Hampton Wade
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
military officer; born in Charleston, S. C., March 28, 1818; grandson of WADE HAMPTON (q. v.); was graduated at South Carolina College. At the outbreak of the Civil War he was believed to be one of the richest of Southern planters and owned the greatest number of slaves. He entered the Confederate army; raised and in part equipped the Hampton Legion, and was chosen its commandant; was wounded in the first action at Bull Run and also at Gettysburg. He was promoted Major-General May 11, 1864, and in August of the same year appointed commander-in-chief of the Confederate cavalry in northern Virginia; was promoted Lieutenant-General in 1865. He greatly distinguished himself in several important actions, including the defeat of Sheridan's cavalry at Trevillians, Va. After the conclusion of peace he was a stanch advocate of conciliation between the North and South; was elected governor of South Carolina in 1876 and 1878; held a seat in the United States Senate in 1878-1890; and was appointed United States Commissioner of Railroads in 1893. He died in 1902. HAMPTON NORMAL AND AGRIschool CULTURAL INSTITUTE, a opened in 1868 in Hampton, Va., under the auspices of the American Missionary Association. In 1870 the school received a charter from the General Assembly of Virginia. The farm land, and the taught, furnish occupation for the boys, whil workshops where trades are the girls are similarly instructed and employed in sewing and cooking classes, doing all the domestic duties of the school, and wherever possible learning trades side by side with the boys. At the end of 1919, the institute reported 1,222 students and 111 professors and instructors, President, James E. Gregg, D. D. In 1878, 15 Indians, who had been in charge of Capt. R. H. Pratt, at St. Augustine, Fla., as prisoners of war, were admitted as students, and from this beginning the Indian Department has increased.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Collier's in 1921 called Hampton "a stanch advocate of conciliation between the North and South," and skated past how he won the governorship: his 1876 campaign was carried by the armed Red Shirts, whose intimidation and killings of black voters at Hamburg and Ellenton historians now treat as the violent core of South Carolina's Redemption rather than a footnote to it. That reassessment has had concrete consequences – in 2015 Alaska renamed its Wade Hampton Census Area, named for a son-in-law's connection to him, the Kusilvak Census Area, and his bronze statue on the State House grounds in Columbia is now a subject of open dispute. The school described in the same entry has grown into Hampton University, chartered as such in 1984, a leading historically black institution with several thousand students rather than the 1,222 reported at the end of 1919; the Indian Department begun with Captain Pratt's fifteen prisoners of war was wound up in the 1920s and is now read as part of the assimilationist boarding-school system Pratt founded at Carlisle.
Written for this edition, 2026.