Capitol Men (53 page)

In contrast, established black spokesmen such as Blanche Bruce and Frederick Douglass had a harder time accepting that "the Reconstruction dream of black assimilation into white American society had died." They had believed fervently in that dream and had fought ably for civil rights, Enforcement Acts, and Constitutional reforms. But when those attainments were reneged upon, it was the ordinary black citizen who knew what to do.

"S
OME MEN ARE BORN GREAT,
some achieve greatness, and others lived during the Reconstruction period," wrote the African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. Even by the standards of that unforgiving era, however, the decline of South Carolina's "savior," Wade Hampton, came with astonishing swiftness. The candidate who had served as the moderate face of redemption soon found himself undermined and made to appear superfluous by the potent conservative wing of the Democratic Party.

The Straightouts had overthrown the reform governor Daniel Chamberlain by talking a great deal about "reforms" of their own, although it became increasingly apparent that they were obsessed chiefly with one—the eradication of black Americans from elected office and from the balloting place. As Martin Gary proclaimed within two years of the election that had brought Hampton to power, "We regard the issues between the white and colored people of this state, and of the entire South, as an antagonism of race, not a difference of political parties ... white supremacy is essential to our continued existence as a people."

Despite the triumph of home rule, the will to violence that had characterized the 1876 campaign had in no way abated; if anything, it intensified as a younger generation of Edgefield men emerged, who, in the words of their one-eyed leader, Benjamin Tillman, "rode hard and delivered strong licks." Tillman, a founding member of the Sweetwater Sabre Club, which had been involved in the massacre at Hamburg, was at heart "a dairy farmer and cotton planter," reported the
New York World,
but also "a rough, fierce, masterful leader ... powerfully built, with a square head, heavy jaws and powerful mouth—the sort of man who
can lead mobs. His one gleaming eye gives an expression of fierceness to his countenance...[it] burns in his head, a menace to his enemies and an inspiration to his friends."

BENJAMIN TILLMAN

His larger-than-life personality and embrace of popular reactionary sentiments—his distrust of cities, Yankees, big business, and wealthy planters; his advocacy for farmers (he had been instrumental in founding Clemson University, an agricultural school for the state's native sons); and his personal heroic connection to the hallowed days of Red Shirt activism—made him an irresistible figure to many white South Carolinians. Supremely confident, Tillman's style was to ride into and over potential hindrances. One night, while delivering a talk from the steps of Charleston's city hall, his words were suddenly drowned out by the tolling bells of a nearby cathedral; another speaker might have been thrown off, but Tillman shrewdly met the distraction. Pointing to the tower he cried, "They ring out the false and ring in the true!"

It might be argued that the powerful white-supremacist attitudes, which opened into full flower across the South in the 1890s and the early twentieth century, first took shape with the Tillman movement in South Carolina. Certainly they were nowhere better articulated or successfully promoted, with Tillman himself a prototype for the familiar modern demagogues of the American South, who combined adherence to "the Southern way of life" with open defiance of the federal government. But unlike some of his successors, the public Tillman was not particularly lovable or even lampoonable. He appeared to savor his role as the supreme bad man of redemption, even goading audiences and the press:

You of the north shoved the Negro into our mouths, but you couldn't make us swallow him, and by the holy God you never will.

We have ten million Negroes and only one Booker Washington, and even he's half white.

All we of the South want is for you to ... keep your long Yankee noses out of the Negro question.

We have done our level best [to disenfranchise blacks]. We have scratched our heads to find out how we could eliminate the last one of them. We stuffed ballot boxes. We shot them. We are not ashamed of it.

"Pitchfork Ben," as he would come to be known (for offering to stick the said implement in the "fat old ribs" of President Grover Cleveland), was to have an outsized impact on not only state but national politics, holding several high offices, including governor and U.S. senator, as the Edgefield spirit morphed into a creed known as "Tillmanism." Its guiding principle was simple: the "control" of white people's lives by black men like Robert Smalls, Richard Cain, and Robert Brown Elliott was the nemesis of civilization, and such a state of affairs, once all too real during Reconstruction, could never, ever recur; the only logical response was to choke the possibility at its source—the ballot box. And because South Carolina contained more blacks than whites, the fear of black domination could be manipulated to make it seem that the biological survival of the white population was at stake, licensing all manner of outlandish interventions. The emotional touchstone of this crusade was always and forever 1876, the year of redemption. "That we have good government now," boasted Tillman, "is due entirely to the fact that the Red Shirt men of 1876 did all and dared all that was necessary to rescue South Carolina from the rule of the alien, the traitor, and the semi-barbarous negroes."

In the interim between the rise of the rifle clubs of 1876 and the legislated disenfranchisement that would arrive under Tillman's guidance in the 1890s, a number of devious means were employed to thwart black and Republican South Carolina voters and still their voices. One well-known deception instituted in the early 1880s was the "eight box law." It turned the ballot box into a maze of interchangeable slots labeled with the names of various offices, such as governor, lieutenant governor, and congressional representatives, making it impossible for illiterate voters to know which box should receive a particular ballot. To defeat those who tried to memorize the location of the appropriate slots, the signs denoting them were frequently rearranged. Illiterate people whose votes
were
desired could be directed by poll workers to vote properly; others would be disqualified for having been placed in "the wrong box." When the Republican state convention met in 1882, delegates agreed that the trickery of the eight box likely disenfranchised as many as 80 percent of the state's Republican voters.

Poll managers, registrars, and vote tabulators appointed by the sitting governor had many other discretionary means available to tamper with voting and the vote count. For one, the registrars could, in reviewing the credentials and identification of blacks aspiring to vote, object to any minor irregularity, even in so minute a question as the applicant's middle initial; at times poll workers might simply hide out, or close the polling place, forcing black voters to wait or return home in frustration. In another act of deceit, poll managers stuffed the ballot box with more ballots than there were voters registered; the law then allowed them to shake the box and "randomly" withdraw ballots until the number inside matched that of the number registered; in the process, of course, large numbers of Republican ballots could be discarded. Or the manager might create an opening in the ballot box that was too small; in this way, many of the ballots placed inside could be declared to be "mutilated" and thrown out.

Congressman Joseph Rainey, who provided a journalist with other examples of Democratic ballot box "rascality," explained how at one precinct, Democratic poll managers were hired who were not properly qualified for the job. When Republicans demanded to know if this state of affairs would invalidate the ballot count, they were assured it would not, but after Republican candidates carried the district, the total vote was vacated on the grounds that one of the poll managers had not been qualified, in direct violation of state law. Rainey pointed out that few if any such irregularities occurred in districts where the black vote, even honestly tallied, did not threaten a Democratic victory.

With time, the Democrats refined their methods so that disenfranchisement needn't wait until official balloting. Joel W. Bowman, an examiner with the Justice Department who visited South Carolina in fall 1882, was told by Democrats "that it is much easier and looks better to adopt means to prevent the registration of negroes ... than to be compelled to intimidate and sometimes kill them on election day." When registrars went into a predominantly black precinct to register voters, they would form two lines of applicants, one black, one white, and take the whites first. As much time as possible would be consumed registering the whites, and when black registration started, Bowman reported, the process would slow even further, as the supervisors challenged blacks with all sorts of "nonsensical and frivolous questions, with evidently no other object in view than to ... register as few colored voters as possible, till the time expired for registration in that precinct."

Blacks who did not manage to register would be told to try doing so at the county seat, but there, similar delaying tactics would be used, including the demand that the black aspirant present a white person who could vouch for his identity (although such was not required by law). "Thereby the time would be frittered away to the disgust and despair of the large mass of applicants, who would finally be forced to return to their homes without their certificates of registration, and were therefore disenfranchised." When, however, Democrats failed to obtain the required certificate, registrars found ways to add them to the list of eligible voters on election day, a courtesy rarely extended to blacks. These kinds of election law violations became so standard after 1876, with few if any prosecutions of the abuses ever sought, that black people understandably became demoralized about voting.

Such developments did not sit altogether well with Governor Hampton, who gradually came to resent the extremists' efforts to nullify moderate aspects of his agenda, particularly the idea that the black electorate, though humbled under Democratic authority, would nonetheless retain its power of the franchise and would have a voice in state affairs. By 1878 he had come to distrust Martin Gary's wing of the party, though he had joined Gary in achieving redemption and feared his own efforts were being set aside at the peril of the state's future. "If you are to go back upon all pledges that I have made to the people," stated Hampton, "if you are to say that the colored men that have sustained us are no longer to be citizens of South Carolina—if you require me to go up and give my allegiance to a platform of that sort, then, my friends, much as I would do for you and South Carolina, much as I desire to spend or be spent in her service, willing as I am to give even my life for my state, I should have to decline. I would give my life for South Carolina, but I cannot sacrifice my honor, not even for her." That summer he warned explicitly against ballot-box fraud in the upcoming election, pointing out that it would demean all that had been struggled for. "If you once countenance fraud, before many years pass over your heads you will not be worth saving, and will not be worthy of the state you live in. Fraud cannot be successful, because the chosen sons of South Carolina form the returning board now. The men placed there as representing the truth and honor of South Carolina would die before they would perjure
themselves by placing men wrongfully in office." Perhaps Hampton wished for too much; the program of voter bulldozing and Red Shirt intimidation that had helped boost him to high office was not easily abandoned by those who'd mastered it.

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.