Benjamin Tillman

Benjamin R. Tillman
84th Governor of South Carolina
In office 1890–1894
Preceded by	John Peter Richardson III
Succeeded by	John Gary Evans
United States Senator
In office 1895–1918
Preceded by	Matthew Butler
Succeeded by	Christie Benet
Born	August 11, 1847 Trenton, South Carolina
Died	July 3, 1918 (aged 71) Washington, D.C.
Nationality	American
Political party	Democratic
Spouse(s)	Sallie Starke of Elbert County, Ga
Religion	Methodist

Benjamin Ryan Tillman (August 11, 1847 – July 3, 1918) was an American politician who served as the 84th Governor of South Carolina, from 1890 to 1894, and as a United States Senator, from 1895 until his death in office. Combative, vitriolic, and openly racist, Tillman's views were a matter of national controversy.

Tillman was a member of the Democratic Party. Tillman also served on the first Board of Trustees at Clemson University after assisting with its founding.^[1]

Biography

Tillman, of English descent, was born near Trenton, South Carolina. He left school in 1864 to join the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War, but was disabled by an illness that later caused the removal of his left eye and thus never fought for the Confederacy. During Reconstruction, he became a paramilitary fighter in the struggle to overthrow the Republican coalition in the state. He was present at the Hamburg Massacre in July 1876, during which a federal militia was overthrown and its arms seized by a group of armed citizens led by Tillman's fellow "Red Shirts."

It was at the Hamburg Massacre that he came of age in 1876, Stephen Kantrowitz writes in this thoughtful biography. As the commander of Edgefield County's Sweetwater Sabre Club, a paramilitary unit dedicated to terrorizing Republican officeholders and restoring white rule in South Carolina, the 29-year-old Tillman, with his red-shirted troopers, participated in the Hamburg Riot on July 8, an occasion marked by the coldblooded murder of a number of black militiamen who had had the effrontery to conduct a celebratory parade through the mostly black town of Hamburg, S.C., four days earlier on the Fourth of July. As Tillman himself would later put it, The leading white men of Edgefield had decided to seize the first opportunity that the Negroes might offer them to provoke a riot and teach the Negroes a lesson by having the whites demonstrate their superiority by killing as many of them as was justifiable. None of the perpetrators of the Hamburg murders were ever brought to justice.

Tillman's role in the Hamburg Riot established him as a leader of men in that time and that place. His involvement, about which he boasted constantly in future years, was the cornerstone upon which he would build a remarkable political career, first as governor of South Carolina and then, for 24 years, as a United States senator.

(Source - NY Times May 21, 2000 Book Review of Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy By Stephen Kantrowitz. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.)

Governor of South Carolina

Presenting himself as the friend of ordinary white farmers, "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman took over the South Carolina Farmers Alliance, and used the organization to advance his political ambitions. He was elected Governor of South Carolina in 1890, and served from December 1890 to December 1894. He helped establish Clemson College and Winthrop College while in office, and the Tillman Halls on both campuses are named in his honor. When the Alliance founded the Populist Party on the Ocala Demands, Tillman arranged for the South Carolina Democratic Party to adopt the platform, though he refused to endorse the "sub-treasury," the Populists' most ambitious economic proposal, or to countenance any appeal to black voters. The strategy prevented the development of an independent Populist Party and the biracial politics of North Carolina, thus assuring white control through the dominant, white Democratic Party.

He was largely responsible for calling the State constitutional convention in 1895 that disfranchised most of South Carolina's black men and required Jim Crow laws. As Tillman proudly proclaimed in 1900, "We have done our level best [to prevent blacks from voting] ... we have scratched our heads to find out how we could eliminate the last one of them. We stuffed ballot boxes. We shot them. We are not ashamed of it." (Logan, p. 91)

In 1892, a group of Tillman's supporters in Abbeville, S.C., prepared a banner anointing the governor the Champion of White Men's Rule and Woman's Virtue. Earlier that year, Tillman had coupled a statement opposing lynching with a declaration that he would willingly lead a mob in lynching a Negro who had committed an assault upon a white woman. His lynching pledge, as this promise became known, was never personally carried out, but it reveals a great deal about Tillman's rhetorical and political strategy. The black man, in Tillman's words, must remain subordinate or be exterminated. An epidemic of mob killings broke out in South Carolina in the 1890's, and in the upcountry counties of Abbeville, Edgefield, Laurens and Newberry, lynchings outnumbered legal executions during that decade.

(Source - NY Times May 21, 2000 Book Review of Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy By Stephen Kantrowitz. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.)

U.S. Senate

Tillman was elected to the United States Senate in 1894, succeeding Senator Matthew Butler, who had also been directly involved in the Hamburg Massacre. Tillman would be re-elected three more times, and would hold office from 1895 to his death in 1918. A hotheaded and intemperate debater, Tillman became known as "Pitchfork Ben" after a 1896 Senate speech in which he made several references to pitchforks, and threatened to "poke old Grover with a pitchfork" to prod him into action.

During his Senate career, he was censured by the Senate in 1902 after assaulting John L. McLaurin, another Senator and his counterpart from South Carolina.[1] As a result, the Senate added to its rules the provision that "No senator in debate shall, directly or indirectly, by any form of words impute to another Senator or to other Senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator."[2] He was also barred from the White House.[3]

He became the chairman of the Committee on Revolutionary Claims (57th through 59th Congresses); served on the Committee on Five Civilized Tribes of Indians (61st and 62nd Congresses); and the Committee on Naval Affairs (63rd through 65th Congresses). During World War I, impatient with the Navy's requests for larger battleships every year, he ordered the United States Navy to design "maximum battleships," the largest battleships that they could use.

Tillman took the lead in railroad regulation, though his foe Republican President Theodore Roosevelt out-maneuvered him in passage of the Hepburn Act of 1906. Tillman was the primary sponsor of the Tillman Act, the first federal campaign finance reform law, which was passed in 1907 and banned corporate contributions in federal political campaigns.

Tillman was the younger brother of George Dionysius Tillman (1826–1902), a U.S. Representative from South Carolina, serving from 1879 to 1893 (with one interruption).

Senator Tillman died in office in Washington, D.C. and is buried in Ebenezer Cemetery, Trenton, South Carolina. A statue of him is outside the South Carolina State House.^[2] Tillman Hall at Winthrop University and Clemson University is also named in his honor as an early trustee of the university.

References

• Burton, Orville Vernon (1985). In My Father's House Are Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, South Carolina. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0-8078-1619-1. New social history; online edition
• Kantrowitz, Stephen (2000). Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0-8078-2530-1.
• Stephen Kantrowitz. "Ben Tillman and Hendrix McLane, Agrarian Rebels: White Manhood, 'The Farmers,' and the Limits of Southern Populism." Journal of Southern History. 66#3 (2000) pp 497+. in JSTOR; online edition
• Logan, Rayford W. (1997) [1965]. The Betrayal of the Negro, from Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson. New York: Da Capo Press. ISBN 0-306-80758-0. This is an expanded edition of Logan's 1954 book The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877-1901.
• Simkins, Francis Butler (1926). The Tillman Movement in South Carolina. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. online edition
• Simkins, Francis Butler (2002) [1944]. Pitchfork Ben Tillman, South Carolinian. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press. ISBN 1-57003-477-X.
• Simon, Bryant (1998). A Fabric of Defeat: The Politics of South Carolina Millhands, 1910-1948. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0-8078-2401-1. online edition

External links

• "Their own Hotheadedness": Tillman speech in Senate advocating disenfranchisement of blacks and lynching of those who protested
• "The White Man's Burden" as Prophecy. Tillman speech in Senate denouncing U.S. imperialism in the Philippines on humanitarian and patriotic grounds

Political offices
Preceded by John Peter Richardson III	Governor of South Carolina 1890–1894	Succeeded by John Gary Evans
United States Senate
Preceded by Matthew Butler	United States Senator from South Carolina 1895–1918	Succeeded by Christie Benet