VI

Licinius Mordecai Prentiss, Doctor Divinitatis, President of the Athens Theological Seminary. Prim and pencil thin, smooth shaven. He read Matthew with love, and Plato with passion. He lived in his mansion on Beaty Street called Parthenon. Now he was being harangued at his desk by his fellow Greek petitioners. These elite few gathered around him like Olympus Mons. What were they going to do about Strangetown? There are illegal whiskies and ladies-of-the-night down there. There are Republicans and transvestites. There are negroes with guns, although they did not say it like that. Dr. Prentiss’s normally steadfast patience snapped. Enough!!

 
The Democratic Party of Limestone County was dominated by the Greeks of Athens. They were for the most part the planter elite and ran it like a machine with Dr. Prentiss as the chairman. Even when the Union army occupied the town early in the war, they remained surly and obstreperous. That is until the mad Russian Ivan Turchininov descended on Athens and sacked it like the Muscovite he was. That was in the Spring of ‘62. The Greeks became pretty docile after that. In fact, they collaborated with the Yankee power to preserve their status. They sold cotton up North in exchange for real money. Formerly ardent secessionists, they were now flexible opportunists. But while they adjusted to gradual emancipation by paying their former slaves, there were already cracks in the edifice. Freedmen were pouring into town from the countryside. They took up residence along Town Creek in a ‘contraband camp,’ which is a rude word for a place of refuge. When the Yankees started paying them real money to dig forts along the Decatur & Nashville railroad, word got around. The Greeks were losing their freedmen workers. They were moving into Strangetown. That just will not do!

 
For Dr. Prentiss, the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment turned crisis for the party’s hold on power. Suddenly thousands of negroes had the right to vote, and who did they vote for? They voted for the party of Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator himself. They voted Republican! The Greeks blinked and did nothing. They had grossly underestimated the surge of political muscle this voting bloc suddenly brought to the polls. When elections came and went, the Democrats were flabergasted to find a Republican was now in control of the most powerful office in Limestone County - Sheriff. They thanked their heavens he was white. But my god? What if he had been black? The possibility terrified the Democrat elites, and so they slowly and surely drew their plans against the source of this new power – Strangetown.