For solid and substantial service and for disinterested devotion to the cause of Democracy, the duration of all which stretches through a period of about a half century, none excels the veteran editor, William Wallace Screws, of Montgomery. From the early dawn of manhood to ripened age, Major Screws has been identified with the fortunes of his native state. It is doubtful that another has impressed the thought of the state so uninterruptedly for so long a time as he. There has never been the slightest waver in his fidelity and downright labor for a long period of years. Certainly he has sufficiently won the approval of the people of the state as to be worthy of a place among the men who have constructed the commonwealth to its present stage of advancement. No flash nor picturesqueness, no sensation nor sudden innovation has at any time attached to that which he has done—it has been service rendered as in a treadmill, patiently, persistently, and perseveringly. He has gone down into the depths with his people, has suffered as they have, and has risen along with them through the varying fortunes which have been theirs in the years of the immediate past.

Major Screws’ native region is Barbour County. His academic training and all indeed he ever had, was at Glennville, a village noted in other days for its educational advantages. He entered life early, for he was admitted to the bar at twenty, after having studied in the law office of Watts, Judge & Jackson, at Montgomery. At the end of a two years’ practice, he entered the Confederate service, being among the first to enlist. Like many others, Major Screws was not a secessionist, but he was a patriot, and subordinating his personal views to the expressed judgment of the people of Alabama, he shouldered his musket and went with the first troops that were concentrated at Pensacola. He joined in the capture of the navy yard and of Fort Barancas, and later became a lieutenant in Company H, Fifty-ninth Alabama regiment, and served under General Bragg in Tennessee and Kentucky, participating in the battles of Chickamauga and Knoxville.

The last year of the war found Major Screws under Lee in Virginia. During that stressful and distressful period he was an active sharer, and was with the remnant of that brave army that surrendered at Appomattox. It was during his campaigning with the two armies that Major Screws developed his popular ability as a writer. A vigorous and versatile correspondent from the front, he enlivened the columns of the Montgomery Advertiser, then presided over by that brilliant editor, Samuel G. Reid. The keen insight of Major Screws into the situation led him at one time to forecast some of the contemplated movements of Bragg’s army, the publication of which led to his arrest by General Bragg, but this was a merely meaningless episode, and only served to develop the fact that the sagacious correspondent had too keen an insight for the comfort of the commanding general.

On his return home in 1865, Major Screws was entirely reliant on his pen for a livelihood, and became connected with The Advertiser as an associate. Great consideration was shown him by the editor, Mr. Reid, who finally put him in possession of the paper. Here has been the orbit of his great service to the state. His tripod was his throne, and though the paper was suppressed for a period of months, under the bayonets of reconstruction, it was not throttled, and its columns radiated with exposures of the corruption of those corrupt days. Under Major Screws, The Advertiser was the vent of heroic expression and the champion of the liberties of the people of Alabama. In those days of darkness and of trial, when Major Screws wrestled with poverty in the maintenance of his journal, the people of Alabama little knew what he was undergoing in their behalf. But in cool heroism he labored on, as though he had the purse of a prince at his command, and unselfishly served the people, undergoing perhaps as much privation as anyone who has ever served the state.

Under conditions like these the unselfishness of Major Screws was put to the test on more than one occasion. At one time during the agitation caused by the Stantons in the notorious struggle to obtain the issue of bonds in behalf of the Alabama and Chattanooga Railroad, the history of which struggle is too long to be gone into here, an agent of the Stantons appeared at Montgomery and proposed to Major Screws to pay him $51,000 for the use of the Montgomery Advertiser in the promotion of the fraudulent scheme. Major Screws was to remain the editor of the paper, and the sum proposed was merely to purchase the right to use its columns, through another, in fixing this burden on the people of the state. He was a poor man, grappling with the difficulties incident to the times, but he flatly declined the offer, and bravely continued his opposition to the issue of the bonds.

There was another occasion when he might have succumbed to a proposal as a Democrat, and found some plausible pretext for his action. The marvelous mineral resources of the state were winning national attention, and a segment of the Democracy in congress under the leadership of Hon. Samuel J. Randall, of Pennsylvania, was espousing protection in the interest of the mineral developments of the country. Mr. Randall was the champion of these Democratic protectionists, and it was sought to bring the mineral interests of Alabama into the movement. The bait was a tempting one at a time when capital was in great need for the development of our deposits, and an exponent, such as the Montgomery Advertiser was, would have proved of immense advantage to this wing of the Democratic party. Accordingly, a special agent was commissioned to Montgomery to offer to Major Screws the snug sum of fifty thousand dollars to espouse the cause of that particular wing, and take plausible shelter beneath the plea of the necessary development of the coal and iron of Alabama, but this he promptly declined. These are sufficient to show his unselfishness as well as his devotion.

Perhaps more than any other since the Civil War, Major Screws has been instrumental in shaping and directing the policies of the Democratic party in the state. He was a candidate for office once, when in 1868 he was elected secretary of state, and during the first administration of Mr. Cleveland he was appointed postmaster at Montgomery. These are the only positions he has ever filled. His career is an important component of the forces which have made Alabama great in the galaxy of American states.

Major Screws has grown old in years in the cause of democratic liberty in Alabama, yet in spirit he is as virile and vigorous as he was in the days gone.