Gentleman and Soldier: The Extraordinary Life of General Wade Hampton (review)

With Gentleman and Soldier, Edward G. Longacre has written the first biography of Wade Hampton III to appear in over half a century. The subject is a natural one for Longacre, who has written widely about Confederate cavalry, and the book's title communicates the general tenor of this admiring book. Hampton is eminently deserving of a new life study. Perhaps the richest planter in the antebellum South, he served with distinction during the Civil War, being wounded twice and rising to become the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia's cavalry corps following J. E. B. Stuart's death in 1864. After the war, Hampton restored his wrecked plantations to prosperity, served as the Redeemer governor of South Carolina from 1877 to 1879, and was elected to two terms in the Senate. In his extraordinary postbellum political career, he urged relative moderation in race relations and vigorously promoted the emergence of a New South. When one considers the man's sustained importance, it is a little discomfiting to think that historians have not produced a life of Hampton since 1949.

Perhaps one reason they have not is because Hampton's seeming contradictions make him an unusually elusive figure. Here was an owner of 1,500 slaves who seemed genuinely to question the morality of the peculiar institution; a deplorer of violence who disposed of countless foes on the battlefield; and a Redeemer governor who preached cooperation among the races. Longacre's purpose, he says, is to "reconcile the conflicting attitudes and contradictory behavior" of Hampton and to show the man finally as he really was (xvi). Indeed, that would make for an extremely illuminating book, but it is not the one that Longacre has opted to write. Such a book would require extended analyses of the general's attitudes toward slavery, violence, and postwar race relations. By contrast, Longacre limns the first forty-three years of Hampton's life in part of one chapter. His postbellum political accomplishments, almost certainly the greater part of his legacy, are treated in similarly cursory fashion.

Just as worrying, Longacre takes an almost wholly uncritical view of Hampton's tenures as governor and senator. Make no mistake, Hampton did do some good; he funded black and white schools at about the same level, for example. Clearly he represented a healthier alternative than the pathological racism of his nemesis, "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman. Yet while it is well to note that Hampton was a man of his place and time, one need not laud him for being better than Tillman. Hampton's rise and that of the Redeemers was predicated on Red-Shirt violence and the intimidation of black voters. If Hampton promised a measure of protection for African Americans, this largely reflected his desire to avoid a more open, unseemly antagonism between the races. As elsewhere in the South, such paternalism was, in part, the price whites paid for the maintenance of civility. And of course all promises were contingent on black deference and subordination.

This, then, is no sweeping life of Hampton. Instead, what Longacre has done is to narrate the events and operational details of Hampton's military career. Fully ten out of thirteen chapters focus on the war years, which is not a bad thing. It is where his strength lies. Longacre possesses an impressive understanding of Civil War–era tactics and an encyclopedic knowledge of Union and Confederate cavalry. He also has a reasonably sure ear for language and is a workmanlike storyteller. Unlike many monographs, Gentleman and Soldier is not hard to read. But Longacre's approach does not go very far toward unraveling the mystery of the inner Hampton, and he does not deliver on the promise to untangle his subject's contradictions.