Wade Hampton: Confederate Warrior to Southern Redeemer by Rod Andrew, Jr.

Wade Hampton: Confederate Warrior to Southern Redeemer by Rod Andrew, Jr. published by University of North Carolina Press (2008) Hardcover $47.50 Paperback $26.00 Kindle $9.99.

 

When I was first studying the Civil War as a young student, Wade Hampton was portrayed as a respected cavalry commander serving in the shadow of the great cavalier J.E.B. Stuart. In recent years, Stuart’s reputation has been reassessed more critically and Hampton’s stature as a military commander has grown. This change in the way Hampton is regarded prompted me to read this ten year old biography.

Hampton is one of a handful of Confederate generals who was famous both before the war and after it. One of the richest men in antebellum America, Hampton was the largest slaveowner in South Carolina. After the war, he was governor of his state and later represented it in the United States Senate. A man of intelligence and great physical courage, he became, for many white men of the South, the embodiment of the virtues embedded in the Lost Cause, a phrase he himself used.

Wade Hampton: Confederate Warrior to Southern Redeemer is a 616 page biography of the paramount South Carolina Confederate. Unlike many biographies of Civil War generals, it devotes significant space to all three phases of its subject’s life. Rod Andrew’s Wade Hampton had a life that spanned much more than the four years of the war.

The first tenth of the book is devoted to the time before the war. It actually begins long before the birth of Wade Hampton. In fact, the Hampton that most of us know was the third in his line named Wade. Andrew offers a detailed account of the sometimes nefarious means employed by Wade’s grandfather to amass a fortune that allowed his grandson to live a life that a European nobleman might envy.

Military history aficionados should not worry that Hampton’s career as a soldier is slighted. More than two hundred pages are devoted to his military service. Roughly the same number of pages cover the Reconstruction and Jim Crow career of Hampton the powerful anti-Reconstruction dissident, the white Redeemer, and, finally, the aging veteran.

In the preface to his book, Rod Andrew lays out four themes that he thinks explain the motivations for Wade Hampton’s life of action. Three are evident, he writes since Hampton’s young adulthood, and one is added after Confederate defeat:

Paternalism, chivalry, and honor, the dominant social ideals affecting Hampton’s upbringing, obviously overlapped and interconnected. All three rested on the assumption of white supremacy and/or leadership by elites, and all three influenced who Hampton thought he was supposed to be from the time of his childhood until his death. For that reason, I do not abandon my use of these three concepts when the narrative reaches the latter half of Hampton’s life. I do pick up another theme, however. That theme is “vindication,” closely akin to what other scholars have labeled “redemption,” “restoration,” and “justification.” The theme of vindication, I believe, is the one in which I make the most use of the biographical perspective in explaining post- Civil War political events. Until late 1860, Wade Hampton wished to avoid disruption to his antebellum life and the Old South civilization in which he had come of age. Believing that civil war threatened upheaval and uncertainty, he was one of the last antisecessionists in the most secession-eager slave state. War came, nevertheless, and Hampton’s middle years were defined by social chaos, violent revolution, personal tragedy, the loss of his entire fortune, and physical and emotional suffering. He gave his wealth, his own blood, and a beloved brother and son in a cause denounced as treasonous by the other side. For the rest of his life, then, Hampton sought not only a return of social peace and stability, but also vindication for all that he had suffered. He wished to redeem the honor of his loved ones, his native state, and his own name. He knew that the Old South was gone and could never be restored, but he hoped to salvage something good and noble from its past, as well as honor for himself, his comrades, and his loved ones. This urge to achieve vindication and self-justification drove Hampton for the rest of his life and explains nearly everything about his postwar political behavior.

While Andrew sometimes makes a convincing case for one or the other of these four motivators, there are other times when he simply hammers some event or action or thought into these four boxes whether it belongs there or not. I wondered many times whether Hampton’s motives might have occasionally been the desire for power or money rather than the chivalric impulse. Some of his post-war acts seemed more about vindictiveness than “vindication.” Unfortunately, Andrew fixes on these four themes and refuses to abandon them even when reasonable interpretation might indicate otherwise.

When Wade Hampton was born on March 28, 1818, Rod Andrew tells us, “The intertwining concepts of honor, paternalism, and chivalry together defined everything that Wade Hampton III of South Carolina was supposed to be.” (p. 3) Considering that these expectations supposedly grew out of the example of his grandfather, Wade Hampton I, it is not as obvious to me as it is to Andrew that they came from the paterfamilias.

South Carolina’s 19th Century elite liked to portray itself as an ancient and hereditary aristocracy, born to rule. Bred to a code of chivalric honor, they claimed the right to govern the lives of lesser white men and rule the bodies of blacks. Wade Hampton I came from anything but such a lineage. He was a parvenu, from the class of small slaveholders, who rose through violence and scandal to tremendous wealth.

Wade Hampton I would be lionized by his descendants as a Patriot hero of the American Revolution. He was a slaveholding defender of American freedom, but he also made his fortune by taking advantage of the chaos of the Revolutionary period. For example, when a Scottish neighbor was harassed by “Patriots” into fleeing South Carolina, Hampton “bought” his land from him, neglecting only to pay for the purchase. As his victim would later find out, seeking the purchase price in a Revolutionary South Carolina court would be impossible for someone who had not been loyal to the new state. It is ironic that Wade Hampton III would attack the Federal government for not respecting the property rights of disloyal Confederates in confiscating their slaves when his own fortune was based, in part, on the exploitation of a “disloyal” man less than a century earlier. The fact that the Scotsman was forced out of the state because he failed to sign a loyalty oath only compounds the irony.

As a Revolutionary military leader, Wade I used his power to confiscate the slaves of suspected loyalists. His fellow South Carolinian freedom fighters did not criticize the taking of slaves from their alleged enemies, something their descendants would so despise ninety years later. They did, however, take Hampton to task for keeping so many of the slaves and other captured property as his personal prizes of war. One Patriot complained after the capture of Fort Motte in 1781, “Col. Wade Hampton was the commander who is said to have made private property of the spoils on this occasion.” (p. 8) While some Patriots ended the war with their fortunes in ruins, Andrew writes that Hampton had enriched himself with “land, slaves, and money.”

After the end of the Revolution, Hampton was rewarded with a seat in the state legislature. He exploited his political power to become one of the principal beneficiaries of the Yazoo Land Scandal, an inside trader scheme that brought him vast tracts of land in Mississippi and made him the largest sugar producer in Louisiana. With nearly a thousand slaves imprisoned on his estates, the Hamptons achieved their gentle status through theft and violence.

Later Hamptons would try to gentle-up the history of their family’s foundations, but they rested in silk because of the grasping avarice of a man who would have put the greed of any Yankee carpetbagger to shame. Contrary to the author’s claims, in antebellum South Carolina it was money that made the man.

Wade Hampton I ruled his roost until 1835. Although South Carolinians of the late 1800s would look back nostalgically at the Antebellum years as a period of racial harmony and paternal care of masters for faithful “servants,” old Wade understood that his family’s fortunes were dependent on extracting every possible ounce of labor from his slaves.

Slavery on the Hampton estate was so brutal that even hardened overseers sometimes objected. A British traveler, James Stuart, wrote that Wade Hampton I “not only maltreats his slaves, but stints them in food, overworks them, and keeps them almost naked. I have seen more than one of his overseers whose representations gave a dreadful account of the state of slavery on his plantations, and who left his service because they would no longer assist in the cruel punishments inflicted . . . but I do not mention such a fact . . . merely on such authority. General Hampton’s conduct toward his slaves is [a] matter of notoriety.” (p. 11)

Even firebreathing secessionist and slavery advocate Edmund Ruffin wrote in 1858 that “[Stuart] has exposed, and I am glad of it, some detestible [sic] cruelty of particular southern slaveholders—especially of the late Gen. Wade Hampton.” (p. 11)

Wade I insisted on the privileges of patriarchal dominance with none of the responsibilities that Southern elite ideology claimed to demand of it. Andrew finds no evidence that Wade I was a nurturing presence for his children or for his grandson and namesake. When the old man finally died, he cut his own wife and daughters out of the will and left everything to his son Wade Hampton II. The scion was not as severe as his father. Wade II tore up the will and gave equal shares to his stepmother and stepsisters.

Like his father, Wade II had served in the military during wartime. As a very young man he fought beside his father in the War of 1812. In other areas he departed from his father’s ways. He cultivated strong family ties and was willing to forgo quick profits.

The Hampton family was rocked, and nearly wrecked, in 1843 when rumors emerged that Wade’s four teenaged sisters had been molested by their uncle. James Henry Hammond had married Wade’s aunt on his mother’s side. While Andrew describes Hammond as beneath the station of his wife, in fact he was part of South Carolina’s elite and would run for governor before the abuse began and would be elected the state’s chief executive soon after it commenced.

I found Andrew’s treatment of this horrific abuse completely unsatisfying. He quotes from the governor; “Here were four lovely creatures from the tender but precocious girl of 13 to the mature but fresh and blooming woman nearly 19, each contending for my love, claiming the greater share of it as due to her superior devotion to me, all of them rushing on every occasion into my arms and covering me with kisses, lolling on my lap, pressing their bodies almost into mine, wreathing their limbs with mine, encountering warmly every portion of my frame, and permitting my hands to stray unchecked over every part of them and to rest without the slightest shrinking from it, in the most secret and sacred regions, and all this for a period of more than two years continuously.” (p. 31) This was written by a man who had both been South Carolina’s governor and represented it in the House of Representatives.

Andrew tells us that Hammonds molestations “fell short of sexual intercourse,” but offers no evidence of this other than the silence of Hammond’s diary. He also describes the molestations as “scandalous” and refers to them as Hammond’s “transgressions.” He calls the abuse of a thirteen year old niece a “shameful dalliance” and describes Hammond being force to break off his abuse as “the end of the affair.”

Had Rod Andrew been writing in the 1800s, I might have at least been able to understand his outrageous description of these events. Coming from a 21st Century author in a book published by a scholarly press makes this approach unfathomable.

The author’s description of the reaction of Wade Hampton, twenty-five at the time, and his father is even more difficult to accept. Andrew writes that while while Hampton could have challenged Hammond to a duel or assaulted him, as called-for by the supposed chivalric code, Wade II decided to do neither. Because Hammond was governor it, would, Andrew writes, “bring public dishonor to the governor’s office and to all of South Carolina. Certainly a horsewhipping or caning of the governor would heap disgrace on the state he represented.” (p. 32) Or maybe Hampton was scared of the governor or thought that extracting retribution would compromise his many business interests.

Instead, Andrew writes approvingly, the Hamptons broke off all relations with Uncle James. This meant he could no longer have the best guests at his parties. In spite of all the rumors of child molestation, in 1857 James Hammond was selected by the state legislature to represent South Carolina in the Senate. The four girls he had harmed were condemned by South Carolina’s elite society to permanent spinsterhood and childlessness.

It is difficult to evaluate the 25 year old Wade III’s reaction to the abuse of his sisters, but we know that for the rest of his life he was a sympathetic and supportive brother. Rod Andrew includes enough details of Wade’s relations with them to humanize him as someone who was more than the ideals that supposedly ruled his behavior. Wade maintained his loyalty to his sisters through war and personal tragedy.

During the 1850s Wade began to step out of his father’s shadow and assume a role in public affairs. He was elected to the General Assembly in 1852. In 1858 he inherited his father’s fortune upon Wade II’s death and was elected to the State Senate. As a politician he was considered a moderate among the slaveholding elite. Although he owned, bought, and sold slaves, Hampton opposed reopening the international slave trade. Hampton believed that the pro-slave trade forces in South Carolina were introducing legislation on the issue to exacerbate sectional tensions. Since the trade in kidnapped Africans could only be legally allowed if Congress passed appropriate legislation, bills to that effect in the South Carolina legislature would have no effect except to anger Northerners. He saw the splintering of the Union as the greatest threat to his own property in slaves.

As secession became the focus of heated debates in 1860, Hampton counselled moderation. He was particularly concerned that his state not inaugurate a war whose potentially revolutionary outcomes were unforeseeable.

When Fort Sumter was attacked by Confederate forces and war begun, Hampton was out of state visiting his western lands. Hampton wanted to prove his devotion to a secession movement he had once opposed. He offered to raise a “legion” at his own expense consisting of six companies of infantry, four troops of cavalry, and an artillery battery. He also donated his entire 1861 cotton crop to the Confederacy. By May, 1861, Hampton was in command of Hampton’s Legion. He would soon embark on a chapter of his life that would make him nationally famous, and leave him with lingering pain from wounds and a son’s death.

Rod Andrew’s detailed retelling of Hampton’s war years is admirable in its reliance on the Official Records and Wade’s correspondence with his family, as well as the reports on his actions by other Confederates. From his first fight at Manassas through the final Confederate surrender, Hampton proved himself to be one of the best of the “political generals” in either army.

At Bull Run, Hampton’s Legion took relatively heavy casualties and Hampton himself was hit in the face with canister. Yet Hampton displayed traits of heroism and coolness under fire that recommended him to his superiors. Throughout 1861 and early 1862 Hampton demonstrated a clear ability to command Confederate soldiers. His competence is detailed by Rod Andrew in this biography. What I missed in it was an examination of just how a man with no military training or experience became such a good combat officer in such a short time. The annals of the Civil War are filled with rich men and politicians, and Hampton was both, who were promoted in the first months of the war and who flamed out spectacularly or otherwise failed.

The other question I had that Andrew did not answer was “Why a legion.” I know that there were other legions formed, Cobb’s for instance, but what was Hampton’s thinking behind this decision? It clearly did not pan out and the three arms of his legion never fought together as a unit.

What Andrew does well is paint a portrait of an infantry commander forced into the cavalry during the Peninsula Campaign. He writes that Hampton “agreed to the change only with the understanding that the appointment was temporary. It was in the infantry that Hampton had learned how to be a soldier; besides, a transfer to the cavalry would take him farther away from the infantrymen of the Hampton Legion—the men with whom he had shared most of the last year.” The reluctant cavalryman was good at his new job, but extremely unhappy with the company he was forced to keep. He apparently never cared for his commander, J.E.B Stuart, and he found that having two colleagues with the last name Lee meant that he could never offer frank criticism of their performance.

Within six months of taking over a cavalry brigade, in “January 1863 Wade Hampton III of South Carolina was an angry man,” Andrew writes. “As far as he was concerned, he was the victim of favoritism, arrogance, conceit, and professional negligence. One man was the source of all those evils bedeviling Hampton—Major General James Ewell Brown Stuart of Virginia. Hampton believed that Stuart was destroying his brigade.” Wade Hampton believed that Stuart favored the Virginia brigades and gave Hampton’s men the worst postings and the most wearing duties. The South Carolinian wrote that Stuart’s favoritism was “as marked, as it is disgusting & it constantly makes me indignant. I do not object to the work, but I do object to seeing my command broken down by positive starvation. We cannot get forage, & in the course of a few weeks, my Brigade will be totally unfit for service. This is a hard case, but unless Genl. Lee, to whom I have appealed, interferes, Stuart will certainly have my Brigade out of the field before very long.” (p. 138)

Soon, Hampton would lose his beloved brother Frank, whom he had encouraged to join the cavalry, in battle. In July 1863, Wade himself would be wounded again, this time at Gettysburg. He was cut on the head by two different Union cavalrymen and suffered a fractured skull. Apart from the danger to his health, the wounds were a danger to his self-image, according to Andrew. He writes that Hampton faced “the difficult matter of being nearly killed by Yankee swordsmen on horseback. Hampton was a physically powerful man, a splendid horseman, and a fine swordsman, and he was proud of all those traits. Each of them was important to his self-image as an example of chivalry and southern manhood. How, then, had those despised Yankees, whom he had once considered cowards, nearly managed to best him?” Hampton wrote only half joking in a letter: “Don’t you feel mortified that any Yankee should be able, on horseback, to split my head open? It shows how old I am growing, and how worthless.” (p. 167)

If Hampton felt neglected in the Army of Northern Virginia, his talents were appreciated elsewhere. Joe Johnston wanted him transferred to the West, a suggestion that James Longstreet, then in Tennessee, seconded. In March of 1864 Hampton’s anger at his perceived treatment in Virginia led him to write an insubordinate letter to Robert E. Lee. The commanding general lost his patience with Hampton and told him that “I would not care if you went back to South Carolina with your whole division.” (p. 186) This mortified Hampton, according to Andrew. Hampton spoke to Mary Chesnut who recounted it in her memoir, “Wade said [Lee’s] manner made this speech immensely mortifying. While General Hampton was talking to me, the president sent for him. It seems General Lee has no patience with any personal complaints or grievances. He is all for the cause and cannot bear officers to come to him with any such matters as Wade Hampton came.” (p. 187) Hampton was in danger of becoming just another one of Lee’s quarrelsome subordinates.

For all of his intelligence, Hampton was unable to objectively assess the state of the Confederacy’s decline or foresee its doom. As Grant’s Overland Campaign got underway, Hampton wrote “If we can only win the first great battle of the campaign, I hope that we can see the ‘beginning of the end.’ If Johnston & Lee can each defeat the enemy I do not think there will be another great Battle during the war.” (p. 190)

The death of Stuart at Yellow Tavern on May 11, 1864 opened a door for Hampton at the same time that it demanded that he express sorrow over his despised chief’s demise. Hampton may have been the natural choice to replace Stuart, but the fact that his two rivals were Rooney Lee and Fitzhugh Lee left the matter in contention longer than it should have, according to Andrew. Hampton’s dislike of Fitzhugh was so great that in 1898 when his son wished to volunteer to serve under Fitzhugh Lee in the Spanish-American War, Wade objected saying that “I would not wish a son of mine to serve, in any case, under Fitz Lee.” (p. 491)

While the Confederacy was suffering mortal wounds, so was Wade Hampton’s plantation empire built on the labor of black slaves. His Mississippi and Louisiana holdings were bleeding slaves and his core South Carolina holdings would soon be on the route of Sherman’s men. During the last ten months of the war, Hampton would do some of his best fighting against both Grant and Sherman to little strategic purpose. Andrew does a fine job of describing the now almost daily fighting by cavalry in Virginia and the Carolinas.

Then Hampton’s home was destroyed by Union forces. Hampton the cavalier now defended the summary execution of Union foragers by his men when the Unionists were described as arsonists. Perhaps he was now another hero caught up in the vindictive spirit of the last days of the Rebellion.

After Lee and Johnston surrendered, Hampton proposed that he be allowed to lead a cavalry force to escort Jefferson Davis to the West or even to Mexico to continue the war. He was among the last of the die-hards to put down the sword.

Wade Hampton did not “surrender” and apply for parole until May 15, 1865, a month after most of the rest of the Confederacy had given up. It may have only have been the intervention of his wife that stopped him from carrying on the fight past all reason. Or perhaps he stopped to visit with her to allow himself to be persuaded.

Rod Andrew’s description of Hampton’s behavior over the next eleven years, which would see him lead the opposition to Reconstruction, and head a Redeemer ticket that came to power as a result of widespread white Conservative terrorism is particularly unsatisfying. Andrew gets the facts right, but keeps trying to squish them into the pigeon holes of paternalism, chivalry, honor and vindication when sometimes Wade Hampton seems to have acted because what he did helped white people take power back from the black majority. Occam’s Razor would have well-served Andrew in his analysis of Wade’s post-war years. If an action could be explained as serving self-interest, why insist that it was motivated by some obscure ideals?

In any event, before the mud of the battlefields was dry on his riding boots Wade Hampton was up to his epaulets in politics. Even though he was not on the ballot he was nearly elected governor in a write-in campaign and he became the state’s leading exponent the argument that apart from ending formal slavery the Confederate defeat had changed nothing about South Carolina’s relation to the Federal government or to her own black population, who made up a majority of the state’s people.

While Hampton opposed calls by some whites that freedmen be expelled from the state, his advocacy of a policy of paternal kindness by a ruling class of whites towards a subordinate class of African Americans left little room for development of the black community into an independent and self-determined polity or even one capable of basic self-defense.

Like many returning Confederate veterans, Wade Hampton faced dire circumstances in the post-war years. “He had emerged from the war saddled with huge debts,” Rod Andrew writes. “Before the conflict Hampton had unwisely extended himself, buying land and borrowing too fast. He had trouble paying all the notes due on his mortgages; bad weather and flooding on the Mississippi in the late 1850s had only made the situation worse. Then he had inherited $400,000 of his father’s debt in 1858. Donating his entire cotton crop to the Confederacy in 1861 had hurt as well, with the result that when more notes came due during the war years, he was unable to pay them.” In 1868 he declared bankruptcy. (p. 315)

While his finances were in decline, his reputation was in the ascendant. Hampton became well-known for his Lost Cause rhetoric disclaiming the preservation of slavery as a Southern war aim and emphasizing the heroism and virtue of the Confederate soldier. In fact, he even used the term “Lost Cause” in speaking of it, as in this speech when he said “I yield to no one in devotion to the lost cause. I would never be the traitor to ignore my past acts.” (p. 351)

Hampton’s biographer writes that “In the period 1866-76 Hampton was a leading symbol of white unity and defiance in South Carolina, as well as in the South as a whole. But he also became one of the leading leading white spokesmen for moderation, peace, and reaching out to the South’s new black citizens. The two roles frequently overlapped and obviously could be contradictory.” (p. 329)

Although Hampton could speak civilly with African Americans, he criticized the Federal government for cramming the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery down the throats of the White South and he denounced the Reconstruction requirement that South Carolina insert a clause in its new constitution ending slavery. Hampton would later claim that he did not oppose emancipation but that he objected to the Federal government not allowing White voters to end it on their own. The fact that they had not ended slavery over the previous hundred years seems to have been lost on him.

Hampton particularly objected to the use of black troops, most of whom were native Southerners, to preserve the civil rights of the freedmen. He decried the United States Colored Troops as “a horde of barbarians, “your brutal negro troops, under their no less brutal and more degraded Yankee officers.” (p. 332) A problem with his strategy of non-cooperation with the Reconstruction program of Congress and two presidents is that as long as South Carolina was not reconstructed, it would be occupied by soldiers.

As much as Hampton opposed Federally mandated emancipation, he was appalled by the idea of universal male suffrage. He didn’t even think most white men should be able to vote. Andrew writes:

Emancipation, however, did not necessarily imply the right to vote. Hampton thought that it would be madness to enfranchise all of the South’s black men before educating them and ensuring they understood that their old masters were still their “natural” leaders. For that matter, he did not think that illiterate or landless white men should vote, either. This was not so reactionary given the historical political culture of his state. South Carolina had instituted universal white manhood suffrage in 1810, but the decision was the result of political compromise, not shared ideology. Many elites like Hampton continued to doubt the wisdom of granting the franchise to the riffraff and had at least preserved officeholding in the house of representatives for men who owned over 150 pounds sterling, or a minimum of 500 acres and 10 slaves. The property-holding requirements for senators and governors were higher still. Traditionally, state legislators and governors had far exceeded those minimum requirements, and the understanding was that while all white men would be allowed the franchise, elites would rule. Now the prospect emerged of an electorate that was 60 percent black and 40 percent white. Such an electorate could transform the entire political culture of the state. (p. 333-334)

Hampton came to advocate “limited black suffrage,” allowing only educated African Americans to vote. According to Andrew:

Hampton’s advocacy of limited black suffrage reflected both pragmatism and instinct. It was not that he supported racial equality—such a concept was unthinkable to him. He did think that blacks, if educated and intelligent, would see the wisdom of bestowing the mantle of leadership on traditional elites like himself. Besides, if the southern states did not take some action on black suffrage, the federal government would, establishing the new precedent that Washington, not the states, had the right to define the citizenship rights of a state’s residents. This pragmatism fit comfortably with Hampton’s paternalism; or, as he put it, “humanity and interest” for once pointed “in the same direction.”14 Extending limited suffrage allowed Hampton and other white gentlemen to be patrons and benefactors rather than tyrants as they bestowed the gift of suffrage on their social inferiors. Finally, Hampton himself had relatively little fear of black people as long as they were led by responsible and moral whites. As explained before, the Hamptons had never feared or loathed their slaves, though they certainly considered them inferior. (p. 335)

What Rod Andrew ignores is that the most likely explanation for Hampton’s restriction of the vote to the educated is that almost no blacks could meet the requirement. While a few thousand poor whites would also be disenfranchised, that was a small price to pay for blocking the state’s black majority from voting.

Considering that the backbone of Hampton’s anger against the Federal government was the post-war deprivation of the right to vote for men who had fought against the United States, his readiness to disenfranchise most of the state’s male population is astounding unless understood within the context of maintaining white supremacy.

Hampton would in later years remind his Northern critics that he had been an early supporter of giving some black men the vote. He had amnesia though about his opposition to the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and the whole panoply of civil rights acts. Even his memory of his limited suffrage plan could be a little shaky, writes Andrew:

In his 1871 testimony to a congressional subcommittee, he implied that he had “always” (since the end of the war) supported granting the franchise to black men “under proper qualifications” and that he had said so to the group of black men he addressed in the summer of 1865. Hampton often claimed (based on the 1865 meeting) that he was the first white man in the South, or in America, to advocate black suffrage. There is no other record of this informal event, and Hampton certainly had not objected when the 1865 state constitution failed to enfranchise any African Americans at all. (p. 334)

Once it was clear that there would be no turning back on African American citizenship, Wade Hampton urged other white Conservatives to adopt policies that would appeal to at least a sliver of the black electorate. Most South Carolinians, about 60%, were black and unless the Conservatives could win over at least a quarter of them, white elites could not retake control of state government. Hampton believed that an offer of paternal care by former slaveowners to the men they had once owned might be enough to secure their votes. Wade Hampton wrote to General James Conner in Charleston:

We can control and direct the negroes if we act discreetly, and in my judgment the highest duty of every Southern man is to secure the good will and confidence of the negro. Our future depends on this. . . . Say to the negroes, we are your friends, and even if the Supreme Court pronounces this Military Bill unconstitutional, we are willing to let the educated and tax-paying among them vote. (p. 335)

Hampton wrote to John Mullaly, an Irish-born Conservative living in New York, in 1867 that Southern Democrats needed to move on from opposing emancipation and recognize the reality of a black electorate. Hampton believed that “Negro Suffrage” was a tidal wave that needed to be controlled. He wrote: “If we can not direct the wave it will overwhelm us. Now how shall we do this? Simply by making the Negro a Southern Man, & if you will, a democrat, anything but a Radical. Beyond these motives for my action, I have another. We are appealing to the enlightened sense & the justice of mankind. We come forward & say, we accept the decision rendered against us, we acknowledge the freedom of the negro & we are willing to have our love for him stir us.” (p. 336) In response to Mullaly’s argument that blacks simply should be barred from voting, Hampton responded “If you can show us how to prevent this voting, we will adopt the plan… You see then why I tell the negroes, that we are willing to let some of them vote. A limited suffrage would do us good, for universal suffrage is a curse.” (p. 336)

When he spoke of his voting plan to black audiences, Hampton referred to it as “Impartial Suffrage” because the property and educational qualifications would be the same no matter the race of the prospective voter. Of course, most African Americans realized that such impartiality would wipe them off of the political map and place power in the hands of their former owners.

Hampton’s plan may have been premised on white supremacy, yet it was not white enough for many South Carolinians. Hampton’s friend Benjamin Perry worried that “General Hampton and his friends had just as well try to control a herd of wild buffaloes as the Negro vote.” Rod Andrew also quotes former Confederate officer Thomas W. Woodward who complained: “Why, oh why, my Southern n***** worshippers, will you grope your way through this worse than Egyptian darkness? Will you not cease crawling on your bellies and assume the upright form of men. . . . Stop, I pray you, your efforts at harmony . . . or you will goad these people by flattery to destruction, before they have a chance to pick out the cotton crop.” (p. 338)

1868 saw the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and other violent white terrorist groups. While Hampton’s direct ties to the Klan are uncertain, Andrew has uncovered “Hampton’s extraordinary letter to James Conner written on June 12. To his old subordinate in black-majority Charleston, Hampton sounded a call to arms. The letter indicates that Hampton participated in the effort to organize an underground white militia. A Mr. Salley and a Mr. Legare of Orangeburg wrote to Hampton in June and asked him to lead the movement to form an “organization” throughout the state. “To this,” Hampton informed Conner, “I replied that the object they had in view met my approval.” (p. 343)

Now my idea is to get as many of these guns as possible in each Dist. Let the men thus armed be under the direction of a Com. or Council stationed at each Court House, or central town, & have the chief authority vested in one person, to reside here [Columbia] or in Charleston. Each Dist. Having a sufficient number of men to protect it, they could be called out in case of any sudden mob, or other outbreak. The whole organization could be wielded by these means easily & rapidly, & could thus secure the safety of our whole people. The details will suggest themselves to you, at once, as well as the advantages of such an organization. Now what do you think of it? If you agree with me, as to its importance, go to work at once. (p. 343)

However far along this scheme actually got, it seems that Hampton was willing to potentially violate his parole and form a paramilitary force to oppose Reconstruction. Fortunately for his later reputation, Hampton soon left South Carolina and went to develop his Mississippi holdings. He was out of the state during much the two worst years of Ku Klux violence, although he was drawn back to testify about the Klan to a Congressional subcommittee. With what had to be dissembling, Hampton testified that he knew nothing of the Klan and said that racial troubles in South Carolina had been caused by the Republicans. In spite of his “ignorance,” Hampton helped organize the legal defense funds assisting white men arrested for participation in Klan atrocities.

In 1871 Hampton wrote to a friend in Abbeville; “When some course of action can be settled on, it is very desirable too, that we should engage the services of some Northern Lawyers to defend our Ku Klux cases. . . . Suppose you try to make up some contributions for a few? We will do the same here.” (p. 361) Rod Andrew writes that this is an “ironic” case of “one of the least negrophobic white men in South Carolina.” Or perhaps it is a case of man so devoted to white supremacy that while not wanting to dirty his reputation by putting on the robe himself would take steps short of that to support the terrorist wing of his movement. (p. 361)

After the Conservatives lost the election of 1870, Klan violence exploded in South Carolina. President Grant responded by sending in Federal troops. Although this period would later be described by Lost Cause advocates as one of military dictatorship, only four hundred soldiers were brought in to supplement the five hundred already there. In other words there was a total force the size of a regiment trying to contain widespread violence in a state with a population of over 700,000.

Wade Hampton became the gubernatorial candidate of the Democrats in 1876. His campaign would see the deployment of the armed Redshirts as campaign workers. The Redshirts were a paramilitary formation used by the Democrats to both protect their candidates and to disrupt and intimidate the campaign of their black and Republican opponents. At the same time, Democrat-supporting terror attacks mounted against the state’s African American community.

As the Democratic candidate, Hampton had to walk a fine line. If Red Shirt violence became too outrageous it would invite Federal intervention in the election, insuring continued Republican rule in the black majority state. If Hampton could be seen as the only man who could control its intensity it might not only keep President Ulysses S. Grant out of Carolina politics, it might also convince some blacks that the best way to end the violence would be to surrender some of their civil rights in exchange for the paternal protection offered by Wade Hampton.

The worst of what Hampton’s allies could do was demonstrated on July 8, 1876 in Hamburg, South Carolina. When a dispute over mutual insults between a black militia company and young white men quickly escalated into racial conflict, Calbraith Butler, a long-time associate of Hampton’s and one of his Confederate lieutenants, led a mob against the blacks. The whites shelled the militia when they took refuge in a building and captured the militiamen, killing some of them after their surrender.

Butler and Martin Gary, another thoroughly racist former lieutenant of Hampton’s from the Confederate army, would help lead the campaign for their former commander. On June 28, 1868, Gary met with Hampton and later recalled the conversation:

I discovered that [Hampton] was in sympathy with the movement General Butler and myself were trying to inaugurate. He told me that he did not expect to return to Mississippi. I then said to him that I intended to try and have him . . . nominated for governor on the straightout ticket; that with Butler and myself on his flanks we could win this battle as we had won others in the war. He replied that he was poor, and come back to get the odds and ends of his former estate together; that he did not desire to run for the office, but that he had made so many sacrifices for South Carolina that if he was the choice of the convention he would run. I was delighted at his acceptance, for I believed that he could harmonize all of the differences of the Democratic party. . . . Governor Hampton had commanded Butler, Conner, and myself. We entered the war as Captains under him as colonel in the Hampton Legion. He came out of the war a lieutenant-general and continued to rank all of us. I did not believe that Kershaw and Connor [sic] could all agree upon any one man, but I believed that we all could rally under Hampton. (p. 375)

Martin Gary knew that Hampton would couch his Redeemer campaign in the language of paternalism and would make an effort to win black support. In fact, Hampton secured the endorsement of the prominent African American Martin Delaney whom he had helped get out of jail before the election year. Gary said later that Hampton’s speeches to win black votes were like “singing Psalms to a dead mule.” Gary admitted that the 1876 election was “a struggle for supremacy between the races and not a mere contest for honest government as has been alleged.” (pp. 373-374)

Gary set a course for the Hampton campaign that followed the “Mississippi Plan.” It was modelled on the campaign of violence and intimidation that whites in Mississippi had used to take power away from that state’s black majority. Gary understood that a black-majority state like South Carolina could never restore white supremacy through the normal functioning of democracy. No significant portion of black men was likely to vote for their own racial subordination.

Martin Gary used reports from Mississippi in devising the Redeemer strategy. According to Rod Andrew one that figured prominently was from;

General S. W. Ferguson of Washington County, Mississippi, to Theodore G. Barker, of Charleston, Hampton’s former wartime adjutant and close friend. The letter came into Gary’s hands and evidently helped the latter formulate his ideas on how the present campaign should be run. Ferguson boasted that in a county of less than 1,200 white voters and over 6,000 black voters, the whites had managed to obtain victory through superior determination and the willingness to use violence. “We determined to carry the election at all hazards, and, in the event of any blood being shed in the Campaign, to kill every white Radical in the Country; we made no threats, but we let this be known as a fixed and settled thing.” Ferguson reported that although white Republicans actually welcomed disturbances that might prompt Washington to send federal troops, none of them were personally willing “to sacrifice themselves on the altar of rascality.” Thus, out of cowardice they counseled peace. Ferguson further claimed that black men did not bother to vote on election day after seeing their party’s leaders “cower and finally retire from the contest.” 

Ferguson prescribed detailed methods. Democrats must be organized on a military basis and armed. They must send out competent speakers to stump the state and attend Republican meetings in order to abuse Republican candidates “to their faces.” White men must go to the polls when they opened and stay until they closed. Finally, he wrote, “never threaten a man individually; if he deserves to be threatened, the necessity of the times require that he should die. A dead Radical is very harmless—a threatened Radical . . . is often very troublesome, sometimes dangerous, always vindictive.” (p. 377) 

Gary took what he learned from Mississippi and distilled it into an election plan. Among other instructions, Democrats were urged to intimidate blacks “so as to show them, you are the superior race, and that their natural position is that of subordination to the white man.” Gary warned Democrats to “Never threaten a man individually, if he deserves to be threatened, the necessity of the times require that he should die.” (p. 378)

Although Wade Hampton’s newspaper mouthpiece spoke supportively of the Mississippi Plan as one designed to bring racial harmony, Hampton himself was wary of the “shotgun policy”, particularly if it was identified with him personally. He rejected Gary’s strategy as the official Democratic campaign plan. The dirty work of political terrorism would have to be done in the dark.

This does not mean that Hampton’s official campaign was free of violence. Whenever he rode into a town for a speech he arrived surrounded by mounted and armed Red Shirt paramilitaries. In Union, South Carolina, for example, 2,000 Red Shirts accompanied him upon his entrance. For blacks who already associated the Red Shirts with white terror, this must have been a chilling message. However, when Hampton entered Abbeville, a contingent of blacks reportedly rode with him.

While Hampton enjoyed the support of the Conservative elite and the militant white revanchists, he must also have gathered the votes of more moderate whites. His rallies in small cities around the state often drew thousands of attendees, not all of whom were Red Shirts or former Ku Klux. Many looking for change, an end to what they saw as a Northern imposed government, became supporters. Those who accepted the changes in the status of blacks could take solace in Hampton’s assurance that not a single right then enjoyed by freedmen would be abridged. Hampton offered a paternal vision of white superiority, not extermination or re-enslavement.

For all of Hampton’s conciliatory speeches, the Democratic Party engaged in its deadly “shotgun strategy” against Republicans in 1876. Black Republicans would find themselves fired from their jobs. Doctors refused to treat Republican patients. According to Andrew, Redshirts mobbed Republican meetings. They would “show up in force, surrounding the meeting, shouting threats, and firing pistols in the air. Armed men would escort a Democratic speaker to the stand, who would denounce the “lies” of the Republican speaker and demand a chance to take the platform. These tactics often demoralized or broke up Republican meetings, and many intimidated Republicans submitted to threats and declined to speak. Armed white men singled out white and black Republicans and threatened them personally. A new wave of political murders washed across the state.” In Ellenton, for example, at least twenty-five blacks were killed in racial violence and one white. (p. 386)

Hampton used the violence of his supporters as a vote winning strategy. He claimed that he alone could stop the terror. Hampton appeared to be magnanimous when he ordered his paramilitary clubs to disarm right before the election, but Andrew reports that while the groups “reported that they had disbanded but had really only changed their names. The Columbia Flying Artillery became the Columbia Musical Club with Four Twelve Pounder Flutes; the Allendale Rifle Club became the Allendale Mounted Baseball Club, with 150 baseball players on the team. Others reorganized as the Mother’s Little Helpers or the First Baptist Church Sewing Circle.” (pp. 388-389)

On Election Day, 1876, illiterate blacks were given ballots with Republican Rutherford B. Hayes’s picture on them, but which were, in reality, Hampton ballots. Whites boasted of voting for Hampton many times over the course of that day and blacks sometimes found themselves turned away from the polls by armed Red Shirts. Andrew describes the most obvious Democratic frauds:

“Martin Gary and other Red Shirt leaders were actually too successful in Edgefield and Laurens counties, where Hampton received more votes than there were adult males in the 1875 census. In the end, Hampton won election by 1,000 votes out of more than 180,000 cast (or stuffed). Amid mutual charges of fraud, the state had two rival governors for months until the Republicans finally conceded that they could not govern in the face of massive white resistance.”

Hampton did fulfill some of his promises of paternal care for South Carolina’s blacks. For example, the integrated state university was closed by Hampton, its black teachers were fired and black students expelled before it was reopened as an all-white institution, but a black college was opened at state expense. Dreams of integrated schools were put away for 90 years, but Hampton provided equal funding for segregated black and white elementary schools. The new governor also appointed many blacks to state offices.

Hampton also took steps towards the marginalization of blacks. He had once opposed the sentencing of criminals to work on “chain-gangs” but eventually accepted a modified version of the system. This essentially allowed whites to control the labor of black men who had once been slaves and were now enslaved again. The death rate on the chain gangs rose to 50% by the end of Hampton’s tenure as governor.

These changes did not have the same long-term consequences for civil rights in the state as the measures the Democrats took to limit the black suffrage. A host of measures were introduced that simply made it harder to vote for blacks. For example, the number of polling places was reduced in Republican areas necessitating some blacks to walk twenty miles to a polling station.

In his 1878 campaign for “re-election” Hampton told black South Carolinians:

“the white man will go on bearing the flag of civilization and Christianity until the last trump shall sound from Heaven. [Cheers.] It is the law of God; it is as fixed as the law which fixed that sun in the firmament. It will not be changed, and I say to the colored people of South Carolina that if they array themselves against the white men as a race, if they draw the color line which I have been trying to obliterate—if they say, because we are black, we intend to be Republicans always . . . I tell you here to-day, that if you place yourselves in this attitude towards the white race . . . never will you have control over South Carolina.”

He warned them:

If any other race places itself in opposition [to the white race] it must give way before the advancing tide and die out as the Indians have done . (p. 433)

At the same times that Hampton reasserted white supremacy, he fought the far-right of his party in its demand for the total exclusion of African Americans from politics. As the sinister extremists contested with Hampton for control of the party, some blacks saw Hampton as the only viable alternative to a racial apocalypse. Robert Smalls was one of a number of black leaders who praised Hampton for adopting a moderate version of white supremacy.

Wade Hampton won the 1878 race 119,550 to 213 votes. The Republicans had not nominated a candidate to oppose him. While the governor’s race was a foregone conclusion, Republicans had hoped to keep the Democrats from overwhelmingly controlling the legislature. “On Edisto Island,” Andrew writes, “inhabited by 1,000 Republicans and 50 Democrats, the polls never opened. Armed Red Shirts patrolled elsewhere, often forcing hundreds of black voters away from the polls over the course of the day.” (p. 441) While Hampton preached fairness, his allies betrayed it.

White rule was finally reestablished and Hampton and his inconvenient paternalism could be cast aside. Hampton was chosen to represent the state in the United States Senate and his gave up the governorship and its powers. Black South Carolina would be subordinated by Jim Crow.

In 1888 Hampton wrote against black suffrage in an essay entitled “What Negro Supremacy Means.” In 1890 he supported a plan to colonize blacks drafted by his old lieutenant Calbraith Butler. Hampton argued that “deep-seated, ineradicable race antagonism” had led to intractable and violent conflict in the United States. While Hampton stopped short of forcible expulsion of blacks, he did want then to be encouraged to leave South Carolina.

By 1890 the Hamptonite Conservatives were being challenged by Ben Tillman from the radical right. Tillman was the sort of fake populist that is all too common a figure in American politics. Born to a well-to-do planter family, he made himself a “man of the people” when it was politically necessary. In the general election, Pitchfork Ben Tillman won with 59,000 votes to 15,000 for the Hampton-backed candidate. While Hampton could complain about the betrayal by the voters, the fact that only 75,000 votes were cast in 1890 vrs. more than 200,000 in 1876 showed how effective the disenfranchisement of most South Carolinians had been. This was a process of black political marginalization started under good, paternal Wade Hampton.

This book is incredibly rich in documentation and each chapter could support a full book with the primary sources Rod Andrew has uncovered. Andrew supplies the backgrounds of the major figures in his story and provides context for the events he describes. The writing is generally good, particularly when discussing Hampton’s military career.

The book does have some shortcomings. I have already mentioned the constant references the author makes to his four motivators for Hamptons decisions. If these were occasionally referenced in the text and then tied together in the conclusion, I would have overlooked what I consider a naïve analytical frame. It is the fact that these four magic words intrude themselves dozens of times into the text that was distracting.

There were a number of minor annoyances as well. Several times in the text Andrew described Hampton as not being a citizen, or losing his citizenship, because he was unable to vote. However, when he discusses Hampton’s plans to take away the vote from most blacks and some whites he never refers to it as taking their citizenship away. As I have noted elsewhere, citizenship and voting were not then, nor are they now, the same thing. Women and children could not vote in the 1860s, yet they were citizens. Black men were made citizens under the 14th Amendment, but they did not get the vote until the 15th was ratified.

A larger problem with the book is the absence of critical African American voices. Just about the only times we hear a black man or woman speak is when Hampton is offered praise. The evidence we have that Hampton was a humane master comes from other whites. The Hamptons owned over a thousand slaves during Wade’s lifetime, it would have been nice to hear from at least one of them who was not involved in domestic service.

I recommend this book, but with some reservations. Unlike many biographies of Confederate generals that promise to tell the story of the man beyond the battlefield and then do so in a ten page pasted in appendix, this book devotes as much space to Reconstruction as it does to Civil War. It also gives some sense of Hampton’s place within his family and community, not easily accomplished because many of his papers were destroyed by fire. It is a good, but flawed volume on an important figure in the creation of the world that Jim Crow would thrive in.

Follow Reconstruction Blog on Social Media:

•