City Directories and History: Wade Hampton III grew into a six feet tall man, with wide, square shoulders, large arms and legs so powerful “he could make a horse groan with pain;” he was the picture of an athlete. Typical of the times, Wade’s father saw to it that his son learned how to manage a plantation and its various support industries. He and his father may numerous trips to their Mississippi and Louisiana plantations where he learned the work and management of their large holdings, and how to deal with the managers and slaves.
The third Wade inherited his sense of responsibility toward the family’s slaves from his predecessors. It was even said he was kind to an extreme, and had the respect of the hundreds of slave who lived on the various plantations, giving their full loyalty, looking to him as a patriarch. Typically, in the antebellum South, the Christmas season marked the end of the agricultural year and the beginning of another. Slaves were often allowed to have a limited vacation of two weeks at which time they came before their masters who inspected their health, presented new babies to the master and received gifts and supplies. In their 1850 Christmas visit to the Houmas plantation in Louisiana the Hamptons distributed to more than one thousand slaves, a blanket, stockings, hat, handkerchief, calico dress, checked apron, fine bleached pants and fancy pants.
Wade graduated from the South Carolina College in 1836, a year after his beloved grandfather Hampton’s death. Two years later, at the age of twenty, he married Margaret Preston of a notable Columbia family. Wade, following his father’s council that his position in life required him to serve his state through government; he took his place in politics in 1852 when he was elected to the House of Representative from Richland County. He served two terms in that body.
A year after Hampton began his political career tragedy struck the family when their daughter, Harriet, died. Margaret Hampton was not well in the succeeding years and after thirteen years of marriage she died in 1855. Apart from Margaret’s death, 1855 was a watershed year for the Hamptons. The legislature of South Carolina was proposing to repeal the anti slave-trade laws of 1807 and 1819. Although a skilled slave would cost as much as $1,600, labor was in demand. Hampton was not in favor of repealing the laws that would bring about wholesale trafficking in human bondage. Knowing this move would bring the ire of northern abolitionists on the state, he offered a resolution against repeal, stating the thought was “fraught with greater danger to the South”. The legislature ignored his resolution though he would later be proved right.
Also in 1855, Wade Hampton II, Wade Hampton III and brother Christopher Fitzsimmons Hampton borrowed $345,370 (nearly $8 million today), mortgaging three Mississippi plantations-Wild Woods, Bayou and Walnut Ridge. These plantations totaled more than 4,500 acres and incorporated 420 slaves. Added to this loan was another $30,000 ($630,000) borrowed from the Bank of Charleston. Though heavily in debt their estates were secure and the elder Wade was confident enough to sell Houmas for $1.5 million two years later. Wade II died in the early spring of 1858 leaving his sons to face a heavy debt. With war only three years away, these loans would prove to be the bane of the Hampton family. Just a year after Margaret’s death, in 1856, Wade was elected to the State Senate. In 1858, soon after his father’s death, the third Wade married Mary Leighton McDuffie who was eleven years his junior. Mary was the daughter of George McDuffie, a former governor and senator of South Carolina, who had died in 1851. The Hamptons and McDuffies has been long time friends and spent vacations together when the socially elite gathered. At her father’s death, Mary, the only child, had been saddled with the operation of a plantation and other businesses. It may have been that Mary turned to the Hamptons for guidance and Wade became her business manager.
In 1860, Wade was elected to his third term in the senate. At that time he was probably the wealthiest man in the South. He owned 3,000 slaves, and in a good year he could expect $200,000 (more than $4 million) from his crops. The good life for Hampton was not to continue. The trouble between the North and South that had been gain momentum for more than thirty years had crested in 1860 and a wave of destruction never before seen was about to fall upon the South.
That year most South Carolina legislators were stricken with secession fever and the only coolant was State’s Rights. Wade agreed with his peers, that the state had the right to hold slaves, but he believed it was not expedient to press the issue with the federal government. Neither did he or the other Hamptons approve of the principle of slavery; in fact, they detested the system. For those of us living in the twentieth-first century it may be difficult for us to understand how a person might despise a system and still be a main participant in it. Hampton must have asked what good would it have done to free thousands of slaves into a state or nation that was ready to defend their civil rights, provide for their well-being and leave them at the mercy of state laws (North and South) that would have restricted their freedom or place them back into bondage.
For years the Wade Hampton family wintered habitually in Mississippi on the Wild Wood plantation, but this year Wade had delayed his family’s departure while he was busy in his third term in the legislature. Like Virginia’s Robert E. Lee, Hampton opposed the state-rights movement believing secession would bring no good to the South. Governor Pickens, however, was an avid secessionist and was bent on secession and called for a special session of the legislature. Hampton, who had no respect for the governor and at one time called him a fool, refused to attend. South Carolina voted to secede from the Union. Though Hampton opposed secession, he, like Lee, remained loyal to his beloved state and volunteered to protect the state and developing Confederacy.
When war began in April 1861, Hampton was forty-three years old and had two sons enrolled in the South Carolina College–Preston and Wade. Though Hampton and Lee were so much alike in politics and view of secession, Hampton did not agree with the general’s strategy for war. Hampton was diametrically opposed to Lee’s strategy and went to Montgomery, Alabama and virtually demanding President Jefferson Davis put him in command of a military unit bearing his name.
The dislike Hampton had for Governor Pickens was openly known, yet the governor gave Hampton a colonel’s commission. Within a week eleven thousand men volunteer to serve in Hampton’s Legion. The legion, organized on 12 June, consisted of six companies of infantry, four troops of cavalry and a battery of “flying” artillery. There were other South Carolina men like Hampton who preferred the battlefield over serving in the state government: Milledge L. Bonham, James Chestnut, Jr. and James L. Orr. Two legislators who served as Hampton’s field officers, Colonel Martin Gary and Major James Conner, would play an import role in his 1876 campaign for governor. Wade Hampton’s sons followed in the footsteps of their father. Wade IV accepted a staff position of General Joseph E. Johnston. Frank joined the cavalry and Preston, shunning an officer’s commission joined a cavalry unit as a private.
Hampton threw his wealth into the Confederacy contributing horses and money to supply his legion and making personal loans to field officers, in all a prodigious amount. He presented fifty-two bales of cotton to the Confederacy that was estimated at a million dollars and suggested to President Davis it be shipped to England where it could be sold to fund the war. Due to President Davis’ hesitancy that allowed the Union to blockade the ports, the cotton was burned on the dock by Union troops. Judah Benjamin, the Treasurer of the Confederacy also tried to get Davis to send all cotton to Europe for safe-keeping, but he, too, was ignored. Benjamin followed his own advice and sent his own cotton to England and after the war was able to begin life anew from the fortune saved.
On 1 January 1861, just three months before the outbreak of the Civil War, the Hampton’s defaulted on a payment of $47,500 on a mortgage secured by one hundred and eight acres of the Sand Hills plantation. The interest on the loans made in 1855 continued to accumulate throughout the war years and on 24 December 1868, the Hamptons were forced into volunteer bankruptcy a confessed debt of $1,042,000-not including $11,970 in interest due to the Bank of Charleston and unknown amounts in private debts. Hampton entered the war as one of the wealthiest men, but would leave it as one of the poorest.
Hampton’s Legion served mainly in the Army of North Virginia in Stuart’s Cavalry. After Stuart’s death, Hampton distinguished himself in opposing Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley and was made Lieutenant General, commanding Lee’s whole force of cavalry. The Legion served gallantly in more than fifteen major battles, some imbedded in the nation’s memory: first and second Bull Run, Seven Pines, Gaines’ Mill and the Seven Day’s Battles. In May 1862 he was promoted to brigadier general and in August 1863 he received the rank of major general and finally, lieutenant general on the same day Sherman was burning Millwood.
J.L. West – Author
This article and many others found on the pages of Roots and Recall, were written by author J.L. West, for the YC Magazine and have been reprinted on R&R, with full permission – not for distribution or reprint!
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