This is the final article in our four-part series on how South Carolina told its children about the Civil War and Reconstruction from 1918 until 1986.
The Simms History of South Carolina had been published by William Simms in 1860. In 1916, the South Carolina state superintendent of education asked Mary Simms Oliphant to author a new adaptation of the book. It would become the standard eighth grade South Carolina history textbook. Mary Simms Oliphant was the granddaughter of William Simms and she was brought up on a plantation. Many South Carolinians called her “South Carolina’s First Lady of Letters.” Her standard history, which was revised in 1932 and went through nine editions, was adopted by the state board of education and used to teach 8th Grade South Carolina history. She and her daughter, Mary Simms Oliphant Furman, later wrote a history book on South Carolina for 3rd Graders. Although she died in 1988, her memory was kept up in the newspapers of the 21st Century, as you can see in this article in The Greenville News from 2017.
Oliphant’s history textbooks were used until the 1980s in South Carolina, which means that many residents of the state over the age of fifty were educated using her textbooks. Is is useful to look at how this book was used in the early 20th Century and to understand how it influences people who are alive today.
This is the fourth and concluding article on the 1918 textbook. I have already written about what the book says about the lead-up to the start of the Civil War. A second post looked at how it describes the course of the war. A third installment looks at the end of the war and the first years of Reconstruction in South Carolina.
This concluding section looks at reestablishing a “legitimate” government. Mind you, that most people in South Carolina were Black and had been slaves before Emancipation, but the legitimate government did not include them in the government. Instead, the textbook lionizes the rise of the Ku Klux Klan as the leading element in the “overthrow of Radical government.”
In looking at this period after 1868, the textbook will claim that the Klan used its disguises as a way of “terrifying” the “impressionable and superstitious” Black citizens. In spite of this claim of non-violent Klan action, it does point to the Klan using assassination and riot to kill off Black opponents and intimidate the Black community.
Now, again, this was a book used to educate 12 year old children.
After the KKK silenced Black political engagement, Congress and President Grant began an investigation of the atrocities in South Carolina and the army deployed a part of a cavalry regiment to the state to stop the intimidation of Black citizens. Here is how the textbook describes the enforcement of the law against the Klan. One of the outrages that the state textbook complains about is the use of evidence given by Blacks against Klansmen.
After Moses, Daniel Henry Chamberlain was elected governor. According to the textbook, Chamberlain was an honest man. However, that did not save him from being deposed in the election of 1876.
The politicians referred to in the next section are all referred to as “generals.” These were men who had been Confederate generals during the Civil War and who held commanding positions in the paramilitary organizations supporting the segregationist Democratic Party. These groups included the “rifle and hunting clubs” which were really armed political groups, the violent “Red Shirts” who were tied to former Confederate General Wade Hampton, as well as other groups tied to the local Democratic Party.
While the textbook focuses on Blacks as the source of disorder, the author says of one series of incidents that 80 to 125 Blacks were killed. In many of the incidents of violence, white paramilitaries used violence to break up meetings of Black voters. In others they carried out premeditated acts of assassination and torture.
In the next section, the author says that the Red Shirts worked to get the “negro men to vote for Hampton.” But she “confessed” that the “means used could be justified only by the ends sought,” in other words they did not get Blacks to vote for Hampton through argument, but through intimidation.
After the election, in which both sides claimed fraud, the South Carolina vote became part of the negotiated settlement of the 1876 Presidential Election.
The next chapter begins with the celebration that the Red Shirts were able to “overthrow…the negro government” of South Carolina. While the textbook says this was met with “great rejoicing throughout the State,” it does not note that most South Carolinians were opposed to Wade Hampton and would soon see their rights evaporate.
Thank you for reading this long tour of how the generation in South Carolina after the Civil War told the story of this era to their children. Let us remember that if you were a Black student in South Carolina, your grandparents were described as “brutish” in the state-supplied textbook and their persecutors were termed “Redeemers” of the South.
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Now, while Mary Simms Oliphant was a powerful force for creating and maintaining how South Carolina schoolkids learned about the past, she has been criticized, both during her lifetime and now. Here are substantial excepts from Will Moredock in the Charleston City Paper:
Many observers have written over the years that South Carolina seems to inhabit some parallel universe, a place of different facts, different truths, maybe even a whole different reality than the rest of the United States. Here in the Palmetto State, a large number of white people still insist that the Civil War was fought over something other than slavery, that the Confederate flag has nothing to do with the state’s racist heritage, and that race relations here are just hunky-dory.
There are many reasons — both cultural and institutional — for these popular delusions. My favorite malefactor is Mary C. Simms Oliphant. The name will sound familiar to many South Carolinians of a certain age. She was the granddaughter of William Gilmore Simms, the enormously popular 19th-century novelist, Southern nationalist, and defender of slavery. More importantly, she wrote the official state history used in public schools for half a century. My parents used Oliphant’s books in the 1930s; I used them in the 1960s. Generations of minds were warped by their racist and Southern apologist attitudes.
These are some of the things I learned from my 1958 edition of The History of South Carolina: “The Africans were used to a hot climate,” Oliphant wrote. “They made fine workers under the Carolina sun.” Oliphant defended slaveholders and their “peculiar institution” this way: “Africans were brought from a worse life to a better one. As slaves, they were trained in the ways of civilization. Above all, the landowners argued, the slaves were given the opportunity to become Christians in a Christian land, instead of remaining heathen in a savage country.”
Oliphant felt that slavery was a necessary but benign institution and described it this way: “Most masters treated their slaves kindly … the law required the master to feed his slaves, clothe them properly, and care for them when they were sick.” Elsewhere, she writes, “Most slaves were treated well, if only because it was to the planter’s interest to have them healthy and contented.” That there were so few slave uprisings in South Carolina “speaks well for both whites and Negroes,” she writes.
During and immediately after the Civil War, Oliphant writes, “The Negroes for the most part stayed on the plantations or farms … The relationship between the whites and Negroes on the plantations was at this time very friendly. Most of the slaves had proved their affection and loyalty to their masters … For more than four years the women and children had remained on the land with only the Negroes to protect them.”
But things soon changed. Here is Oliphant’s very unreconstructed view of Reconstruction: “For the following eight years South Carolina was governed largely by a ruthless band of thieves.” Carpetbaggers “took advantage of the ignorance and lack of experience of the Negroes … Those who did not vote Republican were threatened and mistreated. Moreover, the Republicans had the encouragement of Congress and the backing of federal troops.”
Oliphant adds, “The new legislature was made up chiefly of carpetbaggers, scalawags, and Negroes under their influence … Many members of the legislature could neither read nor write.”
But truth and justice were restored, Oliphant assured her young charges, by men in hoods and robes: “The sight of the mounted klansmen in their white robes was enough to terrorize the Negroes. When the courts did not punish Negroes who were supposed to have committed crimes, the Klan punished them.”
Later editions of Oliphant’s book were somewhat toned down, but this was by and large the official history of South Carolina — taught to black students as well as white — until 1984.
Oliphant’s primary way of dealing with black people in South Carolina history was to ignore them. In her 432-page text are hundreds of illustrations, yet blacks are depicted in only nine. Of those nine, two show blacks picking cotton, one is a 19th-century engraving showing blacks running a cotton gin, while another shows blacks hauling cotton bails on the wharves in Charleston. The only black person identified by name in the entire book is Denmark Vesey, the accused organizer of a failed slave revolt in 1822.
The keepers of South Carolina’s history, archives, and monuments have been ignoring black people for generations. This weekend we begin to correct that with two days of scholarship and observances honoring Civil War hero and Reconstruction reformer Robert Smalls. It is part of the Civil War sesquicentennial observance in the city where that terrible conflict began. The organizers of this four-year series of events are determined to avoid the mistakes of the centennial observance 50 years ago. These events will be dignified and historically inclusive. This weekend’s observance will be a small step toward understanding that war and its aftermath.
Note: The feature illustration was created by me using MS Copilot AI. It is not an historical image and is historically incorrect.
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