Stephen Kantrowitz - Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy

This is the message I bring to my people, Senator Benjamin Ryan Tillman warned the South Carolina state Democratic convention in 1918: [T]he world is passing through the greatest crisis in history. In that final year of his life, some of the particulars of the crisis were new, but most, especially the ever-looming race problem, were not. Tillmans people had seemed to stand always on the brink of racial, economic, and political catastrophe. And if the crisis was constant, so was the white citizenry he intended to awaken: more than a generation after the overthrow of Reconstruction, in an industrialized nation poised on the threshold of woman suffrage, Tillmans people still consisted of the white farming men he had idealized and derided, represented and misrepresented throughout his adult life.

Ben Tillman defined his world against the revolutions of emancipation and Reconstruction that had overtaken it in his youth. White men were supposed to exercise productive, independent mastery over individual households and Southern society as a whole, but that mastery seemed to face daunting obstacles at every turn. Black laborers aspired to autonomy. Northern corporate intereststhe money powerstrangled the Southern economy. Republicans plotted to reestablish political dominance over the region. Abetted by a handful of traitorous white Southern men, these forces were slowly forcing the regions productive white menthe farmers, Tillman called theminto hopeless servitude or perhaps even bloody revolution. Only by mobilizing beneath the banner of white supremacy could these men defeat their foes and create a peaceful and prosperous social order.

The roots of the crisis facing white patriarchy lay far in the past. Long before Tillmans birth in 1847, the regions leaders had warned of a coming struggle against an abolitionist-inspired slave insurrection. Tillmans brothers had stood among the Confederate soldiers who fought unsuccessfully to hold those threats at bay. In the mid-1870s, he himself had taken bloody part in the campaign of terror and fraud that brought down South Carolinas Reconstruction government. But the counterrevolution that the former slaveholders dubbed Redemption did not resolve the regions political and economic crises. Tillman continued fighting, first as an insurgent within the state Democratic Party, then as its leader, and finally before a national audience. Throughout his career as planter, terrorist, reformer, governor, senator, and nationally known orator, Tillman struggled to mobilize the farmersas a constituency and an idea. His vision and his voice shaped the understandings of millions and helped create the violent, repressive world of the Jim Crow South.

Tillman sought to transform the slogan white supremacy into a description of social reality, reconstructing white male authority in every sphere from the individual household to national politics. The project was crucial, for in Tillmans world racial equality was an oxymoron; one race or another would dominate, and if white men failed to rally together, their households would be invaded or subjugated by hostile forces. Whether white men faced the federal government, African Americans, or furnishing merchants, Tillman wanted them to do so as masters, not slaves. He therefore imagined a world in which the fearsome alliance of racial, financial, and federal corruption had been permanently vanquished. His idealized organic society was an agricultural arcadia in which the land-owning farmers were the salt of the earth, and called no man master.

White supremacy, more than a slogan and less than a fact, was a social argument and a political program. It consisted of ideas and practices, promises and threats, oratory and murder. The golden age Tillman imagined had no need for such a slogan, for until Reconstruction, the idea of white supremacy had been implicit in the legal, social, and economic system of slavery and had been enforced and reinforced at every level of society from the plantation to the U.S. Supreme Court. But emancipation, equal protection, and manhood suffrage had destroyed this congruence between the law and the white male monopoly on authority. As a result, white supremacy was anything but a given in the postbellum South. The economic hardships and

It was one thing to posit white male unity and another thing entirely to create and enforce it. No singular white mind existed in the postbellum South, no white volksgeist, and therefore the reconstruction of white supremacy would require new forms of mastery. Almost from the moment of their military defeat in 1865, Ben Tillman and his colleagues began a war against Reconstruction. They entered the struggle well armed, for as slaveholders and Confederate officers, they had extensive experience mobilizing white men. In the twentieth century, it has become commonplace to explain the violent campaigns they waged against Reconstruction and later insurgent political movements as the product of white Southerners racism. But historic prejudices, however powerful and pervasive, do not by themselves do the work of political organization. Black political and economic striving undoubtedly troubled many white men, but paramilitary groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and Tillmans Red-shirts did not simply rise up. Rather, men of the leadership class forged political arguments and organizations that put white mens expectations of mastery to work. In 187677, amid a national political crisis, they succeeded in overthrowing the elected Republican government of South Carolina.