The Union Reform Party of South Carolina was a political party of South Carolina during Reconstruction. Originally called the Citizen's Party, it was founded by reform minded Republicans in the spring of 1870 to oppose the reelection of Governor Robert Kingston Scott. At the time, the electorate of South Carolina was predominantly composed of recently freed slaves who were unwilling to cast a vote for the Democratic Party. The white conservatives of the state recognized that the Democratic Party was a hopeless vehicle for power and instead sought to unite with the bolting Republicans. Not only would the alliance weaken the position of Scott’s government, but the conservatives would then be in a position to influence a new government if elected.
The reform Republicans and white conservatives convened on June 15, 1870 in Columbia to form a new party in order to oppose the policies of the Radical Republicans. A large number of blacks also attended the convention because they had been promised two dollars a day. The Union Reform Party nominated Vermont Republican Richard B. Carpenter for Governor and Matthew Butler for Lieutenant Governor to contest the elections of 1870 by prearranged agreement. There initially were plans to nominate a black man for Lieutenant Governor, but both black men approached for the position declined and the blacks themselves nominated Butler. For the legislative races, a black man was placed on the ticket in every district.
On October 10, 1870, Governor Scott was reelected decisively over Carpenter, 62% - 38%. The Republicans swept all of the contests for Congress and maintained a large majority in the General Assembly. The Union Reform Party failed to gain many black votes because most blacks saw little difference between it and the Democratic Party. The general sentiment among blacks was that although the Republican party was corrupt, the Union Reform Party would limit and curtail their civil rights. After the election, the party became the opposition and its members split between the Democratic Party and the Independent Republican Party for the election of 1872. Richard B. Carpenter himself was taken back into the Republican party and elected in 1872 by the General Assembly for the judgeship of the Fifth Circuit.
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“During Prohibition days, when South Carolina was actively advertising the iodine content of its vegetables, the Hell Hole brand of ‘liquid corn’ was notorious with its waggish slogan: ‘Not a Goiter in a Gallon.’”
—Administration in the State of Sout, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“I not only rejoice, but congratulate my beloved country Texas is reannexed, and the safety, prosperity, and the greatest interest of the whole Union is secured by this ... great and important national act.”
—Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)
“One point in my public life: I did all I could for the reform of the civil service, for the building up of the South, for a sound currency, etc., etc., but I never forgot my party.... I knew that all good measures would suffer if my Administration was followed by the defeat of my party. Result, a great victory in 1880. Executive and legislature both completely Republican.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“Yesterday the Electoral Commission decided not to go behind the papers filed with the Vice-President in the case of Florida.... I read the arguments in the Congressional Record and can’t see how lawyers can differ on the question. But the decision is by a strictly party vote—eight Republicans against seven Democrats! It shows the strength of party ties.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“Mormon colonization south of this point in early times was characterized as “going over the Rim,” and in colloquial usage the same phrase came to connote violent death.”
—State of Utah, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Poetry presents indivisible wholes of human consciousness, modified and ordered by the stringent requirements of form. Prose, aiming at a definite and concrete goal, generally suppresses everything inessential to its purpose; poetry, existing only to exhibit itself as an aesthetic object, aims only at completeness and perfection of form.”
—Richard Harter Fogle, U.S. critic, educator. The Imagery of Keats and Shelley, ch. 1, University of North Carolina Press (1949)