Benjamin Tillman

• Born: August 11, 1847
• Birthplace: Near Trenton, Edgefield County, South Carolina
• Died: July 3, 1918
• Place of death: Washington, D.C.

South Carolina governor (1890-1894) and U.S. senator (1895-1918)

Cause of notoriety: Tillman was instrumental in the implementation and defense of racial segregation in the American South during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Locale: Columbia, South Carolina; Washington, D.C.

Early Life

The son of wealthy slave owners, Benjamin Ryan Tillman (TIHL-muhn) was born after his father died. He was raised by his mother, who instilled in him the conservative, race-conscious values of the Old South. In 1864 he dropped out of school to join the Confederate army but lost an eye to illness and was unable to serve. He subsequently returned to Edgefield County and the family tradition of farming, becoming a large landowner in his own right.

During the Reconstruction period following the Civil War, Tillman became involved with the Red Shirts, a paramilitary organization formed to resist the rule of northern Republicans and restore the dominance of white southern Democrats in South Carolina government. In 1876 Tillman participated in an event known as the Hamburg Massacre, in which a group of Red Shirts murdered several members of a black militia.

Political Career

Despite his relatively affluent background, Tillman successfully launched a political career by promoting himself as a champion of the common people and an alternative to the “low country” aristocrats, who had traditionally dominated the political culture in South Carolina. During his campaign for governor, he criticized the conservative policies of the “Redemption,” or “Bourbon” Democrats, many of which were out of favor with the small-scale, upcountry farmers whose political support Tillman coveted. Tillman’s “farmers’ movement” coincided with the Agrarian and Populist movements taking place throughout the South in the late nineteenth century in revolt against the aristocracy. Tillman, however, refused to break ranks with Democrats to join the Populist Party, which welcomed African Americans into its ranks. Instead, he sought to combine the economic reforms of Populism with the sectionalist, white supremacist platform of southern Democrats. His pro-Agrarian movement within the South Carolina Democratic Party nearly succeeded in capturing control of state government in 1886. Tillman was elected governor in 1890.

As governor, Tillman was an advocate of economic reform and an opponent of social progress, particularly with regard to the treatment of African Americans. Having already successfully lobbied the state to establish an agricultural college, Tillman increased state funding for public education, a concern of the Agrarian Populists, but did little else of substance to advance a Populist agenda. An adherent of the paternalistic conventions of the Old South, Tillman used governmental power to control a variety of social and economic institutions, creating a state monopoly for the distribution of liquor, increasing the regulation of railroads, and stripping African Americans of their voting rights.

“Pitchfork Ben”

Elected to the United States Senate in 1894, Tillman arrived in Washington with a new nickname, having promised to admonish President Grover Cleveland, a pro-industry northern Democrat, by sticking a pitchfork into his ribs. Tillman continued to declare his support for small farm holders but largely ignored the populist causes that they favored, focusing instead upon advancing a white supremacist agenda designed to limit further the rights of blacks to vote, receive equal protection of the law, and access public accommodations. Tillman was instrumental in organizing a state constitutional convention in South Carolina in 1895, which instituted poll taxes and literacy tests designed to prevent blacks from voting as well as laws mandating separate schools for white and black students, forbidding interracial marriage, and tightening the hold of plantation owners over their sharecroppers by creating a form of virtual-debt slavery.

Tillman openly and unapologetically expressed contempt for African Americans and advocated violence and intimidation as means of ensuring their inequality with whites, declaring on the Senate floor in 1900 that black men suspected of sexual relations with white women should be lynched. Occasionally, the propensity toward physical violence that Tillman exhibited early in life would resurface; the Senate censured him in 1902 after he assaulted fellow senator John L. McLaurin on the Senate floor.

Despite his self-professed radicalism and obsession with racial politics, Tillman managed to reach across lines of party and ideology to contribute to the passage of progressive legislation, cooperating with his nemesis Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 by leading Senate debate over a bill regulating railroad rates. Racial politics, however, continued to dominate Tillman’s agenda. Tillman served in the Senate until his death in 1918, but his influence was greatly diminished after strokes in 1908 and 1910 impaired his ability to speak.

Impact

By combining a Populist economic agenda with the white supremacist social agenda of southern Democrats, Benjamin Tillman derailed the emerging Populist movement, resulting in a restoration of white Democratic dominance that would endure for generations in the southern United States. As a state governor and later as a U.S. Senator, Tillman played a prominent role in establishing the system of Jim Crow laws that segregated the races in the American South, preserving a racial caste system that ensured the secondary status of southern blacks well into the twentieth century. Often regarded as one of the most outspoken racists ever to serve in the U.S. Congress, his vehement defense of segregation on the national stage reinforced the institution and emboldened its adherents, contributing to the further subjugation of southern blacks. His encouragement of the use of violence to enforce the South’s racial order resulted in the continued practice of lynching, leading to the murder of numerous African Americans during the segregation era.

Bibliography

Kantrowitz, Stephen. “Ben Tillman and Hendrix McLane: Agrarian Rebels, White Manhood, ’The Farmers,’ and the Limits of Southern Populism.” Journal of Southern History 66, no. 3 (August, 2000): 497-524. Placing Tillman’s pseudopopulist Democratic agenda in the broader context of southern Agrarian Populism, this article discusses how race politics disrupted the Populist movement and ensured the continuation of white Democratic dominance.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Examines Tillman’s rise to power as a case study of the resurgence of white supremacist politics in the post-Reconstruction South.

Simkins, Francis Butler. Pitchfork Ben Tillman: South Carolinian. 1944. Reprint. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002. The classic biography of Tillman, one of the few comprehensive accounts of his life and career.