numbers increased in subsequent years, but opportunities for advancement came slowly.

In the summer of 1955, Police Chief William Kelly promoted two men of African ancestry to the city’s detective force—Privates Cambridge Jenkins Jr. (1926–1994) and Joseph Wong (1923–1979).[34] Described as Charleston’s first Black detectives at the time, and known as “the Governor” and “the Mayor” of the city’s Eastside, Jenkins and Wong blazed a trail left unfinished by an earlier, forgotten generation of dark-skinned officers.[35]

Residents of the South Carolina Lowcountry in the twenty-first century, like audiences everywhere, now expect to see diversity among the men and women who police their community. The same expectations also shape our choices in modern detective novels and streaming whodunnits. Now that you know the basic historical context of Charleston’s first Black detectives, who roamed the tense streets of a colorful city broken by Civil War, can you imagine a fictional series to dramatize their unique experiences?

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