In the late 1800s, Ben Tillman appealed to the SC voters who believed what?

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Benjamin Ryan Tillman

Benjamin Ryan Tillman Jr. (Aug. 11, 1847-July three, 1918), governor of S Carolina and U.S. senator, was born on August 11, 1847, at Chester, his family unit'due south plantation in Edgefield District, South Carolina, the youngest kid of Sophia Hancock and Benjamin Ryan Tillman, planters and innkeepers. His parents had 11 children — seven sons and four daughters.

Their children were as follows:

Thomas Frederick Tillman, (d. August twenty, 1847), killed in the Mexican-American War;
George Dionysius Tillman (1826-1901), married Margaret Jones;
Martha Annsybil Tillman (1828-1886);
Harriet Susan Tillman (1831-1832);
John Miller Tillman (1833-1860), killed in a feud;
Oliver Hancock Tillman (1835-1860), killed in domestic dispute;
Anna Sophia Tillman Swearingen (1837-1909);
Frances Tillman Simpson (1840-1923);
James Adams Tillman (1842-1866), wounded at battle of Chickamauga;
Henry Cumming Tillman (1844-1859), who died of typhoid; and
Benjamin Ryan Tillman (1847-1918).

The Tillman family had resided in South Carolina since earlier the American Revolution. When "Ben" was 2 years old, his father died of typhoid fever, and his mother took over the management of the plantation and inn. Tillman'south mother owned 86 slaves in 1860; 30 of those slaves were African-built-in and had been smuggled into the interior in 1858 from the ship Wanderer.[1]

Family

The Tillman family's history reflected the South's sometimes tearing culture. For instance, Tillman'south father killed a human, his brother John Tillman died while fighting in a feud in 1860 and his brother Oliver Tillman was killed before long after that in a domestic dispute. Some other brother, George Tillman, dueled regularly, accidentally killing an innocent bystander in a gambling dispute in 1856.

Two other brothers also died young: Thomas Tillman was killed in the Mexican-American War and Henry Tillmann died of typhoid fever at age fifteen.

Pedagogy

The young Ben helped his female parent run the inn and manage the family's plantation and her slaves. He was a bookish kid, reading eagerly and widely at a local private school. In 1861, he enrolled in Bethany Academy in the western office of Edgefield, attention until early June 1864, when, just shy of 17 years of age, he withdrew from the academy to enlist in the Confederate army. However, a cranial tumor incapacitated him for two years. Tillman recovered, but he lost his left eye.

Matrimony

In 1865, while convalescing in Elbert Canton, Ga., Tillman met Sallie Starke, a refugee whose family had fled from Fairfield District, Due south Carolina, and they wednesday in 1868. In 1869, the couple settled on 430 acres of Tillman family land given to them by Tillman'southward mother. They had seven children:

Adeline (January 21, 1876-July 15, 1896);
Benjamin Ryan Three (March 13, 1878-1950), who married Lucy Frances Dugas;
Henry Cummings, (b. Baronial fourteen, 1884), married Mary Fox, 1906;
Margaret Malona, (1886), who married Charles Sumner Moore, 1911;
Sophia Oliver, (b. November 26, 1888), who married Henry W. Hughes, 1911;
Samuel Starke, (1892-1894); and
Sallie Mae, (b. Baronial 26, 1894) who married John Shuler, 1916.

Farming and Agronomical Activities 1869-1881

Tillman'southward enthusiasm for experimentation with new crops and his ambitious acquisition of property allowed him to build a successful agronomical business in an era in which virtually Southern farmers were struggling. In 1878 he caused 170 acres of country from his female parent, and, presently thereafter, he purchased an boosted 650 acres at Xc Six, South Carolina, virtually 30 miles north of his other Edgefield country.

Tillman would later write,

the land which I was cultivating was hilly and easily washed, and it became very evident to me that our whole scheme of Agriculture was wrong. The lack of rotation and the abiding plowing of the soil leaving it blank to the winter rains, could but result in final and complete impoverishment on hilly land, with resulting pauperism to the state owners.[2]

By the early 1880s, Tillman endemic more than a yard acres of land, and, with the help of his freedman tenant laborers, he operated over 30 plows. Joe Gibson and his wife Kitty were former slaves who later worked for Tillman every bit tenant farmers. Tillman said of Gibson that, "A more loyal friend no human ever had. Every kid that I have would share his concluding chaff with that negro tomorrow ... I exercise non know whether I belong to Joe or Joe belongs to me ... nosotros have agreed to live together until one or both of us die, and when I go away, if I go first, I know he will shed every bit sincere tears as everyone. I would die to protect him from injustice and wrong"[iii] While Tillman would go well known for his racist views, his human relationship with Gibson offers a stark dissimilarity to his incendiary rhetoric confronting African-Americans.

Subsequently as a U.South. senator, when he was discussing the systematic removal of African-Americans from politics with the establishment of educational qualifications in 1895, Tillman would declare in 1900 that now an African-American

is not meddling with politics, for he found that the more he meddled with them the worse off he got. As to his "rights"—I will not discuss them now. We of the South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men, and we never will. We take never believed him to be equal to the white man, and we volition not submit to his gratifying his animalism on our wives and daughters without lynching him. I would to God the last one of them was in Africa and that none of them had ever been brought to our shores. But I will not pursue the subject further.[4]

Reconstruction and Plans for Redemption from Republican Carpetbag and Scalawag Rule

Like many South Carolinians, Tillman opposed the Republican Reconstruction government of the Palmetto Land. He supported 2 Edgefield lawyers and ex-Confederate generals, Martin W. Gary and Matthew C. Butler, in their plan to "redeem" the state from the Republican Political party, which was overwhelmingly supported by African-Americans. Tillman and his allies viewed the Republican Political party equally an musical instrument of northerners who had moved to the South who were referred to as "carpetbaggers," and southern whites, derogatively called "scalawags." Devised past Gary, the Edgefield Plan, as the policy became known, called for the organization of cloak-and-dagger extralegal military societies that would force the defeat of the majority African-American South Carolinians at the ballot box through the employ of violence, intimidation and fraud. The redemption was to remove non only freedmen, but too the stereotypical carpetbaggers and scalawags and fellow Republicans.

In 1871, Congress passed civil rights legislation sometimes chosen the "Ku Klux" laws, designed to stamp out terrorist racial violence in big sections of the Southward, including South Carolina. In response, many whites organized themselves into paramilitary organizations called "rifle clubs." Tillman was a fellow member of ane of these, the Sweetwater Saber Club, and thereby participated in a small state of war with the African-American state militia.

During the 1876 gubernatorial entrada, these rifle clubs, frequently calling themselves Red Shirts, were determined to use violence, intimidation or fraud to ensure the victory of ex-Confederate general Wade Hampton and the Democrats. This strategy was often called the Edgefield Plan and attributed to Gary.

Throughout the summer and fall of 1876, the Cherry-red Shirts harassed and assaulted black voters and murdered African-American politicians. Tillman'southward prominent role in the Hamburg and Ellenton massacres that twelvemonth secured his prominence amongst Edgefield Commune'south political aristocracy. For instance, he played a leading office in the Hamburg Massacre on July 8, 1876, resulting in the death of 1 white man, Thomas McKie Meriwether; and six freedmen, James Cook, Allan Attaway, David Rivers, Hampton Stephens, Albert Myniart and Moses Parks.

Reaction to Gov. Wade Hampton and "Bourbon" aristocracy

By the early 1880s, Tillman had get increasingly dissatisfied with the white political leaders he had helped install in office. He believed that former Confederate General Wade Hampton and other conservative politicians formed an aristocratic clique that denied his friend, Martin W. Gary, state office. During the antebellum period, the Hamptons, for example, had been planter and political elite in South Carolina. It is interesting to annotation that Tillman'southward older brother, Harvard-educated Confederate veteran George D. Tillman, was a member of the U.South. Firm of Representatives and ran twice against U.South. Representative Robert Smalls, who had escaped from slavery during the Ceremonious War and became a federal hero as captain of the steamship, The Planter.[seven]

Bold the Gary drapery and aggressive political fashion, Tillman accused this clique of ignoring the interests of white farmers and of running the country in the manner of the antebellum planters. Afterward making small contributions to state politics in 1880 and 1882, Tillman forced his way into statewide prominence through a stirring and vitriolic spoken language before the State Grange and State Agricultural and Mechanical Guild on August 6, 1885. He blamed the current state government for the poor economical fortunes of South Carolina's farmers, calling for reform in the state's agricultural educational organisation.

Farmers' Association

In 1886, Tillman followed this speech with the formation of the Farmers Association. Through this arrangement, a letter of the alphabet-writing entrada to country newspapers and statewide stump-speaking tours, Tillman continued to harass the "Bourbon" Democratic state government, criticizing it for graft, abuse and mismanagement of the agricultural department at South Carolina College in Columbia. He disparaged the need for the land'southward military academy, the Citadel, and called for the establishment of an agricultural higher. His spirited deprecation of Charleston and the Lowcountry and of Columbia politicians won him the admiration of the state's white Upcountry farmers and white mill workers, and his shrewd organizational management helped him capture the governorship in 1890. Tillman'south severe but successful oratory, generally filled with insinuation and profanity, along with his shrewd organizational skills immune him to go the state'due south consummate political boss for more than 15 years.

Governor of South Carolina – 1890-1894

Equally governor, he ousted the Bourbon Democrats, installing his own lieutenants in their places, and and then removed these appointees if they lost his favor. In add-on, he sought to ensure white Autonomous control of the state through legislative reapportionment, gerrymandering and other disfranchisement mechanisms. For example, in his second term every bit governor, Tillman helped cancel elected local governments and provided for county officials to exist appointed by the governor upon recommendation of the land senator and representatives. This law finer eliminated blacks as local officials, even where African-Americans were the overwhelming bulk.

During Tillman's governorship, there was a dramatic rising in the number of lynchings of African-Americans in South Carolina and across the South equally a whole. Tillman initially fabricated efforts to command mob rule, and, during his first term as governor, actually spoke out against lynchings. Merely during his second term he often defended lynching in his public statements, one time saying that in certain circumstances he would be willing to lead a lynch mob himself. In 1893, he was widely and justly criticized for his inadequate protection of a black prisoner named John Peterson that probably led to Peterson's lynching. Mayhap most damaging in the long run was Tillman's rhetoric over the form of his career that bolstered the idea that white violence was justified and to be expected whenever white supremacy was challenged.

Despite Tillman'southward racist record, in many ways he was office of a national reform movement of the 1880s and 1890s. During his 2 terms as governor, he compiled a listing of achievements longer than that of his predecessors, although short of his rhetoric. High among those accomplishments was the Dispensary Law regulating the sale of alcoholic beverages. He also reorganized the land's railroad commission, equalized the state's tax brunt, limited the hours of labor in cotton mills and established the primary system of nominating Democratic candidates for function. Additionally, he brought much-needed reforms to the land lunatic asylum and penitentiary, resulting in greater efficiency and a dramatic subtract in the bloodshed rates in those institutions.

Tillman and Higher Pedagogy: Clemson, Winthrop and S.C. Country University

Throughout the early 1890s, Tillman helped to establish Clemson College equally an agricultural and mechanical college and Winthrop Higher, originally Winthrop Training School for Teachers, as an industrial school for women. As a young man, he had been accustomed to the Southward Carolina Higher, but because of illness related to his centre and the events of the Civil War, Tillman never matriculated or received a college teaching. However, Tillman would later have an opportunity to assist in the establishment of not only Clemson University and Winthrop University, but too S.C. Land Academy. Reluctantly, he ceased attacks on the Citadel, which he had called a "dude manufactory."[8]

Tillman opposed using land-grant funds under the Morrill Deed to create an agricultural department at the existing University of S Carolina, instead favoring the establishment of a separate country-grant higher focusing on agricultural education and the applied sciences. He argued that

fuller investigation and study had taught me that the joining of an Agricultural Annex to an older Literary University had proven a failure in near every case when where tried in the United states. The Michigan Agricultural College at Lansing and the Mississippi Agricultural College at Starkesville were so far in accelerate of any of the other hybrid institution.[9]

Probably due to Tillman's political prominence and his adamant advocacy for agricultural didactics, Thomas Light-green Clemson shared with Tillman his plans for willing his estate to the state of South Carolina for the purpose of establishing an agricultural higher. In a meeting with Tillman, Richard W. Simpson and Daniel K. Norris at Fort Hill shortly before his death, Clemson shared his plans, seeking the advice and support of the other three men, which they eagerly provided. Afterwards Clemson's death, Tillman helped lead the political fight to take the land take Clemson'south bequest, and he was appointed past Clemson as one of the original seven successor trustees of Clemson Agronomical Higher. For the remainder of his life, Tillman was a powerful abet and supporter of the school, and he was very proud of his office in its development.

One of Tillman's major contributions to the give-and-take with Clemson, Simpson and Norris had been rooted in his fearfulness of African-Americans being admitted to the higher at some point in the future. Clemson'southward will did non specify that only white students would be admitted. Notwithstanding, the Board of Trustees was to be structured so that a contingent of successor trustees would be self-perpetuating and thus contained of land regime control or influence.

As governor, Tillman supported the creation of Clemson College through the establishment of a captive labor camp where a predominantly African-American coiffure of inmates cleared land, made bricks and synthetic many of the original campus buildings. Some convicts as young as 12 years old worked at Clemson during their incarceration. Tillman reviewed several of their cases, and there is documentation that he issued at least eleven pardons for convicts assigned to Clemson.

Equally for South Carolina State Academy, in an unlikely twist, Tillman supported in 1895 the separation of the Agricultural and Mechanics Institution from Claflin College. Black leaders resented the domination of Claflin's white administrators and faculty over the A&M Constitute. Robert B. Anderson, a blackness delegate from Georgetown, demanded that the state break the connection with Claflin. According to historian William C. Hine, former Congressmen Robert Smalls and Thomas Eastward. Miller, "succeeded in persuading the state'due south most formidable political leader and the convention'south presiding officer, U.S. Senator Benjamin Tillman, to back up the separation of the Agricultural and Mechanics Constitute from Claflin." Every bit Hine wrote on the centennial of South Carolina Land University, "Tillman, for one of the few times in his life, eagerly accommodated black leaders, and proposed a measure to issue the separation of Claflin and the A&1000 institute."[x]

Ramble Convention and State Constitution of 1895

While African-American participation in state politics had been kept to a minimum since the state'south "redemption" in 1876, white Democrats such as Tillman sought to claiming other white political leaders by playing on the fear of possible African-American resurgence at the polls. Tillman called a state constitutional convention in 1895 to enact "the sole cause of our being here," namely to deny African-Americans their voting rights. Tillman'due south disfranchising techniques included a poll tax, educational and property requirements and a subjective test concerning the Constitution, which allowed registration officials to pass whites and neglect blacks.

U.Southward. Senate 1895-1918

Tillman served equally a U.Southward. senator for some 24 years altogether. In the 1894 election he defeated the incumbent senator, beau Edgefieldian Matthew Butler. He served on several major committees, including the Committee on Revolutionary Claims, the Commission on Five Civilized Tribes of Indians, and the Committee on Naval Affairs that created the Charleston Naval Shipyard in 1901. Although Tillman continued to dominate country politics, he lost some of his interest and control as he became involved in national affairs. He broadly identified with the plight of farmers in the South and West, although he avoided aligning himself with the more radical elements in the Farmer'due south Brotherhood and denied that he was ever a Populist. Indeed, Tillman'due south farmer's motion rivaled the Farmer's Alliance and effectively muted the political Populist movement in Due south Carolina. From early, he supported an agrarian platform that included the costless coinage of silver, a federal income tax and railroad regulation. Highlights of Tillman'due south U.South. senate career were the passage of the Hepburn Bill in 1906 that regulated railroads and the Tillman Human activity of 1907 that instituted entrada finance reform.

Tillman suffered strokes in 1908 and 1910 that precluded his acceptance of the chairmanship of the Senate Cribbing Committee in 1913.

Nickname and Moniker of Pitchfork Ben

Having split with Democratic presidential nominee Grover Cleveland in 1896 over the silver event, Tillman alleged that Cleveland "is an one-time bag of beefiness and I am going to Washington with a pitchfork and prod him in his sometime fat ribs."[eleven] Political cartoonists of the era delighted in drawing illustrations of Tillman with a pitchfork in hand.

Tillman's vociferous denunciation of Cleveland earned him the appellation "Pitchfork Ben," signaling the public's perception of the rural senator as a hardheaded, severe champion of the common farmer. Through his vigorous denunciation of African-American political activity, his vocal distrust of eastern monied interests, and his moderate agrarian platform, Pitchfork Ben earned a national reputation as a defender of the land's agricultural interests and as the leading champion of white supremacy and racial segregation.

Speaking in the U.S. Senate on March 23, 1900, Tillman recounted the disfranchisement of African-Americans:

I desire the state to get the full view of the Southern side of this question and the justification for anything we did. We were sad we had the necessity forced upon us, simply we could not assist it, and as white men we are not sorry for information technology, and nosotros do non advise to apologize for anything nosotros accept washed in connectedness with it. We took the government away from them in 1876. We did take it. If no other Senator has come hither previous to this time who would acknowledge information technology, more is the pity. We have had no fraud in our elections in South Carolina since 1884. There has been no organized Republican political party in the State.

Nosotros did non disfranchise the negroes until 1895. And then we had a constitutional convention convened which took the matter up calmly, deliberately, and avowedly with the purpose of disfranchising as many of them every bit nosotros could under the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments. We adopted the educational qualification as the just means left to u.s., and the negro is equally contented and as prosperous and likewise protected in South Carolina to-twenty-four hour period as in any State of the Matrimony southward of the Potomac.[12]

Tillman also aided in the initiation of Jim Crow laws in South Carolina, which would final near a century until the Civil Rights move of the 1950s and 1960s.

Presidential Race of 1896

As a scheduled speaker at the 1896 Democratic National Convention, Tillman hoped for a presidential bid. He spoke in the aforementioned style that had won him success in South Carolina, blasphemous and haranguing his enemies, and raising the specter of sectionalism. However, he thoroughly alienated the national audience, lost his adventure for a run at the presidency, and paved the way for William Jennings Bryan and his famous oratory in his "Cross of Gold," speech to capture the Democratic nomination. After 1896 Tillman contented himself with running state politics and leading the Democratic opposition to a series of Republican presidents.

Spanish-American War in 1898

While Tillman favored war with Spain in 1898, he objected strongly to the ensuing colonization because he feared the inclusion of new non-white populations in the union, and he was suspicious of concern interests involved in the war. Tillman would after asking a plaque fabricated from the U.s.a.Southward. Maine for display at Clemson College. The plaque was placed in the Memorial Chapel and is today in the lobby of Tillman Auditorium. Other pieces of the U.S.S. Maine caused for Southward Carolina included a 6-pounder gun that at present stands on the country house grounds and the capstan identify in the Battery Park in Charleston.

Conflict with President Theodore Roosevelt and Booker T. Washington

Tillman developed a strong enmity toward President Theodore Roosevelt when in 1902 the president rescinded a dinner invitation to the White House because Tillman assaulted fellow South Carolina Senator John L. McLaurin on the senate floor. Tillman never forgave Roosevelt for the snub and strongly opposed the president. Still, in 1906, Tillman formed a coalition with Roosevelt to aid him win passage of tough new railroad regulations. Tillman also opposed Roosevelt'southward invitation of Booker T. Washington to the White House and said, "the activeness of President Roosevelt in entertaining that n------ will necessitate our killing a thousand n------s in the South before they learn their place again."[13] President Roosevelt seldom interacted with Senator Tillman on his aforementioned level. However, in 1908, Roosevelt complimented Tillman on his piece of work at Chautauqua. Roosevelt went on to say that Senator Tillman and Senator Robert M. La Follette were both "very pop in the Chautauqua where the people listen to them both, sometimes getting ideas that are right, more often getting ideas that are incorrect, and on the whole not getting whatsoever ideas at all ... and simply feeling the kind of pleasurable excitement that they would at the sight of a two-headed calf, or a trick performed on a spotted circus horse." [14]

It is ironic that in 1923, only v years afterwards Tillman'southward death, Booker T. Washington'southward colleague and swain professor at Tuskegee Found, George Washington Carver, was the first African-American guest lecturer at Clemson. Carver spoke to a full audience of nearly 1,000 cadets in the chapel in the Principal Assistants Building, afterward renamed Tillman Hall in 1946.

Tillman's constructive legacy in the Senate includes partial stewardship of the Republican-proposed Hepburn Rate Bill of 1906 and the institution of Charleston Naval Base.

In 1908, Tillman suffered his first stroke. His physician recommended a trip to Europe as a means of recuperation. Historian Francis Butler Simpkins said of the trip, "If the South Carolina senator was not able to experience reaction as refined as those of such cosmopolite colleagues as Aldrich or Salary, he certainly was no Goth recently emerged from the backwoods." Although with no formal college didactics, Tillman was self-taught and felt at home in Scotland from his reading of Scott'south novels such as Rob Roy.

Tillman was i of the best-read people of his generation. He had a huge library and was a voracious reader. This is important considering information technology shows that he was in touch with the intellectual trends and scientific racism developing at the fourth dimension, and much of his horrible racism is the logical extension of some of the scholarship of that day.

In 1910 he suffered another stroke that partly paralyzed him, reducing his energy and influence in the Senate. By the time the Democrat Woodrow Wilson was elected to the White House in 1912, Pitchfork Ben was too one-time and infirm to assume the chair of the prestigious Appropriations Committee, an honor due him because of his seniority. Instead, Tillman had to be content with the chairmanship of the Committee on Naval Affairs. The once feisty and staunchly rural Due south Carolina senator became a rubber stamp for the legislation offered past the Wilson administration, only opposing the president on women'due south suffrage, only on that very strenuously.

Political Legacy

Even into the mid-1900s, Tillman exerted influence in South Carolina politics. He engineered elections of his candidates to governor, secured the acquittal of his nephew, Lieutenant Governor James H. Tillman, for murder, and, after the plummet of their friendship, forced the retirement of Senator McLaurin. Yet, while the S Carolina legislature continued to bear witness gratitude to Tillman by consistently reelecting him, Pitchfork Ben'due south long years in Washington, his advancing affliction and his growing conservatism loosened his once mighty control of the Palmetto Country. He occupied his concluding years battling the spurned Tillmanite Cole L. Blease. While Tillman won reelection to the Senate in 1912, he was unable to prevent Blease from gaining the governorship that year, a sign that Tillman could no longer command local politics.

Tillman died in Washington, D.C., on July 3, 1918. He is cached at Ebenezer Cemetery in Edgefield Canton, South Carolina. The epitaph on his tombstone states,

Benjamin Ryan Tillman, Born Baronial 11, 1847-Died 3, July 1918
Patriot, Statesman, Governor of South Carolina 1890-1894
United States Senator 1895-1918. In the Globe War — Chairman Senat
Committee on Naval Affairs. A life of service and accomplishment.

Loving them he was the friend and leader of the common people. He taught them their political power and made possible for the education of their sons and daughters at Clemson Agricultural College and Winthrop Normal and Industrial College.

In the home loving loyal. To the state steadfast truthful. For the nation
"The country belongs to us all and we all vest to it. The men of the Due north, Southward, East, and West carved information technology out of the wilderness and fabricated it great—let us share it with each other, then, and conserve it. Giving it the best that is in us of brain and brawn and heart.[15]

The senate colleague who wrote the most interesting appraisal of Ben Tillman for a senate memorial address was the honorable Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, who Tillman early on in his career characterized derogatorily equally a "negro preacher." Social club was the author of the Lodge Bill of 1890 which, if passed, would take restricted Jim Crow election maneuvers and actions to disenfranchise of African-Americans. Lodge said in his eulogy of Tillman:

The men who have come here proclaiming their intention of revolutionizing and reforming the Senate accept fallen in practice into two classes—those who insisted on standing to set on the Senate and all its habits and methods and those who sooner or later on, more often than not sooner than later, accepted the Senate traditions and ways of life. The former, very few in number, became bores and found themselves unheard and without influence and have been forgotten. The latter have been successful and often distinguished Senators, influential and constructive. It is needless to say that Senator Tillman belonged preeminently to the second class. He never bored anyone. Nevertheless widely one might disagree with him he was always and unfailingly interesting. He came not only to accept the Senate simply to be i of its nearly ardent defenders, supporting its rules, habits, and traditions, and very proud of its history and of its power and importance.[16]

Lodge claimed that on a personal level they began not merely to respect each other, but also to work cooperatively for a common adept and he constitute Tillman more complex:

Only Senators found too that the blunt words and the stormy way when he was roused were far more in show in public than in private life. Behind all this was a kindly nature, plenty of humor, a serious outlook on life, and real sincerity of purpose. One at to the lowest degree of those who came in the process of time to know him well discovered that Senator Tillman had cognition of and genuine fondness for literature and poetry—good literature and good poesy, exist it said—and above all that he was a lover of Shakespeare, a phase of his character not more often than not appreciated. He was a conspicuous and agile Senator for many years and worked hard and faithfully until he was stricken by illness some years ago. Later his partial recovery he went on with an uncomplaining and unfailing courage which allowable everyone'southward admiration until the end came.[17]

Order referred to Tillman's final speeches on behalf of the necessity for intervening into World State of war I as an example when he wrote: "Never did he appear better than in his mental attitude toward the war. He never had whatsoever doubts. He recognized what Germany meant, and he was for the correct and for the state of war with all his force."

Tillman's influence on South Carolina political leaders has long survived him. While a young congressman, James F. Byrnes, who would get U.S. senator, Supreme Courtroom justice, secretary of state and governor of Southward Carolina, became a protégé of Senator Tillman. The elder statesman Byrnes returned to Southward Carolina to fight integration and to perpetuate segregation in the early 1950s, during the time of the argument of the Brown v Lath of Didactics case. William Thurmond, Southward Carolina Senator J. Strom Thurmond'south father, was Tillman'southward attorney in Edgefield. Strom Thurmond every bit a boy was inspired by Tillman's personalized way of political interest, campaigning and stance on segregation.

Legacy

Tillman's legacy for South Carolina and the nation is circuitous and oft disturbing. African-Americans and white Americans often interpret Tillman's accomplishments in contradictory ways. While bringing several progressive reforms to the land, he too was at the forefront of the movement to marginalize and disfranchise blackness Southerners further in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Similarly, while he energized the mass of rural white voters to challenge the aristocratic rule of the state by the Bourbon Democrats, he did then at the expense of the state's disenfranchised African-Americans. Even at the national level, Tillman successfully pioneered the use of race by a Southern demagogue to mobilize white voters.

Every bit historian I. A. Newby explained:

Tillmanism is the nearest thing to a genuine mass movement in the history of white Carolina, and whites in the state paid homage to information technology for over a generation. To students of black history and racial equality its most hit features are the extent to which it expressed the want of white Carolinians to dominate blacks and the fact that much of its unity and force derived from its antiblack racial policies.[18]

Meanwhile, through his support of Clemson and Winthrop College, Tillman positioned himself as a leader of the country-grant college movement and the democratization of higher education among whites, aiding in the founding and growth of ii of import southern universities; he likewise provided crucial support for the institution now known every bit South Carolina Country at a critical point in its early history. Arguably, withal, Tillman's efforts at disfranchising African-Americans through the country legislature and the 1895 constitution have had a greater impact on the state and nation. Historian Richard Maxwell Brown described Tillman as "the best-known and near vitriolic Negrophobe in America."

Due west.E.B. DuBois' Editorial about Benjamin Ryan Tillman

Perhaps ane of the most remarkable appraisals of the life of Benjamin Tillman was an editorial written by African-American civil rights activist and intellectual W.E.B. DuBois shortly after Tillman'due south death and published in The Crisis, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) periodical for which he served every bit editor:

It can inappreciably be expected that any Negro would regret the death of Benjamin Tillman. His attacks on our race have been besides unbridled and outrageous for that. And yet information technology is our duty to understand this human in relation to his fourth dimension. He represented the rebound of the unlettered white proletariat of the South from the oppression of slavery to new industrial and political freedom. The visible sign of their former degradation was the Negro. They kicked him considering he was kickable and stood for what they hated; only they must equally they grow in knowledge and power come to realize that the Negro far from being the cause of their onetime suffering was their co-sufferer with them.

Someday a greater than Tillman Blease and Vardaman, will rise in the Southward to atomic number 82 the white laborers and small farmer, and he will greet the Negro as a friend and helper and build with him and not on him. This leader is non yet come, but the death of Tillman foretells his coming and the existent enfranchisement of the Negro will herald his birth.[xix]

Benjamin Ryan Tillman Bibliography

Tillman's papers are at the South Caroliniana Library, University of Southward Carolina, and in the Special Collections Department of the Robert Muldrow Cooper Library, Clemson University. His papers as governor are at the South Carolina Section of Archives and History, Columbia, S.C. Other family papers are in the J. Eastward. Swearingen and Swearingen Family Papers at the Southward Caroliniana Library.

The definitive biography of Tillman is Francis Butler Simkins, Pitchfork Ben Tillman: South Carolinian (1944). This should be read with Simkins's before The Tillman Motility in S Carolina (1926; repr. 1963). Two important articles are Simkins, "Southward Carolina Dispensary," South Atlantic Quarterly 25 (Jan. 1926): xiii-24, and "Ben Tillman's View of the Negro," Periodical of Southern History iii, no. two (May 1937): 161-74. A newer study especially sensitive to the cosmos of racial rhetoric and Tillman'southward contribution to white supremacy is Stephen David Kantrowitz, "The Reconstruction of White Supremacy: Reaction and Reform in Ben Tillman's Globe, 1847-1918" (Ph.D. diss., Princeton Univ., 1995). Meet besides Clark E. Culpepper, "Pitchfork Ben Tillman and the Emergence of Southern Demagoguery," Quarterly Journal of Speech communication 69 (1983): 423-33; and Howard Dorgan, " 'Pitchfork Ben' Tillman and 'The Race Problem from a Southern Indicate of View'," in The Oratory of Southern Demagogues, ed. Cal 1000. Logue and Howard Dorgan (1981).

Other specialized studies include William Alexander Mabry, "Ben Tillman Disfranchised the Negro," South Atlantic Quarterly 37 (1938): 170-83; George Chocolate-brown Tindall, "The Entrada for the Disfranchisement of the Negroes in South Carolina," Journal of Southern History xv (1949): 212-34; Gustavus G. Williamson, Jr., "S Carolina Cotton Mills and the Tillman Motion," Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Clan (1949): 36-49. For more general coverage of Tillman see William J. Cooper, Jr., The Bourgeois Regime: South Carolina, 1877-1890 (1968); Orville Vernon Burton, In My Father's House Are Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, South Carolina (1985); Burton, "The Effects of the Civil War and Reconstruction on the Coming of Historic period of Southern Males, Edgefield Canton, South Carolina," in The Web of Southern Social Relations: Women, Family, and Education, ed. Walter J. Fraser et al. (1985); and I. A. Newby; Black Carolinians: A History of Blacks in Due south Carolina from 1895 to 1968 (1973).

Burton, Orville Vernon. In My Begetter'south House Are Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, Due south Carolina. Chapel Hill: University of Northward Carolina Press, 1985.

Burton, Orville Vernon. "Tillman, Benjamin Ryan." American National Biography. Online: Oxford University Press, 2000.

DuBoise, West.E.B. Tillman Editorial, The Crisis, Vol. 16, No. iv, August 1918,165 http://library.dark-brown.edu/pdfs/1292949314483625.pdf

Foley, Ehren 1000. "Southward Carolina During Reconstruction." http://www.screconstruction.org/Reconstruction/Home.html, 2012.

Hine, William C. "Due south Carolina State Higher: A Legacy of Education and Public Service." Agricultural History 65, no. ii (1991): 149-67. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3743714

Hofstadter, Richard. The American Republic. Englewood Cliffs, North.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1959.

Kantrowitz, Stephen David. Ben Tillman & the Reconstruction of White Supremacy. Chapel Hill: University of Northward Carolina Press, 2000.

Simkins, Francis Butler. Pitchfork Ben Tillman, Southward Carolinian. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1944.

Tillman, Benjamin Ryan. The Origin of Clemson College. Winston-Salem: 1941

Author Unknown. "Ellenton Riot." New York Times, September 26, 1876.

Footnotes

[1] Francis Butler Simkins, Pitchfork Ben Tillman, South Carolinian, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1944), xxx. Stephen Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy. University of North Carolina Press.2000), 16. The Wanderer smuggled Africans to the Georgia declension landing on Jekyll Island with some 409 persons. Rohrer, Katherine Eastward. "Wanderer." New Georgia Encyclopedia. 27 June 2016. Web. 21 July 2016. http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archeology/wanderer

[2] Benjamin Ryan Tillman, The Origin of Clemson College; with introduction and reminiscences of the get-go course and the opening of the college by his son, B. R. Tillman, who was a fellow member of the showtime class (Class of 1896), (Winston Salem, 1941), 3.

[3] Simkins, 403-404.

[4] "Speech of Senator Benjamin R. Tillman, March 23, 1900," Congressional Record, 56th Congress, 1st Session, 3223–3224. Reprinted in Richard Purday, ed.,Certificate Sets for the South in U. S. History (Lexington, MA.: D.C. Heath and Company, 1991), 147.

[v] Simkins, 66.

[six] Benjamin R. Tillman, (1909). "Struggles of 1876 : How South Carolina was delivered from carpet-bag and negro rule," : Speech at the Red-Shirt Re-matrimony at Anderson [August 25, 1909] : personal reminiscences and incidents. The Struggles of '76

[seven] Gullah Statesman: Robert Smalls from Slavery to Congress, 1839-1915, by Jr. Edward A Miller (Author), Publisher: University of South Carolina Press (Feb 27, 2008)

[8] "military machine dude factory," Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman, 119.

[ix] Benjamin Ryan Tillman, The Origin of Clemson College; with introduction and reminiscences of the first class and the opening of the higher past his son, B. R. Tillman, who was a member of the outset class (Class of 1896), (Winston Salem, 1941), 4.

[10] William C. Hine, "Southward Carolina Country College: A Legacy of Education and Public Service." Agricultural History 65, no. two (1991): 149-67. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3743714

[xi] "bag of beef . . ." Simkins, p. 315.

[12] "Speech of Senator Benjamin R. Tillman, March 23, 1900," Congressional Record, 56th Congress, 1st Session, 3223–3224. Reprinted in Richard Purday, ed.,Certificate Sets for the S in U. South. History (Lexington, MA.: D.C. Heath and Company, 1991), 147.

[thirteen] Stephen Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy. (Chapel Colina: Academy of Due north Carolina Press, 2000), 259.

[14] Simpkins, 446.

[15] Benjamin R. Tillman tombstone at Find A Grave, Inc., Find A Grave, digital epitome (http://world wide web.findagrave.com: accessed 5 October 2015), photo, "gravestone for Benjamin R. Tillman (1881-1974),Memorial No. 8063298, Records of the Ebenezer Baptist Church building Cemetery, Trenton, Edgefield County, South Carolina;" . http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=pv&GRid=8063298&PIpi=29419719

[18] I. A. Newby, Blackness Carolinians: A History of Blacks in South Carolina from 1895 to 1968, (Columbia, Due south.C.: Academy of South Carolina Printing, 1973), 12.

[19] W.E.B. DuBois, Tillman Editorial, The Crisis, Vol. xvi, No. four, August 1918, 165.

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