Benjamin Tillman
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| “ | This is a white man's country, and the white men must govern it. | „ |
| ~ Benjamin Tillman |
Benjamin Ryan Tillman (August 11, 1847 – July 3, 1918) was an American Democratic politician and white supremacist. He served as Governor of South Carolina from 1890 to 1894, then represented South Carolina in the United States Senate from 1895 until his death in 1918. He was considered to be a leading voice of white supremacy in the Reconstruction era as well as the early years of the Jim Crow era.
Biography edit
Tillman was born into a wealthy slaveholding family in the plantation district of Edgefield, South Carolina, on August 11, 1847. He served with a murderous paramilitary unit, agitated for agricultural reform, and was elected to two terms as South Carolina’s governor and four terms as a U.S. senator. Throughout that career, Tillman sought to reshape the post–Civil War nation by limiting the political and social freedoms of African Americans and those of any whites who challenged those limits.
An illness during the American Civil War kept Tillman out of Confederate military service and cost him his left eye. After the war, he supervised former slaves as agricultural laborers in Florida and South Carolina. During Reconstruction, he joined former slaveholders and ex-Confederate officers and soldiers in the rifle club movement, which threatened and assaulted South Carolina’s Republican officials and their black and white supporters. He took part in the Hamburg Massacre, in which rifle club members (known thereafter as “Red Shirts”) besieged a black militia unit, took many prisoners, and selected several militia men and local black officials from among them. They shot these men in the head before telling the rest to flee and firing upon them as they did. Contrary to frequent depictions of such violence as spontaneous eruptions of white Southern men’s rage, this was a premeditated slaughter.
Tillman was overwhelmingly elected governor in 1890. As governor, Tillman’s commitment to white uplift and white liberty was generally trumped by his fear of a black political and social resurgence. He oversaw the establishment of Clemson College for white men and Winthrop College for white women, but he remained less committed to the practice of higher education than to the principle of white supremacy. In 1891 he refused to accept federal aid for Clemson if doing so would require him to accept a proportionate amount of aid for black higher education. Tillman was the prime mover behind the South Carolina Constitutional Convention of 1895, which achieved his goal of disfranchising most black voters without running afoul of the Fifteenth Amendment.
Tillman asserted that black men, freed from slavery’s policing, presented a dire and constant sexual threat to white women. He condemned lynching as an assault on the authority of the state and sometimes called out militia units to protect prisoners, but he also publicly pledged that in cases where a black man was accused of raping a white woman, he would himself lead the lynch mob. Tillman never put his pledge into practice, but he did collude with lynch mobs. In one 1893 case, he sent a black rape suspect to face a crowd of many hundreds protected by only a single guard. The man was lynched.
Tillman voiced similar sentiments in the U.S. Senate and, as he became a popular speaker, on platforms throughout the nation. Most journalists and public officials depicted Tillman as a “wild man,” an impression that drew credibility from many of his activities, including his frequent boasts about his own part in the Hamburg Massacre and his apparent embodiment of the “white savage” he described in his speeches. His nickname, “Pitchfork Ben,” (which was given to him after he threatened to run through President Grover Cleveland with a pitchfork) seemed to capture this image of violent (and agrarian) discontent. Tillman proved himself to be a skilled organizer and a competent legislator, but the nickname and reputation served him very well, for they supported his argument that white men opposed black freedom and equality instinctively and impulsively.
Tillman sought to prevent the federal government from making the “race problem” worse. He fervently opposed U.S. imperialism, fearing that William McKinley's occupation of territories such as the Philippines would bring millions more nonwhite people into the American polity. From the Senate, especially during the administration of Woodrow Wilson, Tillman worked to segregate the federal bureaucracy, strip prominent black men of federal offices, and relegate black federal workers to the lowest rungs of the civil service.
Tillman died on July 3, 1918, near the end of his fourth term in the U.S. Senate.