"Alonzo-Jacob-Ransier" (January 3,1834-August 17,1882)

Reconstruction politician and U.S. congressman,was born in Charleston South Carolina,to free parents,whose names are unknown.Contemporary accounts describe his education as "limited." In the 1850s he secured a position as a shipping clerk with a prominent commercial firm in Charleston.In 1856 he married Louisa Ann Carroll,and they were the parents of eleven children.She died in 1875,and Alonzo married Mary Louisa Mckinlay in 1876.


He was a leading figure in Reconstruction and Republician politics in South Carolina.He participated in the 1865 Colored Peoples' Convention in Charleston that urged the state's white leaders to enfranchise African American men and abolish the black code,a series of measures designed to limit the rights of African Americans and to confine them to menial and agricultural labor.In 1876 Congress passed a series of Reconstruction laws that provided for the reorganization of the southern states,the enfranchisement of African American men,and the disenfranchisement of southerns who had supported the Confederacy.Alonzo subsequently represented Charleston in the 1868 constitutional convention.He served as vice president of the State Republician Executive Committee and then as president from 1868-1872,following the assassination of Benjamin Franklin Randolph.Alonzo was elected to the state house of representatives in 1868 and was Charleston County auditor from 1868-1870.In the state house in 1870 he sponsored a measured that,while not explicitly guaranteeing civil rights for African Americans,provided African Americans with the same legal right to pursue judicial remedies that was available to whites.Alonzo was also a director and secretary of the Enterprise Railroad Company, a corporation organized in 1870 by African American political leaders to operate a horse-drawn streetcar line to haul freight between the South Carolina Railroad terminal and the Cooper River wharves.The company did not survive as an African American owned business,and by 1873 a group of white businessmen led by S.S.Solmon had taken over the railroad.Alonzo joined with several other African American political leaders,including Benjamin A.Boseman,Robert Smalls,Robert Brown Elliott,and Beverly Nash,in forming the South Carolina Phosphate & Phosphatic River & Mining Company.


Described in 1870 by the Charleston News and Courier as exercising " considerable influence," Alonzo reached the pinnacle of his political power in the early 1870s.In 1870 he was elected as South Carolina's first African American lieutenant governor on a ticket headed by incumbent Robert K.Scott.In 1872 he was elected to represented South Carolina's Second District in the Forty-third Congress,from 1873-1875.From 1875-1877 he was the collector for the Internal Revenue Service for South Carolina's Second District.


Alonzo was often regarded as timid and reticent,he was frequently willing to take a bold stand on controversial issues.He joined the black delegate William Whipper in speaking out strongly in the constitutional convention in opposition to legalizing the collection of debts incurred in the purchase of slaves prior to the Civil War.In doing so,Alonzo and William opposed three formidable African American leaders,Francis Louis Cardozo,Joseph Hayne Rainey,and William Mckinlay,who favored payment.Alonzo also joined two other Charleston African American leaders,Richard Harvey Cain and Robert Carlos DeLarge,in opposing a literacy requirement for voting,which was easily defeated.Alonzo consistently supported women's suffrage and attended an 1870 women's suffrage convention in Columbia.He urged ridgid safeguards to protect African Americans voting rights,insisting that voting "is our chief means for self-defense." He opposed segregation in public education so strongly that he abstained from voting on the 1875 Civil Rights Bill in Congress because provisions prohibiting discrimination in education had been deleted from the measure.


Alonzo was deeply involved in the struggles of the Republican Party.In 1872 as a delegate to the Republican National Convention and to an African American convention in New Orleans,Alonzo supported Ulysses S.Grant for reelection and would not join reformers who backed Horace Greeley.As a member of the " Charleston Ring"- one of the factions that thrived in a divided Republican Party in Charleston-Alonzo attacked fellow Republicans for their inept leadership of the public schools.In 1871 Alonzo Alonzo cited the bitter conflicts over patronage among Republicans as the cause of the Democratic victory in the municipal election.Yet he was willing to embrace patronage in 1876 when his tenure as Internal Revenue Service collector was about to expire.He pleaded with Governor Daniel Chamberlain for help in securing nomination to office:"I have a large family and no means for their support and would greatly obliged if my friends will take me into consideration in connection with such a position on the state ticket as they may think me qualified for." He was not nominated,and by 1879 he was reduced to working as a night watchman for $1.50 per day.He was later employed at the Pacific Guano works and as a street laborer.When he died in obscurity in Charleston,the News and Courier did not note his passing.