In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Epilogue “I will not lose my land” After Keitt’s death at Cold Harbor in June 1864, records reveal all too little about Sue and her two daughters. Shortly after the close of the war, the editor of the Boston Atlas noted that she was living in poverty. Before the war, Keitt had boasted that he had married the daughter of a wealthy planter, not a merchant or industrialist or speculator whose assets could vanish overnight during a panic. Now, the editor gloated, Keitt’s former slaves owned the land and his widow was penniless. He may not have been entirely mistaken. Sue still owned the land, but as a local historian recorded about that time, “desolation [had] flapped his wings over this beautiful ridge, and Cinderella-like, raggedness and poverty now claim it as their own.”1 Poverty and defeat did little to change Sue’s hatred of the Yankees and everything they stood for. Benjamin F. Perry, formerly the Unionist editor of the Greenville Patriot, now provisional governor of South Carolina, advised her to take the oath of allegiance to the federal government in order to protect her property, but she adamantly refused. She was not ready, she told Perry, to “bow . . . at Andy Johnson’s footstool.” If sacrifices were the consequence of her loyalty to the principles of her dead husband, she was willing to endure them. She was not afraid of the Yankees. For two years she had lived in the midst of their bombardment of Charleston. She had defied Sherman’s drunken soldiery while they plundered her plantation. They might hang her, but they could not change her heart: “I hate, hate the Yankee nation. They have inflicted upon me every wrong it was in their power to inflict. My children are fatherless, my home a ruin, and every treasure dear from inheritance and association swept away. Not even the blood-stained uniform, precious as my own soul, was spared me. And now . . . I south carolina fire-eater 194 must . . . bow myself an humble supplicant at Andy Johnson’s mercy seat. O! Sir! I cannot, cannot do it.”2 Concluding, she begged Perry, “Save me from the dreadful necessity” of swearing allegiance to the government that had made orphans of her children. Was there no other way to save their inheritance?3 Perry no doubt told Sue that she had no choice in the matter. The Radical Republicans were rapidly gaining strength. Andrew Johnson was her only hope. Her reply was even more frantic than before: “The President you trust is a man to be . . . dreaded. His life is a tissue of betrayals of the South.” He had celebrated his inauguration by hanging an innocent woman.4 He might do justice to the South if the Democratic Party could sustain him, but if the Republicans won the battle for control of the government, he would hand the South over to her tormentors. What, she wailed, was to be the fate of herself and her daughters? Would the radicals confiscate her plantations? And what was “to be done with the demoralized race in our midst?” Her heart quailed at “the thought of the midnight torch and the poison bowl.”5 The news that her brother-in-law Col. Ellison Keitt was preparing to run for Congress sent her into a rage. His “Union proclivities” and his “antagonism to the political principles of [his] distinguished brother” filled her with “sorrow and mortification.” No southern man of honor could hold office under the federal government. Such men were “a laughing stock, . . . tools and butts of the Yankees , . . . regarded with contempt by the people at home.” He had an honorable name, intimately associated with the principles on which the Confederacy rose and fell—“Southern Rights, State Sovereignty, Southern Independence. And Southern Union.” She implored him not to drag his brother’s name through “the disgraceful orgies now enacted in Washington. . . . wait patiently the future. You are young yet and the time may come when with respect to your brother’s memory, respect for yourself, and in all honor and dignity, you can hold office and high estate.”6 Keitt did run unsuccessfully for a seat in the House of Representatives in 1872. Whatever his true political beliefs then, by the middle of the 1870s, he had become an ally of Wade Hampton, an advocate of the Lost Cause, an outspoken critic of industrial capitalism, a leader in the state Farmers Alliance, and a caretaker of his brother’s legacy...

Share