Renty Greaves began life as a slave of Nathaniel Pierce Crowell (born in New Jersey) on Linden Place Plantation near Bluffton. After the Union captured Hilton Head Island, he escaped and became [an unwilling] US Colored Troops soldier; [a more willing] schoolteacher; a small farmer; and a minor player in real estate. After the war, he became a storekeeper for a time. Eventually he entered the political realm as a county commissioner and county coroner. He particularly was interested in protecting freedmen's property rights at Mitchelville. As local political control was wrested by white men, he sought federal appointments as assistant lighthouse keeper and as a pension agent to former Union soldiers and their widows. As White-Perry states in her article "In Freedom's Shadow: The Reconstruction Legacy of Renty Franklin Greaves of Beaufort County, South Carolina:"
For 14 years (1863-1877), persons of African descent once held in chattel slavery worked and served next to former slaveholders to reunite a divided society based on the principles espoused in the United States Constitution. Nowhere else in the South did blacks become the dominant force in gaining equality through self-governance than in South Carolina, the only state to have a black majority in the legislature during Reconstruction. Nowhere in South Carolina did blacks dominate the political scene than in Beaufort County.
Robert Smalls, "King of Beaufort", is the most well known of the local black men who held political power in South Carolina. But he had a number of associates,among whom is numbered the subject of the article, Renty Greaves. Using federal records, state records, and local newspaper microfilm held by us, she has put considerable flesh on a barebones story of the fascinating life led by Renty Greaves.
Read the full story online in Prologue, the quarterly print and online journal of the National Archives.
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