Jeffersonian South vs Hamiltonian New England

The issue between the Federalists and the Republicans, or Democrats as the Jeffersonian Party had also begun to be called, was clear. It stemmed back to the difference in political philosophy between Jefferson and Hamilton…. Caucuses of the two parties in Congress selected respectively President John Adams and C. C. Pinckney as Federalist candidates, and Jefferson and Aaron Burr as Republican, a Northern President and Southern Vice-President, and vice-versa. The campaign was one of extreme bitterness, the Republicans being denounced as Anti-Christ in New England, and every possible slander being everywhere heaped upon the several candidates. Hamilton was the “boss” of the Federalist Party, but… had come to hate Adams, who, nevertheless, after a tour of New England, Hamilton realized had to be the party candidate. Blinded with passion, Hamilton wrote for private circulation a pamphlet in which, with a complete breakdown of political sense and ordinary decency, he declared at length that Adams was utterly unfit for office but that Federalists should vote for him so as to bring in the party. Some of the saner leaders, such as George Cabot, urged its suppression but one of the printed copies fell into the hands of Aaron Burr, who immediately saw to its publication. When the Electoral votes were counted it was found that Jefferson and Burr each had seventy-three, Adams sixty-five and Pinckney sixty-four. It was a Republican victory, revealing markedly distinct sectional and class cleavages. The West and the entire South up to Maryland voted for Jefferson, as did Pennsylvania and New York. Maryland was divided evenly, but Adams, who also got some votes in North Carolina and Pennsylvania, carried the whole of New England. The adroit manipulation of Burr in New York decided the final result but two facts stood out. One was that the agrarian South and the frontier West was strongly Democratic and anti-Federalist, and the other was, on a closer analysis of the local returns everywhere, that the poorer people, the farmers and town artisans and others, were Democratic whereas the main Federalist strength came from the mercantile and other moneyed interests. Excerpted from The March of Democracy: A History of the United States Volume II by James Truslow Adams, Charles Schribner’s Sons, New York, 1947, pages 29-30.

Why the South was right, the North wrong

The victors write history books, and the dominant accounts of the Civil War [sic] reflect the victorious perspective: misguided Southerners sought to destroy democratic governance and preserve slavery. Led by the heroic Abraham Lincoln, Northerners responded by saving the Union and emancipating the slaves. And for leading his moral crusade, Lincoln is America’s greatest president, martyred in his hour of triumph. Charles Adams, best known for his books on taxation, takes aim at this history. His analysis of what more accurately would be called the War of Northern Aggression is a bit different: With the passing of time, all wars seem pointless. The American Civil War [sic] certainly looks that way at this time in history. Heroes begin to look like fools. The glorious dead, the young soldiers who suffered and died, need to be pitied, and the leaders who led them to early graves need to be lynched. In that war, as in so many wars, the wrong people died. When in the Course of Human Eventsoffers a sustained challenge to much of the conventional wisdom about the conflict. Indeed, the book’s title is a bit misleading. Adams doesn’t so much develop a comprehensive argument for secession as puncture the worst hypocrisies surrounding the North’s decision to initiate war. Observes Adams: “Lincoln’s concern that government ‘of the people’ would perish from the earth if the North lost may have been the biggest absurdity of all.” Particularly valuable is Adams’s critique of Lincoln. The victors’ history books tend to glide by Lincoln’s constitutional usurpations and violations. Adams does not. Even those familiar with the 16th president’s unconstitutional militia call, suspension of habeas corpus, and other lawless acts may not know that Lincoln ordered the arrest of U.S. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney for ruling that Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus without congressional approval violated the law. Only the failure of a U.S. marshal to carry out the order “saved the president from what would have been his worst crime against the constitutional scheme of government,” the author writes.

Lincoln’s cynical, hypocritical Thanksgiving speech

Over the Thanksgiving holiday (decreed by Lincoln in 1863) one neocon Tabloid, National Review, reprinted Lincoln’s October 3, 1863 proclamation, highlighting Abe’s cynical reference to “the Most High God . . .” Another neocon Tabloid, The American Spectator, published the typical sappy, a-historical, fact-free, rhetorical mumbo jumbo about “Father Abraham” that Harry Jaffa and his fellow Lincoln cultists are known for. The references to God in Lincoln’s Thanksgiving proclamation, like all other such references in his political speeches, are breathtakingly cynical because of the fact that Lincoln never became a Christian (according to his wife and his closest friend and law partner, William Herndon); he never joined a church; rarely ever stepped foot into one; as a young man wrote an entire book that disputed Scripture; and was famous for his vulgar stories and language. But he studied the Bible as a political tool, just as today’s politicians study opinion polls. Prior to 1863 Lincoln’s references to God and the Bible in his political speeches were mostly catch phrases and buzz words (“a house divided cannot stand”). But as more and more fellow American citizens were murdered by the thousands by his army, and as the war crimes mounted, Abe stepped up his Biblical lingo. By the time of his second inaugural he wrote a speech in which he absolved himself of all blame for the war (“the war [just] came,” he said), blaming the whole bloody mess on God. Presuming to know what was in the mind of God, he theorized that the Lord was punishing all Americans, North and South, for the sin of slavery. He did not theorize on why God would not also punish the British, French, Spanish, and others who were responsible for bringing 95% of all the slaves to the Western Hemisphere. In other words, his Biblical language was always a diversion and a cover-up for the war crimes against American civilians (among other atrocities) that he was micromanaging. The first sentence of Lincoln’s Thanksgiving proclamation is a real howler. The year 1863, he said, “has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies.” What? Healthful skies?! As of the fall of 1863 there had been several hundred thousand battlefield casualties, including thousands of men in both armies who died of yellow fever and other dreaded diseases. There were more than 50,000 casualties in the Battle of Gettysburg alone, just three months earlier. In the second sentence, Lincoln the non-Christian claimed that “we” are “prone to forget” that all of those “healthful skies” come from “the ever watchful providence of Almighty God.” Speak for yourself, Abe! This is followed by another howler, claiming that “peace has been preserved with all nations.” He apparently forgot about the Confederate States of America that he was waging total war against. It gets worse (and funnier). The next thing he says is that “order has been maintained.” Stalin said the same thing about the Soviet Union. By that time Lincoln had imprisoned thousands of Northern political dissenters without due process since he illegally suspended the writ of Habeas Corpus. He had shut down hundreds of “unorderly” opposition newspapers, and deported poor old Congressman Clement Vallandigham of Dayton, Ohio, his most outspoken critic in Congress. As Dean Sprague wrote in Freedom Under Lincoln (p. 299), under Lincoln’s “policy of oppression,” the “entire judicial system was set aside” as “the laws were silent, indictments were not found, testimony was not taken, judges did not sit, juries were not impaneled, convictions were not obtained and sentences were not pronounced. The Anglo-Saxon concept of due process, perhaps the greatest political triumph of the ages and the best guardian of freedom, was abandoned.” Three months earlier there had been draft riots in New York City that one could hardly describe as “orderly.” An eye witness to the riots was Colonel Arthur Fremantle of the British Army, who wrote the following about the New York City draft riots in his book, Three Months in the Southern States (p. 302): The reports of outrages, hangings, and murder, were now most alarming, the terror and anxiety were universal. All shops were shut; all carriages and omnibuses had ceased running. No colored man or woman was visible or safe in the streets or even in his own dwelling. Telegraphs were cut, and railroad tracks torn up. Lincolnian “order” was restored when Abe sent 15,000 troops to New York from the just-concluded Battle of Gettysburg. The troops fired indiscriminately into the draft protesters, killing hundreds, more likely thousands, of them according to Iver Bernstein, author of The New York City Draft Riots. (This scene was portrayed in the movie Gangs of New York, where Bernstein worked as an historical consultant to director Martin Scorcese). But let’s not let historical facts get in our way. Let’s follow the neocon lead and swoon and weep and get chills up our legs over Abe’s Big Lie that “harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict.” The notion that there was “harmony” and “unity” in the Northern states during the war is one of the most outrageous lies in American history. Historian Ella Lonn described how Lincoln created “harmony” within the U.S. Army in the face of massive desertions by literally hundreds of thousands of Northern men in her book, Desertion During the Civil War. Draftees “were held like veritable prisoners” and Lincoln’s government “had no compunctions about shooting or hanging deserters,” wrote Lonn. The murder of deserters achieved Nazi-like efficiency: “A gallows and shooting ground were provided in each corps and scarcely a Friday passed during the winter of 1863–64 that some wretched deserter did not suffer the death penalty in the Army of the Potomac. . . . The death penalty was so unsparingly used that executions were almost daily occurrences. . .” The “method of execution” was “generally shooting but hanging seems to have been used occasionally.” The Thanksgiving speech gets even worse. The very next uttering of Abe’s is that “the laws have been respected and obeyed.” Well, not by Abraham Lincoln, certainly. Even his own attorney general, Robert Bates, stated that his suspension of Habeas Corpus was illegal and unconstitutional, as was the suppression of free speech throughout the North. West Virginia was illegally carved out of Virginia to form a new slave state as part of the union. And where in the Constitution is the president permitted to order soldiers to imprison and deport an opposition member of Congress without any due process? Or rig national elections and imprison duly-elected members of the Maryland state assembly without due process? Doesn’t the Constitution require presidents to see to it that the states have republican forms of government? Indeed, Lincoln’s invasion of the Southern states was the very definition of treason under the U.S. Constitution. Article 3, Section 3 proclaims that: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort” (emphasis added). Treason under the U.S. Constitution consists “only” in waging war against “them,” namely, the free, independent and sovereign states, plural. Lincoln redefined treason to mean any criticism by anyone of him or his administration. In fact, he even said that a man who stands by and says nothing while the war was being discussed was guilty of “treason.” Lincoln also violated international law and his own military code by intentionally waging war on American civilians for four years, killing more than 50,000 of them according to historian Jeffrey Rogers Hummel. Even pro-Sherman biographer Lee Kennett wrote in his book, Marching Through Georgia (p. 286), that “had the Confederates somehow won, had their victory put them in position to bring their chief opponents before some sort of tribunal, they would have found themselves justified (as victors generally do) in stringing up President Lincoln and the entire Union high command for violation of the laws of war, specifically for waging war against noncombatants.” All the “great things” that had happened since he became president, said Abe, were “the gracious gifts of the Most High God . . .” Therefore, he said, “we” should celebrate as “the whole American People” to give thanks to God with a national holiday. This was another very large contradiction: Lincoln never admitted that secession was legal, therefore, he always considered Southerners to be a part of “the whole American people” for political purposes. It is doubtful that a single Southerner, in 1863, would have heeded Abe’s advice and given thanks for all that he had done for them. Lincoln concluded his Thanksgiving propaganda speech with more religious lingo, thanking the Lord for “the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility,” and, get this – Union. The Union – always spelled with a capital “U” – was not just a practical political arrangement created by the founding generation mostly for foreign policy purposes, as Thomas Jefferson said it was. It was supposedly divine, the work of God. Lincoln the non-Christian knew this for sure. It’s what created The Divine Right of Lincoln, similar to The Divine Right of Kings during the Middle Ages. This deification of the state echoed the words of the fanatical New England Unitarian preacher Henry W. Bellows, who worked in the Lincoln administration as its Sanitary Commissioner and whose son, Russell, was Robert Todd Lincoln’s Harvard classmate and best friend. (Lincoln’s son Robert spent the war years “fighting” for good grades at Harvard). Bellows authored a creepy, totalitarian-sounding book in 1863 entitled Unconditional Loyalty which declared that “the state is indeed divine, as being the great incarnation of a nation’s rights, privileges, honor and life” itself.” Moreover, “the first and most sacred duty of loyal citizens” was “to rally round the president – without question or dispute.” In his new book, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and Slavery (p. 265), Lincoln cultist Eric Foner informs us that “it is not surprising that Lincoln seemed to share this outlook.” This “outlook” would have caused George Washington to reach for his sword and lead another Revolution against another despotic and dictatorial regime.

A sidewalk leading to nowhere

Mississippi writer and professor Stark Young, who later taught in Texas, Massachusetts and New York, imparted the following image and words of advice in his essay ‘Not in Memoriam, But in Defense’ that was included in the 1930 Southern agrarian manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand:

I need not forget the grace I celebrate, nor the consideration for others that my boasts imply. This tendency – may I avoid it! – among Southerners at times to drive the shot home arises partly from hurt pride, a defensive tack after years of being poor and shut out from one’s inherited way of living; but the display of it is useless and only offends. On the other hand, I should study when to inflame or offend, to be downright and hot, and so bring the opponent into such heat that he will plank down his idea, tell me what he thinks a civilization should be be. If he has a solid theory, I can make a honorable argument. If he has only a jumble of puerile catchwords, he may be such as can be led to say: “In our town we’ve got twenty thousand miles of concrete sidewalks.” “And where do they lead?” I say. He will not have thought of that.’

The Secession Commissioners: Independence or destruction?

Southern nationalists, the earliest and most ardent of whom were referred to as ‘Fire Eaters,’ struggled for more than three decades to convince Southerners of the necessity of independence from the Union. Men such as South Carolina statesman and US Senator Robert Barnwell Rhett (who spent all of his adult life leading the effort for Southern independence and remained committed to the struggle even after the Confederacy’s defeat) dedicated themselves to rallying Southerners to the cause of independence. Convincing their countrymen to secede was not an easy thing to do though. To this end the secessionists used every divisive issue which appeared, including the tariff, western expansion, slavery and foreign policy, to promote their cause. Despite their efforts, Dr William C Davis in his book ‘Rhett: The Turbulent Life and Times of a Fire-Eater,’ writes on page 582: [N]ot a single piece of testimony survives by which a Carolinian declared that Rhett made him a secessionist. Rather, the record of the years makes it abundantly clear that Carolinians advanced toward secession in a series of fits and starts and steps backward as well as forward, not propelled by the invective of leaders but motivated by events. The conservative nature of Southerners led them to largely reject Southern nationalists’ warnings about the inherent dangers of the Union for decades. Even after secession Southerners chose conservatives to lead the new Confederacy who had opposed secession or embraced it only after it had become inevitable. As Davis writes on page 583: The founding fathers of the Confederacy never for a moment seriously considered a fire-eater for the presidency or vice presidency, and not one of them was considered for a cabinet post either. Those first top leaders were cooperationists to a man, and some such as Stephens reluctant even in that pose. WHAT CONVINCED SOUTHERNERS TO SECEDE? Though many events from the late 1820s through 1860 helped to gradually push Southerners towards independence, what was the one which finally convinced them to secede? We often hear from politically correct defenders of the South that it was a desire to maintain States’ rights that led to secession. Indeed, President Jefferson Davis’ book after the war, as well as the writings of many other former Confederates, emphasised the constitutional struggle between the South and North, the States and the Federal Government. From the other side, those who are anti-Southern and anti-secession, we hear almost to a man that the South’s desire to maintain slavery was the reason for secession. This is an issue we have repeatedly addressed on SNN. Secessionists, primarily from the Lower South, actually sided with Northern abolitionists in defeating the Crittenden Compromise which was embraced by moderates and would have preserved slavery and improved the South’s position within the Union. As well, Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address assured Southerners that slavery would not be touched where it already existed if they would rejoin the Union. If Southerners had been motivated to secede by the fear of abolition in the near future it seems clear that they would have accepted either the Crittenden Compromise or Lincoln’s offer. Professor Charles B Dew’s book ‘Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War‘ is indispensable reading as to what actually convinced Southerners to secede in 1860-61. To be clear, Professor Dew is no friend of the South or supporter of secession. He makes it clear in the introduction and conclusion of his book that he was motivated to write the short book to prove that race and slavery, not States’ rights, were what motivated Southerners to secede. Despite this, his work is important because in it he presents in a short (the book is only 124 pages including the index, notes and appendix) and clear form the reason why the South seceded. He does so by quoting extensively from the Secession Commissioners (the representatives selected by the first seceded States to the other Southern States for the purpose of convincing them to also secede) and summarising their arguments. It becomes exceedingly clear after reading this book and the speeches it was based upon that what motivated Southerners to secede in 1860-61 was a fear that if they didn’t do so they would be physically destroyed. They believed that if they stayed in the Union they would not survive. Specifically, they saw the growing political imbalance in the Union which led to Lincoln’s election in 1860 without the support of a single Southern State and looked ahead to a time when equality (which the South forthrightly rejected in favour of civilisation) would be imposed upon them and would necessarily lead to the suffering and destruction of the Southern people. BACKGROUND The seigneurial civilisation (the centre of which was referred to as the ‘Golden Circle‘ by nineteenth century Southerners) to which the South belonged from the earliest colonial times until 1865 was progressively undermined beginning with the American Revolutionary War. That war split the plantation civilisation in two, greatly weakening it and ultimately spelling the doom for both halves. That split was followed quickly by the advent in the Caribbean of the radical ideology of the French Revolution. ‘Liberty, Fraternity and Equality’ nearly destroyed all of the French Caribbean and ultimately led to a genocidal race war in the fabulously wealthy colony of St Dominque (or St Domingo, as many Southerners called it) – present day Haiti. Southerners saw this happen and were horrified by the destruction and collapse of civilisation which followed. It was around this time that the Enlightenment Era-inspired ideas of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison began to slowly give way to the Romantic Era-inspired ideas of the early Southern nationalists. John C Calhoun, the South’s leading statesman in the first half of the nineteenth century, served to bridge the gap between these two political worldviews. The fall of the French Caribbean due to the imposition of democracy and equality in that region was followed shortly thereafter by the fall of the British Caribbean. Southerners watched this with intense interest as well. Prior to the American Revolution the British plantation colonies of the Caribbean had been close partners with the Southern plantation colonies and they had shared political, cultural, economic and family ties. London’s imposition of democracy and equality in the region led to the swift economic decline of the British Caribbean. By then the Golden Circle civilisation survived largely in the South, Cuba (a wealthy Spanish colony which was periodically threatened with the prospect of democracy and equality by Madrid) and Brazil (a former Portuguese sugar plantation colony). What had been the wealthiest civilisation in the world was clearly on the defensive and being picked apart by outside powers. With the above brief historical sketch one can understand why Southerners in the mid-nineteenth century were on the defensive. Their economy was extremely strong and their power in the US Federal Government was impressive, yet their position was being gradually undermined by the North’s fast-growing (due to immigration) population and western expansion. Southerners saw a time approaching when they would be unable to stop anti-Southern legislation in the US Congress. The prospect of this was frightening given the increasingly radical political noises that came out of the Northeast and Upper Midwest. The Era of Good Feelings was over; the North and South were locked in a struggle for political supremacy, control of the Union and, ultimately, cultural and economic survival. SURVIVAL Beyond even concerns for their political and economic position in a Union which they understood would soon be dominated by a more populous, hostile region, Southerners were greatly concerned for their physical survival. For decades the Fire-Eaters had warned that remaining in the Union threatened the South politically and economically; however, these arguments did not persuade the people of a single State to secede. It was only with the actual fighting on the western frontier (Missouri and Kansas) between Southern and Northern partisans (see here, here, here, here and here), the watershed events of massacres by radical abolitionists (such as John Brown’s Pottawatomie Massacre of 1856) and rise in North of the Republican Party (a purely sectional, anti-Southern party which had as one of its important factions the radical abolitionists) that Southerners en masse accepted the necessity of independence. They saw three possible and destructive scenarios playing out if they remained in the Union. These were 1) the imposition of equality (as had been inflicted upon the British Caribbean and resulted in the dramatic decline of the region), 2) genocidal racial warfare (as had happened in Haiti and had resulted in White genocide and the collapse of civilisation), or 3) racial amalgamation (which would mean the end of White Southerners as a distinct ethnic group). Southerners were unwilling to accept any of these scenarios. Professor Charles Dew notes that the Secession Commissioners’ speeches to the legislative assemblies and political leaders of the South illuminated ‘so clearly the racial content’ of secession. What was at stake was survival, nothing less. After decades of abuse at the hands of the Federal Government and a hostile region it was only the prospect of physical destruction which finally moved Southerners to leave the Union in the winter of 1860-61. Professor Dew writes in the concluding chapter of his book: When they used words like “submission” and “degradation,” when they referred to “final subjugation” and “annihilation,” they were not talking about constitutional differences or political arguments. They were talking about the dawning of an abominable new world in the South…. The secession commissioners knew what this new and hateful world would look like. Over and over again they called up three stark images that, taken together, constituted the white South’s worst nightmare. The first threat was the looming specter of racial equality. …The second element in the commissioners’ prophecy was the prospect of a race war. …Alabamians Garrott and Smith told their Raleigh audience that Republican policies would force the South either to abandon slavery “or be doomed to a servile war.” William Cooper, Alabama’s commissioner to Missouri, delivered a similar message in Jefferson City. “Under the policy of the Republican Party, the time would arrive when the scenes of San Domingo and Hayti [sic], with all their attendant horrors, would be enacted in the slaveholding States,” he told the Missourians. The third prospect in the commissioners’ doomsday vision was, in may ways, the most dire: racial amalgamation. …In Virginia, Henry Benning insisted that under Republican-led abolition “our women” would suffer “horrors… we cannot contemplate in imagination.” There was not an adult present who could not imagine exactly what Benning was talking about. Leroy Pope Walker, Alabama’s commissioner to Tennessee and subsequently the first Confederate secretary of war, predicted that in the absence of secession all would be lost – first, “our property,” and “then our liberties,” and finally the South’s greatest treasure, “the sacred purity of our daughters.” …The choice was absolutely clear. The slave states could secede and establish their independence, or they could submit to “Black Republican” rule with its inevitable consequences: Armageddon or amalgamation. VINDICATION US history after 1865 demonstrates the prescience of the Secession Commissioners. The physical destruction of the South’s towns and farms and the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people was followed by crippling poverty which subjected a previously wealthy nation of people to Third World conditions. This is what the Union did for the South. Economic exploitation became a fact of life that harmed Southerners for generations to come. Racial warfare did in fact break out in areas of the South after the US conquest as Southern paramilitary groups fought Union-supported Black militias. Even greater horrors – namely, a Haitian-like collapse of civilisation in the Lower South – was prevented only by the Revolution of 1876 and the restoration of limited Southern home rule. Recent history, in particular since the late 1950s, has much more closely followed the first and third warnings listed above that were invoked by the Secession Commissioners. Equality and democracy were forced upon Southerners at gun point. The result of this is the horror of the so-called ‘New South.’ In this reality once-safe and prosperous Southern cities are now Third World areas subjected to rampant crime, violence, political corruption, institutionalised anti-White bias and continued decline. Local, agrarian Southern elites have been replaced by democratic creatures with no loyalty to the people, culture and land. Most recently the continued survival of the Southern people has been gravely endangered by the purposeful US policy demographic replacement (as recently bragged about by US Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano). Racial amalgamation is promoted relentlessly in the US media and educational system which have been forced upon Southerners. Resistance to this is labeled ‘hate’ in a perverse injustice to morality and the English language by US society. US history since 1865 has vindicated the warning of the Secession Commissioners. The reality that we face today in the US-ruled South – one which hundreds of thousands of Southerners gave their lives to prevent – is a true horror to behold. The survival and well-being of the Southern people depend on the replacement of the ‘New South’ with a South which will be a homeland for Southerners. This is the struggle of contemporary Southern nationalists.

Red Shirts vs Union occupation in Aiken, SC

In the summer of 1876 South Carolina, a formerly influential and wealthy State, was commonly referred to as ‘the Prostrate State.’ Journalist Alfred B Williams describes the horrors of the Reconstruction era United States military occupation of the Palmetto State in his book Hampton and his Red Shirts: South Carolina’s Deliverance in 1876 as ‘nearly ten years of endurance of wrongs, miseries, humiliations and dangers ever increasing despite patient efforts to secure alleviation by submission, persuasion and pleas for peace.’ The Republican Party, supported primarily by the votes of Union soldiers and freed slaves, ruled the State. Massachusetts native Daniel Henry Chamberlain was made the Governor of the State. An estimated forty thousand White men of the State, which in general included many of the best and brightest citizens, had been killed in the recent war waged by the United States against the Southern States. Many of the White citizens had been disenfranchised for their service to their State and the South. In their place the franchise was extended to illiterate former slaves who were easily manipulated by anti-Southern organisations such as the Union League. Tyranny, lawlessness and corruption ran rampant. So bad were things that it appeared South Carolina and parts of the Lower South beyond might go the way of Haiti, where civilisation was stamped out (and has never recovered) by a slave uprising which resulted in White genocide. Desperate to restore order and Southern control of the State, the Democrats (mostly White Southerners, although some Blacks also actively supported the party) ended up rallying behind former planter and Confederate cavalry general Wade Hampton. In support of Hampton and the Southern Democrats, the Red Shirts appeared. They were a paramilitary organisation, often mounted, distinguished by the red shirts that they donned. They were organised into local ‘hunting’ or ‘fishing’ clubs, as the existence of any Southern military organisation was illegal. It was this force that actively fought the Black militias and Union League forces around the State. The campaign for the governorship and political control of the State that year often involved actually fighting and bloodshed. The White Southern minority in the State ultimately prevailed in what amounted to a revolution and the occupational Reconstruction regime was withdrawn. Williams describes on pages 289-290 of his book an incident which occurred on 17 October 1876 in which the Red Shirts marshaled their forces in the town of Aiken and rallied the local Southern people there against the occupation. As one will note from the passage, the Red Shirts were a disciplined force, not a mob. And theirs was a struggle of liberation. Williams writes: The Republicans undertook to have a meeting at Aiken the seventeenth, but not more than two hundred to three hundred persons were present, all colored, although it was announced that [Massachusetts native and Reconstruction Governor of South Carolina [Daniel Henry] Chamberlain was to speak. Undismayed by arrests and warrants and proclamations, more than a thousand mounted Red Shirts paraded, but acting under orders, refrained from approaching the Republican meeting or doing anything more than ride about the streets and maintain a steady, ceaseless sound of cheering for [Wade] Hampton which could be heard a mile. The prisoners at Lyceum Hall were given special attention and answered heartily the greetings and encouraging yells of their friends gathered outside