Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy

Stephen Kantrowitz

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780807848395, 9780807825303
• eBook ISBN: 9781469625553
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: History

Through the life of Benjamin Ryan Tillman (1847-1918), South Carolina's self-styled agrarian rebel, this book traces the history of white male supremacy and its discontents from the era of plantation slavery to the age of Jim Crow.

As an anti-Reconstruction guerrilla, Democratic activist, South Carolina governor, and U.S. senator, Tillman offered a vision of reform that was proudly white supremacist. In the name of white male militance, productivity, and solidarity, he justified lynching and disfranchised most of his state's black voters. His arguments and accomplishments rested on the premise that only productive and virtuous white men should govern and that federal power could never be trusted. Over the course of his career, Tillman faced down opponents ranging from agrarian radicals to aristocratic conservatives, from woman suffragists to black Republicans. His vision and his voice shaped the understandings of millions and helped create the violent, repressive world of the Jim Crow South.

Friend and foe alike--and generations of historians--interpreted Tillman's physical and rhetorical violence in defense of white supremacy as a matter of racial and gender instinct. This book instead reveals that Tillman's white supremacy was a political program and social argument whose legacies continue to shape American life.

1: Mastery and Its Discontents

Most of the 40,000 people in South Carolina’s Edgefield District had been born into slavery. More than half of the rest, white women and a handful of free black people, could never expect to be citizens. But on the eleventh day of August 1847, Benjamin Ryan Tillman entered his world near its apex. He would never be subject to a master’s surveillance and coercion, nor, after childhood, would he face legal subordination to a male relation. Like his father, for whom he had been named, he would be free and independent—and rich, for the elder Tillman owned four dozen slaves and 2,500 acres of land, more than most of his neighbors. Ben Tillman would inherit not only the formal citizenship that came with white male adulthood but also the social power that came with wealth.¹

But wealth based on slavery came at a price, for neither law nor custom could transform people into things. As workers, kinfolk, believers, and rebels, African Americans pitted their wills against their masters’, defying their legal status as property and making the practice of slaveholding a constant struggle. Wealthy slaveholders, especially planters (those owning twenty or more slaves), sought to give their regime a human face, claiming that paternalist concern bound owner and owned into a virtual family, each household a peaceable kingdom in which subject and sovereign alike had important roles to play. But any flowers of mutuality that did develop had shallow roots, for they rested on the rock of coercive force. Masters lived in fear of a servile revolution that would destroy their entire society, a fear periodically reinforced by news of insurrection plots and murderous assaults. Slaves did more than fear: they suffered physical and emotional brutalities for which there could be no legal redress, although barns burned with some frequency and white families seemed vulnerable to food-borne ailments that household slaves managed to avoid. These reciprocal terrors—not paternalist myths of reciprocal duties—lay at the heart of antebellum Southern life. Very few masters and even fewer slaves ever forgot that the essence of slavery was physical domination or that a bullwhip carried in a velvet bag was a bullwhip just the same.

South Carolina’s planter elite recognized that control of the enslaved majority demanded solidarity among the group that held a collective monopoly on citizenship—the state’s white male household heads. These men ranged from the proprietors of modest family farms to wealthy planters heavily invested in slaves, cotton, and the international export market, all sharing common expectations. In theory, no one, outsider or household member, could challenge a master’s patriarchal authority over his dependents, male or female, slave or free. That mastery of household and dependents—whether or not these included slaves—in turn entitled a man to participate in the shared arenas of political and civic life. Household and collective sovereignty provided the ideal against which most white men measured their world.²

Wherever they turned, planters confronted social realities that contradicted this theory of independent mastery. Inequalities between masters and slaves and between wealthy and less wealthy whites created profound social tensions. Individuals and sometimes groups resisted slaveholders’ authority. Patriarchs who violated community norms in the treatment of their dependents might be disciplined by neighbors concerned with preserving the overall legitimacy of patriarchal authority, and legislatures might formally limit masters’ power over their slaves. Participation in the international economy made cotton producers vulnerable to forces well beyond their control. By the 1840s, many planters had come to believe that these internal stresses were being exacerbated and exploited by an abolitionist conspiracy “to check, and if possible to exterminate the institution of slavery.” Abolitionists, they claimed, sought to close new territories to slavery, distribute insurrectionary materials and ideas throughout the South, and incite the enslaved black workforce to bloody revolution.³

At the moment of Ben Tillman’s birth, the men of his class had already begun mobilizing a white male army against the threats to slavery. This mobilization was in some respects as delicate a task as slave discipline: the defense of slavery had to be framed as a defense of a society based on white patriarchal privilege rather than a defense of a particular property interest. In the short term, this mobilization succeeded. In slave patrols, anti-abolitionist vigilant societies, volunteer militia companies, and finally the Confederate army, white men stood together to defend their households, property, and communities against threats from within and without. Before long, Tillman would be expected to join them—to share in the society’s wealth and government, to share in the solidarity and struggles of master-class life. But during the years of his infancy and childhood, his life depended on his class’s ability to maintain dominance over millions of slaves and solidarity with millions of nonslaveholding white men. These struggles defined Tillman’s early experience. Although he never served in the Confederate army, he became a veteran of the longer, more ambiguous war to make the world safe for mastery.

The Reciprocal Terrors of Slavery

Slaveholders claimed to have paternal feelings for and relations with their slaves, but they also understood that it was crucial that they be feared. In May 1849, the Edgefield Advertiser issued an unusually blunt warning to local slaveholders. Alarmed by the recent murder of county resident Michael Long by one of his slaves, the newspaper editor insisted that “rigid discipline” was the only “wise policy and real justice.” Those who indulged their slaves, “yielding to the tender and humane emotions of their hearts,” violated the most basic precept of mastery: black slaves—a “race of beings naturally ungrateful and treacherous”—could only “be governed by motives of fear.” The most grievous offense against good discipline, the editor declared, was the practice of allowing slaves to move about freely at night, for this enabled them to trade in stolen property with “wicked white men.” Slaves who fell into this practice and under these influences learned to “despise their Master’s authority.” Before long, “for the smallest offence,” these corrupted servants would “inhumanely murder him who was their friend and protector.” In short, failure to maintain “uniform, vigilant, and rigid control” over their slaves could cost slaveholders their lives.⁴

As Alexis de Tocqueville had noted in Democracy in America, although the fear of slave insurrection was “a nightmare constantly haunting the American imagination,” white Southerners generally greeted the topic with “frightening . . . silence.” But the Advertiser’s warning, remarkable only for its lack of euphemism, reflected no merely local, temporary, or peculiar sentiment. Slaves had risen in revolt throughout South Carolina’s colonial history. During the War of Independence, many had fought with the British against their revolutionary masters. Countless plots and panics over the next decades reached a climax in 1822, when Denmark Vesey’s conspiracy terrified white Charleston. Ben Tillman’s father had already reached adulthood when Charleston’s authorities hung dozens of slaves implicated in Vesey’s abortive rebellion. Events elsewhere, notably Nat Turner’s bloody march through Virginia in 1831, made plain the costs of insufficient vigilance. The Advertiser’s warning only reminded slaveholders of familiar but unpleasant facts: the people they owned might kill them in pursuit of vengeance or freedom. As the editor pointed out, Michael Long’s murder—for which two slaves were finally hung and a dozen others whipped—was “only one of several similar instances in our District within the last two years.”⁵

Deterrence, not murder, was the slaveholders’ goal, and domination relied on the credibility of each planter’s perceived capacity for violence. The hanging of a slave for murdering his or her master represented a failure—for the master, certainly, but for slaveholding society as well. Slaveholders meted out brutal lashings in part to quash real or perceived threats but also to make gruesome examples of the disobedient. Masters’ responses to individual acts of disobedience served as a crucial firebreak, for without credible authority on each plantation, the regime would dissolve into economic chaos and perhaps into violence.

As the slaveholders’ foremost historian has pointed out, these men knew that resorting to violence in every instance would mean living in a state of war. But just beneath the surface of the late antebellum era’s long truce bubbled the knowledge that punishment and retaliation might be only a heartbeat away. The wealthy white men of the Beech Island Farmers’ Club, an agricultural society including many Edgefield planters, understood this dynamic. Four days before Ben Tillman’s birth, they met to discuss discipline. When slaves became “impatient, unwilling, and rebellious,” one declared, masters could not afford to hesitate or negotiate. “It is necessary to whip if your rules are disobeyed,” declared another; “enforce your authority, whip if it is necessary to whip, but do not threaten.” “[I]nstead of perpetual scolding, and threatening,” agreed a third, “use the rod.” The preservation of a labor system and a way of life demanded vigilance. “[I]t depends entirely on the management of our slaves,” one planter warned, “whether this institution shall continue to exist.”⁶

Such catastrophes were more likely to affect individual masters than to affect their society as a whole, for slaves as well as masters knew that insurrection plots ended in failure and death. Split up into relatively small groups on separate plantations, living under the watchful eyes of masters, patrollers, and potentially indiscreet fellow bondspeople, black Southerners focused on carving out less dangerous spaces of cultural and social autonomy than those envisioned by Vesey. But slaves never ceased testing the limits of masters’ control. Their resistance frequently took place silently, anonymously, and indirectly. They worked more slowly than they could; they “lay out” in the woods to avoid punishment; they stole from the master’s stores; and they traded with free people.

Troubled by these signs of individual and collective will, slaveholders sought explanations. Perhaps, they argued, such behavior was the result of racial incapacity: if black people “naturally” malingered and stole, slaveholders reasoned, then no individual master could be blamed if his slaves were less than perfectly reliable. In private correspondence, local agricultural society debates, and regional journals such as DeBow’s Review, they made an art (and sometimes a science) of parsing the moral and intellectual shortcomings of “the Negro.” In addition to arguing that status and behavior followed race, they suggested that inequality was a natural and beneficent aspect of human society. Savannah River planter James Henry Hammond, convener of the Beech Island planters (and later governor and U.S. senator), argued in widely published anti-abolitionist letters and speeches that blacks formed a natural “mudsill” class, freeing white people from society’s hardest and dirtiest work. In the North, heartless employers made wage-slaves of white men, and mobs roamed the cities. Racial slavery, by contrast, had made the South a uniquely fortunate and harmonious society.⁷

Hammond’s argument for slavery as a just and organic social order appealed to his fellow planters. Masters hoped that if they articulated the rules clearly enough and enforced them reliably, slaves would accept the legitimacy of their masters’ authority. As one planter acknowledged, “[S]o long as the slave thinks he is unjustly held in bondage, just so long will he be impatient, unwilling and rebellious.” “You must convince them you are not a tyrant but act on the principle of justice,” another explained. The plantation, in other words, must become a just and well-ordered world of familial devotion. Nothing captured this ideal more precisely than the slaveowners’ language of paternalism. Slaves, essentially childlike, incapable of higher reasoning, and only haltingly responsive to moral tutelage, required the combination of kindness and discipline that only a father could provide. Since no slave parent’s authority had any legal standing—slaves’ children literally belonged to someone else—paternal responsibility fell to the slaveholder. Like other children, slaves might occasionally require physical correction. A slaveholder representing himself in this way could refer, without apparent irony, to his “family, white and black.” He might frame a slave’s act of malingering, theft, or insolence as that of a wayward child, not that of a potential revolutionary.⁸

But this paternalism characterized planters’ fantasies far better than it did their society, for forbearance and benevolence could exist only in the space created by terror. At the core of paternalism, in other words, lay brutal coercion. Slaves might be part of a figurative “family,” but in fact masters frequently threatened slaves with sale away from their actual families as a way of coercing obedience, a practice that exposed the hollowness of paternalist pretensions. Slaves might be described as erring children in need of correction, but few children of the master class were subjected to the kinds of beatings administered to human property on Southern plantations. An individual master and slave might even develop bonds of real affection and shared experience, but a master’s death, illness, debt, or whim could in an instant upset what had appeared to be (and even felt like) a system of reciprocal obligations. A master who forbore, who acted with restraint in every extremity, could hardly expect to turn a profit or even to survive. He needed to be able, in the space of a heartbeat, to exchange the paternalist’s face for one of savage, violent determination. Planters who surrendered wholly to “tender and humane” feelings, the Edgefield Advertiser scoffed, sacrificed the patriarchal authority they most needed, and this left them dangerously vulnerable to the black and white men who would otherwise remain their subordinates. Not long after Ben Tillman’s second birthday, a local white man was killed while trying to subdue a shotgun-wielding slave; the killer, the Advertiser claimed, “frankly admits that his former master was a kind and indulgent man.” Whatever the slave had actually said, however his master had actually behaved, it was impossible to miss the intended point: unchecked leniency had wrought deadly mischief.⁹

For this racial system of labor control to function, slaves had to understand that they had a simple choice: obedience or retribution. The slave who approached a master deferentially to seek a favor might or might not gain it. But the slave who seriously overstepped the bounds of appropriate submission would face no such uncertainty. On an isolated plantation on a hot July afternoon, a master facing a recalcitrant or rebellious slave had only one aim: to make an example of that person by bringing him or her brutally to heel. The slaveholders never forgot for more than passing moments that their dominance—“legitimate” or not—above all required fear.

King Cotton and His Subjects

Participation in the international cotton economy made the Tillmans rich, but it also enmeshed them in financial networks that, like slavery, they could not fully control. Cotton might have been “King,” as Hammond insisted on the floor of the U.S. Senate, but not in precisely the way that he meant. Having staked their livelihoods on cotton, planters became less the masters of the staple crop than its subjects. No theory or exhortation could alter large cotton producers’ profound dependence (there was no other word for it) on outside capital to produce and market their crop. Fluctuations in the international market created uncertainty even among the very wealthy. At Ben Tillman’s birth, South Carolina was in the throes of a long and painful economic depression. The cotton boom of the early nineteenth century had tied the state and its cotton-producing households to the Atlantic economy. When the price of cotton sank to a near-catastrophic low in the late 1830s, it pulled those households down with it.¹⁰

The depression ruined many fortunes, and it might easily have brought down the Tillmans. The elder Benjamin Tillman died young in 1849, and with cotton prices low and the plantation’s longtime manager suddenly absent, the household could easily have fallen from its lofty economic position. But cotton prices rebounded in the 1850s, and families who had retained the land and slaves to capitalize on the recovery could prosper. Sophia Tillman and her older children not only had kept the productive capital the patriarch had left them but had improved on it. During the booming 1850s, the household’s wealth in land and slaves nearly doubled. When Tillman was ten, the fa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Introduction: Ben Tillman, Agrarian Rebel
• 1: Mastery and Its Discontents
• 2: Planters and the “Gentleman from Africa”
• 3: The Shotgun Wedding of White Supremacy and Reform
• 4: Farmers, Dudes, White Negroes, and the Sun-Browned Goddess
• 5: The Mob and the State
• 6: Every White Man Who Is Worthy of a Vote
• 7: The Uses of a Pitchfork
• 8: Demagogues and Disordered Households
• Epilogue: The Reconstruction of American Democracy
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index