Palmetto Studies
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Hampton, Wade (1818-1902), American army officer and statesman, born in Charleston, South Carolina, grandson and namesake of a landowner who at his death in 1835 was reputed to be the richest planter in the U.S. Hampton studied law at the University of South Carolina but did not enter practice, instead devoting his time to the management of his extensive estates. He was a member of the South Carolina legislature from 1852 to 1861. At the outbreak of the American Civil War he raised and equipped at his own expense a force known as the Hampton Legion, which participated in the First Battle of Bull Run and in the Peninsular campaign. Hampton was commissioned a brigadier general in the Confederate army in 1862 and a major general in 1863. He was of great assistance in the raids of the Confederate cavalryman James Ewell Brown (Jeb) Stuart, and after Stuart's death he assumed command of the entire cavalry corps. He was promoted to the rank of lieutenant general in 1865. Hampton was elected governor of South Carolina in 1876 and reelected in 1878. He served in the U.S. Senate from 1879 to 1891. From 1893 to 1897 he was the federal commissioner of railroads.[1] In 1876 the Red Shirts, a militant white political organization, supported Wade Hampton, a former Confederate general and the Democratic Party candidate for governor, against the Republican incumbent, Daniel H. Chamberlain of Massachusetts. Bribes and intimidation occurred on both sides. The Red Shirts engineered an apparent victory for Hampton, but the election results were contested, with both sides crying fraud. As it happened, the presidential election that year was also in doubt because of contested electoral votes in four states, three of which—South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana—were in the South. The Republican presidential candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, needed those votes to barely defeat his Democratic opponent, Samuel J. Tilden. He got them. Whether a deal was struck, or whether the Republicans merely gave assurances to cease interfering in the South, Tilden did not challenge the national result, and the Republicans did not challenge Hampton’s claim to the governorship. Hayes withdrew the remaining federal troops from the state when he took office in March 1877. The Democrats had returned to power in South Carolina, and it was to be essentially a one-party state for almost a hundred years thereafter. In subsequent decades the Democrats strengthened their control of state politics by disfranchising the state’s black population.[2] A number of competent officers served in the army, including 71 graduates of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, established just ten years earlier. However, the majority of the officers on duty were newly commissioned and lacked experience. Early in 1812, in anticipation of hostilities, President Madison hastily appointed two major generals and three brigadier generals to lead the preparations for war. All were veterans of the American Revolution (1775-1783), but most had compiled only mediocre combat records and had long since left military service. The senior brigadier general on the staff, James Wilkinson, had faced accusations of treason along with former vice president Aaron Burr in 1807, but was later acquitted. Wade Hampton of South Carolina, the most competent of the new generals, had developed a contempt for Wilkinson that eventually overshadowed his own military abilities. The three generals who most distinguished themselves in high command during the war, Andrew Jackson, Jacob Brown, and William Henry Harrison, all held state militia commissions in 1812.
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