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Shootout in Anderson, 1900

by Robin Montgomery
 
Upon returning home from the war in May 1865, some Confederate Veterans congregated in Navasota. Disconcerted over the war generally and over the withholding of their pay, they looted a warehouse filled with cotton and munitions. In the process a fire and great explosion demolished several nearby buildings, leaving devastated much of the town’s commercial district. 

The consequent placement of federal troops at nearby Anderson as well as Millican lead to further violence, most of it white against black. Hence the Freedmen Bureau’s entered Grimes County to support African-Americans with the franchise, court and labor business and with education. This, in turn, led to further violence including the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. Action generating re action, local African-Americans formed their own militias interspersed with chapters of secrecy-laden Loyal or Union Leagues.

A primary factor giving rise to African-American strength was numbers. By 1870, that race constituted some 60% of the county’s population. The loyalty of African-American voters, therefore, enabled the republicans to retain considerable influence in the county throughout the rest of the 19thcentury. Not only numbers of
African-Americans was significant in the measuring of republican power, but credit and market difficulties spawned agrarian radicalism in Grimes County. As a result, by the 1880s poorer white farmers allied with
African-Americans to form a People’s Party of populist orientation.

So greatly did the populist alliance alarm the conservative establishment that it led to a shootout on the main street of Anderson on 7 November 1900. In the melee, populist sheriff, Garret Scott, lay wounded while his deputy and brother, Emmett Lee Scott, suffered death at the hands of William McDonald. McDonald also lost his life, however, as did a by stander, J.L. Bradley. Only the timely arrival of armed militia ushered in by rail from Houston via Navasota enabled the wounded sheriff to escape with his life for medical treatment elsewhere. This shootout held far-ranging consequences as it brought into the open the “White Man’s Union” which would control Grimes County Politics until the nineteen fifties.

Thank you.


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