Capitol Men

by Philip Dray

  Governor Hampton learned for himself what it was like to be targeted by the Edgefield forces after he and his state superintendent of education were invited to dine with the president of Claflin College in Orangeburg. To their surprise, they found that two eminent local black men—a judge and a professor—were joining them at the table. There is no evidence that the dinner was anything but cordial, but rumors spread that the old, once-proud Confederate general, the "Giant in Gray," had weakened, had taken to "dining or dancing with the colored brothers and sisters," as Gary disparaged it, a sign of political foolishness if not moral depravity. (For white politicians, sharing a meal with a black man, no matter how distinguished, could be a serious misstep, as President Theodore Roosevelt would discover in 1901 when he received the educator Booker T. Washington for dinner at the White House.)

  Then a bizarre accident caused Hampton even more embarrassment and pain. Having announced his intention to challenge vote fraud in the 1878 state elections, the governor left the capital to enjoy some autumn deer hunting. Hampton was a renowned hunter; his specialty as a younger man was the taking of black bears, with his hunting knife, in the swamps of Mississippi. But somehow, during this particular outing in South Carolina, he wandered off from his party, and then the mule upon which he was riding tripped and fell against a tree, crushing the governor's leg. Unable to pull himself to his feet, Hampton lay for several hours alone in the deep woods, signaling with his gun in the gathering darkness until a search party located him and a cart was brought from Columbia to the difficult-to-access spot. The wounded man was carefully hoisted aboard and endured a bumpy, painful ride along a rutted path before reaching a hospital back in town. The incident seemed suspicious—why was the governor of South Carolina, under any circumstances, off by himself in the woods? The New York Times, under the headline "Mule Fraud," accused South Carolina Democrats of concocting the entire story so that the governor would not be held to his promise to explode fraudulent election results. Such speculation halted abruptly when physicians were forced to amputate Hampton's injured right leg.

  Although he won reelection as governor in fall 1878, soon after, the state legislature chose him to represent South Carolina in the U.S. Senate. To attain national office was a great honor, although in leaving the governor's chair Hampton knew he was abandoning his state to elements far less conciliatory than he was. The image of restraint and temperance Hampton had paraded in 1876, which had won him sympathy beyond the state's borders, had always been based on his own reputation as a gentleman-patriot; there was thin support for such moderation now. In 1879, at a rally in Abbeville, the site of a triumphant "Hampton Day" appearance only three years earlier, he was actually booed and shouted down. He warned that he would return to the state and run again for governor, in order to confront the likes of Gary and Tillman, but instead he remained in Washington, serving two terms in the Senate.

  When the Democrats looked out over the political landscape of South Carolina, they saw a state largely swept clean of Republicanism by the restoration of home rule. Marring the view, however, was one stubborn corner of Republican control, Robert Smalls's Sea Island sanctuary of Beaufort County. Long known as "the Negro's Paradise," it was to Pitchfork Ben Tillman a "niggerdom," one requiring immediate redemption. The state's transformation would not be complete, he declared, so long as such an enclave remained. The Democrats in control of the state legislature proceeded to gerrymander the Sea Islands into improbable districts that reduced black voting power and made it physically difficult for blacks to reach polling places.

  This effort complemented a campaign to discredit Smalls personally. In October 1878 Wade Hampton himself had been dispatched to Beaufort to humiliate Smalls before his own people, bringing with him a portfolio of "evidence" from the recently published "Report on Public Frauds," the Democratic effort to permanently tarnish those Republican "miscreants" who had once held authority in the state. Hampton told a gathering there that their beloved congressman had taken a $5,000 bribe, and he offered to show the audience the very checks Smalls had cashed. A number of black men came forward to have a look and "shook their heads significantly," as Smalls, who had been in the crowd, was seen making a convenient exit. The New York Times wrote disapprovingly of the incident, admonishing Hampton to cease "the vengeful political persecutions of South Carolina" and to "call off the bloodhounds of the law from the ex-slave, Robert Smalls, charged with bribery, but really suffering for the old crime of grand larceny in running off with the steamer Planter, taking her over Charleston bar, and delivering her to the commander of the United States blockading squadron."

  Hampton, or whoever had sent him to embarrass Smalls, was in a sense being ungrateful, for Smalls had played a key role in quelling a potentially violent race conflict that had come close to spiraling out of control during Hampton's winning campaign in 1876. Rice planters in the Carolina lowlands that summer, moved by the economic imperatives of a drought year, had begun reducing the amount they would pay for tasks performed by black laborers and introduced the unpopular system of paying workers in scrip, in lieu of cash. Local merchants would redeem the scrip, but because the planters themselves controlled these plantation stores, the overall effect was less pay for the workers; ten dollars was no longer worth ten dollars when, as scrip, it purchased only six or seven dollars' worth of goods. Laborers went on strike at a plantation along the Combahee River, and soon neighboring ones also fell quiet. The planters sought to negotiate, but the angry workers insisted on immediate concessions and began blocking rice shipments and threatening other blacks who refused to join the shutdown. When local white vigilantes invaded the plantations to arrest strike leaders said to have violated the law, the strikers counterattacked, driving off most of the whites.

  With the situation deadlocked, the state appealed to Smalls for help. Warned by militant strikers that if they caught him double-dealing, they would "tie him up and give him 150 lashes on his big fat ass," Smalls managed to wave off a threatened intervention by the state militia; after placating the workers, who feared retribution, he obtained an agreement from the planters to resume weekly cash payments. He won safe passage for some white vigilantes out of the neighborhood and convinced the strike's ringleaders, who refused to surrender to white authorities, to walk the fourteen miles to Beaufort with him in order to turn themselves in to a black judge. Smalls and his "prisoners" were cheered by onlookers as they entered Beaufort, and the next morning a judge dismissed all the charges against them.

  Smalls's history as a useful liaison between the races, however, was little valued by the Red Shirts. In fall 1878, around the time of Hampton's visit to Beaufort, they arrived en masse to harass Smalls and his followers at a Republican rally in the hamlet of Gillisonville. The white Sea Islands missionary teacher Laura Towne recounted that "eight hundred red-shirt men, led by colonels, generals, and many leading men of the state, came dashing into the town, giving 'the real rebel yell' and," as Smalls himself recalled, "whooping like Indians." The Red Shirts, according to Towne, "drew up and as a body stood still, but every few minutes a squad of three or four would scour down [the] street on their horses, and reaching out would 'lick off the hats' of the colored men or slap the faces of the colored women coming to the meeting, whooping and yelling and scattering the people on all sides. This made the colored men so mad that they wanted to pitch right into a fight with the eight hundred, but Robert Smalls restrained them, telling them what folly it was." One of the Red Shirt leaders then proposed a divided-time meeting, but Smalls, a veteran of more than one disastrous divided-time affair, refused. As the invaders fingered their weapons, Smalls and several other black men retreated into a general store, where Smalls directed those who had guns to aim at the door, but not to fire unless the Red Shirts actually broke in. With Smalls and his band effectively held prisoner, a body of Democrats moved off a short distance and began giving political speeches.

  ROBERT SMALLS

  Witnessing Smalls's predicament
, residents quickly spread the alarm throughout the community. According to Towne, "Every colored man and woman seized whatever was at hand—guns, axes, hoes, etc., and ran to the rescue. By six o'clock [in the] afternoon a thousand negroes were approaching the town, and the Red Shirts thought best to gallop away." Still, the invaders left a posse behind to ambush Smalls when he tried to board the train that would carry him back to Beaufort, and as a precaution he hid in some dense brush a safe distance from the station and waited until he could leap aboard the train as it departed. If Smalls was exhausted and disappointed by the day's brush with violence, he was buoyed to find at almost every station large numbers of armed black men waiting to travel in the opposite direction, toward Gillisonville, because they had learned that their "King of Beaufort" was in trouble.

  Smalls was again in his element during a rare visit by former president Grant and his wife in 1880. A boisterous crowd of five thousand turned out to greet the general, with Smalls, resplendent in his uniform and ceremonial sword as captain of the Beaufort Light Infantry, an all-black honor guard, leading the welcoming committee. When President and Mrs. Grant appeared, the crowd erupted in boisterous shouts of "Hallelujah!" Many fell on their knees, weeping and laughing, crying, "'Fore God, that's the man; he's come, 'fore God, sir." The throng at one point pressed so hard around the former first couple that soldiers and police had to push back the people. Under Smalls's command the troops made a sharp demonstration of maneuvers in the street, and artillery pieces were fired to salute the ex-president. Grant then embarked on a scenic drive around the little city, followed by numerous other vehicles, horse carts, and dozens of young barefoot admirers who "hurrah'd" him up and down the picturesque streets.

  The honored visitor, a man of few words, appeared genuinely moved by the enthusiastic turnout. Noting that Beaufort "has occupied a conspicuous place in the history of our country for the past twenty years," he declared it "a place where the best qualities of the newly emancipated race are to be developed. I hope that they will become worthy and capable citizens." Smalls had the privilege of presenting Mrs. Grant with the light infantry's gift of a "handsomely-ornamented cake." When the president signaled to his aides to offer some token present in return, Smalls gallantly reassured him that seeing Mrs. Grant up close was all the reward his men required, a remark that brought laughter and applause. Waxing hopeful about Grant's chances of reclaiming the presidency that fall, Smalls announced, to wild cheering, "I am going to Washington with my company to see General Grant inaugurated on the 4th of March, 1881."

  Despite Smalls's personal popularity, the Democratic redistricting and bulldozing tactics, such as parading Red Shirt units near polling places, ultimately contributed to his first electoral defeat, which came in 1878. To his credit, he refused to be cowed by such maneuvers. He had given considerable thought to the nature of the South's desire for white rule and the many ploys used to turn aside the black vote. In a speech delivered to Congress the year before, "An Honest Ballot Is the Safeguard of the Republic," he had offered the view that, though Southern whites were not without their good qualities, slavery had worked a corrupting influence on them. Decades of absolute power over a servile race had made them cruel, lazy, arrogant, and incurious. Now that the federal government had set both races on an equal plane, "the late slave holding class will not submit peacefully to a government they cannot control, believing they are a superior race." It was this profound resentment of black equality, he said, that drove otherwise decent people, in their weakness and fear, to commit horrible crimes—to threaten, to defraud, to kill. Such actions taken by whites "against a harmless race" became "the blacker with their boasted chivalry, their claim of superior gentleness" and threatened to "make the history of the new South one of blood and ... the subject for one of the darkest pages in American history."

  Understanding the grudge that whites refused to relinquish, Smalls reacted to his first defeat at the polls without dejection; rather, he took heart from the knowledge that the Democrats had been forced to use extraordinary measures to defeat him. He dug in to better prepare for the next election two years hence.

  Unfortunately, Democratic gerrymandering and ballot-box manipulations in the Sea Islands were only part of the Republicans' problem. Loyalty among blacks to the Party of Lincoln had waned over the years in the face of voter intimidation, incessant attacks on the party as corrupt and wasteful, and diminished anxiety about possible reenslavement. So pervasive was the Democrats' dominance over South Carolina politics that when a white Republican named T. B. Johnson managed to be elected to the state house of representatives, the Democrats insisted that before he could take his seat, he had to publicly apologize for supporting Daniel Chamberlain in the "dual house" showdown of 1877; when Johnson refused to honor so absurd a demand, he was denied entry to the legislature. The outlook appeared so dire at the state Republican convention in September 1880 that Robert Brown Elliott warned Smalls and others to not bother mounting political campaigns, since they would surely fail and only further dishearten black constituents. The spirit of change and possibility that had attended the 1868 South Carolina constitutional convention was now such a remote memory, Elliott said, it was hard to believe such things had ever been. Virtually all the postwar aspirations of the ex-slaves, the means by which they were to pull themselves upward to freedom and equality, had dissolved in their grasp "like a rope of sand." Smalls dismissed Elliott's defeatism and plunged ahead anyway, although, as in his 1878 campaign, plagued by the same Democratic harassment, he came up short, losing by a substantial margin to George Tillman, Pitchfork Ben's brother.

  This time, however, Smalls was ready, and he officially contested the results. He pointed out to a special committee appointed by the U.S. House of Representatives that at numerous polling places across the state, Democrats had stuffed ballot boxes and cast out Republican votes; in Edgefield, Democrats wearing red shirts had seized the voting stations the night before the election, while others on horseback "rode through the town discharging guns and pistols." In Aiken County a loaded cannon had been wheeled ominously close to the polling place. In Hampton County, Republican ballots were taken from the poll manager, so that Republican voters could not vote; and elsewhere "polls were opened at unusual places and at improper hours, of which Republican voters had no knowledge." When the committee found Democratic fraud in four South Carolina counties where blacks formed the majority, Smalls insisted that the vote totals from these counties be thrown out, leaving him with a majority of 14,393 to George Tillman's 12,904.

  Tillman offered a unique defense. Rather than attempt to explain away alleged polling station abuses or uphold the vote's legitimacy, he simply argued that it was essential that whites govern South Carolina—that their restored authority was important to the national reconciliation then taking place between North and South. He added, in a twisted allusion to then-prevailing notions of social Darwinism, that the whites' willingness and ability to "win" the election by whatever means necessary, in this case intimidation and trickery, only proved their natural racial superiority. Democratic supremacy in South Carolina politics, in his view, merely evinced "the great universal law of nature—the inevitable law of the survival of the fittest." Despite Tillman's candor, or more likely because of it, the House committee gave the election to Smalls.

  But by 1882, it was apparent that only fate or luck could spare Smalls from the Democratic efforts to eliminate him from Congress in the upcoming election. Sensing that he would not be able to muster enough delegates to win the nomination of the Republican Party that year, Smalls threw his weight behind the white candidate, E.W.M. Mackey, who had played an active role in the constitutional convention of 1868 and in the "dual house." Mackey won the election but died soon after, and Smalls was selected to replace him and finish out his term. He was then reelected in his own right in 1884.

  In 1886 Smalls mounted his last congressional campaign. Time and again he had plucked victory from seemingly impossible odds, bu
t by now the move to oust him and collapse the black enclave he ruled in Beaufort had become something like a national Democratic crusade. So phalanx-like were the forces opposing him that even a modest bill he managed to pass in the House to provide a pension to Maria Hunter, the widow of the former Union general David Hunter, was blocked. Hunter's memory was sacred to the black Sea Islanders because of his 1862 declaration that slaves in South Carolina were "forever free," helping pave the way for the eventual enlistment of black soldiers in support of the Union. Smalls told Congress, "Less than a quarter of a century ago that class of which I am a representative were 'hewers of wood and drawers of water. Our lives were one long eternal night...[thus] we can never forget the Moses who led us out of the land of bondage." But the eloquence of Smalls's appeal failed to impress President Cleveland, who vetoed the appropriation.

  One affront led to another. In Boston in 1882 Smalls was denied a hotel room on account of his race. Blacks across the nation were outraged by this mistreatment, which was reported in the press, although Smalls himself insisted the matter be dropped. More painful for him was the Democrats' success, in the 1886 campaign year, at turning even some of his long-faithful neighbors against him over issues of color. As a one-man bastion of power in the low country, he relied heavily on the spoils system—distributing patronage to maintain his base of support. Smalls himself was a mulatto and his patronage tended to favor other light-skinned blacks. Challenged by the pure black, or "African," members of his constituency, Smalls argued that it had simply made sense for him to appoint to office men who could read and write, had seen something of the world, or had had dealings with whites; this, he insisted, did not imply these individuals were better than others, only that they were better equipped to work for the interests of the Sea Islands. But many had come to view this practice as exclusionary and did not countenance Smalls's argument. Due in part to the death from malaria of W. J. Bowen, his chief Republican opponent, Smalls secured his party's 1886 nomination, but he lost the general election. As in 1880 he made a formal protest on the grounds that Democratic fraud had tilted the results. Unlike 1880, however, this time Congress refused to come to the rescue.