Wade Hampton: Confederate Warrior to Southern Redeemer

Readers surveying historical works on the nineteenth-century South might be excused if they put down their books convinced that there were several notable South Carolinians named Wade Hampton III. There was the young, antebellum Hampton, both the scion of one of the nation's wealthiest families and a brother forced to deal with the scandalous molestation of his four sisters at the hands of an infamous governor. The Civil War brought another Hampton, the solid and talented leader of men who ably assumed command of Robert E. Lee's cavalry after the death of J. E. B. Stuart, but who also failed to save his hometown of Columbia from the flames. Reconstruction seemed to produce a bitter political leader whose vocal resentment of the North finally took him to the governor's chair, the beneficiary of a campaign of intimidation and violence he claimed not to support but refused to disown. But that Hampton soon embraced sectional reconciliation in Washington and simultaneously enraged his most virulent followers through his support for at least a degree of racial justice.

In the past, biographers have focused largely on one Hampton or another, in works that range in tone from denunciation to Confederate hagiography. In contrast, Rod Andrew, Jr., author of a significant book on New South military education, provides a compelling full biography notable for its scope, balance, and insight. Focusing on four themes, Andrew maintains that Hampton's actions actually were much more consistent than previously thought. Conservative politically and socially, Hampton nonetheless inherited from his father a sense of paternalism that at various times led him to treat his slaves humanely, risk the ire of both Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis in his attempts to adequately feed and clothe his men, and later support at least a limited form of African-American suffrage. Concepts of honor and chivalry also shaped the man. Raised in a family with a distinguished military record as well as in a section that demanded courage and ferocity in defense of home, Hampton the reluctant secessionist shook off his doubts to wage a grim war. Honor and chivalry in the evangelical South, however, also required men of standing to offer kindness and forgiveness to lesser beings. After the war, a fourth, powerful theme emerged in his life. With a son and a brother dead, his home and fortune lost, his state humiliated by defeat, and his honor especially besmirched by William Tecumseh Sherman's charges that Hampton burned Columbia himself, he ached for vindication. It was that search that led him to rail against Yankees, enter politics, and finally embrace the terrorism of the Red Shirts, even at the expense of undermining his paternalistic gestures toward the freedpeople. For Andrew, the various threads that together created Lost Cause mythology were not cynical manipulations, but rather genuine expressions of a sense of loss and pain.

In a suddenly crowded field of Hampton biographies, Andrew's insights and detailed attention to both Hampton's military career and his political odyssey makes this work stand out as the fullest and best.