Few people today can imagine the degree to which South Carolina suffered under direct US military occupation following the Union’s conquest of the State in 1865. Alfred B Williams’ book Hampton and His Red Shirts: South Carolina’s Deliverance tells the story in frank terms which could surely never be published by any ‘respectable’ firm today because of his honesty and politically-incorrect language. The White citizens of the State, prior to the war some of the wealthiest and most educated people in the entire world, were largely disenfranchised and the government was handed over to illiterate former slaves and hostile Yankees who didn’t even live in South Carolina. Punitive measures were enacted against South Carolinians. Waste and corruption were the norm. One party rule prevailed. Violence against Whites, especially women, was wide-spread. Local Southern militias sprung up to defend farms and communities. On the whole, the situation was rather similar to what is going on today in South Africa under ANC rule. South Carolinians worried that their State would go the way of Haiti. Indeed, civilisation was on the verge of being utterly stamped out in the Palmetto State when former Confederate General Wade Hampton and his Red Shirt army took back control of the State and re-instituted Southern order. The following excerpt comes from page 23 of Williams’ book:

The white people of the “prostrate state” were given awful insight of what impended over them when the constitutional convention of 1868, called by unanimous negro vote, met in Charleston. The membership was seventy-three colored, fifty-one white, and of the white men twenty-three were actual residents of the state. Tim Hurley, a wandering jockey from Northern race tracks, was chosen to call the assemblage to order. Of the twenty-three resident White men one had been in jail at the close of the Civil War [sic], charged with hiring other to commit assassination, and another was a notorious associate of mulatto prostitutes. Beverly Nash, black, was one of the most prominent figures, a former porter in a Columbia hotel. Of the seventy-three colored members but thirteen paid any taxes at all. The convention levied for its expenses a tax of more than two and a quarter million dollars. This one item was nearly six times as much as the entire state tax of 1860, when South Carolina was one of the wealthy commonwealths. The tax valuation of 1868 was $184,000,000, less than half that of 1860. This, however, was but a taste. The convention wound up its proceedings by transforming itself into the Republican state convention and nominating a full ticket for the party. R. K. Scott, of Ohio, assistant commissioner of the Freedman’s Bureau, was named for governor. Other nominees included two white men from Massachusetts, D. H. Chamberlain for attorney general one of them, one from New York, one colored man and Franklin J. Moses, after famed as the “robber governor.”

Also see: Wade Hampton & Reconstruction, ‘The Prostrate State’ under Union occupation and Wade Hampton & the Red Shirts

Tags: civil war, corruption, reconstruction government, south carolina, tyranny, union

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