Wade Hampton's Jeffersonian Principles
By Dr David Aiken
Continued from Page 1
After the war, Hampton was not bitter. He said, “We acknowledge that the stern, irrevocable verdict of war has been rendered against us. ...We claim to be honest and loyal citizens.”
Still, Confederate Southerners would have to become citizens of two countries. Indeed, most Americans would now have to be dual Americans, because the victorious North would begin immediately to justify itself by claiming the invaders were righteous while Southern defenders were guilty and wicked. The Lincolnian American would spend a century and a half defending its unholy invasion of the South.
The most obvious example of imperial propaganda and deception was when Sherman blamed Wade Hampton for burning Columbia. The eyewitness accounts, though, easily prove Sherman the liar. In his Capture, Sack and Destruction of the City of Columbia, William Gilmore Simms records that Sherman dismissed his invading mercenaries with a general license to forage upon the people of the state: "It was the boast of every officer and soldier in [Sherman's] army, that he had fed fat upon the country through which he had passed; everywhere finding abundance, and had not once felt the necessity of lifting the cover from his own wagons, and feeding from his own accumulated stores. The mendacity of the man strangles his logic. But the complaint of Hampton, and of our people at large, is not what he fed his followers upon the country, but that he destroyed what he did not need for food, and tore the bread from the famishing mouths of a hundred thousand women and children - feeble infancy and decrepit age, and this, too, coupling with the robbery and incendiarism, deeds of the foulest violence, and most reckless debauchery, the meanest practices of thief and outlaw.” (89)
Simms summarizes the invaders, "These monsters of virtuous pretension, with their banner of streaks and spangles overhead, and sworn to the Constitution, which they neither understand nor read." Then Simms speaks of the encouragement they receive from their women back home: their appetite for thievery "is kept lively by their women – letters found upon their dead, or upon prisoners, almost invariably appealing to them to bring home the gauds and jewelry, eyen the dresses, of the Southern women, to deck the fond feminine expectants at home, whom we may suppose to be all the while at their devotions, assailing Heaven with prayers in behalf of their thrice blessed cause and country.” (91)
Years later in the twilight of his life, after repeatedly denouncing Sherman for his lies and war crimes, Hampton would say:
"I am aware that in certain quarters it is the fashion to tell our people that these are all dead issues, and that they should be forgotten as we press on in that new and glorious era which is dawning on the reconstructed South ... that we must forget and forgive! ... What are we to forget? Must we forget that we are the sons of men who gave their blood to establish the liberty of America. ... Can the father forget his son, struck down by his side, in the prime of manly strength and youthful beauty? ... Time may teach us to forgive, but it can never make us forget.”
Furthermore, Hampton claimed that all Southerners have the right
"to justify our cause, to vindicate our motives, and to honor our dead ... If our faith in the justice of our cause was so strong that we risked life and all that made life desirable on the dread issue of war, surely we should strive to justify ourselves in the eyes of the world."
Echoing William Gilmore Simms and many older Southerners, Hampton asked the women of the South to
"teach their children that their fathers fought for the right; that they were inspired by as just a cause as ever fired the hearts or nerved the arms of patriots, and that though that cause has gone down in disaster, in ruin, in blood, not one stain of dishonor rests upon it."
General Hampton continued in a speech before the Sons of Confederate Veterans in Charleston:
"It will be the task of your organization and kindred ones ... to preserve the honor and to preserve from detraction the memory of those who sacrificed everything. ...I want you to try to teach to your children and to your children's children that ours was not a lost cause. I want you to tell them that we were fighting for the right..."
Then General Hampton warned against the "false doctrine" of the new Lincolnian American,
"a false doctrine ... which tells you that because of the failure of our cause there was no truth or justice in it. Any human undertaking, however just it may be, may fail, but the everlasting principle of right and justice can never be blotted out. A great truth, like the God-head whence it emanates [from], is eternal, and it will live 'till the last syllable of recorded time.’”
What is that "great truth," “the everlasting principle of right and justice"? What did Wade Hampton consider those principles?
Who is a Jeffersonian American?
What are the core values which Thomas Jefferson and the Founders fought and died for when the British invaded?
What did Wade Hampton and South Carolina defend?
What motivated the South to secede and to fight until exhaustion in what we say in Charleston was Mr. Lincoln's War?
Green
Both Thomas Jefferson and Wade Hampton were what we call today green. Jefferson's Monticello in Albemarle County, Virginia, was the delight of his life. Built on land he inherited from his father, he died there in 1826 surrounded by his family of grandchildren and great grandchildren. His delight was always in the culture of the soil. He called himself the "most ardent farmer in the state." He conserved, planted, developed, rotated, selected and experimented, making Monticello self-sustaining for himself and some 140 other people. “The greatest service," he said, "that can be rendered to any country is to add a useful plant to its culture." So important was the land to Jefferson that he declared upon his return from France that he preferred the woods and fields to all the gay pleasures of Paris.
Wade Hampton was a major actor in the significant agricultural heritage of Carolina. Throughout the colonial period, South Carolina was not only the wealthiest colony in America but also the wealthiest in the entire, sprawling British Empire. Nine of the ten richest Americans during this period were from South Carolina. The contributions of South Carolinians to agriculture lead every state in America. From indigo, to Carolina Gold, to sea island cotton, to short-staple cotton the state has produced a long line of heroes of the soil.
Short-staple cotton was the source of much Hampton family wealth. The Hamptons owned one of the first cotton gins, and Wade Hampton III was a party to one of the largest financial transactions prior to 1861. In one day in 1860, Hampton sold three shipments of short-staple cotton, fetching him an unbelievable price of more than a million dollars each. (I always thought that deal made it possible for him to create Hampton's Legion.)
After the war, when the Yankees ran the country, the South's green gold was harvested. 146 million acres of timber in the South were cut. Over 160 million telephone poles today in our crumbling power grid came from Southern long leaf pines. Deforesting the South while industrializing the North kick started global warming. There is nothing green about Lincolnian Americans and Yankee dominance, unlike Jeffersonian Americans who respect, conserve and value the earth and all her treasures.
Inalienable Rights
Jefferson is remembered as the philosopher of the Revolution, the man who championed human rights – among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, as well as the right of revolution. "Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God," he said. "The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time." Inscribed under the dome to the Jefferson Memorial in Washington DC are his words, "I have sworn on the altar of God eternal hostility to every form of tyranny over the mind of man."
Wade Hampton was a champion of the rights of Southern Americans on dozens of battlefields. When Lincoln unlawfully and unconstitutionally called for 75,000 volunteers to invade the South, Wade Hampton responded by raising Hampton's Legion to defend the Southland. The key word here is self-defense. Hampton saw himself fighting a defensive war against unlawful, cruel, and mercenary invasion. Although he was not formally educated in military arts, Hampton rose to the rank of Lieutenant General to command Robert E. Lee's horse cavalry in the Army of Northern Virginia, surely one of the greatest armies the world has ever known.
Even though he defended life, liberty, home and family against aggressive invasion, Hampton fought lawfully and honorably, by the rules of international warfare, and not as
Sherman and the Yankee invaders who by their example, (or I should say mis-example) re-introduced and glorified brutal total warfare, which became the accepted practice of Nazis and 20th century totalitarians. Yes, we can thank Lincoln and Sherman for 20th century total warfare. But Wade Hampton committed no atrocities and no crimes against women, children and old people.
He commanded with courage, intelligence, dedication and morality. And unlike his predecessor Jeb Stuart and many high ranking officers, Hampton wore modest clothes and behaved humbly and honorably, just as General Lee who always wore a captain's uniform.
Home Rule
Now we come to what some consider Wade Hampton's greatest contribution. Following Jefferson's principle of self-government by consent of the people, Hampton redeemed the state and ended Radical Reconstruction. The looting of South Carolina escalated after Sherman's march and after hard fighting ceased. Confederate Carolinians were disenfranchised; their property was confiscated; plantations were lost to banks and foreclosures; justice was scorned; and good people were driven beyond the point of endurance. Many were dejected and the overwhelming challenge for all was how to live after the war, how to go on in defeat.
Hampton became a leader and once again displayed his moral and philosophical superiority to the invading Yankees. He became a true statesman for South Carolina. By example and by public policy, he defended the decentralization of States Rights (as opposed to the new centralization and unitary policies of the Lincolnians); Hampton defended the sovereignty of the people in their home states (as opposed to Lincolnian tyranny of majority); and he defended self-government, the sound Jeffersonian principle of government by consent of the people, or as Hampton called it, home rule.
Ending the prodigal and criminal actions of the Reconstruction government, Hampton counseled against retaliatory violence and won the support of decent Americans in both North and South, thus ending the darkest period in Southern history.
Debt
Lincoln did not hesitate to borrow 4.3 billion dollars to wage his unjust war to prevent Southern independence, at 7% interest. There was no control on spending in Lincoln's administration.
Needless to say, the carpetbaggers and scalawags during Reconstruction that Wade Hampton opposed imitated Lincoln's prodigal ways. In a time when public servants spent public money irresponsibly and lavishly, Wade Hampton stood for fiscal responsibility. After all, it was Thomas Jefferson who declared that the worst thing elected officials could do was to spend more money than could be repaid in 20 years. Otherwise the greedy present generations will doom their children and grandchildren to perpetual debt and to economic slavery. Public indebtedness, Jefferson said, would be the destruction of all freedoms and civic virtue. Jefferson considered his greatest achievement as president to be the reduction of the Revolutionary War debt.
Today, there is no question which side our government is on. Our leaders are spending the youth of American into slavery. Every American baby and every American child owes a debt of $50,000 to reduce the imperial American deficit, even before accepting that first job or voting a single time. Neither Southern slave babies nor African children sold into slavery were ever so encumbered.
Would we be better off under Jeffersonian principles of fiscal management? Certainly our children and grandchildren would be.
Would we be closer to our ideals if Wade Hampton and the Confederates had prevailed? Yes.
Would the world be better off if the Confederates had won? Absolutely.
Conclusion
Why remember Wade Hampton?
Education in South Carolina today is called the heart of what's wrong with the state. Many say that education should produce the workers needed to "turn South Carolina around." Some of these activists are looking for ways to continue exploiting the state – after Invasion, after Radical Reconstruction, after deforestation, after 150 years of misrepresentation. Republicans have been obsessed with turning their view of the war into historical record. As a result the Jeffersonian view of America, the original view of the Founding Fathers as an experiment in justice and prosperity, has been removed from public record. To the detriment of us all, our education is currently teaching our youth to feel guilty and to be ashamed of the South, especially the antebellum South and the Confederate South – those periods in our history most Jeffersonian.
But once we open a discussion of the Invasion – its immediate and long-term consequences, then age-old biases and hard-line prejudices are suddenly revealed and softened. When we talk about Invasion and the patriotic heroes who defended their home states, then do we see the conflict between American centralization and imperialism, on one hand, and Jeffersonian decentralization and home rule on the other.
Who, then, is an American?
Wade Hampton is one of our best, because he reminds us of our fundamental principles – defending our homes, our families, and our liberties; while preserving our sacred places and conserving responsibly this marble green earth.
When asked what is an American, our answers are based on history and heroes. Those Jeffersonian principles our ancestors fought for – including self-defense, self-government, fiscal responsibility and a green management of our resources – are the basis of the real American experiment in government, largely because those principles produced such people as Wade Hampton. In war and in peace, Wade Hampton fought against wasteful and prodigal spending, against planet destroying destruction, and against imperialistic tyranny.
Surely we should follow his example.
Featured Presentation
Wade Hamption Memorial Service
Trinity Episcopal Cathedral
Columbia, South Carolina
10 April 2010