![]() He took part in the Hamburg Massacre (July 8, 1876), in which rifle club members (known thereafter as “Red Shirts”) besieged a black militia unit, took many prisoners, and selected several militia men and local black officials from among them. During Reconstruction, he joined former slaveholders and ex-Confederate officers and soldiers in the rifle club movement, which threatened and assaulted South Carolina’s Republican officials and their black and white supporters. After the war, he supervised former slaves as agricultural laborers in Florida and South Carolina. Throughout that career, Tillman sought to reshape the post– Civil War nation by limiting the political and social freedoms of African Americans and those of any whites who challenged those limits.Īn illness during the Civil War kept Tillman out of the Confederate military and cost him his left eye. ![]() He served with a murderous paramilitary unit, agitated for agricultural reform, and was elected to two terms as South Carolina’s governor and four terms as a U.S. Benjamin Ryan (“Pitchfork Ben”) Tillman was born into a wealthy slaveholding family in the plantation district of Edge-field, South Carolina, on August 11, 1847. ![]()
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