University of South Carolina Scholar Commons University South Caroliniana Society - Annual South Caroliniana Library Report of Gifts 4-21-2007 2007 Report of Gifts (140 pages) South Caroliniana Library--University of South Carolina Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/scs_anpgm Part of the Library and Information Science Commons, and the United States History Commons Recommended Citation University South Caroliniana Society. (2007). "2007 Report of Gifts." Columbia, SC: The ocS iety. This Newsletter is brought to you by the South Caroliniana Library at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in University South Caroliniana Society - Annual Report of Gifts yb an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The The South Carolina South Caroliniana College Library Library 1840 1940 THE UNIVERSITY SOUTH CAROLINIANA SOCIETY SEVENTY-FIRST ANNUAL MEETING UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA Saturday, April 21, 2007 Mr. Steve Griffith, President, Presiding Reception and Exhibit ...................... .. ...... 11:00 a.m. South Carohruana Library Luncheon ................ ..................... ..... 1:00 p.m. Capstone Campus Room Business Meeting Welcome Reports of the Executive Council and Secretary-Treasurer Address ........................... Dr. Elisabeth S. Muhlenfeld President, Sweet Briar College 2007 Annual Report of Gifts to the Library by Members of the Society Announced at the 71st Meeting of the University South Caroliniana Society (the Friends of the Library) Annual Program 21 April 2007 Political Assassination in South Carolina – 2006 Address by A.V. Huff, Jr. Gifts of Manuscript South Caroliniana Gifts of Printed South Caroliniana Gifts of Pictorial South Caroliniana South Caroliniana Library (Columbia, SC) A special collection documenting all periods of South Carolina history. http://library.sc.edu/socar University of South Carolina Contact - [email protected] 2 Political Assassination in South Caroilna by A.V. Huff, Jr. Keynote address presented, 29 April 2006, at the 70th Annual Meeting of the University South Caroliniana Society Text published in the 2007 annual Program The study of history reacts in strange ways to current events. The topic of political assassination has reappeared, perhaps as a part of the rising threat of world-wide terror. First, there was Stephen Sondheim's musical, "The Assassins," that focused on American presidential assassinations. It closed off-Broadway in 1990 and did not have a successful run on Broadway until after 9/11. Then in 2005 National Public Radio reporter Sarah Vowell published Assassination Vacation, a morbidly amusing book of her travels to sites related to presidential assassinations. Last week at the meeting of the Organization of American Historians there was a session on the topic. Historians and sociologists interested in the American South have almost always identified violence as a hallmark of Southern society. In his now classic study, The Militant South, 1800-1861 (1956), John Hope Franklin demonstrated violence in the region at every level of society. The experience of civil war and Reconstruction modified but did not change the pattern. Statistics in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries show Southern states almost always leading the list of criminal homicides by percentage of the population. Perhaps the most widely-known analyst of the recent South is sociologist John Shelton Reed. In Reed's most comprehensive study, The Enduring South (1974, 1986), his chapter on Southern violence is entitled "South of the Smith and Wesson Line." In the study of South Carolina history is the sobering but aptly titled Carnival of Blood by our friend John Hammond Moore. The struggle for political supremacy in the post-Civil War South led to generations of organized violence by groups with competing visions of the "New South." 3 Lynching and gang violence have occupied our attention. But examples of political assassination in the region, as in the nation as a whole, are few and striking in their uniqueness. In other Southern states one thinks of the assassinations of Governor William Goebel of Kentucky in 1900 and Louisiana Senator Huey P. Long in 1935. In South Carolina there were four I have identified - all in succeeding generations and in quite different circumstances, but between adherents of rival political groups. My list is not exhaustive, and others do not fit. For example, the murder in 1958 of Bennettsville state senator Paul Allen Wallace by clerk of court William Allen Rogers seems to have been more personal than political. The first assassination was that of a prominent African-American leader during Reconstruction - state senator and chair of the state Republican executive committee Benjamin Franklin Randolph. The second was Redeemer planter and former Confederate officer L.W.R. Blair of Kershaw County. The third, reflecting the hatreds of the Populist era, N.G. Gonzales of Columbia, the founding editor of the The State paper. The fourth was state senator Edward J. Dennis of Berkeley County, one of three generations of his family to serve in that position. They represent four generations of Southerners after the Civil War, and all were embroiled in the volatile politics of their particular eras. Benjamin Franklin Randolph was born a free black in Kentucky and grew up in Ohio. He was educated at Oberlin College and ordained a minister in the Methodist Episcopal Church. He was a chaplain in the Union Army stationed in Beaufort, and like many others of his generation - black and white - he remained in South Carolina with the support of the American Missionary Association, becoming assistant state school commissioner for the Freedmen's Bureau in Charleston. When it was established in 1868, he associated with the South Carolina Mission Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church. A newspaper editor, he was a delegate to the 1868 state constitutional convention, rose in the ranks to chair the state Republican executive committee, and was elected to the state Senate from Orangeburg County. In October 1868 Randolph took a campaign tour to the upstate, delivering a speech in Abbeville on the 15th and the next day headed for Anderson. The Columbia Phoenix commented that Randolph "was a persistent advocate of the social equality idea." On board the train from Abbeville to Cokesbury he "made himself obnoxious to many of the passengers by his violent expressions and threats, but was not molested." Changing trains at Hodges' Depot, he was gunned 4 down on the platform by three white men who immediately mounted their horses and rode away. The coroner held an inquest over the body, and the verdict stated that Randolph "came to his untimely end at the hands of three persons unknown to the jury." No one was ever arrested for the crime, though it was widely rumored that former Confederate colonel D. Wyatt Aiken had planned the assassination. Aiken was a prominent planter at nearby Cokesbury, a leader of the state Agricultural and Mechanical Society, a national leader in the Grange, and from 1877 to 1887 served in Congress. About 1000 people, mostly African Americans, attended a meeting condemning Randolph's assassination in Charleston at White Point Gardens. Republican Governor Robert Scott issued a proclamation on October 20, charging the people of the state with anarchy and lawlessness. Randolph was buried in Columbia, not Charleston where Republican leaders felt that feelings ran too high. Lovick William Rochelle Blair was born in 1821, the scion of wealth, reputation and violence. His father, James Blair, of Scots Irish descent, was known as "the Waxhaw giant" because of his six feet-six inch height. He was a planter, adjutant general of the state militia in the War of 1812, and a member of Congress until his death in 1834. His mother, Charlotte Rochelle, was of Huguenot descent and inherited the substantial property of her father who was hanged for his complicity in the murder of a neighbor over a property dispute. The namesake of his Rochelle grandfather, Rochelle Blair, was schooled briefly in Virginia, but returned home to the family plantation, Red Oak Camp, and was tutored by a French schoolmaster. At the age of thirty-nine he married a local woman; they were members of the Camden Methodist Episcopal Church, South. In 1861 he joined the state militia with the rank of captain and was promoted to major in 1863. In the waning years of Reconstruction, Major Blair espoused the racial orthodoxy and solidarity of the former Confederates seeking to recapture political control of the state government. He liberally shared his views in the Kershaw Gazette. As the early historians of Camden characterized them, he was "always straightest of the straightout." In December 1875 he denounced the fusion efforts of white Conservatives and reform Republicans: "Is it not true that every white man should 5 cease to talk this fusion gibberish. Credulous Conservatives must open their eyes to the fact that one or the other of the two races must rule the State of South Carolina." Yet, in August 1876 he was espousing the moderate racism of Wade Hampton: "White and black are mutually dependent upon each other, and should respect, honor, and observe the rights of each other." Once the Conservatives were victorious, Blair began to break ranks with the local Democratic orthodoxy. In the Camden newspapers and in public debate he championed the paper money policy of the Greenbacks against the hard money arguments of South Carolina Democrats. He was publicly jeered as an independent and a radical. He also attacked the fencing laws supported by the majority in favor of the free range practice of the antebellum period. In the 1880 gubernatorial election he was nominated for governor by a convention of independents, though he was soundly defeated by General Johnson Hagood. He attracted a number of African-American supporters in the election. He continued to air his ideas in the local papers.