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Stephen Kantrowitz: Ben Tillman & the Reconstruction of White Supremacy. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Pp. 422. $19.95.)
Benjamin Ryan Tillman is largely forgotten. Those who remember him are apt to recall only one incident from his life-the day, in 1892, when he threatened to go to Washington and stick a pitchfork into that "bag of beef," President Grover Cleveland. Thus he gained the nickname "Pitchfork Ben" and a place in American political lore. Often unremembered are the more important features of his life, not the least of which was his crude and brutal racism.
Ben Tillman was born in 1847 in the South Carolina upcountry. His father was a wealthy slaveholder, and young Ben and his brothers soon learned that the successful management of slaves sprang not from paternalism, but from violence and fear. They also learned that on the plantation the master was sovereign, and all the members of his "family"-- his wife, his children, his slaves-were subject to his will and dependent on his favor. The Civil War threatened this world, and the Tillmans lustily supported the Confederate cause. But Ben Tillman was never to fight. Just as he was about to enlist in 1864, he was diagnosed with a cranial tumor. A surgeon saved his life, but only after removing his left eye.
If Tillman never got the chance to kill Yankees, there were other theaters in which he might exert his manhood. After the war, he successfully rebuilt the family plantation. More importantly, he joined the Red Shirts, nightriders who terrorized and murdered South Carolina blacks during Reconstruction. For the rest of his life, Tillman's speeches rapturously hearkened back to his Red Shirt days. He believed the Red Shirts...