Giant In Gray: A Biography Of Wade Hampton Of South Carolina

By Manly Wade Wellman

At last Wade Hampton—Grand Seigneur, Southern planter of vast acres, Confederate general, superb cavalry commander, Governor and United States Senator—reaches his full stature in an authoritative, life-size biography. Manly Wade Wellman has found a many-sided subject for his first venture into the field of biographical writing. As Confederate soldier, Hampton was a man of tremendous attributes—great of body, great of heart, indomitable in spirit. When The War Between The States called him from his aristocratic life as a landed proprietor, he was already in his forties, a man who had no professional military training and who abhorred war. However he soon showed himself a born soldier, stalwart in command, with knightly qualities of selflessness and courage. When the fighting ended he had been wounded three times, but he had saved many a situation, and he was still an unassailable tower of strength in the Southern cause. Wade Hampton’s military career is an inspiring record, but it is in his account of the post-war years that Mr. Wellman brings out the full greatness of the man. After ten years in private life, salvaging what he could from the ruin of his estate, Wade Hampton was called to public life to fight the corruption that was overwhelming his native State. His terms as Governor of South Carolina and as United States Senator showed him to have been a true Southern liberal, honestly desirous of justice to all men regardless of party or color-an honest American of good will who rose above claims of party and region. In his biography, Mr. Wellman has been able to draw on new sources for facts and their interpretation, and his illustrations represent the pick of all the existing Hampton photographs.-Print ed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Golden Springs Publishing
• Release date: Nov 6, 2015
• ISBN: 9781786256614

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Text originally published in 1949 under the same title.

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GIANT IN GRAY: A Biography of Wade Hampton of South Carolina

BY

MANLY WADE WELLMAN

The name and fame of Hampton will endure as long as loyalty and courage are respected by the human race.—John Esten Cooke, Wearing of the Gray

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 5

QUOTATIONS FROM COPYRIGHTED SOURCES 7

DEDICATION 10

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 11

ILLUSTRATIONS 13

PART ONE—The Grandee 14

I—To live for Dixie 14

II—The four Wade Hamptons 18

III—I will sacrifice everything but principle and honor 29

IV—Old times there are not forgotten 40

V—The mustering of the Legion 47

PART TWO—Gentleman-At-Arms 55

VI—Bloody Manassas 55

VII—The year with the infantry 63

VIII—Southern sabers 75

IX—Ride and shoot 89

X—Swords at Gettysburg 101

PART THREE—The Stricken Field 110

XI—Cavalry on defense 110

XII—We have scarcely time to bury the dead 120

XIII—My son, my son! 131

XIV—Fight and fall back 142

XV—The ceasing of the bugles 154

PART FOUR—There Was No Peace 162

XVI—Forlorn hope 162

XVII—The steadfast Southerner 177

XVIII—Election is a mockery 190

XIX—Nomination 199

PART FIVE—Freedom Hard Won 207

XX—Hurrah for Hampton! 207

XXI—I have been elected your governor...I will take my seat 218

XXII—Birthday in Washington 226

PART SIX—The Rise and The Fall 238

XXIII—Governor and Senator 238

XXIV—Gratitude is short-lived 252

XXV—Eventide 261

XXVI—God bless all my people 266

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PRINCIPAL SOURCES 269

BOOKS, PAMPHLETS AND SPECIAL ARTICLES 269

PRINCIPAL NEWSPAPERS AND OTHER SERIAL PUBLICATIONS 276

PRINCIPAL MANUSCRIPT COLLECTIONS 277

WADE HAMPTON 278

THE BRIDEGROOM 278

THE BRIGADIER 280

THE CHIEF OF CAVALRY 282

AFTER THE WAR 284

THE CANDIDATE OF 1876 285

THE SENATOR 287

THE OLD SOLDIERS 289

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 290

QUOTATIONS FROM COPYRIGHTED SOURCES

Direct quotations from the following copyrighted books and serial publications have been included in the present work, on pages indicated in parentheses following each source.

Adams, James Truslow. America’s Tragedy. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1934. (pp. 30, 31, 168.)

Alexander, E. P. Military Memoirs of a Confederate. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1907. (p. 79.)

The Atlantic Monthly, Boston, April, 1901. (p. 286.)

Bowers, Claude G. The Tragic Era. Houghton Mifflin Co., New York, 1929. (pp. 206, 226, 238, 260, 265.)

Brooks, U. R. Ed. Butler and His Cavalry IN the War of Secession. The State Co., Columbia, S. C., 1909. (pp. 108, 109, 110, 111, 128, 144, 146, 147, 148, 155, 159, 160, 161, 163, 164, 172, 173, 174, 185, 187, 188, 331.)

Brooks, U. R. Ed. Stories of the Confederacy. The State Co., Columbia, S. C., 1912. (pp. 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 95, 100, 102, 104, 120, 121, 150, 178, 243, 244, 269.)

Century Magazine, The Century Publishing Co., May, 1898. (pp. 7, 186.)

Chesnut, Mary Boykin, A Diary from Dixie. D. Appleton & Co., New York, 1903. (pp. 43, 49, 50, 75, 162, 171, 180, 193, and illustration title-matter.)

Clark, Walter L. Ed. Histories of the Several Regiments and Battalions of North Carolina in the Great War, 1861-‘65. State of North Carolina, Raleigh and Goldsboro, N. C., 1901. (pp. 73, 74, 137, 138.)

Dodd, William E. The Cotton Kingdom. Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., 1921. (p. 20.)

Fleming, Walter L. Ed. Documentary History of Reconstruction. A. H. Clark Co. Cleveland, O., 1907. (pp. 212, 213, 214.)

Freeman, Douglas Southall. Ed. Lee’s Dispatches. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1919. (pp. 151, 165.)

Freeman, Douglas Southall. Lee’s Lieutenants. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1942-1944. (pp. 64, 152.)

Hitchcock, Henry. Diary of Sherman’s March to the Sea. Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., 1927. (pp. 39, 182.)

Library of Southern Literature. The Martin & Hoyt Co., New Orleans and Atlanta, 1908-23. (p. 50.)

Logan, Kate Virginia (Cox). My Confederate Girlhood. Garrett and Massie, Richmond, 1932. (pp. 62, 65.)

Maurice, Sir Frederick. Ed. An Aide-de-Camp of. Lee; Being the Papers of Colonel Charles Marshall, Sometime Aide-de-Camp, Military Secretary and Assistant Adjutant-General on the Staff of Robert E. Lee, 1862-65. Little, Brown & Co., Boston, 1927. (p. 79.)

McClure, Alexander Kelly. Colonel Alexander K. McClure’s Recollections of Half a Century. The Salem Press Co., Salem, Mass., 1902. (p. 96.)

Oberholtzer, Ellis Paxson. A History of the United States Since the Civil War. The Macmillan Co., New York, 1928. (pp. 193, 201, 214, 219.)

Pryor, Mrs. Roger A. Reminiscences of Peace and War. The Macmillan Co., New York, (p. 49.)

Reynolds, John S. Reconstruction in South Carolina. The State Co., Columbia, S. C., 1905. Rice, John A. I Came Out of the Eighteenth Century. Harper and Brothers, New York, 1942. (p. 331 and illustration title-matter.)

Rhodes, James Ford. History of the United States From the Compromise of 1850 to the Restoration of Home Rule in the South in 1877. The Macmillan Co., New York, 1913. (p. 199.)

Rowland, Dunbar. Ed. Jefferson Davis, Constitutionalist: His Letters, Papers and Speeches. Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, Miss., 1923. (pp. 6, 182, 183, 184, 185.)

The Saturday Evening Post, The Curtis Publishing Co., Philadelphia, Feb. 20, 1904. (pp. 318, 322, 329.)

Selby, John A. Memorabilia and Anecdotal Reminiscences of Columbia, South Carolina, and Incidents Connected Therewith. The State Co., Columbia, S. C., 1905. (pp. 252, 253)

Sheppard, William Arthur. Red Shirts Remembered: Southern Brigadiers of the Reconstruction Era. The Ruralist Press, Atlanta, 1940. (pp. 244, 245, 303, 305, 306.) Sheppard, William Arthur. Some Reasons Why Red Shirts Remembered. Charles P. Smith Co., Greer, S. C., 1940. (pp. 262, 289.)

Simkins, Francis Butler. Pitchfork Ben Tillman. The Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, La., 1944. (p. 135.)

Simkins, Francis Butler. The Tillman Movement in South Carolina. The Duke University Press, Durham, N. C., 1926. (pp. 313, 314, 316, 317, 318, 324.)

The South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine. Printed for the South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Society by the Walker, Evans and Cogswell Co., Charleston, S. C., July, 1908. (p. 213.)

Thomason, John W. Jeb Stuart. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1930. (p. 94.) Thompson, Henry Tazewell. Ousting the Carpetbagger from South Carolina. The R. L. Bryan Co., Columbia, S. C., 1927. (pp. 195, 199, 219, 240, 241, 242, 255, 263, 270, 271, 275, 282, 283, 284.)

Wallace, David Duncan. The History of South Carolina. The New York American Historical Society, Inc., New York, 1934. (p. 285.)

Wells, Edward L. Hampton and His Cavalry in ‘64. The B. F. Johnson Publishing Co., Richmond, 1899. (pp. 15, 19, 71, 135, 156, 181, 295, 324, and illustration title-matter.)

Wells, Edward L. Hampton and Reconstruction. The State Co., Columbia, S. C., 1907. (pp. 36, 131, 132, 172, 186, 196, 256, 257, 263, 264, 266, 274, 276, 277, 287, 291, 308, 309, 321, 327, 328, 333, 334, and illustration title-matter.)

Wiley, Bell Irvin. The Life of Johnny Reb. The Bobbs-Merrill Co., New York, 1943. (p. 58.)

Williams, Alfred B. Hampton and His Red Shirts. The Walker, Evans and Cogswell Co., Charleston, S. C., 1930. (pp. 258, 260, 261, 262, and illustration title-matter.) Wise, John S. The End of an Era. Houghton Mifflin Co., New York, 1899. (p. 154 and illustration title-matter.)

Wright, Mrs. D. Giraud. A Southern Girl in ‘61. Doubleday, Page & Co., New York, (pp. 6, 38, 127, 128, 164.)

DEDICATION

FOR

WADE

my son

"...and bring you up

To be a warrior and command a camp."

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ANY work pretending to comment on the important historical past is too much for one man. This study of Wade Hampton’s career was made possible by unselfish and varied help from more persons than can well be mentioned in this space. I set down a few names, and ask pardon of the rest.

Continuously and tirelessly, Frances Wellman has listened, suggested, copied, searched, waited, interviewed and encouraged. If her enthusiasm for this book has not been worn entirely away by the toil of years, let her accept my diffident gratitude.

Three persons have read and reread the manuscript at various stages in its preparation, have offered sane advice, and have repeatedly rallied me with their expressions of faith. In inadequate recognition of their assistance and inspiration, I name Dr. Frederick Creighton Wellman of Pinebluff, North Carolina; Miss Muriel Fuller of New York City; and Miss Polly Reardon of Califon, New Jersey.

To Dr. Douglas Southall Freeman of Richmond, great of heart as he is great of scholarship and literary distinction, thanks for the time he took from his tremendous labors to discuss with a stranger the character and place in history of Wade Hampton, for invaluable guidance on certain research trails, and for the loan of material from his own files.

Living descendants and kinsmen of Wade Hampton have been gracious and helpful, notably Mrs. Preston Hampton Haskell and Miss Margaret Haskell of Richmond, who have made available many family records, letters and portraits. The late Dr. Charles C. Haskell of Richmond contributed a wealth of personal reminiscence of the kindly and dignified grandfather he remembered. It is a source of deep regret that Dr. Haskell did not survive to see the publication of this work, in which he repeatedly expressed so great an interest and in the making of which he had so important a part.

Libraries, historical societies and other repositories of material, North and South, have been generous and intelligent in the help they have given. Dr. J. De R. Hamilton, at the time head of the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and his able assistant, Mrs. J. P. Watters, were able to produce hundreds of items of Hamptoniana from the collection’s great files. Mrs. Lucy Hampton Bostick, head of the Richland County Library at Columbia and a grandniece of Wade Hampton, not only helped to find source material but contributed lively and circumstantial memories of many family traditions. Mr. A. N. Salley and Mr. F. M. Hutson, director and chief clerk respectively of the Historical Commission of South Carolina at Columbia, were hospitable, informative and generally helpful. Miss India ‘Thomas, house regent of the Confederate Museum at Richmond, found and copied photographs and took from its show case the mighty battle saber of Hampton in order that it might be examined, weighed and measured. The staff of the splendidly arranged and indexed manuscript room of Duke University at Durham, North Carolina, was cheerfully helpful in finding letters by Hampton, his relatives and friends. At the New York City Public Library, Mr. Gerald P. MacDonald, chief of the Historical and Genealogical Division, and Mr. Paul North Rice, chief of the Reference Department, gave efficient assistance to me, as to so many other writers and students. Thanks are due to the staffs of the Virginia State Library at Richmond, the South Caroliniana Library at Columbia, and to many others in many towns, great and small.

Nor to be forgotten are those who rendered special services of many kinds. The Reverend Mr. F. Craighill Brown of Sewanee, Tennessee, a member of the Florida branch of the Hampton family, lent a genealogical table that solved many questions about the first American Hamptons. Miss Eva Mae Grice of Chapel Hill secured rare source books and consulted records for biographical data on minor figures in Wade Hampton’s career. Mr. Alexander P. Goetze of Westwood, New Jersey, a sojourner in many lands but a true and understanding lover of the American South, accompanied me on some 2,000 miles of travel through Southern cities, villages and battlefields, helping to gather information. Miss Elizabeth Minor of Fredericksburg, Virginia, obliged with useful introductions. Mr. George F. Scheer of Chapel Hill made available an informative wartime letter from Wade Hampton. Mrs. Katherine Newton McColl of Southern Pines, North Carolina, whose father rode with Wade Hampton in war and supported his political efforts in peace, offered of her own generous volition some family reminiscences and called attention to obscure but valuable publications. And Mr. Daniel Henderson of New York City, when he heard of my nearly completed labors, readily and gracefully relinquished his own half-formed project of a Wade Hampton biography and turned over to me the interesting notes and bibliography prepared by himself and his collaborator, Mr. Alfred Chandler, Jr., of Wilmington, Delaware.

To these and to scores of other readily helpful ladies and gentlemen, my sincere and lasting thanks.

MANLY WADE WELLMAN

Pinebluff, North Carolina, June, 1949

ILLUSTRATIONS

WADE HAMPTON AT SEVEN IMPORTANT MOMENTS IN HIS LIFE

THE BRIDEGROOM

THE BRIGADIER

THE CHIEF OF CAVALRY

AFTER THE WAR

THE CANDIDATE OF 1876

THE SENATOR

THE OLD SOLDIER

PART ONE—The Grandee

I—To live for Dixie

A CLOCK struck twice in one of the dark houses. It was 2 o’clock in the morning of April 29, 1865, and little Yorkville in South Carolina was as dreamily quiet under the stars as any town in America. Clattering hoofs in the darkness must have sounded like war arums, Someone reined in and dismounted.

Some citizens were awake to greet that lone rider and to hear his volley of eager questions. Yorkville was off the terrible main thoroughfare of the War Between the States. Sherman’s plundering columns and the ragged remnants of Joe Johnston’s army had fought it out to the South and the East, around Columbia and on into North Carolina. But yesterday the beaten, fugitive government of the Confederacy had passed through Yorkville, and now out of the night had ridden the South’s ranking combat officer still in service this side of the Gulf States.{1}

Even in the dark, he was like an idealized statue of a mounted warrior.{2} Only when he left the saddle were the townsfolk aware of how weary and travel-stained were both beast and rider. The visitor was a stalwart man in his middle forties, six feet tall and so powerfully built that he seemed shorter unless you stood close to him and found yourself looking up into his brilliant blue eyes.{3} Dimmed riding boots sheathed his muscular legs; a heavy sword swung from his belt. On either shoulder of his long gray coat rode the three stars of a lieutenant-general. He had a chest like a barrel, a corded neck, a proud, massive head. His thick dark beard did not wholly conceal a wide mouth that in a happier hour might smile courteously. His nose was long and straight, and his jaw was resolute. When he took off his broad felt hat, his brow showed wide, domed and high, the brow of a steady thinker. Among the locks of his hair gleamed three scars, from saber and musket ball. Several Yorkville residents knew him by sight, and all of them knew him by reputation. He was General Wade Hampton, first soldier of the Carolinas.

As he asked questions and listened to answers, others awoke, came to look on, and muttered to each other about him. Here and there may have been a few of the old bitter faction that had hurried the South into secession and war, and perhaps these remembered with disapproval Hampton’s ante-bellum politics. As head of a great and wealthy South Carolina family and as an unexcited State senator he had pleaded for peace, preservation of the Union, moderation in slavery. But none in Yorkville or throughout the Confederacy could challenge his conduct after the coming of war. A colonel at Manassas, a brigadier at Seven Pines, a major-general in the Wilderness and, finally, chief of cavalry for Robert E. Lee and then Joe Johnston, he had succeeded prodigiously as strategist, tactician and hand-to-hand fighter. Men said that he was the surest shot, the fastest and most skilful horseman, the most powerful swordsman{4} in all the Southern hosts. One or two insisted that he was stronger physically than any other officer or man who wore the gray{5}—and he looked it there in the dim street, even though he and his borrowed mount were so manifestly exhausted. His uniform dripped water from swimming a river. He sagged and wavered, planting his booted feet apart to sustain himself. But his soft, deep voice was still steady and earnest as he inquired for news of Jefferson Davis.

Yes, they were able to tell him, the President of the Confederacy had been in Yorkville. With him were members of his cabinet, some secretaries and staff officers, and the scraps of five cavalry brigades, mostly Kentuckians and Tennesseans.{6} It was a sad, furtive body of men, worried over reports that Union cavalry was pursuing.{7} President Davis had been entertained at the home of William Wallace, where a last hoarded handful of coffee beans had been roasted and boiled for his entertainment, and where little Helen Wallace had sat on the President’s knee and coaxed a smile to his drawn face.{8} But all that cavalcade had gone South; and, no, there was no message for General Hampton. Perhaps Davis was in Abbeville. Nobody could be sure—the hunted men had been purposely vague, timid about being followed.{9}

Among those who came to meet Hampton was one, at least, for whom sight of him seemed to ease a cosmic burden of worry and sadness. She was a slender woman, still young, beautiful despite the tenseness of her expression, plainly the daughter of rich and polite people. The two greeted each other tenderly, though with restraint before so many onlookers. Yorkville knew who this was, too—Mary McDuffie Hampton, the General’s wife, sheltering here since the Hampton estates had been ravaged and burned over by Sherman’s invaders.{10} Reunited, the husband and wife could have stood for a tableau of the South’s overwhelmed greatness, the delicate, worried, brave woman and the armed man still stubbornly defying impossible odds.

Hampton rested in his wife’s quarters while the spring sun rose. The daylight brought other riders, among them some of his own aides and couriers. There arrived also his ranking subordinate, point-bearded, great-eyed little Fighting Joe Wheeler, who like himself had left Johnston’s army before the surrender to Sherman. Mrs. Hampton summoned General Wheeler to her sitting room, to back up her earnest plea.

She wanted to persuade her husband to abandon what might have been the crowning triumph of his daring, skilful war career—a planned rescue of President Davis from his pursuers, a junction with the still considerable forces to the West, and a final resumption of the fight for Southern independence in unravaged, well-garrisoned Texas.

Hampton could have done it, if anybody could. Jefferson Davis himself had believed that, only two days before. Under Hampton, in the cavalry corps of Johnston’s army, had ridden crank brigades of veteran horsemen who earlier had made fools of all the Army of the Potomac, who six weeks before had driven Sherman’s pet cavalry chief from bed in his underwear, and who had thereafter fought to a standstill two Federal corps at Bentonville. While Johnston had talked surrender with Sherman, Hampton had talked retreat across Alabama and Mississippi with Davis—retreat shielded by thousands of cavalrymen whom the whole Union army would not dare press too closely. They would cross the Mississippi River, gathering up en route the commands of Dick Taylor, Bedford Forrest and others. Once in Texas, with the Mexican border as a supply channel and a possible last refuge, they might defy and counterattack the enemy for years to come. Ultimate victory was not impossible, at least not to Wade Hampton’s undaunted mind.

The fate that ever seemed to deny a Confederate victory had intervened. Johnston had surrendered his army to Sherman on April 2 6. Hampton, absent from duty and conferring with Davis at the time, called himself an exception from the surrender terms and, while insisting that his men must stay and disarm, had ridden to join the President. A few staff officers and couriers began the journey with him, but their horses wore out. On a single fresh mount secured at Charlotte, Wade Hampton rode on alone, swam the Catawba River, and came finally to Yorkville, the last point from which he had received any news of Davis. There his horse, his information and his own great endurance of body and spirit all gave out.{11}

As he sat listening to the entreaties of Mary Hampton and the sober counsel of Joe Wheeler, his thoughts were tragically hopeless. His mansion, his millions of dollars, his entire way of life had vanished. His son Preston was dead, shot down before his eyes on Virginia battlefield. His gentle, beloved brother Frank was dead, of Yankee bullet wounds and saber slashes two years before. Whole hosts of his friends and comrades were dead. Here at the end of the war, with Lee and Johnston surrendered and Jefferson Davis running like a hare before pursuit, Wade Hampton remained still free but tired out, solitary and unguided in the field which he held, literally alone, against hundreds of thousands.

If he chose to seek battle with the first Yankee patrol he met, to fight and die, taking with him as many foemen as possible...the impulse had its attractions for him. I shall fight as long as I can wield my saber, he had written to his friend Wigfall;{12} and, only last week, to Jefferson Davis: As to my course I shall fight as long as my government remains in existence, for I shall never take the ‘oath of allegiance.’{13} These were not bombasts. In his first battle Hampton had charged the enemy cannon and had fallen under their very muzzles with a bullet-creased head. He had sabered it out against half a squadron of blue horsemen at Gettysburg. With half a dozen men he had driven sixty of Sherman’s foragers pell-mell from Fayetteville. When he spoke of fighting to the end, he spoke with the authority of a full experience. But, Mary Hampton and Joe Wheeler now reminded him, his life was not his own to throw away.

His comrades and chiefs were gone, but there remained his wife and his children, three of them small and helpless, who must be fed and sheltered and protected. There remained also the beaten South, miserably sad, wounded and weary, that must be given example and leadership. Forsaken himself, Wade Hampton must not forsake those who still needed him.

After all, once he had been a power in the land. A whole generation had loved and admired him for his intellect, generosity and grace. Even the most frantic of the secessionist fanatics had respected his calm opinions before the war. Now the war was over. A new struggle was starting, to aid and restore the land.

In the midst of the conversation Joe Wheeler watched Hampton and was struck by the big man’s appearance of extreme fatigue. He redoubled his arguments, urging upon Hampton the obligations of family and private business, and pointing out that he himself, younger and less hampered, might better go on to help Davis. Finally Hampton yielded, and wrote a letter for Wheeler to take to President Davis.

Tell the President, said Hampton, that if in the future there should appear any way in which I can serve him, I will do so to the last.{14}

The two generals shook hands and said good-bye. Wheeler hurried off in search of the Presidential party. Hampton climbed again into the saddle of his patient, tired horse. He faced toward the North, back on the trail that would bring him into the hands of Sherman’s parole officers. From there he would go home, or to the pile of burnt wreckage where home had been.

Half of his life was finished in bloody defeat. Half of his life remained to him. During that latter half of life he was to lead Southerners through years of dismay and persecution, back to freedom. When at last he died, with a blessing on his lips, many would think he had died too soon.

II—The four Wade Hamptons

HIS friends have praised him, and his enemies have sneered at him, by calling him an aristocrat to the tips of his long, strong fingers. If they mean that he knew from birth the importance of great property, fine manners and wide responsibilities, they are right. If they suggest that the family history of the Hamptons was from antiquity a record of social prominence and easy living, they are wrong. For the third Wade Hampton was born to less than a generation of affluence, and in 1860, the high point of the Hampton material fortunes, he had back of him but eighty years of real family distinction.

The Hamptons of South Carolina have neither more nor less sure claim on an ancestry of European nobility than have the majority of America’s early settlers. Hampton is an old and well-respected name in England, traceable to the eleventh or twelfth century in Staffordshire. Similarities in baptismal names on both sides of the water indicate that from a Middlesex branch of the family came William Hampton to Jamestown in Virginia, aboard the Bono Novo, in 1620{15}—one year after the first melancholy Negro slaves were sold on the beach where he landed. His wife, Joan, followed in 1621 with their three English-born children, and the colonial records designate William Hampton as a planter, living in Gloucester County on a 700-acre estate called Hampfield. In 1623 was born the first American Hampton, Thomas, who became a clergyman and served two churches in James City County for more than thirty years. Some genealogists confuse this ancestor with another, Reverend Thomas Hampton,{16} who landed from England in about 1629, but who died with no traceable heirs. No records show any close relationship between the two.

The eldest son of the Reverend Thomas Hampton of James City County was John Hampton, who became a militia captain and prospered modestly as a planter. His son, also named John, married Margaret Wade, and was educated for the church like his grandfather, but never took orders. Their second son, Anthony, was a flax-breaker—an honest trade but hardly an aristocratic one. Cotton, in those days, had no importance as home fabric or foreign export, and many of the American colonists wore linen of their own growing and weaving.

When the second John Hampton died in 1748, he left his lands and his two Negro slaves to Margaret Wade Hampton for life, the property to pass later to his eldest son, a third John. Anthony, less comfortably provided for, sought fortune in South Carolina, near a new wilderness settlement that one day would be called Spartanburg.{17} Land could be had for the asking. Anthony made a clearing and built a cabin, into which he settled his wife, his five sons, his one daughter and his son-in-law, James Harrison. This aggressive second son of John Hampton had an aggressive second son of his own, who was baptized Wade, the patronymic of Anthony’s mother. The first of the Wade Hamptons was middle-sized and sinewy and had a limited education—remarkable on that frontier, where any education at all was hard to come by. It is said that he taught a school for children of the Spartanburg pioneers,{18} but his favorite occupation, naturally enough, was hunting. The Hamptons of the Carolina backwoods shot deer and turkeys, ploughed and planted. A community of seven adult males, healthy and forest-wise and good shots with the musket—they might well laugh away the hint of danger from Cherokees prowling the pine thickets.

Perhaps it was the news, brought by galloping courier, of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia, that caused Wade Hampton to be away from home on a July day of 1776.{19} At this time he was twenty-four years old or thereabouts; pioneer records are not always reliable. Also absent from home at the time were his three younger brothers, Edward, Henry and Richard. Wade seems to have been the first to return to the Hampton cabin.

There was no cabin.

The Cherokee raiders had come, swiftly and silently. Before their victims had time to offer defense, those victims were shot or tomahawked—Anthony Hampton, his wife, his eldest son Preston, his daughter and her husband and her little boy. The savages had scalped the bodies, looted the dwelling, and set everything afire. Wade found nothing to greet him but smouldering ashes and butchered flesh.

His young face—it was lean, with a thin mouth and a long sharp nose and a jutting chin—set in a hard glare as he gazed at the ruins and the bodies. Very suddenly, he had become head of the family. His first duty in that position was immediately plain to him. He called his brothers and neighbors and told them to load their muskets.

Trail-wise and grim, they followed and surprised the war party and took a gory vengeance. Many Cherokee braves were slain, and the survivors driven deep into the woods, away from their old haunts. Afterward, what? The blood of the whole Cherokee nation could never conjure back the butchered kinsmen. The spot that once meant home had become hateful to the surviving Hamptons. They needed other scenes and other occupations, and with these things history was sternly ready to furnish them.

The War for American Independence, beginning in Massachusetts, spread to the South and called for men to wage it. The Hampton brothers enlisted with the South Carolina revolutionaries, and all of them made good records as soldiers. Wade, the oldest, proved exceptional.

South Carolina was harshly treated by the British regulars and the considerable force of mobilized loyalists. The patriots, under Marion, Moultrie and Sumter, fought back savagely. There is a long history of raid and counter-raid, burned homes, hanged prisoners, brutality avenging brutality. The opposing forces traversed every county in the State as at present defined, and fought in all of them but three. More than 100 engagements, large and small, took place within South Carolina’s borders, with Wade Hampton fighting in many of them. An accomplished trailer and sharpshooter, a veteran of forest conflict with Indians, he succeeded famously in the hit-and-run warfare. Early in his military career the British captured him, and released him after he gave his parole never to take up arms again to fight King George; but when British troops burned the homes of non-combatant patriots, he argued hotly that the rules of civilized warfare had been ignored and that his own parole could be considered as void. He returned to the service, and was gathered in a second time by some British scouts. His position was a desperate one, for as a parole violator he would be hanged, promptly and ignominiously, to a convenient tree. As his captors marched him toward their camp, he watched for his chance and it came. A careless redcoat lounged within reach. Hampton grappled with him and leaped clear with the man’s musket in his hands. He shot a second soldier and, using the stock as a club, smashed his way through the party, running like a deer beyond the reach of the avengers.{20}

This genius for personal combat might in modern times have won him a sergeancy of rangers or commandos. Then it secured him an officer’s commission. By the time Light Horse Harry Lee was sent by Washington to the aid of the Carolinas, the young hunter had risen to the rank of lieutenant-colonel of cavalry. He rode like a Bedouin, and showed talent with a broad, curved saber, not good for thrusting but capable of dealing a terrible slash when wielded by a strong arm. He served with distinction at Eutaw Springs, and helped in the final defeat of the British.

By the time peace became official in 1783, the first Wad Hampton was of established military reputation. He was past thirty, which was considered almost middle age in that era of early development, and felt quite ready to settle down. The new State capital, Columbia, was founded on the Congaree River in 1786. Good land thereabouts sold for ten dollars a hundred acres, and the veteran purchased enough to lay out a big farm by the river, on the outskirts of the city.{21} In the year of peace he had married Martha Epps, a widow. She died shortly afterward, leaving no children, but in 1786 he was married again, to Miss Harriet Flud.{22} He bought slaves and began to grow tobacco.

By 1790 he had increased his holdings, planting grain and vegetables as well as tobacco, and building stock pens and paddocks. His slaves now numbered eighty-six,{23} and he rationed, medicined and directed them with military efficiency and justice. His was a vigorous nature, and a practical nature as well. He made good on a chance for greater fortune than he and his fellow-planters had ever imagined.

Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in 1792. A crop that had been relatively small, and difficult to process, now presented a potential source of mighty wealth. The self-made baron by the Congaree—he had a big house by now, and more than 1,000 acres under cultivation—planted cotton. In the fall of 1799 his sweating Negroes produced 600 bales, worth $90,000 on the market.{24} Comfortably situated before, he was now on the road to riches and power. The first Wade Hampton had, in the phrase of a later commercial age, come in on the ground floor of the cotton business.

As the nineteenth century dawned he was a man of means, reputation and family. His eldest son had died in babyhood, but Wade the second was born in 1791, and Frank a year later. Harriet Flud Hampton was carried off in 1794 by one of the fever epidemics that swept the Congaree country almost annually, and in 1801 he took a third wife, Mary Cantey, who would survive him until 1863 and maintain even in her last years a reputation for liveliness. By her he had three daughters.

The cabin-born, forest-bred founder of this family managed to find time for recreation and self-improvement. Sketchy as his formal education had been, he liked to read and to think. He bought books by the thousand, but not enough of them to fence himself in from the outdoors where he had grown up. His race horses were famous, and in 1800 his entries won every first prize in the four-day meeting of the Charleston Jockey Club.{25} As he had hunted for meat in his youth, so now he hunted for sport, and excelled the most gun-wise of his neighbors. The capital city knew and respected him, and had reasons for gratitude. His charities were varied and extensive. He contributed importantly toward the founding of Trinity Episcopal Church. In 1801 he was a principal endower and an original trustee of the newly organized South Carolina College in Columbia.

His character was individual almost to eccentricity, as remembered by Edward Hooker of Connecticut, who was imported in 1805 as a tutor for the Hampton children. The Yankee and the Carolinian had frequent discussions, Hampton standing with widespread feet and stooped shoulders to state his animated and original views. He called himself a "loose Christian," by which he meant that he was liberal in his views toward the faith of others, and desired the same liberality toward his own. It sounds like a less elegant echo of Thomas Jefferson’s religious philosophy, and Hampton’s attitude must have pleased Thomas Cooper, the scholarly deist who was building strongly for education and culture as president of the South Carolina College.

The old soldier liked people, but not too close to him. It was preferable, he told Hooker, to live two or three miles at least from any neighbors...the tendency of these village settlements is to make people more contracted, less hospitable and less friendly.{26} It was well for his fellowman not to crowd him. To his dying day he resented anything that seemed an interference with his rights, and would oppose with equal violence the oppression of the weak; nor did he confine his justice to human beings. Once, while visiting a friend, he rose earlier than others in the house and walked out into the dawn. Later his host found Hampton sitting under a tree in the yard, and from a branch above him dangled the limp corpse of the family’s largest and choicest turkey gobbler, minus its head.

I had to kill him, announced the veteran. He was strutting about and beating all the smaller fowls, and I could not endure it. It was not fair play.

Perhaps conditioned by knowledge of Hampton’s temper, the host admitted that the turkey deserved its fate.{27}

Maintaining his taste for military life, Hampton re-entered the army as a peacetime officer and in 1809 was promoted brigadier-general. He also sat in Congress for two terms, though with no particular distinction.

In 1812, when both of his sons were students at the South Carolina College, came new war with Britain, and the old soldier went into combat service again. He was a gruff commander, savage but not too successful in the field. He quarrelled with brother-officers and became the target of harsh criticism, and at the end of hostilities resigned from the army in none too good a mood. But the younger Wade, who