Religion, gender, and the lost cause in South Carolina's 1876 governor's race: "Hampton or Hell!".

GENERAL WADE HAMPTON, THE CONFEDERATE CAVALRY HERO, RODE again on October 7, 1876. Flanked by the paramilitary arm of the South Carolina Democratic Party--which was made up of local groups known as "rifle clubs"--Hampton entered the midlands town of Sumter, South Carolina, an important stop in his gubernatorial campaign tour. In the center of town, a speakers' stand had been erected, and on it a black-robed figure, bound in chains, stood solemnly before a crowd of farmers and townspeople. As the hopeful candidate assumed his position on the platform, the shadowy figure flung off its chains and cast aside its robe of mourning, revealing a beautiful young woman, with skin and dress of white, wearing a tiara emblazoned with the words South Carolina. The journalist Alfred Brockenbrough Williams witnessed the crowd erupt at this performance, with many of the men openly weeping. Late into the night, Williams reported, frenzied horsemen rode through the town crying out "Hampton or Hell!" The candidacy of Wade Hampton in the 1876 governor's race seemed to these white South Carolinians to be the chance to restore South Carolina to "home rule." (1)

The historiography of southern "Redemption" has tended to focus on the ways in which conservative whites used fraud and violence to overturn Reconstruction regimes. Whether the story is told as a heroic narrative of "redemption" or as a dream of democracy deferred, the emphasis has centered on votes--whether bought, coerced, or fraudulently counted. (2) No new evidence challenges the role of intimidation and violence in this and other Redemption contests. Former Confederate brigadier general and leading "straight-out" Democrat, Martin Witherspoon Gary, certainly believed that for the Hampton campaign to succeed without compromise or cooperation with Republicans, "every Democrat must feel honor bound to control the vote of at least one negro." (3)

This article, however, also takes into account Gary's contention that the Hampton campaign must "get up all the enthusiasm we can among the masses." (4) South Carolina Conservatives, like Gary, recognized that these white masses were the key to Democrats' regaining power in postbellum society. They understood, moreover, that power functioned best in a context of cultural consensus. If Conservatives could control the tenets of that consensus in such a way that the white masses acquiesced to domination by the Democratic elite, then Conservative rule would certainly be assured. To this end, in the 1876 campaign Conservatives successfully created and celebrated a public spectacle that drew upon the racial and gendered obsessions of white Carolina culture. The ritual and rhetoric that accompanied the so-called Hampton Days of September and October 1876 depicted the conflict between Democrat Wade Hampton and Republican incumbent Daniel H. Chamberlain as a religious struggle between good and evil (between "Hampton" and "Hell") and preyed upon white anxieties about ideas of race and gender. As public representations of cultural ideology, the Hampton Days celebrations bring us into a tightly woven network of memory and myth.

A close examination of this ideology's manifestation as public spectacle in the Hampton campaign promises two important results. First, it opens a window to the vexed question of southern conservatism. The attempt to define the conservative worldview of the South has generally focused on the lineaments of proslavery ideology or on the planter's relationship to bourgeois capitalism. Eugene D. Genovese's skillful explication sees southern conservatism as "a variant of transatlantic traditionalism" that "expresses a belief in a transcendent order" and "accepts social stratification as necessary and proper." (5) But this ideology, as the Hampton Days celebrations suggest, lived in public spectacle as well as in the writings and ruminations of the southern learned divines and public intellectuals who populate the pages of Genovese's work. If historians seek to describe the ideological shape of southern conservatism, they must not ground their argument simply in the study of the written texts of southern politicians and intellectuals. (6) Second, an examination of the Hampton Days rightly brings the postbellum development of the Lost Cause into the discussion on southern conservatism. In the campaign South Carolina Conservatives used the Lost Cause to publicly represent their worldview, to express continued defiance toward the government of the United States in spite of their military defeat, and to stabilize the boundaries of their racial and gendered hierarchy in the topsy-turvy world of the postbellum, postemancipation South.

Radical Reconstruction had come as an especially brutal blow to the pride of the recalcitrant state that William T. Sherman had called a "hellhole of secession." When the Republican-dominated Congress passed the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, a special "Conservative State Convention" in South Carolina warned of the "ignorant mob" that would come to power should black suffrage become a reality. Federal military power and the large number of newly enfranchised African American voters made real political resistance to Reconstruction ineffectual. Choosing the paradoxical strategy of combining "Ku Klux" terror and cooperation with Republicans, white Conservatives sought to retain some degree of control over the state. (7)

This strategy, however, proved futile from the point of view of some of South Carolina's white leaders. The 1872 governor's race ended with the election of Franklin J. Moses Jr., a "scalawag" who had participated in some of the worst corruption of the outgoing Robert K. Scott administration. Conservatives looked apprehensively on the fact that Moses had been elected by the midlands and black-majority low-country. Martin Witherspoon Gary and his compatriot from Edgefield, former Confederate general Matthew C. Butler, began to look on the past attempts at cooperation with Republicans as collaboration with an unyielding enemy and promoted instead the militarization of Conservative resistance. Agricultural and Democratic "clubs," formed immediately after the war to coerce black labor, transformed themselves into "rifle clubs" as early as 1874. The rifle clubs, unlike their predecessors, were organized under military discipline and a strict command structure. Although these organizations would play a central role in the Hampton campaign in 1876, Democratic leaders in the meantime found themselves at odds over the proper deployment of the paramilitary groups. Gary and the radical "straight-outs" of Edgefleld County hoped to use the armed bands, composed mostly of battle-hardened Confederate veterans, to reopen a shooting war between South Carolina and her enemies. In contrast, Wade Hampton, with much of the rest of the Democratic leadership in tow, sought to use the clubs only to make a display of military might and so fulfill his policy of "force without violence." (8)

Both Hampton and the more radical "straight-outs," then, saw the clubs as integral to their effort to restore Democrats to power. Often these clubs acted as a militia at the command of Conservative leaders while cloaking themselves as social organizations. The constitution of the Richland Rifle Club, for example, simply referred to the group's central objective as "social intercourse," along with "target shooting and such other amusements as they [the members] may determine." These "other amusements" would ultimately include acting as the military arm of Hampton's 1876 campaign. Each club typically had fifty to sixty members, with altogether about thirty thousand white men under arms. A later congressional investigation found that the rifle clubs were led by men who had "long borne military titles obtained not by service in the militia, but on the fields of Manassas, Malvern Hill and Gettysburg." (9)

The 1874 gubernatorial election of Daniel H. Chamberlain, a Yale graduate, abolitionist, and commander of black Union troops in the Civil War, did little to allay the anxieties of white Conservatives. As the 1876 election approached, a number of Conservatives made plans for a "straight-out" campaign in which they would use any means necessary to overthrow a government that they considered fundamentally illegitimate. Hampton M. Jarrell, whose description of events sometimes suffers from his tendency towards apologia, has nevertheless correctly written that this campaign should be seen as a "counterrevolution" rather than as an election. (10)

The choice of Wade Hampton as the Democratic standard-bearer seemed a natural one, perhaps in part because Hampton, unlike many former Confederate leaders, had no clear connection to the "Ku Klux" terror of the early 1870s. Considered by many to be the very incarnation of Carolina chivalry, Hampton came from an aristocratic line of South Carolina military heroes that reached back to the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. After the Confederate States fired on Fort Sumter, Hampton had raised and equipped out of his own huge personal fortune a force of cavalry, infantry, and artillery known as "Hampton's Legion." Fierce in combat, he had proven to be one of Lee's most able commanders and was charged with leading the Army of Northern Virginia's cavalry after the death of J. E. B. Stuart. (11) White Conservatives, usually Confederate veterans, saw clearly that South Carolina would rally behind this embodiment of the Lost Cause in a bid to overthrow the Reconstruction government. To ensure this result, leaders planned public celebrations of Hampton's candidacy, soon called the Hampton Days. For two months the general toured the state, beginning in the solidly Democratic white counties of the up-country and ending in Charleston, completing what Richard Zuczek has described as Sherman's March in reverse. (12)

The upcountry town of Anderson was the first stop in Hampton's campaign tour on September 2, 1876. Thousands of firmly Democratic supporters turned out to see the mounted rifle clubs, 1,600 members strong, and to listen to a cornet band compete with a cannon that to one listener's ears made the roaring sound of "salute and triumph." When Hampton began to speak to the crowd, he immediately had to "stand a long while and look and listen," as Anderson greeted him with "the yells of men frantically screaming their heads off and the shrieked love and frenzy of women." Hampton's cavalcade proceeded from Anderson to the mountain towns of Walhalla and Pickens, then to Greenville. Engineering the largest spectacle thus far in the campaign, mounted rifle club members and the R. E. Lee Fire Company greeted Hampton in Greenville with a torchlight procession and a parade of "citizens afoot and in wagons," many dressed in the red shirts that had come to symbolize devotion to Hampton and support for white conservatism. The Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer noted that "cheer upon cheer" greeted Hampton both at the torchlight procession and at the rally the following day on the grounds of Furman University. (13)

Southern conservatives, as the Hampton Days celebrations exemplify, often found themselves in the paradoxical situation of attempting to maintain and institutionalize an elitist ideology while having to appeal to popular political support. (14) Nevertheless, their use of ritual and spectacle to unite public opinion hardly constituted a new methodology of power in the political history of the West. Late in the fourteenth century the cities of northern Europe celebrated the arrival of sovereigns with rituals both intricate and colorful. The visual elaboration of the theme of sovereignty, which often included the strategic use of motifs from the Catholic Church's Advent liturgy, furnished a structure of meaning with which most early modern bystanders would be familiar. Gordon Kipling, one of the foremost interpreters of these celebrations, has argued that royalty often used such political rituals during inaugural ceremonies to reinforce the notion that the sovereign inherited both an immanent and a transcendent legitimacy. At the same time, these rituals had a folk aspect, since they constituted "a deeply felt assertion of communal solidarity." (15)

Traditions of political ritual in colonial and antebellum America provide further encouragement to examine public spectacles in the context of the Reconstruction South. One study has made the point that the investigation of public ritual in early America moves political history away from its standard role of interpreting "the words and actions of the ruling elite." Historians have also made use of ritual as a category for analyzing southern mentalites. Charles Reagan Wilson drew heavily on the anthropological work of Clifford Geertz and Anthony F. C. Wallace in his groundbreaking study of the Lost Cause. Bertram Wyatt-Brown and Kenneth S. Greenberg have similarly examined rituals of dueling, honor, and manhood in the Old South. (16)

While historians who have focused on ritual have successfully shown how symbolic human actions reflect the values of the ever-elusive "folk," they have yet to recognize fully that public spectacles also shape and embody political ideology from above. The Hampton campaign reveals that southern conservatives used the Lost Cause movement to promote their own ideology and to shape public behavior. They sought to define and encode the boundaries of racial identity, to reaffirm antebellum attitudes regarding gender, and to express a revivified Confederate nationalism. Neither a self-conscious religion nor simply a gloss on New South economic concerns, the Lost Cause functioned in 1876 as an aesthetic of yearning, an attempt to represent the world that southern conservatives had watched go down in flames at Appomattox. The power of these images blossomed into a new Confederate nationalism that would haunt South Carolina into the twentieth century. (17)

Democratic leaders, almost all of whom were former Confederate generals, manipulated the aesthetic of the Lost Cause to herald a revival of the Confederate South, united to face its enemies. A Greenville newspaper reporter, for example, wrote that the Democratic club hoped that the town's planned torchlight procession, along with the other elements of pageantry, would "have the best effect upon the people of Greenville." The hoped-for effect certainly seems to have been achieved. Hampton's journey through the upcountry towns appears in the sources as a succession of ovations. After leaving Greenville, Hampton moved on to nearby Spartanburg, where the thunder of cannons and fireworks and the light of torches and "burning balloons" greeted him that night. "South Carolina white men," a journalist noted, "were going into this fight with more determination and desperation of purpose than they went into the Confederate war." The mounted processions seemed to embrace all classes of South Carolina whites, as evidenced by some of Hampton's less "knightly" supporters, who resembled southern Don Quixotes, perched on mules and wearing some unkempt version of a red shirt and "shabby, ragged and patched breeches." (18)

The uniform of the Hampton supporter, the red shirt, became the most important visual symbol of the campaign. Oddly, its origin and meaning seem to have been uncertain even for the participants. Opponents of Hampton claimed that its bloodred color represented the willingness of the "straight-outs" to use violence against Afro-Carolinians. However, had this been the case, Hampton himself would likely have publicly rejected such a symbol for undermining his vision of white supremacist paternalism. A more likely story relates how Martin Gary modeled the red shirt on Giuseppe Garibaldi's 1860 Italian "Red-shirts." Gary, a Harvard graduate, had a library well stocked with European history and would have appreciated this nationalistic symbolism. Regardless of its uncertain paternity, the red shirt quickly became the most public symbol of devotion to Hampton's reanimated Lost Cause. William Watts Ball, a young child in 1876, remembered the impossibility of finding a store in Laurens County that had not sold out of red flannel. Undeterred, the young Hampton supporter had his red shirt made out of red calico. (19)

In the eyes of Conservative South Carolina whites, Hampton embodied both the ideology of the Lost Cause and the memory of the Lost Eden, the Old South. The emotional reaction of the crowds as he took the speakers' platform suggests that he had become the central vehicle of Lost Cause values for Hampton Days participants. Contemporaries saw him as both "an aristocrat to his fingertips" and a blunt soldier in the War for Southern Independence, who would "chat on the war with the humblest private of the Confederacy or on the merits and characters of dogs and horses." One observer described the former cavalryman in language redolent of the medieval chivalric tradition, evangelical fervor, and the cloying magnolia scent of the southern elite: "Hampton, simple, unaffected gentleman, dauntless warrior of South Carolina, loving and reverencing his God, his cause and his commonwealth to the last recess of his clean soul." From a different ideological line of vision, a hostile Atlantic Monthly article claimed Hampton had "strikingly crystallized all the arrogant old plantation qualities of the South." (20)

The image of Hampton as Lost Cause warrior received immeasurable support from the fact that not a few Confederate veterans served as his partisans. The response to Hampton's campaign suggests that a resurgence of Confederate sentiment occurred in 1876, an open and public awakening to feelings long fermenting in small, local memorial associations. As early as 1866 a Confederate Soldiers' Association had formed in the South Carolina mountain town of Pickens, with Wade Hampton as its first featured speaker. (21) After a decade of reliving the war in private celebrations, "old Confederate cavalrymen" embraced the announcement of Hampton's candidacy, "shout[ing] along the roads and in the streets of court house towns that with somebody like Wade Hampton to lead they could and would storm Hell." A member of the Richland County Democratic Club later recalled that a pre-campaign rally of mounted Red Shirts in Columbia had reminded him of "the day of Lee's Critter companies." (22) Reporting on the September 13 parade and mass meeting in Laurens, the Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer described the common opinion that the marches, thunderous cannonades, and hospitality of the townspeople recalled "the times of 1861, when the boys were starting off to the army." (23) Governor Chamberlain himself claimed, "Never since the passage of the Ordinance of Secession has there been such scenes in the state." These invocations of the Confederacy suggest a society filled with profound yearnings. The rifle clubs, placed on public display, offered a way for South Carolinians to contemplate and reenact the past. The Hampton campaign thus became Carolina's version of what Henri Delacroix would call "a game of ghosts." (24)

The Hampton Days not only enlisted former Confederates to march in support of a revivified Old South, but also former slaves, who, in the view of Hampton and many other Democratic leaders, would have a role to play in the new post-Reconstruction order. "Black Red Shirts" made a prominent appearance in many of the parades and were often placed conspicuously on the speakers' platform. One observer noted that Democratic campaign managers appeared "solicitous about them and gave them front seats on the stands." Hampton's understanding of paternalism and social harmony fueled this appeal to African American cooperation. The Democratic Party leadership hoped, moreover, that such public expression of black support announced to the federal government that the spectacle of armed ex-Confederates did not constitute another illegal "Ku Klux" movement. (25)

The 1876-77 congressional investigations into South Carolina electoral fraud uncovered several examples of former slaves who did in fact join companies of Red Shirts and march in the Hampton Days celebrations. Merriman Washington of Richland County led a Red Shirt club of sixteen black South Carolinians to the polls, half of whom, he later testified, were chased off by "a heap of the republicans." Aaron Mitchell, a black resident of Abbeville County, became a poll manager for the Democrats and testified that he had "voted as many [black Democrats] as between one and two hundred at Abbeville Court-House." The black supporters of Hampton had diverse reasons for casting their lots with the very embodiment of the master class. Some continued to benefit from white paternalism, like Jonas Weeks of Richland County, who had been a slave belonging to Wade Hampton's father. Other African American Red Shirts had more complex motives, like Asbury Green of Abbeville County, who was wearied of sharecropping and simply hoped that a change of administration would improve his prospects. "I want a change in the government," he remembered thinking. "I never have got no good out of the republican party. I never have got ten cents out of the party." (26)

Wade Hampton had long called on South Carolinians to view their southern world as both biracial and white supremacist. Speaking in 1866 to one of the earliest organizations of Confederate veterans, Hampton encouraged his former comrades to remember their duty to the freedman: "As a slave, he was faithful to us; as a freedman, let us treat him as a friend." Refusing to recognize that Afro-Carolinians could exhibit agency of their own, Hampton viewed them as either loyal friends or Republican pawns. He maintained a tight web of paternalism and control over the former slaves of the Hampton family and believed that other southern whites should do the same. Within this context black voting became acceptable. White supremacist paternalism, Hampton believed, could control these votes just as it could control other aspects of blacks' lives. He told a biracial audience in Abbeville, "We want your votes, we don't want you to be deprived of them." Martin W. Gary rejected this strategy, telling a supporter that he would rather "sing psalms to a dead mule" than speak to black audiences as Hampton did. Nevertheless, Gary, who viewed the campaign of 1876 as a war between races rather than political ideologies, for the most part remained quiescent in his criticism of Hampton for the sake of the "straight-out" campaign. He would not, however, hold his tongue under Hampton's gubernatorial administration: as Stephen Kantrowitz has shown, Gary's philosophy of white supremacy came to fruition in South Carolina's Tillman movement of the 1880s and 1890S. (27)

Southern Christianity, symbolically tied to Confederate memory, played a prominent role in the Conservative campaign, as it did in shaping the larger Lost Cause mythology. The postbellum white South created what can only be called a "Confederate religion," as Christian leaders transposed the virtue of Johnny Reb with the teachings of Christ and celebrated the memory of the fallen nation with the language of Zion. In the 1876 campaign southern religious practice structured the ritual of the Hampton celebrations. Just as sovereigns in the premodern West shaped their royal pageantry around the liturgical world of the Catholic Church, so did white South Carolinians mold their political performances around the ethos of evangelical religion. Prayer and the singing of hymns created a revivalistic atmosphere in the mass meetings that occurred along Hampton's route. The county Democratic clubs began their gatherings with prayer and, in the case of the Richland County Democratic Club, resolved to sing "joyful hosannas" upon Hampton's election. Moreover, the central dogmatic and subjective experience of southern evangelicalism--personal conversion--easily conjoined with the category of the political. In a particularly evocative phrase, Democrats termed the decision (often made under duress) by white Republicans to throw their support to Hampton as "crossing Jordan." Rifle-club members similarly claimed that those who joined the Hampton campaign had "[come] over to the Lord's side." (28)

Profoundly shaping the Hampton-Chamberlain struggle as a Christian crusade, the religious imagery employed by campaigners was matched by the rhetoric of South Carolina church leaders, who had already prepared the ground for a Conservative challenge to the Republicans. For example, Ellison Capers, an Episcopal priest who had served as a brigadier general in the Confederate army, became one of the most active and outspoken Hampton supporters. Converted to faith in both Christianity and the Confederacy by the experience of war, Capers became a kind of high priest of the Lost Cause in South Carolina, described as one of those who "pledged themselves to its [the state's] redemption under a white man's government." Only a ministerial assignment to Selma, Alabama, in 1875 kept Capers from more personal involvement in the campaign itself. A letter to the state's Baptist newspaper, The Working Christian, called on "The Christian Patriots of South Carolina" to refrain from violence and yet to do all in their power to support "our great ambition." The state's Democratic Central Committee appointed a "day of prayer and fasting" for Hampton's supporters. Testifying to the widespread religious support, one seemingly amazed observer noted that "even Episcopal and Catholic" churches observed the rite. The encouragement given by church leaders clearly urged white South Carolinians to think of themselves as Confederate Christians. (29)

Hampton thus clearly fits into Charles Reagan Wilson's paradigm of "Crusading Christian Confederates." Hampton has been described as "a churchman of influence," though he made few statements about and evinced little personal interest in theological matters. Nevertheless, conservative Carolinians, whose religious devotion had intensified in the crucible of Confederate defeat, structured the celebrations of his candidacy so that the campaign seemed blessed with divine legitimacy. The general, who already embodied the virtues and values that white southerners believed constituted the noble crusader for southern independence, was now enveloped in a patina of religious expression. The way in which the Hampton campaign combined the religious and the political suggests that the multiple themes scholars have noted in the celebration of Confederate memory often merged. Hampton's 1876 campaign mingled the concerns of those, like politicians, who "interpreted the Lost Cause as a defense of states' rights, and ... waved the gray shirt to enable former Confederates to win election," with the priorities of those, like ministers, who utilized the Lost Cause as "a set of symbols of virtue and an overarching myth which embodied threatened values." The Democratic Party leadership sought to summon the aesthetic vision of a lost world, a world of brave Confederate soldiers and faithful slaves surrounded by an aura of Confederate religion. (30)

In addition to the expressed longing for a lost past, the campaign's symbolic tableaux, such as the young woman's casting off her black robes and chains upon Hampton's arrival, became a theater of racial and gendered anxiety. It chronicled white South Carolinians' humiliation at their perceived loss of traditional freedoms and their fears that domination by Yankee radicals and their black "pawns" might continue. These fears had deep antebellum roots. A number of historians have made the argument that white male southerners, especially those who lived during or who could remember the slave system, became particularly jealous of their liberties since they had seen with their own eyes the terrors of bondage and servitude. Heavily invested in the construction of their political identities as freeborn and independent, they fiercely asserted that no slippage into bondage would occur. (31) After the Old South society failed at war, southern conservatives, wanting to protect their own liberty within an ordered polity, worried over the often amorphous shape of postbellum racial and gendered identities. Tableaux, performed in connection with the political struggle of Redemption, became a way to exorcise these anxieties by establishing clear racial and gendered boundaries. Joel Williamson has written that the notion of "place"--designated social spaces within hierarchical systems--was a central concept in the vocabulary of southern conservatism. The Hampton campaign tableaux sought to establish "place" for emancipated African Americans and deployed the bodies of white women to exhibit, and legitimize, conservative ideology in the postbellum South. (32)

Reconstruction-era South Carolinian white men had much to ponder as they contemplated their identifies as freeborn and independent citizens. Complete and total subjugation already seemed to be a reality to many white South Carolinians. John Leland of Laurens, who had been imprisoned in 1872 for "Ku-Klux" activity, wrote two years later that he felt "irresistibly impelled to publish to the world that the grand old State, declared to be free, sovereign and independent, [a] hundred years ago, is now deposed, gagged, and trampled in the dust." Similarly, the Greenville Enterprise and Mountaineer anxiously reported in the midst of the 1876 campaign that the federal government planned "an armed invasion of the State." (33)

These fears of complete domination by a regnant radicalism using black "pawns" also appeared prominently in the Redeemers' rhetorical trope of "corruption" in the state government. One South Carolinian, though no supporter of Hampton, referred with disgust to the state's Reconstruction government as "a grand carnival of crime and debauchery." Similarly, Robert Barnwell Rhett, writing in 1875, grumbled that the political subjugation of South Carolina constituted at its heart a moral problem, having been occasioned by "the decline of virtue, and the depravity of the people." Benjamin F. Perry, in one of the opening speeches of the Hampton campaign, declaimed against "the corruption of the State and federal Government," its "extravagance," and its "enormous taxation." Tyrannical power, with tendencies essentially venal and corrupt, threatened the state, these critics protested. Using the language of outraged republicanism, South Carolina Conservatives thus constructed for themselves an enemy deeply immoral and opposed to virtue; with the images of "carnival" and "depravity," it was also an enemy tainted by religious impurity. (34)

The anxiety over the corruption of the Reconstruction government and the threat it posed to white Carolina liberty escalated after Governor Chamberlain's October 7 decision to ban the Democratic rifle clubs. These fears were further exacerbated by the fact that the Democrats did not have a monopoly on paramilitary organizations. A black militia, under Chamberlain's command, served as the militant arm of the Republican Party. Conservatives worried about this "lawless mob," making accusations that "the Republican party has precipitated riot and murder upon the State." The possibility of so-called riot and murder had steadily increased with armed clashes occurring between blacks and whites, particularly in Hamburg in early July and Cainhoy in mid-October. Perhaps most ominous of all to white South Carolinians, in Aiken County two African American men allegedly attacked and attempted to rob "a respectable white woman, in her own home with ... her husband at work in the fields...." Conservatives thus thought they saw their deepest anxieties coming to pass even as they sought to reassert their political hegemony. The image of "a lawless mob" debauching the state's wealth and honor in the legislature coalesced with the image of two emancipated slaves assaulting a white woman in the home, while her husband performed the work in the fields. (35)

Carolina Conservatives surely felt that they had stepped through Alice's looking glass to a world where white men found themselves disarmed, former slaves joined militia units with the blessing of the state government, and sacred white womanhood suffered insult within the enclosed household. These confused patriarchs responded with a gendered rhetoric of resistance that had long been a part of the rhetorical panoply of South Carolina Conservatives. Stephanie McCurry has argued that lowcountry planters appealed to yeoman farmers during the nullification and secession crises with a language that equated the invasion of the state with the invasion of the household. South Carolina secessionists rendered this "invasion" in terms of sexual violence, suggesting that the "violation" of the household's women and the undermining of the patriarchal prerogative would be the outcome of federal "rapacity." Both a South Carolina gendered as feminine and the actual wives, sisters, and mothers who inhabited the domestic sphere faced "violation," if yeomen did not resist an intrusive central government. The only options available became "manly resistance" or effeminate submission. (36)

A similar gendered language appears in the Lost Cause aesthetic of the Hampton campaign. J. P. Thomas of Charlotte's Carolina Military Institute, at a Democratic meeting in Edgefield on August 10, 1876, called upon the "sturdy yeoman" to take a stand for "Old Mother, South Carolina." John Leland, who dedicated his memoirs "[t]o the Women of South Carolina," also used gendered terms to describe the allegedly illegitimate Reconstruction government: "Her [South Carolina's] seat and name has been usurped by a brazen-faced strumpet ...." Leland, so fearful that the government of his beloved state had turned to foreign gods, ascribed the intensity and the excitement of Hampton's march to "the women of the State," to whom he sang numerous paeans. (37)

Gendered images such as these drew both on the antebellum ideal of the "Southern Lady" and the increased importance this concept had acquired in the mythology of the Lost Cause. The peculiar concerns of the antebellum world had already fashioned the white southern lady, in W. J. Cash's unforgettable words, into "the South's Palladium, ... the shield-bearing Athena gleaming whitely in the clouds." The crushing defeat of the Civil War created an even more elaborate mythology of womanhood. With white men fearing that the Old South had gone down in flames because of their moral failure, white women became the repository of southern virtue. Furthermore, Gaines M. Foster has suggested that women protected their male relatives from insecurity about theft masculinity and its prerogatives by welcoming home theft Confederate husbands, sons, and brothers with enthusiasm and by declining to use the interstices of war to challenge the patriarchy of the Old South. After the war, the idea of pure Confederate womanhood thus became an essential element of the Lost Cause mythology, stabilizing the hierarchy of the family and of southern society by buttressing the sagging defenses of white southern manhood. (38)

Perhaps it assumes too much to think that anxieties over the meaning of masculinity and sexuality found relief simply because the women of southern households had welcomed their men home. Proof that such uneasiness remained a feature of the white male southern mind into the 1870s appears in Leland's depiction of the state government as "a brazen-faced strumpet." Conservative fears about the decline of republican virtue and the dangers of a Radical government that Conservative rhetoric rendered as a "loose woman" intermingled with concerns about the potency of white manhood. Calling on Carolina men to once again stand up for their "Mother, South Carolina," the 1876 campaign offered them another opportunity to live up to their charge to defend home and hearth. The fact that Chamberlain could disband their rifle clubs while arming a black militia viscerally reminded them of the humiliation of 1865. Would the white southern lady remain faithful during this new crisis? Could white southern men defend their domestic and political space, ensuring the loyalty of their women and destroying the "brazen-faced strumpet" in the Columbia statehouse who threatened their liberties?

The Hampton Days answered these questions with a resounding rebel yell of affirmation. Hampton's cavalcade passed from acclamation to acclamation in its triumphal tour of the upcountry. The celebration in the small town of Ninety-Six, for example, featured a mounted procession of Confederate veterans reportedly two miles long. At stop after stop, the Hampton Days became a stylized round of torchlight parades, fireworks, cannonade, and speeches by Hampton and lesser Confederate lights that called for resistance and unity among white Conservatives. While women had always played a prominent part in the organization of these campaign events, the proscription of the rifle clubs in October seems to have thrust them into an even more crucial role. Alfred Brockenbrough Williams called the tableau performed at Sumter on October 7, the incident described at the beginning of this article, the "unspoken answer" to the disbanding of the clubs. He wrote of the sheer emotive power of seeing a chain-wrapped figure, wearing clothes of mourning, transformed into "a radiant young woman in pure white[,] ... tall and stately, head up-lifted and eyes shining like stars...." Her liberation galvanized the audience into a congregation of overwrought men and women, whooping rebel yells and willing to do anything to insure the defeat of radicalism. (39)

A similarly gendered spectacle made the Hampton Day at Winnsboro even more elaborate than Sumter's offering. As Hampton made his way to the speakers' platform amid yet more rebel yells and a greeting from Confederate hero Matthew C. Butler, a young girl with a cap and staff, designated Liberty, raised another young belle, a prostrate South Carolina, to her feet. Nearby stood a feminine Justice bearing a sword, while a choir sang "patriotic songs." The tableau reached its climax as a local minister offered prayer. The participation of ministers in these tableaux, along with the evangelical hymn-singing and religious rhetoric, made the image of white womanhood an even more powerful symbol. By juxtaposing Confederate symbolism with white womanhood, and combining both these powerful ideas in the iconography of the South's revivalistic faith, celebrants of Confederate memory transformed onlookers into a true people's army for the coming revolution. (40)

White South Carolina women's public expressions of loyalty to Hampton and his cause strengthened post-Appomattox southern manhood. The rich symbolism they enacted linked Carolina conservatism to divine values. Their bodies became public texts in which the conservative ethos challenged and defeated Reconstruction radicalism. Nina Silber has written that gender, "[b]ecause of its association with `natural' and immutable functions, ... has offered a potent metaphor for legitimizing political relationships, for making power arrangements seem basic and fundamental." The Hampton campaign not only used the legitimizing language of gender but also fused it with the sacred values of the evangelical South. Concerns over the loss of rights and the invasion of property blended with the mythic dimensions of the images of womanhood used in the campaign, transforming the women of the Hampton tableaux into the verisimilitude of purity and divine endorsement for the Democratic effort. Beautiful white southern bodies, central to the aesthetic of the Lost Cause, shaped the inchoate longings of yeoman Red Shirts into a conservative ethos that celebrated evangelical truth and depicted the Hampton campaign as a battle for ancient Carolina liberties. (41)

Perhaps the most elaborate tableau occurred at Aiken on October 20. Tensions ran at fever pitch in this region throughout 1876. The Hamburg Massacre had occurred in Aiken County in July of that year. Just three days before Hampton's arrival, President Ulysses S. Grant issued a proclamation supporting Chamberlain's earlier disbanding of the Democratic rifle clubs. When Hampton arrived in Aiken, South Carolina's Palmetto flag greeted him, flying above a stand adorned "with garlands of evergreens." Aiken celebrated southern womanhood by building a platform for the white women of the town and decorating it with mottoes such as "Truth," "Virtue," and "Honor." Hampton, saluted with a legend that read "Hampton--We Love, Welcome, and Honor Him," spoke of his "sorrow that the people of Aiken had been subjected to so much undeserved persecution." Chamberlain, almost as if he desired to play his assigned role in this unfolding drama, decided to arrest a number of suspected "Ku Klux" on the day of Hampton's arrival. (42)

Conservatives used the Hampton campaign's gendered symbolism to dramatize basic power relationships and stave off anxieties about masculinity. Race also played a crucial, if surprising, role both in the iconography of the campaign and in its rhetorical constructions. The anxieties of South Carolina Conservatives seem to have been primarily connected to the threat of "radicalism"; images of emancipated blacks as sexual threats to white southern women rarely played a role in the campaign. Hampton's policy toward South Carolina blacks seems to have been to "fuse" with black Republican leaders by offering them some of the spoils of patronage. Such intended cooperation, therefore, played a part in the campaign imagery. The garlanded speakers' platform at Aiken, for example, featured what Williams described as "a large cartoon" that "represented the Palmetto [tree] prostrate and white and Negro men working together to lift it and the caption `While's There's Life, There's Hope."' This poster suggests a very different symbolic world from the one that would emerge in the 1890s. In 1876 black men were still seen as faithful retainers with a role to play in the southern social order. Only later, in the late 1880s and 1890s, would they become "black beasts"--inherently dangerous political, sexual, and economic threats--in the white southern mind. The Lost Cause aesthetic in 1876 allowed that white women's bodies had been symbolically, but not literally, victimized by the politics of radicalism. The complete dismantling of the southern social order in the coupling of black and white bodies lay beyond the margins of this generation's cultural imagination, a lurking terror hidden from view. (43)

The racial demonization of African American women, however, did occur. The use of young, white, female bodies to legitimize and explicate an ideology implicitly assumed the marginalization of other bodies. The language of the Hampton campaign placed African American women outside the Conservative dream for South Carolina. In part their exclusion resulted from the strong political consciousness that they exhibited before and during the Hampton campaign. Disfranchised and economically vulnerable, African American women believed the Republican Party's suggestion that a Hampton victory would mean a return to slavery. Thus, black women willingly shamed black men who had "crossed Jordan" to the Democratic cause. African American Red Shirt Edward Henderson described how some of his comrades found that their wives "wouldn't sleep in the same bed with them" if they voted with the Democrats, while Jonas Weeks, the aforementioned Richland County black Democrat, testified to a congressional committee that a crowd of angry black women had "called me all kinds of names and they would pull off my breeches and call me a devil." Preston Taylor, a black Democrat who had the temerity to cry "Hurrah for Hampton!" as he left the polls, later reported that "the women jumped on me and tore off all my clothes...." (44)

The political consciousness of black women clearly horrified white Conservatives as much as it rattled black Democrats, since the women's political actions challenged the sacred boundaries of the social order both as women and as black people. Thus, African American women became symbolic counterpoints to the purity of white southern womanhood, that integral symbol of the southern conservative ethos. The rhetoric of the campaign contrasted the "southern lady" sharply with black female supporters of the Republicans. Fashioned by the Democrats as unruly, disorderly, and violent, black women became a symbol of Radical Republicanism in its most appalling aspects. One of the chief charges leveled against "scalawag" Franklin Moses, for example, concerned his alleged dancing "with mulatto prostitutes." Williams wrote that Moses, by "flaunting his vices," helped move white Carolinians from the "habit of submission" to "burning anger and craving for combat." Conservatives believed that black women used their bodies as instruments of political subversion, corrupting white Carolina liberties. (45)

Images of disorderly black women abounded in Alfred B. Williams's accounts of the Hampton campaign. Describing a Republican meeting of black South Carolinians on Edisto Island, Williams noted the "very ugly mood" of black women, who seemed "especially maddened and foaming with rage." In another article Williams suggested that the faithfulness of black men to their former masters faced a twin threat from the "Union Leagues" (Republican Party political cells similar to the Democratic clubs) and the "taunts and abuse of incensed women." Black women greeted the final Hampton Day in Charleston with jeers and catcalls that Williams described as "frantic." (46)

The idea of black women embodying political and sexual disorder epitomized for Conservatives the forces of social chaos that threatened the ordered world of white Carolinians. South Carolina matron Florella Meynardie's 1879 novel, Amy Oakly; or, The Reign of the Carpet-Bagger, contains a fictional representation of a Hampton Day celebration in Charleston in which black women, described as "female demons," shout "bitter, insulting invectives" at the Red Shirts. Significantly, the language of religious impurity also fills Meynardie's descriptions. She uses terms such as "polluted wretch[es]" to describe the black and mulatto women who made up the derisive crowd. Moreover, these unruly women are depicted as destroyers of their own households, with much of their venom directed at their own husbands. In one of Meynardie's scenes, a black woman threatens to rip the red shirt off of her "old man, dat varmit Ike," if he were to don it and join the Democrats. (47) Thus for Meynardie, and it seems for many South Carolina Conservatives, politically aware black women came to represent the obliteration of distinction, boundary, balance, and limitation--all quite important terms in the political and social grammar of conservatism. When these women rejected the patriarchal prerogative of their husbands by criticizing their political choices and refused to support Hampton as the new white "master," the women's behavior seeped into the political realm. Unlike the young white southern women who acted out the drama of Carolina's straggle for liberty while personifying the virtues of the defeated South, African American women's uncontrolled bodies flaunted their subversion and challenged the harmony of household and republic. In the cathedral of the Lost Cause, jeering, taunting, politically aware black women became, in the eyes of Carolina Conservatives, the gargoyles leering out from the shadows.

Hampton's victory would be a narrow one. Both Radical Republicans and Conservative Democrats perpetrated fraud and used violent coercion to manipulate the vote. The byzantine machinations that led to Hampton's accession to the governorship need not be recited here. Certainly pervasive fraud and extreme brutality made Hampton's victory possible; testimony before Congress later revealed that intimidation had occurred in every South Carolina county, with Aiken and Edgefield, the bailiwick of Martin W. Gary, supplying the most egregious examples. Nevertheless, the commitment of the former Confederates to the resurrected Lost Cause represented by the Hampton campaign provided the crucial unifying element for a white populace that had shown little unity since Appomattox. By April 1877, with the federal government unwilling to intervene, Hampton would inaugurate what William J. Cooper Jr. has called "the Conservative regime." (48)

The celebration of Hampton's election reemphasized the themes of divine vindication that had been so important in the campaign. An article in the Baptist Working Christian announced, "God has crowned the closing year with another blessing. Wade Hampton is our governor. We cannot doubt that every good and perfect gift (and this among them) cometh down from the Father of Lights." "What hath God wrought!" a jubilant John Leland wrote at the end of the campaign: God had delivered South Carolina from her "more than Egyptian bondage." (49)

Most important, Hampton's victory justified the persistence of Confederate memory. "In all the grief and mourning of our stricken State over her `Lost Cause,"' Leland wrote, "there are found no tears of penitence." South Carolina had not renounced her stand for Confederate nationhood. A sense of Confederate identity continued to play an important role in the southern conservative ethos by informing its defiance of interference by the national government. Confederate memory seemed more sacred than ever, as Conservative South Carolinians saw in the Hampton campaign and victory a resurgence and exoneration of the southern cause. Post-Reconstruction South Carolina was, Leland asserted, "re-baptized with the blood of some of her bravest and best." The honor of the state, in question during Radical rule, was restored, as "she once more proudly holds forth her time-honored escutcheon." (50)

Recent interpreters of the Lost Cause have seen it as a nonsectional memorial to sacrifice and death and a celebration of white Americanism that, at the turn of the century, could "easily enter the mainstream of national memory." This view fits easily with an earlier analysis that saw Confederate mythology as a colossal effort to restore southern self-esteem, an effort that never challenged the idea of sectional reunion. Edward L. Ayers has even postulated that the proliferation of Confederate veterans' organizations signaled the South's involvement in a broad, national culture of nostalgia rather than an assertion of its militant difference. (51)

The Hampton Days celebrations challenge these conclusions. An examination of these public spectacles suggests that the interpretation of the Lost Cause has suffered from scholars' shifting the focal point of Confederate memorial culture to the 1880s and 1890s. The perspective of those years, during which towns raised monuments in their squares and women's memorial societies laid flowers on the graves of dead Confederates, gives credence to the notion that the Lost Cause, for many white southerners, functioned as little more than a nostalgic look at the past and a prop for flagging self-esteem. An analysis of the Hampton campaign, and perhaps other Redemption political contests, demonstrates instead that the Lost Cause provided an idiom for continued resistance to the federal government and a ritual embodiment of the southern conservative ethos. Hampton's campaign shows that South Carolinians publicly celebrated the Lost Cause as a direct challenge to the federal and Republican-dominated state governments. Fearing domination and the loss of republican liberties, Conservatives turned toward a gendered language of insurgency. The bodies of white southern women were placed on display, exhibiting in sometimes elaborate tableaux the hopes and yearnings of South Carolina Conservatives, even as the language of the campaign expressed the terror of uncontrolled black female bodies. The language of the Lost Cause, before it became inscribed on stone monuments, functioned as a grammar of recalcitrance and as a vehicle for the white southern conservative ethos.

(1) "October '76, Critical for Carolina," in Alfred Brockenbrough Williams scrapbook (South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia; hereinafter cited as SCL). This scrapbook, assembled in 1926, contains newspaper articles that Williams wrote as an "Eyewitness Reporter ... on Events of 1876 in South Carolina." Williams later published this material in a slightly altered form as Hampton and His Red Shirts: South Carolina's Deliverance in 1876 (Charleston, 1935). The author would like to thank James Farmer and Val Lumans for reading this article in its early stages. Special thanks also to Robin Copp and the staff of the South Caroliniana Library.

(2) Good political histories of the Reconstruction era abound, including William Gillette, Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869-1879 (Baton Rouge and London, 1979); W. McKee Evans, Ballots and Fence Rails: Reconstruction on the Lower Cape Fear (Chapel Hill, 1966); and Kenneth M. Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction, 1865-1877 (New York, 1965). However, these important works ignore the role of culture and ideology. Eric Foner has made use of religion and social history in his monumental account of the Reconstruction era, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York and other cities, 1988). However, much of his thesis turns on rather traditional political history combined with class analysis. See pp. 573-74 for his discussion of South Carolina and the Hampton campaign. Joel Williamson, After Slavery: The Negro in South Carolina During Reconstruction, 1861-1877 (Chapel Hill, 1965) offers the best revisionist picture of Reconstruction in South Carolina. One very fine work that views itself as "post-revisionist" is Edmund L. Drago, Hurrah for Hampton! Black Red Shirts in South Carolina During Reconstruction (Fayetteville, Ark., 1998), xi (quotation). Examining Hampton's African American supporters, Drago has dealt with some quite controversial material in a way that illuminates questions of agency and the complicated issue of "black conservatism." However, any new revisionism, including one that focuses on cultural materials like my study, should not obscure the level of violence endured by Afro-Carolinians during the Redemption contests. After the 1876 Ellenton riot, for example, whites executed between thirty and fifty black Republicans, including South Carolina state representative Simon P. Coker of Barnwell County. Richard Zuczek, State of Rebellion: Reconstruction in South Carolina (Columbia, S.C., 1998), 176, 178. Wilbert L. Jenkins makes the important point that many lowcountry blacks actively and successfully resisted white violence in 1876. In a particularly sad irony, the only truly proactive measure taken by the federal government during South Carolina's scurrilous election involved stationing troops to prevent African Americans from intimidating white voters in Charleston County. See Jenkins, Seizing the New Day: African Americans in Post-Civil War Charleston (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1998), 150-52.

(3) "Plan of Campaign" (1876), Martin Witherspoon Gary Papers (SCL); also reprinted in Francis Butler Simkins and Robert Hilliard Woody, South Carolina During Reconstruction (Chapel Hill, 1932), 564-69 (quotation on p. 566).

(4) Ibid., 568.

(5) Eugene D. Genovese, The Southern Tradition: The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1994), 22. The literature views southern conservatism primarily as a species of intellectual history. In works such as The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South (New York, 1965) and Southern Tradition, Genovese has argued for a genuine southern intellectual tradition that defended hierarchical social relationships, based on the rule of the planter class. An opposing argument to Genovese's can be found in James Oakes, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders (New York, 1982), esp. xi-xiii; and Oakes, Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South (New York, 1990). Drew Gilpin Faust has located the meaning of southern conservatism in the proslavery argument, a defense of organic social relations shaped by slavery. This assessment appears most prominently in the introduction to Faust, ed., The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830-1860 (Baton Rouge and London, 1981), 1-20.

(6) The work of anthropologist Clifford Geertz has challenged the notion that lost worldviews can only be excavated from traditional manuscript sources. In Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth Century Bali (Princeton, 1980) Geertz writes that "ideas are not ... unobservable mental stuff." Ideas, he suggests, appear in "[a]rguments, melodies, formulas, maps, and pictures" not as "idealities to be stared at but texts to be read" (p. 135). The phenomenon of the Hampton Days offers one such "text to be read."

(7) John G. Barrett, Sherman's March Through the Carolinas (Chapel Hill, 1956), 39 (first quotation); Zuczek, State of Rebellion, 38-40 (second and third quotations on p. 40), 47-63, 162, 166.

(8) Zuczek, State of Rebellion, 30, 52-57, 125-27; Walter Edgar, South Carolina: A History (Columbia, S.C., 1998), 402-3 (quotation on p. 403).

(9) Constitution and Rules of the Richland Rifle Club of Columbia, S.C., with a Roll of Its Officers and Members (Columbia, S.C., 1874), 3, in Records of the Richland Rifle Club (SCL). One inflated statistic had the numbers involved in the clubs as high as 75,000, over 1,000 more than the number of white male voters in the state. Governor Chamberlain, who had no reason to minimize the tally of participants, told congressional investigators that approximately 20,000 to 30,000 had marched as Hampton supporters. See U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Privileges and Elections, South Carolina in 1876: Report on the Denial of the Elective Franchise in South Carolina at the State and National Election of 1876, to Accompany Senate Miscellaneous Document 48, Forty-Fourth Congress, Second Session (Washington, D.C., 1877), 149, 459; hereinafter cited as Report on the Denial of the Elective Franchise. Special thanks to Robin Copp at the South Caroliniana Library for helping me hunt down this source.

(10) Hampton M. Jarrell, Wade Hampton and the Negro: The Road Not Taken (Columbia, S.C., 1949), 41-42 (quotation on p. 41). Surprisingly, very little worthwhile material on Hampton is available beyond standard military histories. Much else, like the Jarrell account, represents ancestor worship; Manly Wade Wellman, Giant in Gray: A Biography of Wade Hampton of South Carolina (New York and London, 1949) is one example.

(11) William R. Brooksher and David K. Snider, Glory at a Gallop: Tales of the Confederate Cavalry (Washington, D.C., and other cities, 1993), 213. For a discussion of Hampton's military prowess and image in South Carolina see the entry on Wade Hampton by W. Scott Poole, in David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler, eds., The Encyclopedia of the American Civil War: A Political, Social, and Military History (5 vols.; Santa Barbara, Calif., and other cities, 2000), II, 920.

(12) Zuczek, State of Rebellion, 173.

(13) "Hampton Campaign Opens at Anderson," in Williams scrapbook (first four quotations); "Hurrah for Greenville!" Greenville (S.C.) Enterprise and Mountaineer, September 13, 1876, p. 1, c. 1 (fifth quotation).

(14) Blew Gilpin Faust has noted this basic tension within antebellum southern conservatism, especially in South Carolina. Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge and London, 1982), 40-43; Faust, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South (Baton Rouge and London, 1988), 38-40.

(15) Gordon Kipling, Enter the King: Theatre, Liturgy, and Ritual in the Medieval Civic Triumph (Oxford and other cities, 1998), 3 (quotation), 6, 28, 39.

(16) Simon P. Newman, Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia, 1997), xi (quotation); Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 (Athens, Ga., 1980); Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York and Oxford, 1982); Kenneth S. Greenberg, Honor and Slavery (Princeton, 1996).

(17) Interpreting the Lost Cause as primarily an aesthetic does not deny that religion or economic interest played a critical role in the movement. Aesthetic theory offers a way to consider the actual responses of listeners and spectators. More than a simple psychological interpretation, it provides historians with a tool to examine how affective sentiments are elicited through complex symbolisms tied to larger political, religious, and economic contexts. The use of aesthetics to understand the Lost Cause seems especially germane after considering the work of theorist Henri Delacroix, who referred to aesthetic representation as "a game of ghosts," in which longing finds expression in the construction of a lost golden age. The postmortem celebration of the Confederacy functioned in this fashion; white South Carolinians dramatized the Lost Cause as a set of meditative images that represented southern conservatism. See Delacroix, "Varieties of Aesthetic Experience," in Eliseo Vivas and Murray Krieger, eds., The Problems of Aesthetics: A Book of Readings (New York and Toronto, 1953), 279-85 (quotation on p. 282). A similar interpretation of the meaning of aesthetic experience appears in Roger Scruton, "Recent Aesthetics in England and America," in Scruton, The Aesthetic Understanding: Essays in the Philosophy of Art and Culture (Manchester, Eng., 1983), 3-13.

(18) "The Seventh of September," Greenville (S.C.) Enterprise and Mountaineer, September 6, 1876, p. 1, c. 7 (first quotation); "Twelve Stirring Days in '76 Campaign" (second and third quotations), and "Spirit of Carolinians Indomitable" (fourth and fifth quotations), both in Williams scrapbook.

(19) Drago, Hurrah for Hampton! 9-10; William Watts Ball, The State That Forgot: South Carolina's Surrender to Democracy (Indianapolis, 1932), 159. For more on the origin of the red shirts, see Oakley Park, the Martin W. Gary House and "Red Shirt Shrine," in Edgefield, South Carolina, maintained by the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

(20) "Hampton and Chamberlain Sketched," in Williams scrapbook; "A South Carolinian" [Belton O'Neall Townsend], "The Political Condition of South Carolina," Atlantic Monthly, 39 (February 1877), 183.

(21) "Speech of Gen. Wade Hampton," Pickens (S.C.) Keowee Courier, October 6, 1866, p. 1, c. 1; a full account appears in Louise Matheson Bell, ed., Rebels in Grey: Soldiers from Pickens District, 1861-1865 (Seneca, S.C., 1984), 113, 123-24. See also Henry Tazewell Thompson, Ousting the Carpetbagger from South Carolina (Columbia, S.C., 1926), 26-27.

(22) "Straight-Out Fight Gets Under Way," in Williams scrapbook (first and second quotations); Richland County Democratic Club minutes, March 1878 (third quotation), in Records of the Democratic Party, Richland County, Columbia, S.C. (SCL).

(23) "A Grand Occasion," Greenville (S.C.) Enterprise and Mountaineer, September 20, 1876, p. 4, c. 3.

(24) Report on the Denial of the Elective Franchise, 260 (first quotation); Delacroix, "Varieties of Aesthetic Experience," 282 (second quotation). See also n. 17. One way of understanding this "game of ghosts" is to incorporate Mircea Eliade's notion of "eternal return," an important concept in the human religious imagination. Ritual, scholars of religion argue, provides a means for participants to return to "mythic time" in a way that stabilizes the social relations of present, or "profane," time. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return or, Cosmos and History, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, 1954); and Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York, 1959), 75-76. Grace Elizabeth Hale has an instructive discussion of what Eliade would call "mythic time" in Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (New York, 1998), 51-67. Hale notes that in cultural materials such as the Uncle Remus stories, white southerners constructed an image of the "before-the-war Negro" that transformed the past into a happy realm of easy biracial familiarity and loyal retainers (p. 59).

(25) Drago, Hurrah for Hampton! esp. 12; Ball, State That Forgot, 161 (quotation); Zuczek, State of Rebellion, 93-108. Zuczek downplays the role of the federal government in the elimination of the Klan and yet notes that "hundreds" of people were arrested (p. 108).

(26) Senate Miscellaneous Documents, 44 Cong., 2 Sess., No. 48: South Carolina in 1876: Testimony as to the Denial of the Elective Franchise in South Carolina at the Elections of 1875 and 1876 (3 vols., Serials 1727-29; Washington, D.C., 1877), I, 563 (first quotation), 965 (second quotation), 959 (third quotation). The testimony of Merriman Washington, Aaron Mitchell, Jonas Weeks, Asbury Green, and other African American Red Shirts is annotated and reprinted in full in Drago, Hurrah for Hampton! 57-94 (first quotation on p. 63; second quotation on p. 81; third quotation on p. 73).

(27) Thompson, Ousting the Carpetbagger from South Carolina, 26 (first quotation); William Arthur Sheppard, Red Shirts Remembered: Southern Brigadiers of the Reconstruction Period (Atlanta, 1940), 102 (third quotation). Excerpts from a number of the speeches made by Hampton to black audiences were compiled into a campaign pamphlet entitled Free Men! Free Ballots!! Free Schools!!! The Fledges of Gen. Wade Hampton, Democratic Candidate for Governor, to the Colored People of South Carolina, 1865-1876 (n.p., 1876), 3 (second quotation); a copy can be found at the South Caroliniana Library. Stephen Kantrowitz notes that for most Conservative Democrats in 1876, "white government" did not mean "skin color as much as ideology." Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (Chapel Hill and London, 2000), 73. A good discussion of Hampton and race appears in William J. Cooper Jr., The Conservative Regime: South Carolina, 1877-1890 (Baltimore, 1968; reprint, Baton Rouge and London, 1991), 84-93.

(28) Democratic Club of Liberty Hill, S.C., June 6, 1868, meeting minutes (SCL); Richland County Democratic Club minutes, September 7, 1876 (first quotation); "October '76, Critical for Carolina," in Williams scrapbook (second quotation); Report on the Denial of the Elective Franchise, 304 (third quotation).

(29) Walter B. Capers, The Soldier-Bishop: Ellison Capers (New York, 1912), 120-21 (first quotation on p. 120), 155; Wilson, Baptized in Blood, 55-57; "The Christian Patriots of South Carolina," Working Christian, November 16, 1876 (second and third quotations); [Townsend], "Political Condition of South Carolina," 186 (fourth and fifth quotations).

(30) Wilson, Baptized in Blood, chap. 2 (first, third, and fourth quotations on p. 37); Wellman, Giant in Gray, 32-33 (second quotation on p. 32).

(31) A fuller discussion of this phenomenon appears in J. Mills Thornton III, Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800-1860 (Baton Rouge and London, 1978), esp. xviii; and J. William Harris, Plain Folk and Gentry in a Slave Society: White Liberty and Black Slavery in Augusta's Hinterlands (Middletown, Conn., 1985), chap. 1.

(32) Joel Williamson has argued that the creation of an "organic society" in the Old South constituted the primary tenet of the southern conservative ethos. In such a society, "people would know their own places and functions...." Place was "the vital word in the vocabulary of Conservatism, and it applied to whites as well as to blacks." Williamson, A Rage for Order: Black/White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (New York and Oxford, 1986), 17 (first and second quotations), 71 (third quotation).

(33) John A. Leland, A Voice from South Carolina (Charleston, 1879), 13 (first quotation), 91-97; "A Projected Raid on South Carolina," Greenville (S.C.) Enterprise and Mountaineer, September 20, 1876, p. 4, c. 4 (second quotation).

(34) [Townsend], "Political Condition of South Carolina," 180; Robert Barnwell Rhea, "Fears for Democracy," Southern Magazine, 17 (September 1875), 311; "Speech of Ex-Gov. [Benjamin F.] Perry at Glassy Mountain Church," Greenville (S.C.) Enterprise and Mountaineer, August 30, 1876, p. 1, c. 4. Evangelical religion's connection to republicanism gave a special moral impetus to critiques of political corruption. Historians of religion and the American Revolution have done the best job explicating this tendency. See, for example, Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill, 1982); and Nathan O. Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England (New Haven and London, 1977).

(35) Zuczek, State of Rebellion, 177; "Governor Chamberlain Arming the Negroes," Greenville (S.C.) Enterprise and Mountaineer, September 20, 1876, p. 1, c. 1 (first and second quotations); "Ellenton Riots Diffuse Dread and Horror," Williams scrapbook (third quotation).

(36) Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York and Oxford, 1995), 260.

(37) "Opening of the Democratic Campaign in Edgefield County," Edgefield (S.C.) Advertiser, August 10, 1876, p. 2, c. 1 (first and second quotations); Leland, Voice from South Carolina, [iii] (third quotation), 13 (fourth quotation), 163 (fifth quotation).

(38) Wilbur J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York, 1941), 86; Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865 to 1913 (New York and Oxford, 1987), 28-29; Wilson, Baptized in Blood, 46; LeeAnn Whites, The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender: Augusta, Georgia, 1860-1890 (Athens, Ga., and London, 1995).

(39) "Ellenton Riots Diffuse Dread and Horror," and "October '76, Critical for Carolina" (quotations), both in Williams scrapbook.

(40) "Hampton Receives Ovation in Yorkville," in Williams scrapbook (quotation). The notion of the Reconstruction struggle as a kind of "people's war" appears in Zuczek, State of Rebellion, 5. Unfortunately, this otherwise excellent study of South Carolina's Reconstruction era gives little attention to the role of the Lost Cause in its discussion of while Conservatives. Walter Edgar writes that the response of white South Carolinians to the tableaux "was something akin to religious ecstasy." Edgar, South Carolina, 403-4 (quotation on p. 404).

(41) Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill and London, 1993), 7. Anthropologists such as Victor Turner have stressed the role played by bodies and their attendant biological realities in stabilizing cultural values. Ritual, Turner has written, contains twin poles of meaning--at one pole reside "physiological phenomena (blood, sexual organs, coitus, birth, [and] death)," while at the other reside "principles of organization: matriliny, patriliny, [and] kingship...." The role of "ritual action" is to link these poles of meaning and to cause "an exchange ... in which the normative referents are charged with emotional significance." The bodies of white southern women in the Lost Cause movement serve as an example of Turner's thesis: they grounded the hierarchical order of the Old South, with its concern for a white male--ordered liberty, in the allegedly stable realities of bodies and biology. Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, N.Y., and London, 1974), 55.

(42) Zuczek, State of Rebellion, 178; "Edgefield Red Shirt Shot from Ambush," in Williams scrapbook (quotations).

(43) Jarrell, Wade Hampton and the Negro, 123; "Edgefield Red Shirt Shot from Ambush," in Williams scrapbook (cartoon quotations). Joel Williamson has described this phenomenon of the 1890s as the construction of the "black beast," the image that white southerners came to hold of a new generation of black men whose uncertain status within the southern social world rendered them threats to white male sexual and economic prerogatives. Williamson, Rage for Order, 186-91.

(44) South Carolina in 1876, I, 939 (Henderson quotation), 560 (Weeks quotation), 555-56 (Taylor quotations); Drago, Hurrah for Hampton! 4043; Report on the Denial of the Elective Franchise, 327.

(45) "Straight-Out Fight Gets Under Way," in Williams scrapbook.

(46) "Spirit of Carolina Indomitable" (first and second quotations), "Radicals Close Ranks for '76 Campaign" (third and fourth quotations), "Hampton Party Reaches Charleston" (fifth quotation), all in Williams scrapbook.

(47) Florella Meynardie, Amy Oakly; or, The Reign of the Carpet-Bagger (Charleston, 1879), 130-31.

(48) The initial tally gave Hampton 92,261 votes to Chamberlain's 91,127. The extent that fraud produced this outcome becomes clear when we consider that South Carolina had 74,199 eligible white voters and 110,744 eligible black voters in 1876. This result would have required that every white male voted (and voted Democratic), with an additional 18,062 black voters, whether through free will or intimidation, casting their ballots for Hampton. Notoriously, Edgefield, Aiken, and Laurens Counties had more votes cast for Hampton than eligible voters. Report on the Denial of the Elective Franchise, 224-92, 459-64; Edgar, South Carolina, 404; Cooper, Conservative Regime, 16. Cooper's study reveals how a cultural ideology like conservatism can encounter enormous difficulty when its adherents try to put its principles into practice in political arrangements and institutions.

(49) "To The Baptists of South Carolina," Working Christian, November 16, 1876 (first quotation); Leland, Voice from South Carolina, 183 (second quotation), 152 (third quotation).

(50) Leland, Voice from South Carolina, 16 (first quotation), 184 (second and third quotations).

(51) Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth Century America (Princeton, 1997), 155 (quotation); Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking (New York, 1970), 186; Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (New York and Oxford, 1992), 334-38.

MR. POOLE is an assistant professor of history at the College of Charleston.