Capitol Men

by Philip Dray

  Encouraged by the advice, South Carolina's Martin W. Gary, a former Confederate general, prepared a thirty-three-point Democratic agenda for achieving victory at the polls in November; it featured guidelines for physically intimidating the opposition. It included specific instructions on how to maintain discipline in the rifle clubs, many of which were organized like regular military units, with orders, drills, and a system of rank that reprised positions of authority once held under arms in the Confederacy. The campaign would be sweeping in scope, aimed not to achieve parity with the Republicans but to wipe them out, ultimately placing a Democrat in every elective or appointed office in South Carolina. Point 12 advised that "every Democrat must feel honor bound to control the vote of at least one negro, by intimidation, purchase, keeping him away or as each individual may determine, how he may best accomplish it." Point 16 cautioned Democrats to "never threaten a man individually if he deserves to be threatened, the necessities of the times require that he should die. A dead Radical is very harmless—a threatened Radical or one driven off by threats from the scene of his operations is often very troublesome, sometimes dangerous, always vindictive."

  CONFEDERATE TROOPS IN RETREAT

  Gary was the descendant of old Edgefield aristocracy, an attorney and cotton planter "devoted to his fine horses ... game chickens, and the ... merry music of the hunter's horn." He had a violent temper and was considered too unpredictable—some thought genuinely crazy—to be part of the Democratic brain trust. Nonetheless he was highly visible at events during the campaign of 1876, his head "as bald as a billiard ball" (he was known as "the Bald Eagle of the Confederacy"), an impulsive man who seemed in a perpetual state of agitation and who spoke in a rush of words. "He goes off in conversation like a skyrocket," explained a sympathetic biographer. "Five feet eleven in height, with an elegant, well-proportioned form, he bore himself with an air of distinction. His classic features, mobile and full of expression, were lighted by the searching grayish-blue eyes of the natural fighter, and more than one man was to quail before his fiery glance."

  He was most renowned for a valorous utterance on the field of battle at Second Bull Run, where, during pitched fighting, a Yankee colonel had demanded the surrender of Gary's troops. "What, sir?" Gary famously exclaimed. "These are South Carolinians, and will never surrender!" The next day he led an attack that destroyed an entire federal unit. Placed in charge of the defense of Richmond in spring 1865, he was said to be the last officer to flee the Confederate capital before the Union advance into that city. It was characteristic of Gary that while Grant and Lee were discussing surrender at Appomattox, he was dodging federal patrols and boasting of his will to fight on; it was a point of great pride that he had never actually surrendered to the Yankees, never formally conceded the cause—a resolve that informed his belligerence toward Reconstruction and his will to overthrow it.

  The special talent of Gary and his Red Shirts, whose distinctive "uniform" had been christened at Hamburg, was their ability to intimidate black and white Republicans, frequently by unlawful means, while posing as the orderly legions of the righteous. Earlier Klan violence in South Carolina in 1870–71 had been instructive: Klan actions were too random and indiscriminate, merely punishing individuals without being linked to an orderly call for change. Without an overarching political agenda, night riding could frighten and alienate even would-be sympathizers and possibly trigger federal intervention. The Red Shirts improved on this model by amassing huge legions of "troops," charging them with the idea that they were the vanguard of a new dawn in the South and keeping a modicum of control over who rode in their ranks; young boys and known hoodlums were discouraged from taking part.

  By August of 1876 somewhere between two hundred and three hundred rifle clubs had formed in South Carolina, with a total of nearly fifteen thousand members. They were most active in Edgefield, Laurens, Aiken, Barnwell, and Abbeville Counties, upcountry areas in the southwest part of the state. Armed to the teeth and riding in groups that ranged from fifteen to two hundred, they broke up or interfered with Republican rallies, sent deadly warnings to Republican leaders, published proclamations in newspapers, and placed the names of black Republicans in so-called "dead books"—individuals who would be reckoned with in good time. "They do not claim to be Americans," a New York Times correspondent wrote of the Red Shirts, "[but] proudly boast that they are South Carolinians, and they are fully prepared to follow Gen. Gary's terrible instructions. I do not exaggerate ... when I say that they are again animated by the same spirit of disorder and rebellion which brought on the civil war sixteen years ago. They are better organized than they were then, and they are better armed."

  They also had brought forward an ideal candidate to lead the state's redemption, the former Confederate general Wade Hampton. A major landowner in both South Carolina and Mississippi, Hampton was the grandson and namesake of a renowned Revolutionary War figure who had also served in Congress. His father had been with Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans. Fiercely loyal to South Carolina, he had never been an ardent secessionist, yet responded to the tocsin of battle by using his personal fortune to finance his own Confederate regiment, "Hampton's Legion," at whose head he won acclaim as a battlefield tactician, despite his lack of formal military training.

  But Hampton's most winning trait was a cool demeanor borne of entitlement, a gentlemanly restraint that separated him from the more combustible Martin Gary or Mathew Butler. For all his wealth and aristocratic Southern ways, he was markedly democratic in his openness to people of all rank. At war's end, he had been gracious in accepting the fundamental results of the conflict, saying of the freedman, "As a slave, he was faithful to us; as a free man, let us treat him as a friend. Deal with him frankly, justly, kindly."

  There was, however, nothing soft or effete about Hampton. In combat he was said to have been fearless, wading into the thick of battle and dispatching Union cavalrymen with a broadsword, apparently some sort of family heirloom. On the campaign trail he took delight in mocking the aides and reporters who tried to keep pace with him, since much of the travel was done on horseback. "He was a big, powerful, athletic man," remarked a contemporary, "carrying just enough extra flesh to become his 58 years. When in the saddle he looked as if he and the horse were one."

  One of the more significant effects of Hampton's candidacy was that it converted F. W. Dawson, the influential British-born editor of the Charleston News & Courier, to the Democratic cause. Dawson had enlisted in the Confederate navy during the war, then joined the Army of Northern Virginia, rising to an officer's rank, and saw action in numerous battles before being made a prisoner of war. Managing Charleston's leading paper after the peace, he became a barometer of moderate white opinion. In 1868 he organized biracial political meetings in Charleston for the local city council elections, gatherings Dawson proudly claimed were the first of their kind in the state. By the mid-187os, he and his paper supported Daniel Chamberlain's reforms and voiced skepticism of hotheaded Democrats like Gary and Butler. "Straightout-ism, with its threat and bluster, with its possible disturbances and certain turmoil, is the foe of mercantile security and commercial prosperity," he wrote in May 1876. The threats of federal intervention or disruptions to commerce were the editor's chief apprehensions.

  When Hamburg occurred, however, and the Straightout movement burst forth, the News & Courier found itself editorially stranded. Readers canceled subscriptions. Several whites, including Gary, challenged Dawson to duel, as if to ascertain how Southern a man Dawson really was (a threat the editor took seriously, as he regarded Gary as unbalanced). So long as the Straightout policy was represented by the likes of Butler and Gary, Dawson remained convinced it was suicidal; the harsh mistreatment of blacks in denying them the ballot would only bring more federal troops into the state. But when the Democrats chose the rocklike Wade Hampton as their standard-bearer, Dawson had a change of heart, and the News & Courier restyled itself as a Straightout paper, dropping its fealty to
Chamberlain. Dawson's turnabout was "an audacious, masterly somersault at which everybody laughed," but it was a move that most people approved of and one that ended a long-simmering tension.

  The newspaper immediately demonstrated its new mien by lampooning the black politician Joseph Rainey, who in his reelection bid for Congress had warned his constituents against the Straightouts, citing their ultimate intention to disenfranchise blacks. Calling Rainey "a very light mulatto, of limited ability," the News & Courier endorsed his Democratic competitor, a white man named Richardson who, it vowed, "will guard the interests of the colored people far more vigilantly than Rainey has done. Colored Congressmen have no earthly influence in Washington," the paper alleged, "even among Republicans. Intelligent, highly educated and influential whites are what the Southern people, irrespective of color, need in Congress, and such are the Democratic candidates."

  The conversion of Dawson was but one indicator that the choice of Wade Hampton had been an inspired one. Even some blacks were susceptible to his charms, awakening the longstanding Republican fear that the planter class would manage to reunite emotionally with its former slaves. One of the more notable blacks to espouse support for Democratic positions was Martin Delany, an abolitionist and Harvard-educated physician who attained the rank of major in the war and served in the Freedmen's Bureau. His speeches and writings stated that the experiment of Reconstruction had failed to convince the nation that blacks could be taken seriously as custodians of government. They must now strike the best bargain possible with Southern whites, whatever compromise they could salvage, before the final curtain of Reconstruction was rung down. "Rest assured of this," said Delany, "that there are no white people North or South who will submit to see blacks rule over the whites in America. We may as well be plain and candid on this point, look each other in the face, and let the truth be known." Francis Dawson thought Delany "a black prophet" and called his advice to his fellow black citizens "a solemn warning ... They cannot hereafter complain that there was not one of their race who possessed the boldness and ability to expose their faults, and point out to them the edge of the precipice on which, in blind security, they stand."

  By assuring the freedmen that he would respect their rights to free labor, to the ballot, and to education ("I pledge my faith," he wrote in a campaign pamphlet, "that if we are elected ... we will observe, protect, and defend the rights of the colored man as quickly as [of] any man in South Carolina"), Hampton held out the vision of a government run by the South's native leadership class, one that would reconstitute the caring paternalism of antebellum times while respecting the blacks' new status as citizens.

  Certainly most blacks remained skeptical, and even some whites murmured that Hampton's vaunted heroism and wealth were mostly illusions—that he was more shabby genteel than true aristocrat, a man who banked on the glory of his ancestors. ("Like a beet," quipped the New York Times, "the better part of him is underground.") But the program was seductive, appearing to offer the best of all worlds, or at the least an alternative to the tumult of Reconstruction. The Hampton forces went out of their way to coddle those blacks curious about joining the Democracy, staging free barbecues "for colored brethren, and engaging speakers [who] tried to amuse, instruct, and interest them." At every rally Hampton's aides made sure a section of chairs with quality views of the stage were set aside for black attendees. "The only way to bring about prosperity in this state is to bring the two races in friendly relations together," the candidate assured an audience at Abbeville in mid-September. "If there is a white man in this assembly [who] believes that when I am elected Governor, I will stand between him and the law, or grant to him any privileges or immunities that shall not be granted to the colored man, he is mistaken."

  The Democratic campaign was thus from its inception double-edged. While Hampton offered chairs with good views and free dinners to black people and gentlemanly composure and reassurances to Northern onlookers, Butler, Gary, and the Red Shirts provided the intimidation. Hampton occasionally hurled red meat to the faithful by invoking his Confederate service, railing about federal "bayonets," and vowing that he would unflinchingly take up his famous broadsword again if South Carolina were to call upon her sons.

  As early as 1868, the New York Times had warned that the results of the Civil War would be rendered meaningless if the South should "again become impregnated ... with a fixed spirit of disloyalty which will need but the favoring moment to precipitate itself into a sweeping revolution." Now, in 1876, the signs of impending upheaval were unmistakable: the Fort Moultrie centennial observance that year turned into a giant Confederate reunion, with armed veterans reconstituting their former regiments, marching in ranks to martial music, and cheering an afternoon of "hot Southern speeches." During the event word came that, at St. Louis, Samuel Tilden had just been nominated as the Democratic candidate for president, and there were hoorahs for his victory. When war veterans who had ridden in from Georgia for the occasion expressed disgust "at the unwonted spectacle of negroes in office" in the Palmetto State, locals assured them the offending situation would not long persist.

  "Hampton's Triumphant Progress," "The Fires of Patriotism Everywhere Aglow," and "The Spirit of Seventy-Six!" were a few of the exuberant headlines that greeted Wade Hampton's campaign of redemption, which marched across South Carolina from seacoast to upcountry hamlet. "Never has there been so general an uprising of the people of the upcountry as there is at present," recorded the News & Courier. "At Anderson, Greenville, Spartanburg, Union, Laurens, Walhalla, Pickens and Newberry ... Hampton ... has received grand ovations ... The people have said, and they mean it, that they will either redeem South Carolina or die in the attempt."

  There was no denying that with these events, known as "Hampton Days," white South Carolina had experienced a genuine rebirth; here were the pride and self-respect so sorely missing since 1865; here were Southern men, valorous and once again full of purpose. The impact of strutting brass bands and booming cannon on sleepy towns that had not heard such fanfare since the days of secession can well be imagined. It was redemption in the fullest sense of the word—redemption from unwanted Republican political domination and federal policies, but more important, redemption of the South from inglorious defeat. The campaign even took on the sense of a religious crusade, with a prayer day, fasting, church services, and its own "Joan of Arc"—Francis and Lucy Pickens's teenage daughter Douschka, a skilled horsewoman, who rode through Edgefield Village at the head of a column of whooping Red Shirts.

  Hampton himself observed that South Carolinians seemed more determined to secure his election than they had been to win the Civil War. At one rally in Manning, country people arrived "three on a mule" to witness a promised display of pageantry. Thirty-seven young women appeared on stage draped in white costumes identifying them as the individual "United States"; but face-down on the floor laid one dressed in a black robe—South Carolina, "the Prostrate State." The moment the candidate strode onstage to deafening cheers, "the Prostrate State" arose and, "throwing off her somber draperies, appeared a fair white robed figure like the others. Her deliverer, Wade Hampton, had come."

  WADE HAMPTON

  Spectacle on such a scale proved hard for the state's Republicans to match. An infamous debacle in August 1876 in Edgefield made this plainly evident. The incumbent Republican gubernatorial candidate, Daniel Chamberlain, accompanied by Robert Smalls and the white Republican E.W.M. Mackey, arrived for a party rally, only to be greeted by six hundred mounted Red Shirts under the command of Gary and Butler. The Democrats demanded "divided time." The Republicans at first refused, saying they had called the gathering expressly to meet with their own faithful and to ratify the national ticket of Rutherford B. Hayes and William A. Wheeler. But the Democratic presence was overwhelming, with a crowd of townspeople swelling the Red Shirt ranks. Smalls, directly facing Butler and his rifle clubs, must have felt he had stepped into the very Hamburg massacre he had so eloquently criticized to Congress.
Having little choice, the Republicans agreed to share the platform, with speeches of one half-hour allocated to each presenter.

  This ostensibly fair format quickly broke down. Governor Chamberlain was heckled as he vowed to continue his reform efforts, and whites even nudged loose the posts holding up the speaking platform, nearly causing it to collapse as Chamberlain completed his remarks. Butler then came to the podium to denounce Smalls and Chamberlain for having accused him of membership in the Ku Klux Klan. Mackey bounded up to defend Chamberlain, urging listeners to help secure the governor's return to office as the best way to maintain peace in the state. When Gary's turn came, Chamberlain was moving to one side of the stage in order to speak with an aide; Gary loudly, and to the glee of his followers, commanded the governor to return to his seat at once, or the Red Shirts would force him to remain there. "I spoke to him in rude and rough language in order that the rude and rough negro might understand it," Gary later said. "This is what killed the spirit of the negro, to see the governor of the state and the chosen leader of their party abused in such unmeasured terms." Gary went on to castigate the governor as "a damn bald-headed renegade and bummer of Sherman's army," then turned his wrath on Smalls, "who has used my name in the Halls of Congress as being the leader of the Ku Klux." He defied Smalls to "open his lips on this stand today." The audience roared its approval, shouting, "No, that God damn nigger shall not speak here today!" Butler then returned to the stage to take a turn at haranguing Chamberlain, standing over him and shaking his finger in his face, but the crowd's enmity seemed to shift to Smalls. When Butler mockingly asked for the crowd's "opinion" of "the Boat Thief," the cries were loud and unanimous: "Kill the damn son of a bitch! Kill the nigger!" Many of the black Republicans in the audience, understandably cowed by what they'd seen and heard, began quietly leaving the rally.