Lightning Rod Scalawag: The Unlikely Political Career of Thomas Minott Peters

Lightning Rod Scalawag: The Unlikely Political Career of Thomas Minott Peters One of the state Supreme Court justices who became a lightning rod for the political and legal issues of the Reconstruction period , Thomas Minott Peters, presided over the court for only one year (1873–1874) and yet became one of the most hated jurists in Alabama history.1 A notorious scalawag, Peters was routinely vilified in the press for both his “Radical Republican” politics and his decisions that denied the right of secession as a basis for Alabama statute. The events of one hot summer evening in 1878 may help us begin to understand the source of Peters’s unpopularity. On Saturday July 13 Peters delivered a stirring speech at a meeting of Lawrence County’s “colored” Republican convention at Mountain Home. The meeting was observed by a reporter from a Democratic paper with a long record of keeping track of one of the state’s most notorious scalawags. The Moulton Advertiser’s reporter, “Eye-Witness,” paraphrased Peters’s talk to raise the alarm one more time: He made a black republican speech and told them that he was a radical and intended to do a great many radical tricks before he died. He dwelt at length upon Paul Horton Paul Horton teaches history at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. He is indebted to Robert H. McClain Jr., a direct descendant of Thomas M. Peters, for sharing e-mail correspondence and much of his family research. The author would like to thank Colin Rennert-May, Amy Smith-Horton, Mike Fitzgerald, Ed Ayers, Eric Foner, Ed Bridges, and the most kind editors and readers of the Alabama Review for their encouragement and assistance on drafts of this article. 1 Peters plays a pivotal role in two books that are based on oral histories of Unionist northwest Alabama: Donald Dodd and Wynelle S. Dodd, Winston: An Antebellum and Civil War History of a Hill County of North Alabama (Jasper, 1972), 78–123; and Wesley S. Thompson, The Free State of Winston: A History of Winston County, Alabama (Winfield, 1968). According to one local historian, tradition has it that Peters’s library and papers were dumped in a ditch near his home after his house was sold. April 2011 117 the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and said that the 16th Amendment would be the right of suffrage to women. The colored ladies . . . whose modesty he extolled, he said would vote. Seeming to admit, that white ladies would shrink from mingling with a crowd of negroes at the polls. A good Democrat, Eye-Witness had difficulty maintaining even feigned objectivity: “And here the unnatural monster seemed to gloat over the idea of defeating us with women votes, and forever fastening upon the white people of the South the radical yoke.” Peters spoke with “touching pathos” about civil rights and compared civil rights legislation to the “Lord’s prayer.” When “he spoke of Fort Pillow,” where hundreds of African American Federal soldiers from the First Regiment Alabama Siege Artillery had been massacred by troops under the command of Nathan Bedford Forrest in 1864, “his remarks were enough to have raised a riot.” Although other African American and white Republicans made credible speeches that day, “none seemed to sanction the demon-like violence of judge Peters.”2 In the minds of Eye-Witness and his Democratic readers, Peters’s threatening rhetoric had to be self-serving. He would compromise all political principles to seek and maintain power. From this perspective the former Unionist was the worst sort of opportunist who betrayed his friends, country, and social class to become Alabama’s highestranking judge. In the words of Bourbon historian John Witherspoon Dubose, “he always avowed intense Union sentiments. He fell into the ranks of the scalawags without a jolt. His attainments as a lawyer were mediocre, insufficient to justify his promotion. When the invading enemy came into the counties along the Tennessee River, he went into their lines to stay, and his conduct naturally increased his claims upon the recognition of the carpetbag element.” Similarly William Garrett, writing in 1872, attributes Peters’s rise to the state supreme court to opportunism: “He was...