Much More to 'Pitchfork Ben' Than Senate Fistfight

S.C. Encyclopedia | Benjamin Ryan Tillman was born in Edgefield District on August 11, 1847, to Benjamin and Sophia Tillman. The family was wealthy in land and slaves, and Ben Tillman was educated in local schoolhouses and on the family’s acres. A serious illness at the age of sixteen cost him his left eye, and his convalescence kept him out of Confederate service. In 1868 he married Sallie Starke. They had seven children.

In the mid-1870s Tillman joined the Sweetwater Sabre Club and became part of the paramilitary rifle-club movement, through which white landowners challenged the Republican state government. He took part in the Hamburg Massacre (July 1876), in which rifle-club members (known thereafter as “Red Shirts”) besieged a black militia unit and murdered several captives. Tillman later explained that “the leading white men of Edgefield” had determined “to seize the first opportunity that the negroes might offer them to provoke a riot and teach the negroes a lesson.” The massacre fractured compromise arrangements between state Democrats and Republicans and helped create the electoral crisis of 1876–1877.

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