Women, Gender, and Racial Violence in South Carolina, 1865--1900

W&M ScholarWorks Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects 2007 "From eager lips came shrill hurrahs": Women, gender, and racial violence in South Carolina, 1865--1900 Kate Fraser Gillin College of William & Mary - Arts & Sciences Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd Part of the African History Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, and the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Gillin, Kate Fraser, ""From eager lips came shrill hurrahs": Women, gender, and racial violence in South Carolina, 1865--1900" (2007). Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects. Paper 1539623512. https://dx.doi.org/doi:10.21220/s2-kphb-9t47 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. “FROM EAGER LIPS CAME SHRILL HURRAHS” Women, Gender, and Racial Violence in South Carolina, 1865-1900 A Dissertation Presented to The Faculty of the Department of History The College of Wilham and Mary in Virginia In Partial Fulfillment, Of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Kate Fraser Cote Gillin 2007 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. APPROVAL SHEET This dissertation is submitted in partial fulfillment of The requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Kate Fraser Cote Gillin Approvedby the Committee, February 12, 2007 Scott R. Nelson, Chair Leisa Meye: Betsy Konefal ■ O Susan Donaldson Department of English Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. DEDICATION For Peter James Gillin, my heroic Yankee and For my mother, who knew I could do it Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Acknowledgements v Abstract vi Chapter 1. Introduction and Historiography 2 Chapter II. Land, Labor, and Violence 33 Chapter III. Black Politics and Violence 66 Chapter IV. Getting Organized: The Ku Klux Klan in South Carolina 107 Chapter V. Sin and Redemption: The Election of 1876 156 Chapter VI. Strange Fruit Hanging from the Palmetto Tree: Lynching in South Carolina 198 Bibliography 244 Vita 256 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank the two advisors who guided this project- Helen Campbell Walker and Scott Reynolds Nelson. I am indebted to Professor Walker for her early influence on my studies, particularly for exposing me to the expansive range of literature that occupied her office floor. I am also deeply appreciative of the time and energy Professor Nelson spent reading and critiquing my work. Thank you for your humor and support, and for encouraging me to continue. I am also grateful for the work and support of Professors Leisa Meyer, Carol Sheriff, James Whittenburg, and Melvin Ely, whose scholarship and excellent teaching have made me a better student of history. I am particularly indebted to Dr. Barbara Bellows Rockefeller, a remarkable teacher and ally. I would also like to thank the staffs of Swem Library at The College of William and Mary in Virginia, the South Caroliniana at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, South Carolina, the South Carolina State Archives, and the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, DC. Special thanks must go to The Madeira School in McLean, Virginia for funding my final research trip to South Carolina. My deepest respect and gratitude go to the members of its history department, Sara Cleveland, John Campbell, Shields Sundberg, Larry Pratt, Lydia Nussbaum, and Paul Hager, excellent colleagues and great friends. And finally, to my beautiful family—Pete, Jack, Xander, and Phin—thank you for your faith in me, and for napping each summer day so that I could finish this project. I love you all more than you will ever know. v Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ABSTRACT In the years following the Civil War, southerners struggled to adapt to the changes wrought by the war. Many, however, worked to resist those changes. In particular, southern men fought the revised racial and gender roles that resulted from defeat and emancipation. Southern men felt emasculated by both events and sought to consolidate the control they had enjoyed before the war. In their efforts to restore their pre-war hegemony, these men used coercion and violence with regularity. White southern women were often as adamant as their male counterparts. Women of the elite classes were most eager to bolster antebellum ideals of womanhood, the privileges of which they enjoyed and guarded carefully. In keeping with the turmoil of the war, however, white women endorsed, encouraged, and engaged in acts of racial violence alongside their men. Such behavior may have been intended to preserve the antebellum order, but it served only to alter it. In addition, black women were as determined to carve out a measure of womanhood for themselves as powerfully as white women worked to keep it from them. Black women asserted their rights as mothers, wives, and independent free women in the post-war years. Ironically, they too participated in acts of intimidation and racial violence in an effort to safeguard their rights. Such activities did not simply force the inclusion of black women in white definitions of womanhood, but altered the meaning of womanhood for both races. The fields of battle on which these men and women engaged included the struggle for land and labor immediately following the war’s end; the rise of black politicization and the reaction of white Democrats; the creation of the Ku Klux Klan as an agent of both gender and politics; the election of 1876 in which men and women of both races used the political contest to assert their competing gender definitions; and the rise of lynching as the final, desperate act of antebellum white manhood. Despite the reactionary nature of white women’s activism, the fact of their activism and the powerful presence of black women in these violent exchanges reshaped the nature of southern gender roles forever. vi Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. “FROM EAGER LIPS CAME SHRILL HURRAHS”: WOMEN, GENDER, AND RACIAL VIOLENCE IN SOUTH CAROLINA, 1865-1900 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Chapter 1 Introduction and Historiography In January 1871, members of the York County, South Carolina, Klan attacked the home of a local white woman named Skates. After a scuffle, they pinned her to the ground, opened her upended legs, and poured a steaming brew of tar and lime into her vagina. They then spread the excess over her body and threatened to return if she did not leave the area within three days. Moments earlier, Skates had assisted three black men who were themselves the targets of the Klan’s violent predilections. The Klan found the men under Skates’s floorboards, dragged them from the house, and whipped them until the victims were able to escape. In their frenzy—and in response to her actions—the klansmen then turned their attention to Skates.1 The penalty they chose for her was startling, not merely because it was cruel and violent, but because of its deeply gendered nature. They simply whipped the men, or, at least, that is all they were able to do before they broke free. Skates’s “punishment” was overtly sexual and played upon her biological differences. It also far exceeded a whipping in terms of its brutality. In an era of dramatic social, political, and economic upheaval, Skates was exempt from the protections promised to certain southern women. Indeed, many women in the South after the Civil War—white and black—found that not only was their sex a useless shield against the 2 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. rampant violence of an undeclared racial war, but that gender and sexuality were often the reasons for the violence. These women, however, were empowered by this unstable period in southern history. Some found strength in their symbolic value; others chose to use their sex as a door to the wider world; still more embraced the brutality that was characteristic of the late nineteenth- century South because it suited their individual and community goals. The following chapters will explore the rise of violent assaults on southern women of both races, the gendered reasons behind postwar violence, and women’s own participation in acts of violence against others in the decades following the Civil War. The confluence of gender, sexuality, race, and violence was not a post-war phenomenon, but in a brief period of time, it achieved a heretofore unheard of level of intensity with repercussions throughout southern society. The Confederate surrender in April 1865 inaugurated a struggle throughout the American South: to what extent would the ruling class of wealthy white men allow newly freed black men and women to enjoy the right of self-determination? The process was complicated by a number of factors, including the rise of a southern middle class—both black and white—the weakening of elite hegemony during the war, black enfranchisement, and the physical devastation of the South. The post-war, Reconstruction, and Redemption eras were nothing if not unsteady as the South dragged itself toward the turn of the century. With each agonizing stage in the South’s recovery, white southerners introduced greater social distinctions and 1 Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck, A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lvnchings.

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