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In the South, there was a growing movement by the 1870s to restore control of the South to Southerners, a growing resentment of any alien governing of Southern states by outsiders operating under the Reconstruction Acts. Those who wished to return control of the South to Southerners came to be known as the "Redeemers," or the "Bourbons." No, the Bourbons did not refer to people who drank a lot of that liquid produced in Kentucky. It referred to the French Bourbons who tried to restore the monarchy in France earlier in the nineteenth century.

The Bourbons were in part of the old planter, old plantation class. They were in part composed of the newly rising middle and upper-middle class industrial capitalists, the people like the Richard Edmondses, the Henry Gradys, and others that we've talked about. Like their fellow Southerners before the Civil War, the Redeemers were determined to uphold white supremacy. This meant, as far as they were concerned, putting an end to any and to all black influence in politics. Now, we could take many examples to illustrate this, but perhaps the best example for us to take is the state of South Carolina, the state in which, in many respects, the Civil War had begun.

It's important to take South Carolina as an example because, for a short period of time, South Carolina, more than any other Southern state, was heavily influenced by black voting and by some black officeholding. One of the first actions of the state of South Carolina, in the aftermath of the Civil War, was to set up a system of integrated public schools. The result, to any of us who have lived in the late twentieth century, was predictable. Most South Carolinians who were white simply pulled their children out of the public schools, turning them into nearly all black, or all black, public schools. Following the attempt to integrate the schools in South Carolina, a coalition of white liberals and black voters established an extensive public works system. They established an extensive system of poor relief in the 1870s. Within a few years after the end of the Civil War, the indebtedness of the state of South Carolina was the highest in the South. By 1874, the Redeemers of South Carolina had triumphed--the white majority was back in the saddle; the state was back in the hands of conservative whites.

The attitudes of South Carolinians toward their black population could best be represented by a man named Wade Hampton. Hampton was one of the best known South Carolinians both throughout the South and, indeed, throughout the nation in the later years of the nineteenth century. He had served with distinction in the Confederate army during the war. He'd gained election as governor of the state of South Carolina in 1876. He finally went as a representative from the state to Washington, D.C. He was a symbol of the Redeemers, the conservative whites, coming back to power in a variety of Southern states. Wade Hampton was always proud of the fact (and never missed an opportunity to let an audience know it) that he had been the very first man in the South to advocate that blacks be given the vote. But, as he constantly reminded his black audiences, "The best friends of the colored man are the old slaveholders. We're the ones know how to take care of you." As long as black voters kept their place, as long as black voters voted as they were told for men like Wade Hampton, the Wade Hampton's of the South were happy to let blacks vote.

Copyright 2004 University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents