South Carolina - V. O. Key

When V. O. Key was writing about South Carolina politics in 1949, he described it as a one party state with no continuing sense of interest group and no obvious center of power. Concepts like region or class simply didn’t survive serious scrutiny. Each election began with at least four candidates and the winner was the one with the most friends and neighbors. Only the realization that a second party would necessarily need to appeal to a new group of voters like Negroes kept the Democrats unified.

While Key attributes the personal style, importance of race baiting and legislative government to post-Reconstruction institutional features, the Denmark Vesey controversy suggests the political contours of the state are much older. In 1822 Charleston, party differences were beginning to emerge, but the nascent political identifications would not have predicted who would be allies.

Most were shades of republicans. William Johnson, Jr., was appointed to the Supreme Court by Thomas Jefferson while John Lyde Wilson was closely connected to Aaron Burr, who’d been defeated for president by Jefferson in 1800, but then supported him against Alexander Hamilton. Wilson’s wife’s great uncle, Samuel Ashe, was an anti-federalist governor of North Carolina during John Adams administration who supported Jefferson.

Only James Hamilton, Jr, was raised in a federalist environment, that of slave transporting Newport, Rhode Island. However, by the time he was intendant of Charleston he was a Republican poised to became a supporter of Andrew Jackson. The tariffs and Missouri compromise made them realize a central government was a potential threat to their control over their slaves.

As Key suggested, kinship connections, and the cultures they signify, would have been a better indicator of alliances. Johnson and Bennett were related through Bennett’s sister Sarah. Wilson and Hamilton shared ties with the Alston family through William Allston and Esther LaBrosse De Marlbeouf. Hamilton’s mother’s father’s first wife, Elizabeth, was their daughter, while Wilson’s wife, Charlotte, was their granddaughter.

More important than either party or personal networks may have been the underlying attitudes towards the importance of a centralized government that separated the federalists from the Jeffersonians, and the rule of law that separated some Carolinians from both. Indeed, these differences may be no more than a continuation of attitudes towards the emerging nation state that had separated men into three groups under the Stuarts. [See posting for 27 December 2009]

Duels and lynchings are perhaps the greatest symbolic acts that place individual definitions of justice above those of the state and the law. When Wilson was elected to the state senate in 1826, Thomas Grimké wanted him impeached for fiscal impropriety as governor. Wilson’s response was to challenge him to a duel. In 1838 he wrote The Code of Honor to establish standards for such confrontations.

When John Bowman, the uncle of James Hamilton, accused his sister-in-law’s husband of fathering an illegitimate child in the north, the senior Hamilton lost the lower part of a leg when Bowman bested him in a duel that left the younger Hamilton to devise an explanation for his father’s accident.

Walter Edgar indicates Hamilton’s reputation was greatly enhanced by stories he fought 14 duels, although Robert Tinkler believes the only time he actually took up a pistol was against a young man in New York, William Gracie, who, he believed, threatened his intended marriage to an heiress, Elizabeth Heyward.

The execution of Denmark Vesey and five other slaves was a very public lynching preceded by a cart taking the six men through King Street to vacant land north of the city. The activated militia gave a sense of legitimacy to what, in fact, was the administration of a sentence arrived at in secret by a group of men using procedures the governor, Thomas Bennett, claimed "violated the ‘rules which universally obtain among civilized nations, in the judicial investigation of crime.’"

Key comments on the recurring pattern that men from the up country parts of South Carolina who ran of populist platforms like Ben Tillman, Cole Blease and Olin Johnston gradually moderated their views to expand their support beyond their regions and substituted persecution of Negroes for their former class appeals. He believed they not only had to build political coalitions in the conventional sense, but gain support through politicians committed to decentralized institutions.

He predicted Strom Thurmond would abandon his moderation to oppose civil rights. If Key had looked to the pre-Civil War years, he would have noted John Calhoun had forsworn his neutrality on nullification; if he were alive today, he would see pressures to conform being exerted on Lindsey Graham and Mark Sanford by the General Assembly.

Such hegemony is not accidental. Slaves and freedmen who watched the execution of a carpenter who purchased his freedom with a lottery prize, a slave free to hire himself out, and a ship’s carpenter understood the rituals of supremacy that were usually diffused and veiled. The state had already taken away the rights of owners like Joseph Vesey to free their slaves, and soon would stop men like Thomas Blackwood from allowing their chattel the freedom to work for themselves. The state was ready to defy international law by imprisoning any freedmen who appeared as sailors in the port, lest they mingle with slaves like Peter Poyas on the wharves.

Whites like Thomas Bennett were reminded of the power of secret groups to punish those who rebuff their hints when the other three hanged men were the governor’s property.

Notes:
Bennett, Thomas. Quoted by Michael P. Johnson, "Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators," The William and Mary Quarterly 58:915-976:2001.

Edgar, Walter. South Carolina: A History, 1998.

Egerton, Douglas R. He Shall Go out Free: the Lives of Denmark Vesey, 2004, for description of execution. This is one of the books criticized by Johnson.

Key, V. O., Junior. Southern Politics in State and Nation, 1949.