Remembering The Successful Right-Wing Insurrection Of 1876
Donald Trump follows in the same path as South Carolina Gov. Wade Hampton
A fair share of fairy tales will circulate today about January 6, 2021, and how Donald Trump’s mob attacked the Capitol in an “unprecedented” assault on democracy. However, there is significant historical precedent for the events of January 6. The less-than United States has always had a tenuous relationship with freedom and democracy.
One past insurrection that was quite successful occurred in my home state of South Carolina. After the Civil War, former Confederate general and enslaver Wade Hampton actively opposed Reconstruction and any participation in politics from newly freed Black people. He laid low for the next decade, biding his time, but after the US government started enforcing anti-Klan legislation in 1870 and 1871, he raised money for their legal defense funds. Many white Southerners had formed “rifle clubs” (wink, wink) after the Civil War that swiftly grew to as many as 20,000 members. Political campaigns became increasingly violent.
Hampton led the Redeemers, a political coalition of Southern conservatives who sought to reclaim political power and enforce white supremacy. They undermined and suppressed the liberal vote through violence and threats of violence. By 1876, just six years after Black men gained the right to vote, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida were the only Southern states left “unredeemed” (i.e. restored to white rule). Rutherford B. Hayes, a Union general and one-time abolitionist, agreed to withdraw federal troops and abandon Black Southerners in exchange for the presidency. I presume the No Labels organization approves of Hayes’ “bipartisanship.”
Prominent supporters of Wade Hampton’s gubernatorial campaign were the Red Shirts, a white supremacist terror group considered the paramilitary arm of the white conservative South. Their name was a mocking reference to the so-called “bloody shirt” speech from Sen. Oliver P. Morton, a close ally of Abraham Lincoln’s, denouncing violence inflicted on Northern soldiers and so-called “carpet baggers.” The speech was intended to appeal to their humanity, but instead racist thugs started proudly wearing red shirts as a symbol of defiance and resistance for white conservatives in South Carolina (who then identified themselves with the Democratic Party). They’ve always loved owning the libs. Nice white ladies sewed red flannel shirts and other red garments. They even wore red ribbons in their hair or around their waists. Young men who were too young to fight in the Civil War wore red shirts to show that the Confederacy still endured.
Red Shirts actively intimidated Black voters and any white voters who weren’t on the right side politically. They were especially active in the states where Black people were the majority. They crashed political meetings, disrupted organizing efforts, and terrorized Black voters to keep them from the ballot box. Black citizens had the franchise for barely a decade but stopped voting from fear, and others were coerced into voting for white conservative politicians (then Democrats) under pressure.
In South Carolina counties not far from where I grew up, Black men who dared vote were driven from their homes and whipped, and many Black political leaders were murdered. It’s important to note that in 1870, Black people made up at least 58.6 percent of South Carolina’s population. My home could’ve become Wakanda, but true democracy is often helpless against violent fascism, as I fear we might soon learn again.
During the 1876 elections, white conservatives in the state voted "early and often,” while the Black vote was violently suppressed. Wade Hampton’s path to the governor’s mansion was especially bloody. Nicholas Lehman, in his book Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War, estimated that 150 Black South Carolinians were murdered during Hampton’s campaign.
Hampton’s thugs didn’t just suppress the Black vote, they artificially inflated the white vote in Laurens and Edgefield counties, where the vote counts comically exceeded the total population. Both Hampton and incumbent governor Daniel Henry Chamberlain claimed victory in the election, and after six months — during which Hampton negotiated behind the scenes for the removal of federal troops — the South Carolina Supreme Court declared Hampton the winner. This made him the first former Confederate to regain power in the state since the Civil War.
Chamberlain had supported civil rights. Hampton obviously did not, and Jim Crow soon jumped all over the backs of the “free” Black population. White conservatives called Hampton the “Savior of South Carolina” who’d made their state great again.
Hampton was re-elected in 1878 with Red Shirt support but less violence than last time. Black people had learned a bitter lesson. Two days after the election, Hampton was thrown from a mule while deer hunting and broke his right leg, which was later amputated due to complications. That one-legged bastard still inflicted hell on Black people — not that history accounts for this. The South Carolina state encyclopedia’s entry on Wade Hampton states that his “administration was characterized by honesty, fiscal conservatism, and attempts at cooperation across racial and party lines.” Meanwhile, South Carolina’s “Black codes” required Black “servants” to work from dawn to dusk while maintaining round-the-clock smiles. Black people were forbidden from taking any job other than laborer unless able to pay a $100 fee (almost $2,000 in today’s money).
Now, Black people in Greenville, South Carolina, drive on Wade Hampton Boulevard and their kids attend Wade Hampton High School. Although far too many Americans are heavily invested in treating Trump and MAGA as historical outliers, they unfortunately are not, and without decisive action, Donald Trump might enjoy a similar fate as Wade Hampton.
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I grew up in Wilmington NC, the site of an actual violent coup. Not that we knew much about it until Philip Gerard's Cape Fear Rising was published. Of course, Wilmington's Black community remembered.
I went to school with a kid named Wade Hampton. Another with the middle name Pickett (direct descendant). And plenty of others named for the coup leaders, like Hugh Macrae.
The South is absolutely full of people who fondly memorialize the Civil War and other atrocities. Some of these people are vicious racists. Some are passively racist and classiest. Some are polite racists. Some, like me, were unconsciously racist. It's easy to be that way when you grow up in a place like Wilmington. I've done a lot of unlearning and learning since leaving there.
I know it's impractical to expect ordinary citizens to be steeped in their country's history, but they should have at least a passing acquaintance with the broad themes of history.
The right understands this fundamental point well enough to have mounted a ferocious attack on schools, on history, on knowledge itself.
The Southern project of an origin myth, the frenzied revisionism of the Civil War (that revisionism pervades the current crisis) began, of course, before the conflict was even over, and has only escalated over generations, boosted by Hollywood and by books like the infamous Gone With The Wind and oozing into the information mainstream during the Reagan years when the Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch, a malignant white supremacist, was imported to create a beguiling alternative news narrative.
In contemporary terms the attack on knowledge gets a massive boost from Jerry Falwell Senior's seg academy movement, launched in the wake of Brown v Board of Education in 1954.
It escalates throughout the McCarthyite 1950s into a generalized attack on "liberal" books, "liberal" professors, "liberal" versions of history, all deemed to be socialistic, communistic, unAmerican, and all around mad, bad, and dangerous to know.
It goes ballistic in the 1980s with the attack on settled science, especially evolution (although this is an enduring theme that goes back to the 1920s).
It has spiraled out of control in the Donald era with attacks on teachers, librarians, books, ideas, the content of textbooks: there has been a sustained, coordinated legislative assault on reality itself, including the complex reality of the nation's past: an effort that by now includes Congressional assaults on educators and the very concept of education at all levels, including the university level.
To fill the void where knowledge once reposed, the right--through useful vectors like Fox, Twitter, and Rumble---pours out a steady stream of invented histories, all of which involve variations on a theme of Glorious Whiteness oppressed by diversity, equity, and inclusion, to be unchained in our time by the Great Leader Trump. White folks are given to believe they'll be free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, etc.: a perverse notion of white martyrdom fueled by sheer ignorance and incendiary and cruel alternative histories.
It's so sad and so wrong you cannot help pitying the poor rubes with their empty lives and their sense of despair, standing around the tent buying what the Republican hucksters are selling, even as you get ready to engage in what is potentially a lethally ugly struggle with them. Ordinary people are pieces on a game board. You cannot win the struggle by hating them or expressing contempt for their malice or ignorance. You have to keep focused on the wealthy, powerful, cynical men who move us all around for their own profit and amusement and who have, over centuries, found race the most useful motivator of them all.