Today I learned that Samuel Jones Lee was the first African-American Speaker of the South Carolina House of Representatives from 1872 to 1874 1. The reason the discovery resonated so much with me is that the history has some modern reverberations and is closely tied to several nearby counties. His tenure is associated with the Disputed Government of South Carolina of 1876 and one of the most contentious presidential elections in American history.
Lee was born in Abbeville which is the birthplace and deathbed of the Confederacy and served in the house from 1868 to 1874 with the last two years as Speaker. The dates just jumped out at me as unusual given the reconstruction era. It turns out he served in the Confederate Army and was likely the child of his plantation owner and Confederate general Samuel McGowan given that no documentation can be found of his birth father, nor of his service in the Confederate Army even though he was photographed in the uniform of McGowan's regiment, the 14th South Carolina Infantry.
Samuel Jones Lee2 & Samuel McGowan3 👇🏼
The key to exactly how this occurred is understanding exactly what happened after the Civil War which involved The Disputed government of South Carolina in 18764 and the 1876 U.S. Presidential election5. Rutherford B. Hayes should never have been president. South Carolina submitted an impossible percentage of eligible voters, murdered some voters, left the certified votes unsigned, and had our electoral votes declared illegal. It's part of the reason Congress created the Electoral Commission and even though Samuel Tilden won both the popular and electoral votes, the Republicans had a one-seat advantage on the commission and decided to give all of the disputed electoral votes to Hayes.
And it's even weirder in South Carolina where from December 1876 to April 1877, both parties claimed victory in South Carolina while simultaneously creating militias, passing laws, and collecting taxes. Both Edgefield and Laurens counties submitted votes that outnumbered their residents. There were armed conflicts in and around the statehouse and a large influence on the elections were the South Carolina civil disturbances6 like the Hamburg Massacre7. Eventually, Daniel Henry Chamberlain conceded to Wade Hampton III after Hayes withdrew the federal troops as part of the Compromise of 1877.
The Compromise of 18778 is debated in historiographic circles. Still, it basically went like this... the Democrats accepted Hayes as President on the terms that the federal troops who had been put in place after the Civil War in South Carolina be removed which effectively ended the U.S. Reconstruction era and cemented the racist Southern block until the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Although somewhat naive to the subject matter, it seems to me that the only thing good to come of it all was Puck8, the first successful humor magazine in the United States. The cartoon below by the founder Joseph Keppler is entitled shows Rutherford B. Hayes strolling off with a woman labeled "Solid South" implying a deal with Roscoe Conklin, who designed the compromise of 1877, as Mephistopheles or the devil.
The echos of this history seem to be particularly strong in my nearby proximity... minus the obvious political party flop largely driven by Strom Thurmond, whom my better half worked for in the Senate. I have a photo of me as an infant standing next to the large statue of Wade Hampton on the South Carolina statehouse grounds while there is scant recognition for Chamberlain. I used to live a couple of doors down from Wade Hampton's birthplace which is still standing and South Carolina didn't have another Republican governor until a hundred years later. The current South Carolina Senator from Edgefield is the majority leader and our congressional district is represented by a fellow over in Laurens County. There have only been several presidents to lose the popular vote and this vocal minority seem pretty bent of repeating history. It was duly noted in my reading that the same folks behind the Hamburg massacre of 1876 also used the word 'values' to describe their goals.
I discovered all of this while researching James Brown for another essay when it overtook my attention. I never knew of Hamburg, South Carolina even though I driven through it numerous times. I was researching James Brown's showmanship and his history of working at his Aunt's brothel in the segregated south right across the river from Hamburg, South Carolina when I discovered that Samuel Jones Lee lived there. It's a pretty stunning piece of trivia I'm sure to be using... The first African-American speaker of the South Carolina House happened during our most divisive history over a 100 years before the Civil Rights Act.
It's unfortunate that in the end, Lee's legacy has mostly been described as scandalous and the conditions for which he rose to the position were quite unusual. Speaking of... here's Trump speaking at the South Carolina Silver Elephant Gala a month ago, President Camacho from the movie Idiocracy, and James Brown which pretty much sums up my puckish take on it. 👇🏼
- Samuel Jones Lee - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Jones_Lee | Vandervelde, Isabel. Biography of Samuel Jones Lee. Aiken, S.C.: Art Studio Press, 1997 | https://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/lee-samuel-j/ - Oldfield, John. “The African American Bar in South Carolina, 1877–1915.” In At Freedom’s Door: African American Founding Fathers and Lawyers in Reconstruction South Carolina, edited by James Lowell Underwood and W. Lewis Burke, Jr. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000.
- SC House Gallery Portraits - Samuel Jones Lee - https://www.scstatehouse.gov/studentpage/Explore/portraits/house/SamuelLee.shtml
- Samuel McGowan - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_McGowan_(general)
- Disputed government of South Carolina of 1876–77 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disputed_government_of_South_Carolina_of_1876–77
- 1876 United States presidential election - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1876_United_States_presidential_election
- South Carolina civil disturbances of 1875 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Carolina_civil_disturbances_of_1876
- Hamburg massacre, South Carolina - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamburg_massacre
- Compromise of 1877 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compromise_of_1877
- Puck - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puck_(magazine)