Benjamin Tillman - Tillman As Governor

Tillman As Governor

The Farmers' Convention was the first move in the political campaign of 1886. Tillmanites did not yet have the control over the Democratic Party of South Carolina, that they later obtained. Consequently, Tillman was unable to obtain the Democratic Party nomination for governor himself through the convention nominating system in 1886. Thus, Tillman sought merely to influence, who the Party chose for guvenatorial nomination, by supporting the least objectionable candidate. At the 1886 State Democratic Convention, and win the were able to in their nomination of a candidate for governor. Hugh S. Thompson had been elected for governor in 1882, succeeding Johnson Hagood. Elected as Lieutenant Governor with Thompson in 1882, was John C. Sheppard. In 1886, Thompson had resigned making Richardson governor. Now Sheppard was running for re-election as governor in the election of 1886. Running against Sheppard was John P. Richardson, whose family had supplied South Carolina with four governors throughout history. Accordingly, Richardson was not expected to be an agent of the change that Tillman was seeking. Accordingly, Tillman supported Sheppard for re-election in 1886.

Tillman was elected Governor of South Carolina in 1890, and served from December 1890 to December 1894. As governor, Tillman finished establishing Clemson College and also created Winthrop College. The Tillman Halls on both campuses are named in his honor.

The Southern Farmers Alliance began as a national organization in the early 1880s. However, the Farmers' Alliance established itself in South Carolina in 1888, where it became a rival of Tillman's Farmers Association organization. When the Alliance founded the Populist Party based on the Ocala Demands, Tillman arranged for the South Carolina Democratic Party to adopt parts of the platform which dealt with the free coinage of silver, a Federal income tax and a repeal of the tax on the circulations of state banks. All of these measures were solid progressive measures that placed Tillman among the "progressives" of his time. However, Tillman refused to endorse government ownership of the railroads or the "Sub-treasury Plan." The Sub-treasury Plan was the Populist Party's most ambitious economic proposal. A form of the sub-Treasury Plan would eventually be enacted in the form of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. Of course, Tillman refused to countenance any appeal to black voters. The strategy prevented the development of an independent Populist Party in South Carolina and prevented any attempt at the biracial politics like that of North Carolina. Thus, white control of South Carolina was assured via the dominant, white Democratic Party.

Tillman was largely responsible for calling the State constitutional convention in 1895 that disfranchised most of South Carolina's black men and required Jim Crow laws. As Tillman proudly proclaimed in 1900, "We have done our level best ... we have scratched our heads to find out how we could eliminate the last one of them. We stuffed ballot boxes. We shot them. We are not ashamed of it." (Logan, p. 91)

In 1892, a group of Tillman's supporters in Abbeville, South Carolina, prepared a banner anointing the governor the "Champion of White Men's Rule and Woman's Virtue". Earlier that year, Tillman had coupled a statement opposing lynching with a declaration that he would "willingly lead a mob in lynching a Negro who had committed an assault upon a white woman." His "lynching pledge", as this promise became known, was never personally carried out, but it reveals a great deal about Tillman's rhetorical and political strategy. The black man, in Tillman's words, "must remain subordinate or be exterminated". An epidemic of mob killings broke out in South Carolina in the 1890s, and in the upcountry counties of Abbeville, Edgefield, Laurens and Newberry, lynchings outnumbered legal executions during that decade.