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Wade Hampton: man of contrasts
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The American Civil War brought many compelling personalities into public view, and one of the more complex personalities was Lieutenant General Wade Hampton III. His life reads like one long-running contradiction. An exceptional cavalry commander on the tactical and organizational level, Hampton had nor prior military experious (though military exploits did run in the family). An opponent of secession prior to the outbreak of war, Hampton at the end of the war was one of the last holdouts wanting to continue fighting. After the war Hampton was a harsh opponent of Reconstruction, but was also perhaps the only major southern Democrat to woo black voters.
Wade Hampton was born on March 28, 1818 in Charleston, South Carolina. Hampton's father had served as an aide to Andrew Jackson during the War of 1812. His grandfather had been a cavalry officer during the American Revolution. The Hampton family was well-connected and well off, having had two family members serve in Congress prior to the Civil War and being one of the wealthiest familes in the south.
Hampton himself entered South Carolina state politics in the early 1850's by getting elected to the state legislature, and he took control of the family's vast plantation holdings in South Carolina and Mississippi in 1858, after the death of his father. Unfortunately, it was also at about this time that a combination of international financial panic, poor weather conditions in the southeast, and family overextension of debt (to purchase the properties in Mississippi) worked to put the family finances in deep distress.
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As if that wasn't bad enough, in late 1860 Hampton's home state of South Carolina decided to secede from the Union. Though a slave-owner, in fact probably the leading slave-owner in the hotbed state of South Carolina, Hampton had never been one of the "Fire-Eaters". He had fought efforts in the state legislature to ignore federal law and reopen the trans-Atlantic slave trade. His father and grandfather had fought for the United States, and his father had opposed secessionist movements in the legislature in the 1830's and in 1852. Until recently the family had prospered within the Union, and financially secession probably could not have come at a worse time.
Once the die was cast though, Hampton became an ardent backer of his state. He donated the family's entire cotton crop for 1861 to the Confederate government, and organized his own legion of infantry, cavalry and artillery, paid for in large part through his own funds. (Organizationally, legions were never effectively used during the Civil War. Hampton's Legion was eventually disbanded and he became strictly a cavalry commander.) Hampton himself had no prior military experience, but he had worked with horses all his life and quickly became one of the more effective cavalry commanders in the Eastern theater. After the death of Jeb Stuart in 1864, Hampton was promoted to Lieutenant General and placed in charge of the cavalry corps in the Army of Northern Virginia.
Unfortunately for Hampton and the Confederate Army and government, by the fall of 1864 the war had turned decidedly in favor of the Union. A war of attrition in the Virginia theatre and a long string of defeats elsewhere had left the Confederacy with few options better than staying behind breastworks in Petersburg, Virginia, and harrassing (and very little more than that once Atlanta fell) William Tecumseh Sherman's army as it marched through Georgia and up toward the Carolinas. Wade Hampton was shifted to the Carolinas where he might be more useful helping Confederate General Joseph Johnston find a way to stop Sherman.
Hampton had some success in harrassing and disrupting some of the units of Sherman's army while they engaged in foraging expeditions, and at one point nearly captured the Union cavalry commander Judson Kilpatrick. But after Johnston's defeat at Bentonville and Lee's surrender at Appomattox, the end was evident. Joe Johnston contacted Sherman to set up surrender negotiations.
By this point most Confederate military commanders recognized the necessity of ending the fighting, but there were a few exceptions. Wade Hampton was more exceptional than most. The war had helped to ruin the family finances, his childhood home in South Carolina had been destroyed by Sherman's troops, and back in the fall Wade's son Preston had literally died in his arms after being shot during the fighting around Petersburg. Hampton was bitter, and not looking forward to surrendering to men he despised.
There are several anecdotal stories about Hampton's personal behavior at Bennett Place in Durham. According to some he carried a hickory switch instead of a sword to show how little respect he had for Sherman and Kilpatrick. Supposedly he faked having trouble controlling his horse, so that he would not have to shake Sherman's hand. And during the negotiations Hampton and Kilpatrick nearly got into a fist fight.
When it became obvious that the negotiations would end in a surrender, Hampton absented himself in order to claim he was not covered by it, and headed south to try and link up with Jefferson Davis in Charlotte. When he arrived, Hampton learned that Davis had continued south into South Carolina, so he followed suit, stopping off to spend the night with his wife Mary in Yorkville. At this point Hampton's military career ended, because Mary convinced him (with a little assistance from fellow cavalry commander Joe Wheeler) that his family obligations now outweighed his military ones.
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During Reconstruction Hampton became involved in politics once again. Though an opponent of Reconstruction, he refused to let his own name be placed in nomination for governor in 1865, for fear that his election might delay South Carolina's reentry into the Union. It is unclear to what extent Hampton knew about the activities of the early Ku Klux Klan to terrorize southern blacks out of the political process. Given that he openly campaigned for black support in the 1876 election, Hampton probably truly believed that the Klan reports were exaggerated (as he stated in Congressional testimony), refusing to believe that patriotic South Carolinians could engage in murder and terrorism.
Hampton had never believed in racial equality (or for that matter, class equality), but unlike many southern populists of the late nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth centuries he personally never exhibited any bitterness toward African-Americans. His followers and allies are another matter. When Hampton was elected governor in 1876, in part due to a small but significant portion of the black vote and with promises of
fairness to the black citizens of South Carolina, his allies were simultaneously using violence and
intimidation to diminish black voter turnout. (The most notorious incident was the "Hamburg massacre", where six members of a local militia were executed after they surrendered to white ruffians.)
Newly elected Governor Hampton was praised as the "savior" of South Carolina for bringing an end to
Reconstruction, but over the years he fell out of favor with his allies because he refused to go back on
promises made to the black community. Serving two terms in the Senate after his governorship, Hampton was driven out of politics in the early 1890's by followers of "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman, the future governor and senator who had been a leading force in the waves of anti-black terror in the 1870's (and participant in the Hamburg Massacre).
In the last decade of his last life Hampton became a firm proponent of the "Lost Cause" ideology, which attempted to cover up the role of slavery in bringing on the war (and for decades succeeded in doing so). When he died in 1902, Hampton was an icon for Confederate veterans throughout the south.
"The Bloody Shirt: Terror After the Civil War", by Stephen Budiansky, Penguin Group, 2008.
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