Was Wade Hampton a Hypocrite for Calling for the Use of FEDERAL Troops to Suppress Strikes in 1894?

Pat Young

Brev. Brig. Gen'l
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I just finished reading Heath Cox Richardson's book West From Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America After the Civil War. According to Richardson, Hampton showed the contradictions of the modernizing American when he, a former rebel, denounced striking labor unions as insurrectionists. He called for Federal troops to suppress strikes by workers in 1894 when railroads were blocked by them! Heather Cox Richardson writes:

Wade Hampton, of all people, now a United States railroad commissioner, believed that "all thoughtful and patriotic citizens ... deplore the condition of affairs brought about by the disgraceful and dangerous strike recently inaugurated by designing demagogues." Clearly thinking of Tillman and the angry agrarian contingent he commanded in South Carolina, Hampton continued that "the strong arm of the Government" had to maintain the supremacy of the law and repress anarchy and communism. "No one upholds whatever of State's rights is left to us more earnestly than myself," he remarked, but he reminded readers that the president had a constitutional duty to repress domestic violence-a rich statement coming from such a staunch opponent of the Ku Klux Klan laws of the early 1870s. Hampton went on to reveal his understanding of how the developing mainstream vision could reconcile the nation's acceptance of mounting racial discrimination with the long-standing concept of success through hard work. "Every humane man must feel profound sympathy for all honest toilers where labor does not yield proper remuneration," Hampton wrote, "but no legislation, no government, no earthly power, can rectify the immutable law by which the gifts of fortune are distributed with an unequal hand." Invoking the language of old free labor Republicanism that white southerners had scorned immediately after the war, he could solve this problem only by calling for laborers to become landowners, which would make them independent and "conservative, law-abiding citizens."
 

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