Cold Water and the other Army

As a young teen growing up in Sumter, S.C., William James Clark was caught up in a religious revival sweeping the nation in the 1840s. That revival fired up two reform movements, one for the abolition of slavery and the other for the abolition of drink. The antislavery forces didn't get much traction among white Southerners (the Grimke sisters excepted) but the anti-drink folk set in motion laws and attitudes that still reverberate in South Carolina (and Massachusetts).

Young WJ Clark was at the forefront. In 1849 he was elected president of the Order of Temperance, also known as the Cold Water Army. Here is its theme song, to the tune of Yankee Doodle:

"Cold water is the drink for me,
Of all the drinks, the best sir;
Your grog, of whate’er name it be
I dare not for to taste, sir.

Give me dame nature’s only drink,
And I can make it do, sir;
Then what care I what other think,—
The best that ever grew, sir."

WJ was born in Charleston in 1835 to a grocer also named William James Clark and his wife Anne LaComb Perdreau, a great great great granddaughter of the Remberts who fled France. In 1838, when the little boy was 3, a great fire swept through Charleston, destroying the Clarks' property. They picked up and moved to Sumter.

In 1854 the younger WJ moved to Manning and married Margeret Ann Stukes, then 16. They lived on a farm, part of Stukes family lands, on what became known as Clark's Hill, just west of Clark's Branch, which flowed through the western part of the town.

WJ enlisted in the Confederate Army in 1853, two weeks after his son Sam was born, joining Company I, 23rd regiment, under the command of Colonel Henry L. Benbow.