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Francis Warrington Dawson and South Carolina’s Spirit of 1876: A Case Study of the Perils of Journalistic Heresy

By CARL R. OSTHAUS

Volume 1, Number 4
Fall, 1977

Few South Carolina whites paid much attention to the nation’s centennial in the summer of 1876; instead they were preoccupied with redeeming their state from Reconstruction, suppressing blacks’ political rights, and overthrowing an alien, Republican Carpetbag government. That the redemption of their state –one of the last three held in Republican thrall—would entail criminal conspiracy, intimidation, and even murder troubled the consciences of many, but hardly impeded the inexorable movement toward home rule.  Many white South Carolinians would have preferred not to use violence on Republicans and blacks, for they were fearful of arousing Northern anger and provoking Washington to move yet more Federal troops into the state to bolster the Republican government.

No man better represented those who were originally reluctant to support a campaign of intimidation and terror than the state’s leading editor, Francis Warrington Dawson of the Charleston News and Courier. In the crisis of the overthrow of Reconstruction, Dawson advocated a policy of moderation and in so doing broke with majority sentiment in his state.  He risked the political and economic ruin of his newspaper, and indeed jeopardized his own life. Dawson’s predicament reveals that on issues which essentially defined the South—race, Democratic solidarity, and home rule—no dissent was tolerated. The press obsequiously followed rather than formed public opinion. Freedom of the press was as much a victim of South Carolina’s spirit of ’76 as were the political rights of black men.

Dawson’s background made him a rather unlikely candidate for leadership in reconstructing South Carolina. A Roman Catholic, he was born and reared in England of purely English stock. In 1861 he enlisted as a seaman on the Confederate ship Nashville, perhaps because of sympathy with the South or to escape family trouble. The precise motive is unknown. After six months of service in the Confederate Navy, he enlisted in Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. He paid for his Southern credentials in blood on three separate Virginia battlefields, but by war’s end Dawson had attained only the rank of captain, hardly a prestigious springboard in a society crowded with colonels and generals. Although Dawson lived in poverty in the first few months after Appomattox, his indefatigable energy and talent as a writer soon brought employment on successive Richmond papers and then on the renowned but financially shaky Charleston Mercury. Soon, however, with the able assistance of his friend and business partner, Benjamin Riordan, Dawson purchased the Charleston News, and, in 1873, bought out the Charleston Courier, forming the Charleston News and Courier.1

Almost immediately the News and Courier became the dominant journal in South Carolina. As an owner-editor, Dawson was an exemplar of the old-fashioned style of personal journalism; so slashing were his editorial diatribes that they could score the hide of a rhinoceros. With his merger of the Charleston News and the Charleston Courier, Charleston became essentially a one-paper city and Dawson’s future seemed assured. “Our net profits from Jan. 1 to June 30,” he wrote his wife in mid 1874, “are just about $10,000! How’s that for high?”2 Secure economically and employing a core of able correspondents, Dawson disdained potential rivals. Just as Charleston dominated the South Carolina business, social, and political world, so Dawson’s News and Courier lorded it over the country journals. Even the News and Courier’s enemies compulsively read the paper. Said Daniel H. Chamberlain, the Carpetbag Republican attorney general and soon-to-be governor, “The News and Courier is like surgery to me—painful but necessary!  I wish I could add, healthful!”3

Chamberlain was in for major surgery under Dawson’s editorial scalpel when he became the Republican candidate for governor in 1874. Chamberlain, wrote Dawson, was not fit to fill the executive chair: he was guiltier than the worst of South Carolina’s Scalawag or Carpetbag debauchers. The Republicans, of course, won the election; and almost immediately, and in an amazing turnabout, Dawson joined hands with Chamberlain to reform South Carolina.4

It may be that any newspaper aspiring to state or regional hegemony could not afford banishment from the councils of the politically powerful, but one need not be too cynical about Dawson’s transformation. In addition to his obvious concern for his paper’s access to inside information and government printing contracts, there was a genuine personal and ideological meeting of the minds between Chamberlain and Dawson which rapidly led to an alliance of principle as well as expediency. Both were outsiders in South Carolina; both were men of letters and upper middle class conservatives who stood for honest, efficient government.5  Despite his denunciations of Republican venality and corruption, Dawson had never been a bitter end resister or a violent Negrophobe. As far back as 1867 Dawson had encouraged Colonel Robert Barnwell Rhett, the fire-eater’s fire-eater and editor of the Charleston Mercury, to support the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, to lead the South back into the Union, and to save it from the frightful misery of forced Reconstruction.6 Rhett had spurned the invitation to moderation.

As an editor Dawson always looked first to the defense of Charleston’s business elite, whose welfare he undoubtedly identified with that of all South Carolinians. Political corruption would harm the business man’s interests, but political violence would be even worse.  What the business elite needed was reform by orderly, legalistic processes. That is what drew him to the new Republican governor, Daniel H. Chamberlain.7

As governor, Chamberlain fought and broke with corrupt elements in his own party. In the month following the governor’s inauguration Dawson met with Chamberlain, a former Massachusetts abolitionist, and soon a few guardedly cordial words for the governor emanated from the editorial columns of the News and Courier.8 In early 1875 much stronger ties bound the editor to the governor, for Dawson badly needed Chamberlain’s help. In a recent election contest, the News and Courier had accused a corrupt Scalawag candidate for county sheriff of being a murderer and was consequently sued for criminal libel.  Dawson’s key defense witness happened to be a felon who was hiding out in Georgia; Dawson needed extradition papers and a pardon from the governor to bring him back to South Carolina. Chamberlain cheerfully complied. With one inexpensive gesture, the governor struck at his enemies in the Republican party and won the support of the most powerful paper in the state. Shortly after this incident, the News and Courier gave its warmest endorsement to the administration of Governor Chamberlain, whom it described as a statesman of “eminent ability, eminent culture and eminent integrity.”9 Much personal correspondence and a semi-public courtship ensued, until finally the Republican governor had to remind his importunate Democratic editorial ally the “you know we must not be too good friends.”10

In December 1875 Governor Chamberlain temporarily endeared himself to all white South Carolinians by vetoing a couple of particularly scandalous judicial appointments by his Republican legislature. White South Carolina applauded, and Editor Dawson began to argue that in 1876 the Democrats could reclaim the state and rid it of corrupt elements by acquiescing in the Republican governor’s reelection. Fusion between the Democrats and the better element of the Republican party could offset the 30,000-vote black majority in South Carolin.11

Between January and August 1876, almost every issue to the News and Courier praised Chamberlain and urged the Democrats to leave the gubernatorial slot on their ticket vacant. The alternative, Dawson argued, would be extremely dangerous. If the “Straightout” Democrats, as the intransigents called themselves, had their way, they would try to elect a Democrat governor by using terror and intimidation to eliminate the majority black vote. At the national level the Democratic presidential candidate, Samuel Tilden, would be hurt by Southern Democratic violence, and more Federal troops would be brought into the state.  Violence would harm Charleston’s commercial development. Most fearful of all, such a campaign of violence might explode into a race war, and in the South Carolina low country blacks outnumbered whites. Here whites lived in fear, dreading an uprising of the blacks.12

Obviously, Dawson’s fusion plan suited the low country’s needs, and especially appealed to Charleston’s commercial leaders. Just as obviously, it ignored the passions of the up-country whites, who indignantly rejected Dawson’s course and demanded a Straightout Democratic ticket. Had Dawson been a native South Carolinian, he might have been more attuned to the age-old friction between up-country and low country and made some effort to placate the up-country while protecting the interests of his own region.

Dawson campaigned for fusion with the Chamberlain Republicans, but he burned no bridges behind him. He stressed his loyalty to Democratic party unity: as early as December 1875, he reassured South Carolinians that “when our people fix upon their policy for 1876 we shall go with them.”13 As the successful editor had once remarked, “Newspapers run in the interest of any one man, by himself or anybody else, die, very young.”14 As of May 1876, Dawson’s policy seemed to be winning, although not by much.  When the Democratic state convention met in that month, the Straightout faction denounced the pusillanimous timidity of the fusionists, but the convention voted by a small majority to delay selection of a gubernatorial nominee.15 So far, Dawson had had his way.

On May 1, 1876, while the Democrats wrangled, a new daily paper, the Journal of Commerce, appeared on Charleston streets.  Never was an editorial purpose more obvious: the Journal of Commerce was to smash fusion and eviscerate Dawson’s News and Courier. Like most successful editors, Francis Warrington Dawson had accumulated plenty of enemies. Backed by Charleston’s German business group, who blamed Dawson for the defeat for their popular mayoralty candidate in 18875; backed by Straightout Democrats who found Dawson’s politics contemptible; and backed by many South Carolinians who disliked Dawson’s dictatorial ways and felt Charleston journalism should offer a choice, the Journal of Commerce could be a powerful rival.16

The first issues of the new competitor probably provoked more mirth than fear in the senior paper’s offices. The staff of the Journal of Commerce was inexperienced and disorganized, the paper lacked access to a wire service, and the news end was a sorry affair. The editorial page radiated wrath and indignation but had little else to offer. The first editor, a brilliant and experienced journalist from the New York World, was pitifully ignorant of Southern ways.  “He used to write with a state map before him that he might know whether Orangeburg of Oconee was the nearer to Charleston.”17 To remedy this situation, the Journal of Commerce’s stockholders brought back from New Orleans Dawson’s old boss and rival, the terrible Colonel Robert Barnwell Rhett.  Soon Rhett’s editorials entertained Charlestonians with cruel excoriations of Dawson and the fusionists. People read the Journal of Commerce only for the editorials, for everything else about newspaper work bored Rhett to distraction and so he ignored it. According to the paper’s star reporter, A.B. Williams, Rhett “had the old-fashioned contempt and disregard for the news end.”

I doubt if he ever in his life checked up to see what his subeditors
and reporters were doing or gave the slightest attention to the
mechanical department.  We had some curious experiences. 
In Col. Rhett’s absence I have beheld with wondering eyes the
entire editorial and typographical force drunk at 6 o’clock in the
evening and the paper they got out was a weird wonder. Those
were the days of hand type, when each printer could keep a bottle
under his case and refresh himself at discretion.18

The Journal of Commerce was all Straightout Democrat blast and blunder. As a modern newspaper it was not in the same league with the News and Courier, but then South Carolina was not, perhaps, ready for a modern newspaper anyway. Subscribers preferred to read a paper confirming their prejudices and brutalizing their enemies, rather than a progressive journal that distracted them with news and argued novel policy alternatives. Consequently, the News and Courier’s circulation fell as the Journal of Commerce’s rose.19   The fight might have been a long, drawn-out struggle of indeterminable result had there not occurred a racial explosion in the sleepy hamlet of Hamburg, South Carolina.

Progress had ignored Hamburg, which in July 1876 was practically an all-black village whose only solace was in being let alone by whites. Here on Centennial Day, July 4, 1876, the local black militia, while parading on the main street, briefly harassed and insulted the sons of two prominent white families. The Edgefield Rifles, the county’s white rifle club, could hardly pass up such an opportunity.  Four days later the white riflemen, let by ex-Confederate General Matthew Calbraith Butler, besieged the militia’s armory, and after much shooting in which one white was killed, the militia fled, leaving some prisoners in General Butler’s hands. Some of these prisoners were massacred, a few even being used as running targets for the Edgefield Rifle’s shooting practice. As Benjamin Tillman boasted on the floor of the U.S. Senate in 1900: “We shot them.  We are not ashamed of it.”20

White South Carolinians thrilled to the news from Hamburg. Some who claimed to detest murder and even to deplore the shooting of blacks announced that the Hamburg blacks had rioted and had been quelled to prevent the outbreak of a war of the races. In short, Butler and the Edgefield Rifles were completely justified.21

Dawson’s News and Courier, however, took a different line. Since Hamburg was nearly an all-black town, how could the whites have been threatened? There was little excuse for the conflict itself, wrote Dawson, “and absolutely none for the cowardly killing of the seven negro prisoners who were shot down like rabbits long after they had surrendered.” Although the News and Courier absolved Butler of personal complicity in murder, for that was not his style, still Butler was in charge and had to bear responsibility for the actions of the white rifle clubs.22

Governor Chamberlain denounced the bloody and cowardly deed at Hamburg and appealed to President Grant for more troops.  Grant, who described Hamburg as a barbarous massacre of innocent men, stripped east coast garrisons of troops so that on election day the secession state had more Federal troops than at any time since 1865.23

Political passion now reached a peak in South Carolina as whites closed ranks against Chamberlain.  The Straightout campaign, dominated by ex-Confederate cavalry general Butler and Martin Witherspoon Gary, took over the Democratic party, leaving Dawson’s fusion policy a discredited wreck.  The clash of the races, not political corruption or dishonest government, was to be the issue of 1876. The Straightouts resolved to place the scion of South Carolina’s wealthiest and most aristocratic family and one of Lee’s great cavalry leaders, Wade Hampton, in the governor’s chair.  Hampton would speak platitudes about fair play and honest government and about welcoming black voters, but behind the rhetoric lurked Hampton’s Red Shirts, armed white groups throughout South Carolina patterned after Butler and Gary’s up-country rifle clubs.24

Dawson tried vainly to defend his principles by issuing editorial pleas for moderation, fair play, decency, and justice:

“We shall be told [he wrote just three days after the murders]
that it does not become a Democratic newspaper in South
Carolina to give ‘aid and comfort’ to the Radicals by denouncing
as criminal, any act of a body of South Carolinians. Our answer
to that is, that there is only one right and one wrong for Democrat
and Republican.  What is wrong we must condemn. We will not
consent to cover up a wrong, because it is committed by our
political associates or personal friends. Too much injury has been
done the South by such a course.”25

And when howls of outrage were heard from Edgefield and other Straightout, up-country counties, Dawson, perhaps with more bravado than good sense, slashed to pieces their attempts to defend the Hamburg murders and roundly condemned “those who wink at such deeds as the killing of unarmed and defenceless Negroes.”26

South Carolinians were accustomed to Dawson’s style of abuse and vilification in condemnation of Carpetbaggers and Scalawags; now they were shocked and outraged when he turned his weapons on those they admired.  South Carolina whites would never feel personal or collective guilt for the Hamburg killings. What happened in that little village was fully justified and was comparable to killing in wartime, when peacetime ethical restraints are naturally lowered.27  Dawson was now to learn that in a clash of race and in a test of white solidarity, no dissent was possible.

His rival paper, the Journal of Commerce, demanding a postponement of judgment of Hamburg and a fair hearing for the whites accused of the Hamburg riot, soared in popularity. News and Courier subscriptions were canceled at an alarming rate. Soon subscribers even refused to pick up their prepaid papers at the post office.28

Dawson faced financial ruin, but even this was not the most serious of his problems. Trying to stay alive was more important. General Gary, one of the original Straightout leaders, and a fiery Edgefield rifle club commander, was incensed by Dawson’s politics and his personal abuse.  Gary, who was proud of having refused Lee’s order to stack arms at Appomattox, was the very prototype of the “mint julep-sipping, race baiting politicians who have adorned fiction and fact in southern history.”29 When Dawson rashly called him braggart and slanderer, Gary publicly labeled Dawson a coward and calmly awaited the obligatory challenge. Dawson, a Catholic, refused to comply, pleading his religious scruples. Some South Carolinians who knew that Dawson had engaged in dueling affrays immediately after the war scoffed at his explanations, but given his war wounds and lengthy service---and the fact that he made himself available should someone wish to hold him to account by an attack on his person---few, it seems, could doubt his courage.30

Hardly had this crisis subsided when Colonel Rhett of the Journal of Commerce abused Dawson in terms which again called for a challenge. Dawson responded in kind, comparing his own war record with Rhett’s wartime service in a safe newspaper office well away from the combat. This was dangerous talk. Rhett was a veteran duelist who had already killed his man. Charleston expected a shoot-out between the editors or a public brawl at the very least. Among the less happy witnesses of this round of challenges was reporter A.B. Williams, who feared that he would be dragged in. Williams later recalled,

“Those times members of editorial, mechanical and business
officeforces were expected to take personal interest and part
in all the rowsof their papers and editors. Of course all of us
were armed.  At least Ithought I was. The silver mounted
twenty-eight calibre six shooter I owned had been regarded
in Virginia as quite a formidable weapon. The first time I
showed it to a man in South Carolina he said: ‘Sonny, if ever
you shoot any gentleman in this part of the country with that
thing and he finds it out, he’ll take it way from you and beat
you with it for insultin’ him.” Later I was to learn that a
thirty-eight was the very smallest caliber tolerated in respectable
society. The really well dressed man wore a forty-four.
Before the end of that year the most conservative and
well- mannered young gentleman making evening calls took his
artillery from his hip pocket or holster and laid it on the mantel
as casually and as much as a matter-of-course as he hung his
hat on the rack in the hallway. A man without a revolver felt
undressed and embarrassed, as a man now walking the
public streets at noon lacking his trousers.31

Wilson described the scene when Rhett and Dawson edged close to bloodshed:

“The steps and porch of the post office at the foot of Broad
Street and the doors of offices in the neighborhood were
crowded with men anxious to see the fight and Mayor
Cunningham had policemen and detectives ranged along the
sidewalk, apparently idling there. Captain Dawson came
down the south side of Broad Street with his brother-in-law,
Colonel Jimmy Morgan, both keeping sharp eyes about them
but neither making any sign, and Colonel Rhett strolled
tranquilly up the north side. To the disappointment of the
onlookers, and my relief, there was no battle.  Maybe it would
not have been very serious, after all. Subsequent observations
taught me that hitting a man with a revolver---even a forty-four---
across Broad Street was far from a sure thing. I developed that
Colonel Rhett was acting strictly according to the code, which
provided that one insult might not be resented effectively by
another. If a man called you a liar you were expected to hit,
shoot or challenge forthwith.  Answering that he also was one,
“so’s your old man,” or anything like that, was counted as mere
idle persiflage and meaningless gossip. Colonel Rhett, having
given the insult, had nothing more to do, under the code, than to
put himself in a position to be shot at, if anybody elected to shoot.
As he had done this two days in succession, with no results
beyond two columns of burning anathema, in excellent English,
the incident was regarded as closed.”32

Perhaps these incidents revealed only the bloodthirsty natures of Gary and Rhett, but at least one country journal, the Williamsburg News, thought they revealed a fatal and sinister flaw in Southern life:

“Rhett thirsts for more blood. The stains already on his hands
are not enough. He joins with Butler and Gary to silence, if
possible, free speech in South Carolina. The challenge of
Gary to Mr. Dawson is followed up by Rhett the red-handed,
who seeks to drive the editor of the News and Courier to the
wall. They want no half way work. South Carolina as she was,
is the object they keep in view. A slavery of men, of opinion
and of speech, white as well as black. The Hamburg massacre
was symptomatic. It is of a peace [sic] with the lynching of
anti-slavery men…and other characteristics of a slave
civilization.”33

By late July Dawson’s policies were dead and his paper was dying. The pressure of conformity in white South Carolina was suffocating him. It was time to choose between surrender and ruin, and Dawson was not the stuff of which martyrs are made. All along he had seen the possibility of the fusionists’ defeat and had tried to keep open a few bridges behind him for a quick retreat.34 As early as July 8, at the peak of the Hamburg massacre, he had prepared for his retreat: “It is our deliberate opinion that General Hampton, if nominated will, more fully than any other Democrat who has been named, bring out the whole vote of the state in November.  South Carolina cannot do him too much honor. There is no office in her gift of which he is not worthy.”35   Thus, as the August 15 Democratic convention approached, Dawson dumped Chamberlain for Hampton by simply declaring with genteel dignity that he would support the wise decision of his party and his state.36

But on Hamburg there was no gentility or dignity in Dawson’s rout; on August 11 he broke and ran shamelessly.  The News and Courier’s headlines squalled: “Ample Truth of the Lawlessness of the Black Soldiery.  A Militia Company Organized to Kill Whites---Their Threats and Violence---No Shot Fired by the Whites until Meriwether was Killed.”37 

Four days later, as Dawson expected, Wade Hampton won the Democratic gubernatorial nomination.  Dawson clasped the Edgefield Rifles, General Butler, General Gary, Robert Barnwell Rhett, and the whole South Carolina Democratic party to his editorial bosom.38   The News and Courier hailed the Straightout triumph with the headline, “Wade Hampton and Victory!”  These sudden, public turnabouts on Hampton and Hamburg amounted to an “audacious, masterly somersault at which everybody laughed, but which everybody approved.”39 At last South Carolina stood solidly against the Republicans, revealing a degree of unity more complete than during secession and the Civil War.

Now Dawson turned on his friend, Governor Chamberlain, and lambasted him vigorously, accusing him of treacherous duplicity and moral paralysis; he was a “moral chameleon taking the hue of what he feeds on!”40 Chamberlain took Dawson’s betrayal with more grace and generosity than might have been expected.  The News and Courier, he wrote, was “enlisted under leaders…seeking to carry out a policy which does not command the approval of either their heads or hearts.  This policy has been forced upon them by the most unwise, impracticable, reactionary, and aggressive men of their party.  The essence of that policy is intimidation.”41

Dawson’s News and Courier did yeoman work in Hampton’s cause.  “When the historian in years yet unborn shall speak of Hampton as the founder and regenerator of this State,” concluded the Camden Journal in 1879, “it will also speak of the News and Courier as his ‘right bower’”.42  On election eve, when Charleston’s streets were a scene of violence and brawling, Dawson was seen in his buggy making the rounds of polling places.  The next morning his friends found him nursing a slight but honorable bullet wound in the leg, a small price to pay for Democratic success and getting right with his people.43

But many Democrats remained suspicious of Dawson.  When both Hampton and chamberlain proclaimed victory and established competing administrations, the News and Courier headed the support for Hampton, and Dawson personally rallied white taxpayers to honor only the Hampton government.44   Greatly weakened, the chamberlain government collapsed when President Hayes withdrew Federal support from South Carolina Republicans.

The price of victory for Dawson and conservative elements of the Democratic party was high.  They embraced the tactics of fraud and violence.  They gave their blessing to the stuffed ballot boxes, the parading of the Red Shirts in black districts, and the policy of dividing time; that is, having Red Shirts heckle or demand to speak to Republican rallies and then bully or terrorize the speaker and the crowd.  Violence went unchecked; at Ellenton a riot resulted in the deaths of from 15 to 150 people.45

Quite predictably, once the thugs and extremists had returned South Carolina to the white Democrats, Dawson and his conservative allies repudiated them and once more preached the politics of law and order. Gary and the up-country Straightouts were frozen out of the higher echelons of Wade Hampton’s administration. By 1878 Dawson rather patronizingly admonished the hot-headed Straightouts and other critics of the conservative regime of South Carolina:

“We tell them, in all frankness, that South Carolina will not
tolerate lawlessness at elections. This revolution must move
backwards. Steps must be taken to ensure whites as well as
blacks absolute freedom of choice, and freedom in expressing
their preferences; or there will be trouble in the Democratic camp
before the next general election. Let the dead past bury its dead!
There is no need to ask pardon. The state and the country are
ready to render a verdict of “Not Guilty; but don’t do it again!”46

Dawson calmly placed the blame for 1876 squarely on a few hotheads, Martin W. Gary and the up-country Straightout leadership, to be exact.  As historian Ernest C. Clark has put it: “Having walked in the mud of their over-zealous supporters, Dawson and his compatriots were somewhat belatedly lifting their skirts.”47

Although the conservative element emerged triumphant in its contest with the Straightouts, Dawson’s own position in the period after redemption was hardly secure.  It took time to live down his flirtation with political heresy in 1876.  The Straightouts, of course, hated him. Gary wrote the “only English men…like [Dawson] are on the fusion, miscegenation & Mongrel government policy.”48 When Republicans charged Dawson with illegal influence peddling, his rival, the Journal of Commerce, joined in the cry against him.49 “For the sin of a mere difference of opinion, honestly entertained, he is pursued as a public enemy,” wrote the Marlboro Planter.50

Dawson and his friends counterattacked in the state capital, and he was cleared of the charges by the Committee on Frauds.  He sued the Journal of Commerce for $25,000 and thoroughly terrorized its editors and proprietors before dropping the suit.51 Dawson’s friends joined in public tributes to his loyalty and courage, and the country press rang with his praise.52 In September 1877---almost a full year after Dawson had gotten right on Hampton and Hamburg---he wrote is devoted wife, “I have never felt stronger in the state than Ii now do, our [God?] be praised!  The night is near at an end.”53 Less than a year later, the Journal of Commerce folded, folded, and once again the News and Courier reigned supreme.54

In later years Dawson won plaudits as a progressive journalist in a backward state, and his press campaign against dueling, whiskey, and gambling won him much sympathy. When South Carolina finally outlawed dueling in 1882, all recognized Dawson’s key role, and he was honored for his efforts by the Pope.55 But Dawson’s progressivism was more a matter of the style of politics than of political principle. He believed in white supremacy and conservative rule as much as any South Carolinian. His discouragement of political violence was a question of taste and tactics. He was quite ready to recommend the employment of fraud and intimidation, provided it could be done without such adverse publicity as to disturb commerce.56 In 1885, for example, he advised his former comrade in arms, ex-Confederate General Fitzhugh Lee of Virginia, how to handle the black vote in his gubernatorial campaign:

“The bed-rock of the whole thing is to make the colored
people understand that the respectable white people of
Virginia intend to rule the State. Make them understand this,
and you will have no trouble. Black majorities will disappear
as the snow melts before the sun. I am satisfied myself that
the simple appearance of a band of re-shirts in each colored
county, as a proclamation that the elements which control
South Carolina, Georgia, North Carolina and the other states
have made up their mind to control Virginia likewise, with do
the business. There need not be a blow, nor even a harsh
word.  Satisfy “Cuffy” that you are in earnest, and he will
abstain from voting.”57

Some taint from his 1876 apostasy clung to Dawson’s reputation for many years. Old residents could not fully adopt Dawson the outsider, and many in Charleston resented as well as respected the power of the one-man press. However frequently he boasted of his service to Hampton and the Redeemers,58 someone always remembered the Dawson of ’76 who defended the black militia of Hamburg, backed a Republican governor, and defied white majority sentiment.  Perhaps only a great tragedy could fracture this encrusted suspicion. When a devastating earthquake struck Charleston in 1886, Dawson became a popular hero as he ignored his own safety to rally the people, organize relief measures, and communicate Charleston’s distress to the world. As Jonathan Daniels, another famous Southern editor who knew about such matters, once concluded, “nothing less than the Charleston earthquake of August 31, 1886, could have made his acceptance final among his neighbors.”59

Notes

The author wishes to express his appreciation for Professor Gerald C. Heberle for aid and advice in the preparation of this article.

1For information about Francis W. Dawson’s Civil War record, postwar difficulties, and early career in newspaper work, see the following sources: Dictionary of American Biography, III, 151-152; S. Frank Logan, “Francis W. Dawson, 1840-1889: South Carolina Editor” (Master’s thesis, Duke University, 1947); James Morris Morgan, Recollections of a Rebel Reefer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1917);  Herbert Ravenel Sass, Outspoken: 150 Years of the Charleston News and Courier (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1953).

2Francis Warrington Dawson to Sarah Morgan Dawson, July 14, 1874, Francis Warrington Dawson Manuscripts, Perkins Library, Duke University.

3D.H. Chamberlain to Dawson, July 31, 1874, Dawson Mss. For an assessment of Dawson’s position in South Carolina journalism, see: Joseph Walker Barnwell, “Reminiscences of the Courier and Its Editors, “ News and Courier (125th Anniversary Edition), May 1, 1928;  William Watts Ball, The State that Forgot:  South Carolina’s Surrender to Democracy (Indianapolis:  Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1932), 171; Ernest C. Clark, “Francis Warrington Dawson in the Era of South Carolina’s Conservative-Democratic Restoration, 1874-1889” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1974), 40; A.B. Williams, “The Press of South Carolina in the Revolution of 1876,” News and Courier, June 16, 1907; Robert H. Woody, Republican Newspapers in South Carolina, Southern Sketches No. 10, 1st ser. (Charlottesville, Va.:  Historical Publishing Co., 1936), 51-52.

4Clark, “Francis Warrington Dawson,” 46-47, 61; Logan, “Francis W. Dawson,” 140.

5For background on Chamberlain, see DAB, II, 595; Walter Allen, Governor Chamberlain’s Administration in South Carolina (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1888).

6Dawson to “My dear Hemphill,” June 28, 1876, Hemphill Family Papers, Perkins Library, Duke University.

7Joel Williamson, After Slavery: The Negro in South Carolina During Reconstruction, 1861-1877, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965), 401-402; News and Courier, February 7, 1876.

8Williamson, After Slavery, 402.

9Jonathan Daniels, They Will Be Heard (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1965, 192; News and Courier, May 14, 1875.

10Chamberlain to Dawson, June 24, 1875, Dawson Mss.

11See, for example, News and Courier, December 23, 1875, p. 2.

12News and Courier, February 18, 1876, May 8 and 9, 1876, Clark, “Francis Warrington Dawson”, 84-85; Daniels, They Will Be Heard, 193; Williams, Hampton and His Red Shirts, 33, 41; Williamson, After Slavery, 271.

13News and Courier, December 14, 1875.

14Ibid., April 29, 1876.

15Clark, “Francis Warrington Dawson,” 72,79, 83.

16Ibid., 78-80; News and Courier, clipping, July 25, 1878, Scrapbook, I, 36, Dawson Mss.

17Williams, Hampton and His Red Shirts, 32-33; Williams, “Press of South Carolina,” News and Courier.

18Daniels, They Will Be Heard, 190-193; Williams, “Press of South Carolina,” News and Courier.

19Daniels, They Will Be Heard, 193.

20Clark, “Francis Warrington Dawson,” 85-87; Williamson, After Slavery, 267-269; Francis Butler Simkins, Pitchfork Ben Tillman: South Carolinian (Baton Rouge: Lousiana State University Press, 1944), 400.

21Williamson, After Slavery, 269.

22News and Courier, July 10, 11, 13, 1876.

23Ibid., August 8, 1876, 2; Logan, “Francis W. Dawson,” 149-150; Williams, Hampton and His Red Shirts, 56; Williamson, After Slavery, 270.

24Williamson, After Slavery, 406-407.

25News and Courier, July 11, 1876.

26Ibid., July 22, 1876.

27Logan, “Francis S. Dawson,” 149-150; Williams, Hampton and His Red Shirts, 34,35, 42; Barnwell, “Reminiscences of the Courier”, News and Courier.

28Williams, Hampton and His Red Shirts, 35,56; Williams, “Press of South Carolina,” News and Courier.

29Clark, “Francis Warrington Dawson,” 119; Daniels, They Will Be Heard, 193; Logan, “Francis W. Dawson,” 154-155.

30Logan, “Francis W. Dawson,” 72; Williams, Hampton and His Red Shirts, 52-53.

31Williams, Hampton and His Red Shirts, 64-65.

32Ibid.

33Williamsburg News, in Scrapbook, I, 10, Dawson Mss.

34Clark, “Francis Warrington Dawson,” 94.

35News and Courier, July 8, 1876.

36Williams, Hampton and His Red Shirts, 53; News and Courier, July 5, 1876.

37News and Courier, August 12, 1876, pp. 1,2; Clark, “Francis Warrington Dawson,” 4, 284-285.

38Williams, Hampton and His Red Shirts, 78-79.

39Ibid; News and Courier, August 17, 1876.

40News and Courier, December 5, 1876, quoted in Clark, “Francis Warrington Dawson,” 97.

41Quoted in Allen, Governor Chamberlain’s Administration, 361.

42Camden Journal in News and Courier (January 11, 1879), clipping, Scrapbook, I, 39, Dawson Mss.

43Barnwell, “Reminiscences of the Courier,” News and Courier, 10-B; Williamson After Slavery, 271-272.

44News and Courier, December 21, 1876, in Scrapbook, I, 20, Dawson Mss.; Logan, “Francis W. Dawson,” 165.

45Clark, “Francis Warrington Dawson,” 111, 112; Simpkins, Pitchfork Ben Tillman, 57-69.

46News and Courier, December 16, 1878.

47Clark, “Francis Warrington Dawson,” 118.

48Martin W. Gary to R.R. Hemphill, September 25, 1878, in Clark, “Francis Warrington Dawson,” 122; Dawson to General John Bratton, June 1, 1888, p. 139, Letterpress Book, Hemphill Family papers.

49Clark, “Francis Warrington Dawson,” 1006, 107.

50Marlboro Planter, in Scrapbook, I, 5, Dawson Mss.

51Dawson to Sarah Morgan Dawson, undated, Letters, 1874-1885, Dawson Mss.; Dawson to Sarah Dawson [July 1877], ibid.; Clark, “Francis Warrington Dawson,” 108.

52General G.W. Sorrel to Dawson, August 22, 1877, Scrapbook, I, 25, Dawson Mss.; News and Courier, August 18, 1877, p. 23, ibid.; Winnsboro News, p. 28, ibid.

53Dawson to Sarah Dawson, September 16, 1877, Letters 18874-1885, Dawson Mss.

54News and Courier, July 25, 1878, in Scrapbook I, 36, Dawson Mss.

55DAB, III, 152; Daniels, They Will Be Heard, 195.

56Clark, “Francis Warrington Dawson,” 112, 124.

57Dawson to Fitzhugh Lee, August 14, 1885, pp. 139-140, Letterpress Book, 1884-1887, Dawson Mss.

58News and Courier, January 2, 1882, Beaufort News, in Scrapbook, I, 48, Dawson Mss.

59Daniels, They Will Be Heard, 201.