Benjamin Tillman

Benjamin Ryan Tillman, Jr. (11 August 1847 – 3 July 1918) was a politician of the Democratic Party who was Governor of South Carolina from 1890 to 1894, and a United States Senator from 1895 until his death. A white supremacist who often spoke out against black people, Tillman led a paramilitary group of Red Shirts during South Carolina's violent 1876 election.

We tried to overcome the thirty thousand majority by honest methods, which was a mathematical impossibility.

Whites have absolute control of the state government, and we intend at any and all hazards to retain it.

How did we recover our liberty? By fraud and violence.

Quotes

• As governor of South Carolina, I proclaimed that, although I had taken the oath of office to support the law and enforce it, I would lead a mob to lynch any man, black or white, who ravished a woman, black or white.
  • As quoted in Pitchfork Ben Tillman, South Carolinian (1967), by Francis Butler Simkins. Louisiana State University Press. OCLC 1877696, p. 396.

• I have three daughters, but, so help me God, I had rather find either one of them killed by a tiger or a bear [and die a virgin] than to have her crawl to me and tell me the horrid story that she had been robbed of the jewel of her womanhood by a black fiend.
  • As quoted in Pitchfork Ben Tillman, South Carolinian (1967), by Francis Butler Simkins. Louisiana State University Press. OCLC 1877696, p. 397.

1890s

• The citizens of this great commonwealth have for the first time in its history demanded and obtained for themselves the right to choose her Governor; and I, as the exponent and leader of the revolution which brought about the change, am here to take the solemn oath of office ... the triumph of democracy and white supremacy over mongrelism and anarchy, of civilization over barbarism, has been most complete.
  • As quoted in Pitchfork Ben Tillman, South Carolinian (1967), by Francis Butler Simkins. Louisiana State University Press. OCLC 1877696, p. 144.

• The whites have absolute control of the State government, and we intend at any and all hazards to retain it. The intelligent exercise of the right of suffrage ... is as yet beyond the capacity of the vast majority of colored men. We deny, without regard to color, that 'all men are created equal'; it is not true now, and was not true when Jefferson wrote it.
  • As quoted in Pitchfork Ben Tillman, South Carolinian (1967), by Francis Butler Simkins. Louisiana State University Press. OCLC 1877696, p. 144.

• How did we recover our liberty? By fraud and violence. We tried to overcome the thirty thousand majority by honest methods, which was a mathematical impossibility. After we had borne these indignities for eight years life became worthless under such conditions. Under the leadership and inspiration of Mart[in] Gary ... we won the fight.
  • As quoted in "The Question of Race in the South Carolina Constitutional Convention of 1895" (July 1952), by George B. Tindall. The Journal of Negro History, 37 (3): 277–303. JSTOR 2715494., p. 94.

1900s

• In my state there were 135,000 negro voters, or negroes of voting age, and some 90,000 or 95,000 white voters.... Now, I want to ask you, with a free vote and a fair count, how are you going to beat 135,000 by 95,000? How are you going to do it? You had set us an impossible task.
  • Speech to the United States Senate (23 March 1900).

• We did not disfranchise the negroes until 1895. Then we had a constitutional convention convened which took the matter up calmly, deliberately, and avowedly with the purpose of disfranchising as many of them as we could under the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments. We adopted the educational qualification as the only means left to us, and the negro is as contented and as prosperous and as well protected in South Carolina to-day as in any State of the Union south of the Potomac. He is not meddling with politics, for he found that the more he meddled with them the worse off he got. As to his "rights"—I will not discuss them now.
  • Speech to the United States Senate (23 March 1900).

• We of the South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men, and we never will. We have never believed him to be the equal of the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him. I would to God the last one of them was in Africa and that none of them had ever been brought to our shores.
  • Speech to the United States Senate (23 March 1900).

• We made up our minds that the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the constitution were themselves null and void.
  • Speech to the U.S. Senate (23 March 1900).

• The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they learn their place again.
  • Regarding Booker T. Washington's meeting with Theodore Roosevelt on October 16, 1901, as quoted in Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (2000), by Stephen Kantrowitz. University of North Carolina Press, p. 259.

• Republicanism means Negro equality, while the Democratic Party means that the white man is supreme. That is why we [white] Southerners are all Democrats... History has no record of Negro rule. The situation is grave, and calls for wisdom and all manner of statesmanship. If we had our say, the Negro could never vote. I believe that God made the white man out of better clay than that which the Negro was made from... We don't need another race to help us at this time. In some of the states, the Negro holds the vote of control... In Chicago, the Republicans needed the Negro vote to elect their whole ticket, so a nigger was nominated for judge and elected.
  • Speech (1906).

• Is President Roosevelt ready to act up to his own theory and have his children marry men and women of the other races? Would he accept as a daughter-in-law a Chinese, a Malay, an Indian, or a negro in accord to the doctrine laid down in his message which I have quoted? We all know that he would not, and while "fine words butter no parsnips", words like these are a source of incalculable evil.
  • Tillman's address to the Senate on the Brownsville affair on January 12, 1907. Roosevelt had issued a statement saying that each of the accused men at Brownsville would be dealt with on his merits, without regard to race.

• We reorganized the Democratic Party with one plank and only one plank, namely, that this is a white man's country and the white men must govern it.
  • Regarding the Democratic Party's goals (1909), as quoted in Voices of Civil War America: Contemporary Accounts of Daily Life, by Lawrence Kreiser and Ray B. Browne, p. 27.

Quotes about Tillman

• He [Tillman] declared if all [blacks] were shot like wild beasts the country would be better off, but that was unlawful. Therefore, when they were unable to produce passports, they should be placed on chain gangs until they reformed or left the country.
  • The Washington Post.

• There has always been in the South that intellectual elite who saw the Negro problem clearly. They have always lacked and some still lack the courage to stand up for what they know is right. Nevertheless they can be depended on in the long run to follow their own clear thinking and their own decent choice. Finally even the politicians must eventually recognize the trend in the world, in this country, and in the South. James Byrnes, that favorite son of this commonwealth, and Secretary of State of the United States, is today occupying an indefensible and impossible position; and if he survives in the memory of men, he must begin to help establish in his own South Carolina something of that democracy which he has been recently so loudly preaching to Russia. He is the end of a long series of men whose eternal damnation is the fact that they looked truth in the face and did not see it; John C. Calhoun, Wade Hampton, Ben Tillman are men whose names must ever be besmirched by the fact that they fought against freedom and democracy in a land which was founded upon democracy and freedom. Eventually this class of men must yield to the writing in the stars. That great hypocrite, Jan Smuts, who today is talking of humanity and standing beside Byrnes for a United Nations, is at the same time oppressing the black people of South Africa to an extent which makes their two countries, South Africa and the American South, the most reactionary peoples on earth. Peoples whose exploitation of the poor and helpless reaches the last degree of shame. They must in the long run yield to the forward march of civilization or die.
  • W. E. B. Du Bois, "Behold the Land," 1946

• No South Carolinian, with the single exception of Calhoun, has ever made a profounder impression on his generation than Tillman.
  • Francis Butler Simkins, Pitchfork Ben Tillman, South Carolinian (1967), Louisiana State University Press. OCLC 1877696, p. 546.

• Two days later, Tillman gave another speech and apparently was offended by the presence of a black man in the audience. ‍'‍Look down that aisle, there's a nigger as black as the ace of spades‍'‍, the South Carolina Democrat exclaimed. According to a news report, the man was well dressed and only smiled at Tillman's outburst, showing more class in that moment than Tillman had shown in his entire life.
  • Bruce Bartlett, Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party's Buried Past (2008), p. 51.

• They still honor Benjamin Tillman down here, which is very much like honoring a malignant tumor. A statue of Tillman, who was known as 'Pitchfork Ben', is on prominent display outside the statehouse. Tillman served as governor and U.S. senator in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A mortal enemy of black people, he bragged that he and his followers had disenfranchised 'as many as we could', and he publicly defended the murder of blacks.
  • Bob Herbert, "The Blight That is Still With Us" (22 January 2008), The New York Times.

• Tillman was from South Carolina, and as I hear the story, he was concerned that the corporations, Republican corporations, were favorable toward blacks and he felt that there was a need to regulate them.
  • Clarence Thomas, replying to a student question at Stetson University College of Law (reported in The New York Times, February 3, 2010).