South Carolina Scalawags (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: South Carolina Scalawags Charles J. Holden South Carolina Scalawags. By Hyman Rubin III. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006. Pp. 232. Cloth, $29.95.) In South Carolina Scalawags, Hyman Rubin III focuses on a frequently overlooked segment of the state's population during the tumultuous post–Civil War era. Those native-born white South Carolinians who became Republicans and supported the Reconstruction regime, dubbed "Scalawags," are often forgotten in all the attention normally reserved for freedmen, "carpetbaggers," and the unreconstructed. To the extent that historians have considered these native white Republicans, they usually are quick to conclude that they were either political opportunists or men without status acting out class resentment. Rubin argues that a composite picture of native white Republicans is difficult to draw; though small in numbers, they nonetheless represented the up-country and low-country, large farmers, small farmers, small merchants, and urban artisans. Rubin instead stresses that their commitment to democratic principles, rare in that notoriously undemocratic state, compelled these native white Republicans originally to join in the cause of creating a new, biracial polity in South Carolina. Rubin marks the state constitutional convention of 1868 as a pivotal moment in the formation of the Republican party in South Carolina. In the long sweep of the state's conservative history, the convention, as Rubin notes, was "radical" in that its representatives reflected the state's racial composition; over half were African American. But, he notes astutely, this same racial composition presented white Republicans with the complicated dynamic that dogged them over the next decade. The enthusiastic embrace of [End Page 295] African American political rights infuriated local white Democrats, sparked a wave of Klan-on-black violence, and consequently made white Northern allies nervous. Those white Republicans who hoped to navigate their way through all three groups to create a more democratic, yet still stable, South Carolina had their work cut out for them. A relentlessly violent insurgency and internal factionalism marred South Carolina Republicans' efforts to govern through the early and mid-1870s. The Scalawags themselves eventually split between those who hoped to reach out to the allegedly more genteel members of the old elite in the name of order (as Rubin points out, Scalawags' loud worries over the lack of which became a self-fulfilling prophecy) and those who understood that to stay close to the African American base was the only way for South Carolina Republicanism to survive. Explaining the Scalawags' ongoing predicament, Rubin does a good job of showing also how local events were shaped by national political developments. For instance, once the national Republican Party lost control of the House of Representatives in 1874, Reconstruction in South Carolina was effectively on the road to extinction. Violence against Republicans continued with little fear of legal repercussions, culminating in the Hamburg Riot of 1876. Here, as Rubin chillingly recounts, white members of the Edgefield "rifle club" cornered members of the Hamburg black militia in "an upstairs room" and eventually laid siege with artillery until most were captured. Then these white South Carolinians and Georgians "began to choose captives, one at a time, to be shot through the head in cold blood" (105). Rubin is especially effective at demonstrating the link between white-inspired violence and the ultimate defeat of the Republican Party. Scalawags were not inclined, nor were they able, to counter this method of murderous politics. From 1868 to 1876, Scalawags and South Carolina Republicans generally endured several seasons of violence linked to political campaigns, as in the final 1876 campaign, where, as Rubin observes tartly, "votes were only incidental to Democratic plans" (106). Rubin has also rescued from obscurity the personal stories of native white Republicans such as the redoubtable Simeon Curley and John Winsmith (who survived seven gunshot wounds from a Klan attack), whose commitment to a biracial democracy in South Carolina is worth remembering. That the commitment waned among some after Reconstruction fell should not come as a surprise, as historians going back to C. Vann Woodward noted a similar dynamic after the fall of Southern Populism later. What might be a surprise to some readers is the extent to which it was there in the...