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| Wade Hampton is honoured with a large statue at the SC capital and is known as ‘The Saviour of South Carolina’ for leading the Revolution of 1876 |
Journalist Alfred B Williams describes the horrors of the Reconstruction era United States military occupation of the Palmetto State in his book Hampton and his Red Shirts: South Carolina’s Deliverance in 1876 as ‘nearly ten years of endurance of wrongs, miseries, humiliations and dangers ever increasing despite patient efforts to secure alleviation by submission, persuasion and pleas for peace.’
The Republican Party, supported primarily by the votes of Union soldiers and freed slaves, ruled the State. Massachusetts native Daniel Henry Chamberlain was made the Governor of the State.
An estimated forty thousand White men of the State, which in general included many of the best and brightest citizens, had been killed in the recent war waged by the United States against the Southern States. Many of the White citizens had been disenfranchised for their service to their State and the South. In their place the franchise was extended to illiterate former slaves who were easily manipulated by anti-Southern organisations such as the Union League. Tyranny, lawlessness and corruption ran rampant. So bad were things that it appeared South Carolina and parts of the Lower South beyond might go the way of Haiti, where civilisation was stamped out (and has never recovered) by a slave uprising which resulted in White genocide.
Desperate to restore order and Southern control of the State, the Democrats (mostly White Southerners, although some Blacks also actively supported the party) ended up rallying behind former planter and Confederate cavalry general Wade Hampton. In support of Hampton and the Southern Democrats, the Red Shirts appeared. They were a paramilitary organisation, often mounted, distinguished by the red shirts that they donned. They were organised into local ‘hunting’ or ‘fishing’ clubs, as the existence of any Southern military organisation was illegal. It was this force that actively fought the Black militias and Union League forces around the State.
The campaign for the governorship and political control of the State that year often involved actually fighting and bloodshed. The White Southern minority in the State ultimately prevailed in what amounted to a revolution and the occupational Reconstruction regime was withdrawn. Williams describes on pages 289-290 of his book an incident which occurred on 17 October 1876 in which the Red Shirts marshaled their forces in the town of Aiken and rallied the local Southern people there against the occupation. As one will note from the passage, the Red Shirts were a disciplined force, not a mob. And theirs was a struggle of liberation. Williams writes:
The Republicans undertook to have a meeting at Aiken the seventeenth, but not more than two hundred to three hundred persons were present, all colored, although it was announced that [Massachusetts native and Reconstruction Governor of South Carolina [Daniel Henry] Chamberlain was to speak.
Undismayed by arrests and warrants and proclamations, more than a thousand mounted Red Shirts paraded, but acting under orders, refrained from approaching the Republican meeting or doing anything more than ride about the streets and maintain a steady, ceaseless sound of cheering for [Wade] Hampton which could be heard a mile. The prisoners at Lyceum Hall were given special attention and answered heartily the greetings and encouraging yells of their friends gathered outside.Also see: Reconstruction tyranny in South Carolina, ‘The Prostrate State’ under Union occupation, South Carolina prior to the Revolution of 1876, Nominating Wade Hampton & closing ranks, Wade Hampton & Reconstruction, The Battle of Hamburg and Wade Hampton & the natural elites of traditional society
