Benjamin Tillman, better know as Pitchfork Ben, was a former Confederate who had risen to prominence as one of the most ruthless partisans of white supremacy in the whole country. Tillman was elected governor of South Carolina and later became a senator from the same state. In a speech in 1903, Tillman sketched out his involvement in the violent suppression of the Black vote when he was in his twenties as a member of the Red Shirts, a secret white supremacist underground. The Red Shirts were allied with former Confederate Lt. General Wade Hampton in his successful campaign for governor in 1876.
Senator Tillman made a speech in the Senate in 1900 in which he explained how the white minority had deprived the Black majority of South Carolina of their right to vote. In a later speech at a Red Shirt reunion, Tillman recounted being involved in four “riots” in which his followers beat and killed Blacks to keep them from voting during the election of 1876. Tillman’s remarks can be found in the Congressional Record beginning at page 3218. Tillman is taking Republican Senator Spooner to task over his claim that the Civil Rights and related laws were passed when the Black Codes were legislated at the state level to prevent Blacks from being recognized as citizens. The words below are from Tillman’s argument in the Senate on March 23, 1900:
I will, briefly…recapitulate the conditions which brought about the necessity for stuffing ballot boxes, for shooting negroes, and for using violence and fraud in taking charge of our State government in South Carolina. The Senator, I suppose, did not understand me to say that such conditions exist there now, because I have never made any such acknowledgment. not help it; and no legislation which can be enacted can help it.
I proclaimed the fact that in 1876, when we had stood eight years of carpetbag government and there was nothing left us of our civilization unless we rose in our might and took the government back from the carpetbag horde of thieves and scoundrels and their scalawag allies, the native-born rapscallions, who had been foisted upon us at the point of the bayonet-when government ceased to yield protection, when there was semianarchy, when 8,000 armed negro militia were parading np and down the roads, threatening our wives and our children and our homes, when at night burning houses were lighting up the horizon in almost every county, when the conditions were so appalling that any kind of government, any military despotism, was preferable to that, we made up our minds that the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the Constitution were themselves null and void; that the acts of Congress under them placing our State under carpetbag rule were null and void; that oaths required by such laws were null and void, we resolved that the intelligence, the wealth, and the patriotism of the State, belonging only to the white people, should seize the government from the horde of ignorance and vice; that we would not longer tolerate bribe-takers on the bench and thieves in our high places; that life was not worth having on the terms and under the conditions forced on us.
We swore by the memories of revolutionary sires that we would redeem our State from the grasp of aliens and negroes, and we did it; and I have no apologies to make for it. If you contend that no indictment of Republicans can come from South Carolina, I will tell you that the Republican party was responsible for that condition of things; I will tell you that Grant, who was then President, sent the army there to hold down the whites and perpetuate the condition of misrule and anarchy and robbery which prevailed, and where the troops were the white majorities, the Democratic majorities, were the greatest-not by reason of the presence of the troops, but because the whites did not hesitate to vote early and often and to carry the elections in any way that was found necessary.
…let it not be forgotten that in dealing with the race question in the South those of the Southern people who were engaged in the civil war, the Confederate war, had inherited those slaves. They had been taught from childhood that the existence of slavery was not wrong, morally or legally. The author of the Declaration of Independ·ence was a slaveholder; the Constitution recognized slavery; and after the strife was over and the issue had been settled by the sword, the question as to the disposition of the emancipated slaves was, of course, a very perplexing one.
The Senator says that but for the enactment by the Southern legislatures of the “black codes,” in which there was to be a practical restoration of slavery under the guise of liberty, there would have been no enfranchisement of the ex-slaves; that they would not have been given the ballot. History does not state that, and the condition of politics at the time does not warrant it.
…There was first a desire of revenge by putting the ex-slaves in control of the Southern States and putting white necks under black heels. There was next a desire to perpetuate the domination of the Republican party in the United States…
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Mr. TILLMAN. And he said we had taken their rights away from them. He asked me was it right to murder them in order to carry the elections. I never saw one murdered. I never saw one shot at an election. It was the riots before the election, precipitated by their own hot-headedness in attempting to hold the government, that brought on conflicts between the races and caused the shotgun to be used. That is what I meant by saying we used the shotgun.
I want to call the Senator’s attention to one fact. He said that the Republican party gave the negroes the ballot in order to protect themselves against the indignities and wrongs that were attempted to be heaped upon them by the enactment of the black code. I say it was because the Republicans of that clay, led by Thad Stevens, wanted to put white necks under black heels and to get revenge. There is a difference of opinion. You have your opinion about it, and I have mine, and we can never agree.
I want to ask the Senator this proposition in arithmetic: In my State there were 135,000 negro voters, or negroes of voting age, and some 90,000…white voters. General Canby set up a carpetbag government there and turned our State over to this majority. Now, I want to ask you, with a free vote and a fair count, how are you going to beat 135,000 by 95,000? How are you going to do it? You had set us an impossible task. You had handcuffed us and thrown away the key, and you propped your carpetbag negro government with bayonets. Whenever it was necessary to sustain the government you held it up by the Army.
Mr. President, I have not the facts and figures here, but I want the country to get the full view of the Southern side of this question and the justification for anything we did. We were sorry we had the necessity forced upon us, but we could not help it, and as white men we are not sorry for it, and we do not propose to apologize for anything we have done in connection with it. We took the government away from them in 1876. We did take it. If no other Senator has come here previous to this time who would acknowledge it, more is the pity. We have had no fraud in our elections in South Carolina since… There has been no organized Republican party in the State.
We did not disfranchise the negroes until 1895. Then we had a constitutional convention convened which took the matter up calmly, deliberately, and avowedly with the purpose of disfranchising as many of them as we could under the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments. We adopted the educational qualification as the only means left to us, and the negro is as contented and as prosperous and as well protected in South Carolina today as in any State of the Union south of the Potomac. He is not meddling with politics, for he found that the more he meddled with them the worse off he got. As to his “rights”-I will not discuss them now. We of the South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men, and we never will. We have never believed him to be equal to the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him. I would to God the last one of them was in Africa and that none of them had ever been brought to our shores. But I will not pursue the subject further.
I want to ask permission in this connection to print a speech which I made in the constitutional convention of South Carolina when it convened in 1895, in which the whole carpetbag regime and the indignities and wrongs heaped upon our people, the robberies which we suffered, and all the facts and figures there brought out are incorporated, and let the whole of the facts go to the country. I am not ashamed to have those facts go to the country. They are our justification for the present situation in our State. If I can get it, I should like that permission; otherwise I shall be forced to bring that speech here and read it when I can put my hand on it. I will then leave this matter and let the dead past bury its dead. I make the request, Mr. President, to have permission to print the speech delivered by me in the constitutional convention in South Carolina in 1895 in the RECORD.
From: Congressional Record (1900) page 3233 to 3234
Illustration shows Benjamin R. Tillman as “Simon Legree”, whipping a black man labeled “Negro Voter”.
Caption: Simon Legree Tillman Don’t I own you, body and soul, you black dog? / Uncle Tom Yuh may own mah body, Marse Tillman, but mah soul belongs t’ de Republican Party!
Illus. in: Puck, v. 60, no. 1549 (1906 November 7), centerfold.
Copyright 1906 by Keppler & Schwarzmann.
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