Youngest Living Carpetbagger Tells All Or, How Regional Myopia Created "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman

It won't shock readers of Southern Cultures to learn that when northerners begin to study the South, they bring along what we'll just agree to call misconceptions. I know this firsthand because I remember a few choice and painful moments in my own early apprenticeship as a South-watcher. Born and raised in a suburb of Boston, educated in eastern schools, I approached my first graduate-school research trip to the South in 1990 with a mixture of fear and exotic expectation, as though my upcoming week in Wilmington, North Carolina, were a trek to Machu Picchu during the heyday of the Shining Path. I remember finalizing hotel arrangements over the phone and then declaring with some awe, "They have speed-dial!" The fellow student to whom this discovery was reported, a Missourian, fixed me with a disdainful glare and reminded me what I'd forgotten: "North Carolina is in the United States."

The joke on me was small, especially in comparison to the larger point: I went South that first time expecting to find something wildly, radically different from the world of my northern roots and upbringing. And, I regret to report, I found what I had gone looking for—if not in the more or less familiar and almost entirely hospitable surroundings of libraries, archives, and Motel 6s, then in the surviving historical record of the Wilmington massacre and coup of 1898. Here, I thought, was a race war, a moment quintessentially southern in the sense that the nation's underlying struggles over race and sex and power broke the surface of social and political life like some great prehistoric beast. Although I was a student of the nineteenth century, it would be some time before the New York City draft riots troubled my "regional" imagination, nor did Boston's war over busing during the mid-1970s seem in any way relevant.

A year or two later, still fascinated by the "exotic" quality of the southern experience of race, sex, and violence, I chose as my dissertation topic the life and career of South Carolina's "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman, a man who seemed to represent all that was horrifically and ineluctably southern. From the 1870s to the early twentieth century, it was hard to find an individual who played a role at more moments of crisis or who stood more whole-heartedly for the social and political order known as white supremacy. Too young and then too ill to serve the Confederacy, this upcountry farmer led a brutal paramilitary rifle club against South Carolina's Republican government and subsequent interracial political movements. Later, having won the governorship in a campaign of invective and innuendo, he promised that when a black man stood accused of raping a white woman, he himself, as governor, would lead the lynch mob. He masterminded the state constitutional convention of 1895, which disfranchised most black men and many whites. He trumpeted these achievements from the floor of the U.S. Senate, where he sat from 1895 until his death in 1918, claiming to be the champion of "the farmers," the hard-pressed white men who had been impoverished by war, Reconstruction, and the ineffectual rule of Wade Hampton's "aristocrats."

The genius of his leadership, he constantly reminded listeners, was not simply his legislative or executive acuity, but his commitment to victory at any cost. Tillman earned the sobriquet "Pitchfork Ben" from his threat to punish Grover Cleveland for his monetary policies by impaling him on said instrument, but the name signaled something broader about his willingness to use violence, not necessarily only as a last resort. From the senate floor and elsewhere, he recalled his participation in the Hamburg massacre of 1876 in which "red shirt" rifle clubs besieged and then murdered members of a black militia unit. "I have nothing to conceal about the Hamburgh riot," he declared. "We...