Part 13:
On Election Day, 1876, illiterate blacks were given ballots with 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 1868 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 ****, 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 ****.
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.
Up next, a few final thoughts on Wade Hampton: Confederate Warrior Southern Redeemer.