James H. Fordham, of the free persons of color before the war, held the position of a lieutenant on the police force of the city of Charleston, from 1874 to as late as 1896. He was a light quadroon, who might have been passed for a Spanish officer. Taciturn to a degree, he discharged the duties of his office thoroughly and conscientiously. Scarcely ever speaking, unless spoken to, and apparently never ruffling the white roundsmen under his command. Yet, in the longest speech he ever made, backed as it was by appropriate action, he evinced an understanding of, and devotion to the fundamental principles of democracy which, if appreciated by the great German people, might have saved them from the pains and penalties they are now undergoing for subjecting the world to the exigencies of military ambition. The occasion of Fordham’s speech was an incident in 1891, occurring in one of those periodical struggles by which democracy in the United States perpetually renews its strength at the expense of officialdom. At the close of a warmly contested and close primary, the successful faction opposing the municipal administration in Charleston, found it difficult to bring the result in one ward to a count and decision. Impatient and suspicious, as the delay wore past midnight, a worthy but somewhat choleric individual, of the faction announced successful at every other point hours earlier, denounced the presence of the police in the poll where the delay was being maintained by the masterly inactivity of the administration manager. One of the policemen on duty, ordinarily as amiable as he was strong and courageous, advanced toward the citizen and angrily challenged the accusation with the inquiry: “What right have you to make charges against the police?” Before the citizen could reply, the quadroon lieutenant sprang from his horse, pushed through the crowd and, placing himself between the two, the only colored man in a group of excited whites, firmly but quietly said to the policeman: “What right has he to make charges against you? The right of any citizen, at any time to make charges against any policeman, and I am here to uphold that right.”[285] It is useless to comment upon this incident; for, to any one who needed such, comment would be useless. As an incident of the growth of caste feeling, twelve years later in the same locality, a mulatto policeman having arrested a drunken German for noisily quarreling with his wife upon the public streets was, upon the demand of the leading hyphenated politician of the city, dismissed from the force.