Wade Hampton: Confederate Warrior to Southern Redeemer (review)

For decades, Wade Hampton had no scholarly biography and, indeed, only two book-length treatments of his life, the most recent of which dated from the late 1940s. The past five years, however, have seen three full-length biographies, and Hampton is a recurring character in Heather Cox Richardson’s recent synthesis of post–Civil War America. Despite this wave of Hampton scholarship, Rod Andrew’s work stands out as definitive and exactly the sort of sophisticated treatment Hampton has deserved for a long time.

When Wade Hampton died in 1902, he was eighty-four years old, yet much of what has been written of him gives its real attention to just four of those years, between 1861 and 1865, probably due in part to a fire in 1899 that destroyed all of his papers. Andrew treats Hampton’s Civil War career thoroughly, but he emphasizes throughout the study that it is only possible to understand what Hampton did in the war from the perspective of the world that shaped him and that, in many respects, what he did after the war was of much broader significance. This is a welcome change. Andrew conveys the world Hampton grew up in and gives as good a portrait as we can have of his life. Hampton was guided by the values of “paternalism, chivalry, and honor,” and Andrew does a fine job situating these cultural values and explaining the sincerity that Hampton felt about his role and responsibilities in society (xiv). Indeed, often it seems as though Andrew has entered completely into that world and fully shares its perspective on Hampton, but just as the modern reader is about ready to write this off as one more hagiography, Andrew pulls us up short with a telling comment on that world’s limitations. It is, in short, a biography that manages to enter completely into its subject’s world and present it in the most sympathetic light while never giving up a shrewd and sometimes harsh objectivity. Andrew writes well about Hampton’s war years, but the great value of this book is its careful account of Reconstruction and the years following Hampton’s election as governor in 1876. This part of Hampton’s life—indeed, everything after the death of his son at the Battle of Trevilian Station—is framed by Andrew’s “vindication” theme, which seems an accurate understanding of Hampton’s own views. Andrew challenges the trend of recent years to lump Hampton in with all the other white supremacists and smooth out what were important distinctions in both belief and action, making a sophisticated argument for his position and reinvigorating what had been a fairly moribund area. More significantly, perhaps, he has made use of documents from the 1876 campaign, especially the correspondence of Hampton’s ally James Conner, that I have not seen in other accounts and which should become central to future debates on these topics. The writing throughout is clear and engaging, and the book is well equipped with effective maps, which help keep all the cavalry escapades straight. While Andrew has worked much harder than any previous writer to find sources and accomplished great things in this regard, there could yet be other useful sources: bankruptcy records might explain much about Hampton’s business activities during and after the war, and much valuable material about Reconstruction and especially 1876 can be found in retrospective accounts penned in the early twentieth century by actors big and small who no longer had any reasons to hide anything.