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- Description is exactly "Florence (AL) Gazette reports of local Black voter support for William M. Lowe's campaign for the Eighth Congressional District of Alabama.
Though an avowed Democrat, Huntsville, Alabama native and Confederate veteran Col. William Manning Lowe (1842-1882), after being passed over for two Democratic Party nominations in the late 1870s campaigned as an independent and by 1880 was a member of the Greenback Party, which was was a short-lived coalition of farmers and laborers--white and Black--that arose in the mid-1870s to protest a variety of federal monetary policies and which took its name from its support for the continued printing of paper money by the government. In Alabama the national Greenback-Labor Party (GLP) served as the chief vehicle for challenging the Democratic Party from 1878 to 1882.
in 1880 Gen. Joseph Wheeler defeated Lowe by a slim margin, but state election officials disqualified more than 600 pro-Lowe ballots. Wheeler took office in 1881 however Lowe challenged the election results, was vindicated, and finally, in June of 1882, at the end of his appeal, Lowe was able to take his congressional seat but became ill with tuberculosis and died that October; Wheeler won the special election to fill out the remainder of Lowe's term."
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