Joseph Crews (c. 1823 – September 13, 1875) was a Reconstruction militia leader who served as a member of the South Carolina House of Representatives from 1874 until his assassination in 1875.
After the American Civil War, as racist attitudes hardened, he was referred to as a "Negro trader" and "accused of Union sympathies".
"Like companies of Confederate cavalry", "heavily armed whites" pushed away black voters—until Federal troops came from twenty miles away, with Crews, and took control of the ballot boxes.
[5] According to a letter sent to President Ulysses S. Grant by L. Coss Carpenter, an Internal Revenue Service collector in South Carolina, Crews was shot by armed men three miles from the Laurens County courthouse on the morning of September 8, 1875.
According to Carpenter, he was the leading Republican politician in the county, and without him it would have been very difficult to prevent "ascendancy" of the area's Democratic Party.
[10] In August 1876, Francis McGann was arrested and confessed to taking $200 from Republicans Cullen Lark and John Hamilton for the murder.