BLACK SEA ISLAND LIFE AND POSTBELLUM RACE NARRATIVES

Before the 1893 hurricane, the South Carolina Sea Islands served as an oasis for black South Carolinians seeking to escape the violence and economic deprivation in the state's upcountry. In 1876, white paramilitary forces killed eleven African Americans in cold blood and faced no repercussions from local authorities. In addition, black agriculturalists who had once hoped that emancipation would be defined by independent landownership found themselves pulled into a vortex of sharecropping and debt peonage. “For ten years we have tried to make money and have not been able to do so,” lamented one agricultural worker from the upcountry county of Edgefield. “We are poorer now than when we began, we have less, in fact we have nothing.”Footnote ⁷

As a result, black South Carolinians flocked to the Sea Islands following the collapse of Reconstruction. Between 1870 and 1880, Beaufort County, the political district that housed the Sea Islands, saw the percentage of its black population increase from 85 percent to 92 percent. In 1879 alone, at least 1500 black South Carolinians from the neighboring counties of Barnwell, Hampton, and Colleton migrated to Beaufort County.Footnote ⁸ Residing mostly on the large Sea Islands of Port Royal and St. Helena off the coast of the mainland, Black South Carolinians saw Beaufort County as an oasis of black political power where they could still practice their political rights to the fullest and acquire land. During the 1880s and 1890s, Beaufort not only elected African Americans to several local and statewide offices but also was located in one of the last two remaining congressional districts that sent African Americans to Congress.

By 1890, 92 percent of Beaufort County's more than 34,000 residents were African American, leading many in the national media to call the region around the Sea Islands the “Black District.” For some, it was a positive title designed to highlight the success achieved by both the political leaders and the everyday citizens. With more than 70 percent of the county's owner-operated farms held by African Americans and 13,075 black families owning farms, Beaufort County represented the fulfillment of the Reconstruction-era promise of building a self-sufficient black community rooted in landownership.Footnote ⁹ “Colored men who, ten years ago worked as field hands for fifty cents a day, now own their lands and earn a comfortable support from them,” reported the People's Advocate, a black newspaper in Washington, DC, in 1880.Footnote ¹⁰ For Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a former Union general who commanded a regiment of black soldiers that had been stationed in the Sea Islands during the Civil War, visiting the Sea Islands in 1879 reconfirmed his faith in the region. “Nothing in actual life can come so near the experience of Rip Van Winkle, as to revisit war scenes after a dozen years of peace,” he reported. “Not another county or township in the state could show such a record for freedom from crime and pauperism.”Footnote ¹¹

For others, the existence of a “black district” conjured the perils of “Negro Domination” during Reconstruction. In his 1873 exploration of the postbellum South, Massachusetts-born journalist Edward King claimed that the Sea Islands’ black farmers were poor stewards of the land they had acquired since emancipation. “[T]hey are in possession of a great deal which they cannot use,” he protested. “They seem, especially on Port Royal Island, contented with a small tract of land on which to raise cotton, and over which their hogs may wander.”Footnote ¹² According to King, black Sea Islanders’ embrace of subsistence farming refuted claims that black southerners could mirror the production of independent northern agriculturalists. Charles C. Pinckney of Charleston went further, declaring that “whenever they (the negroes) dominate by numbers and political preponderance, most of them have retrograded towards the worse phases of African life.” A site where black South Carolinians sought freedom from violence and economic deprivation, various groups of Americans looked to the Sea Islands during the late nineteenth century to frame debates about racial progress and racial regression since Reconstruction.Footnote ¹³

THE STORM AND ITS IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH

On Sunday, August 27, 1893, residents of the Sea Islands began to suspect that the heavy rain they had been experiencing since Friday was more than an ordinary summer storm. By midnight, the storm had reached the height of its destructive force. Water rose to five feet deep in some places, the wind was causing serious damage to houses, and giant trees were being uprooted.Footnote ¹⁴ According to Admiral Lester Beardslee, a white northerner who was stationed at the Port Royal naval base, “the houses came down like card houses. … Some collapsed and crushed their inmates on the spot.” Rosetta Archer, a black resident of Port Royal Island who was a child at the time, feared that the rising tide would carry away her family's house.Footnote ¹⁵

While Archer's family managed to make it through the storm without suffering any casualties, most families on the islands were not as fortunate. The Reverend Bacchus Green, a prominent minister from Port Royal Island, had preached on Hilton Head Island on Sunday and was stranded there the night of the storm. He returned home to discover that his wife and five children had all been killed. Several families had to make terrible choices as the floodwaters tore their homes apart. One father, seeing that the wind and tide would sweep away his house, carried his two children to bed and told them to be good, say their prayers, and go to sleep. He then wrapped his sick wife in a blanket and carried her out, wading through the waist-high waves and hearing the crash as his house toppled. “It was a hard thing to choose,” he told one of his neighbors with tears in his eyes. Susan Rice's brother, Dr. Gowan Hazel, was one of three white residents of Beaufort who perished in the storm. Dr. Hazel, a former Confederate general, left his home to help rescue two of his black neighbors who had been caught in a riptide. The raging waters carried all three to a watery grave, and their bodies were not discovered until Tuesday morning.Footnote ¹⁶

By Monday morning, the winds had begun to weaken, but the floodwaters remained. “In all that distance I did not see a dry spot,” reported G. W. Wilkins, a white cotton merchant on St. Helena Island. “There was water everywhere and the desolation was complete. In one place I saw the roof of a house in a tree-top.” One of the more disturbing features of the post-storm landscape was the omnipresence of dead bodies. “We saw dead cats and dogs, and dead horses and hogs all along the shore,” Rosetta Archer recalled, “and some dead men and women and children. We saw one dead woman holding onto a timber of her house by her teeth.” The task of identifying and burying the dead was overwhelming. Bacchus Green, who was still mourning the loss of his family, immediately began working with local relief organizations to distribute food and clothing. Many bodies went unidentified and were simply placed in mass graves. On Kane's Neck, a plantation on Port Royal Island, thirty-seven people were buried in one trench. This practice, which was repeated in several places on the islands, helped speed the work of burying the dead but made it difficult for the Beaufort County coroner to produce an accurate accounting of the storm's casualties.Footnote ¹⁷

In the immediate aftermath of the storm, leading citizens of Beaufort County banded together to raise national awareness and spur donations. The Sea Island Relief Committee, like the leadership of the county's local politics during the 1890s, included both black and white men. Among their number were George Holmes, the white mayor of the town of Beaufort; Niels Christensen, a Danish immigrant and Union Army veteran who had served as superintendent of the Union cemetery in Beaufort; and black former congressman Robert Smalls, then the federal collector of customs at the port of Beaufort. Eight subcommittees oversaw the distribution of relief, each in a different part of the county. In addition to administering donations of food, clothing, and supplies, the Sea Island Relief Committee served as a vehicle for Sea Islanders to articulate their own story of the storm. In a September 1 appeal to “the American People,” the committee announced its own estimates of the storm's destruction: more than 800 lives lost, 2000 people left homeless, at least 6000 entirely dependent on charity. “[T]he destruction was thorough and complete,” with “not a grain of corn or a pod of cotton left in the fields washed by the raging sea.”Footnote ¹⁸

The tragedy, horrible in and of itself, was made more ruinous by its decimation of the hard-worn freedom dreams that the county's black residents had built into the landscape. The committee made the connection between Beaufort County and postbellum black progress explicit:

The committee's call for action was inextricable from a local memory of Reconstruction as “years of hard toil.” The Sea Island Relief Committee also couched its call for donations in explicitly racial terms. “The distress exists all over the Sea Islands among the colored population,” the committee explained, “and has assumed proportions, as a result of the great disaster, beyond the efforts and abilities of local aid to alleviate.” In framing the longer history of the Sea Islands as a story of progress, The Sea Island Relief Committee hoped that the national audience would remember the promise of Reconstruction and donate the local relief effort so that this progress would not be erased.Footnote ¹⁹

The local black press called for racial solidarity and action. In addition to reporting details of the calamity and encouraging support for its victims, the black press had to consider questions of respectability and racial representation. The Savannah Tribune made its readers aware of the plight of the Sea Islands and invited members of the Sea Island Relief Committee to Savannah so that they could solicit donations from the city's black community. The Tribune had long printed a weekly update on happenings in Beaufort County called “Back Home News” because a significant number of Savannah's black residents came from Beaufort County and continued to travel back and forth between the two areas. In soliciting donations, the Tribune’s editors hoped that racial solidarity would serve as a motivating force. “It is well-known that nearly all of the sufferers on the island are our people,” the Tribune observed, “and this being the fact should especially spur the colored citizens to contribute liberally towards them.”Footnote ²⁰

Beaufort County's most prominent black newspaper, The New South, also invoked racial pride but did so in a way that reinforced a conservative and deeply gendered vision of citizenship. The paper's editor, Samuel J. Bampfield, a son-in-law of Robert Smalls, was part of a new generation of black leaders who viewed post-Reconstruction black progress as rooted in the black community's industry and prudence. In an article titled “There is Everything in Right Methods,” The New South declared that the only path forward for the Sea Islands could be through rugged individualism. “The idea of self help is to be as much encouraged among those who are aided by these committees as possible,” the paper declared. The New South discouraged black residents of the Sea Islands from accepting direct charity and lauded the Red Cross for requiring able-bodied individuals to work in return for aid. “[E]very true woman or man would much prefer to obtain these rations in this way than to expose his manhood to the danger of being lowered by a total dependence upon charity,” the paper insisted. Like black elites in other parts of late nineteenth-century America, Beaufort County's leaders believed that practicing a politics of respectability was a critical part of proving that African Americans deserved full citizenship rights.Footnote ²¹

The New South’s emphasis on respectability was likely tied to a belief that the Sea Islands were inextricably connected to how African Americans desired to remember Reconstruction as a moment when they proved their worthiness for citizenship. In another story, the paper called attention to a man on St. Helena Island who, despite being able-bodied and having $200 in the bank, had applied for assistance from the Red Cross. “Rations are being given out,” the man claimed, “and as I have lost my crop along with the rest, I should receive equally along with the others.” The New South responded with a strong admonition to its readers:

Framing the storm as a moment when black Sea Islanders could demonstrate their mastery over virtues like independence, industry, and thrift, The New South drew a clear connection between the present and an earlier era when black Sea Islanders proved their citizenship through military service, political participation, and agricultural labor: the Civil War and Reconstruction.Footnote ²³ In so doing, the paper drew attention to both the need for relief in the midst of the human suffering and also assured potential donors that they were contributing to a region that represented racial progress, not racial regression.

THE PANIC OF 1893 AND THE NATIONAL RESPONSE TO THE STORM

The 1893 Sea Island Storm occurred in the midst of the most calamitous economic downturn of the nineteenth century. As banks and businesses across the country collapsed, millions of Americans lost work and unemployment skyrocketed to over 40 percent in some states. In addition to demanding radical changes to U.S. monetary policy, populist groups called for both state and federal government to provide direct aid to the nation's hard-hit farmers and unemployed workers. As the belief in the natural harmony between capital and labor was shattered by growing levels of income inequality, a growing number of Americans began to embrace class identity and class conflict as defining features of the late nineteenth-century social fabric.Footnote ²⁴

In response to these calls for more government during times of crisis, laissez-faire intellectuals doubled down on a Social Darwinist framework that compared the economy to the natural world. Emphasizing that ideas like “natural selection” and “survival of the fittest” defined the modern economy, Social Darwinist intellectuals built animosity against policies that interfered with the free market. Even during the Panic of 1893, these ideologues saw no role for government to alleviate the suffering of the undeserving poor because such a category did not exist. The widespread currency of Social Darwinism among the nation's elites had a chilling effect on the generosity of philanthropic organizations. Societies that offered welfare to the poor had to demonstrate that they were neither helping specific racial and economic groups nor disincentivizing the poor from work by being too openhanded with aid. What emerged out of this moment of scientific racism was a “scientific charity” that aimed to be objective without upsetting the natural order the free market.Footnote ²⁵

When the American Red Cross took over the 1893 Sea Island Storm relief effort on October 2, 1893, Clara Barton and her staff immediately began implementing this particular vision of philanthropy. Requested by Benjamin Tillman in early September, the American Red Cross spent a month assessing the damage and determining the efficacy of the local relief effort before it began distributing aid at the beginning of November. While Red Cross officials commended the efforts of local leaders to provide for the storm victims, they found the committee's methods sorely lacking. “The manner of distribution previous to November 2, though performed by willing workers, was not, could not be, that systemic distribution which comes only after years of experience,” declared one Red Cross worker. Red Cross officials closed the warehouses that the Sea Island Relief Committee had used to distribute aid so that they could inventory preexisting donations. Storm victims who lingered in the town of Beaufort expecting to receive rations were told by the Red Cross to disperse so that the city “could be rid of the demoralizing influence of idle people.” With the doors now closed, Barton and her associates canvassed the entire county to develop a census of those who had been affected by the storm and account for the precise holdings of each household.Footnote ²⁶

When relief operations resumed under the official banner of the Red Cross, it became considerably more difficult for storm victims to receive aid. Although rations were issued to families in need, the weekly allotment for a family of seven was set at only one peck of hominy and one pound of pork. All except the elderly and the infirm were expected to work in exchange for aid. Men were given shovels and spades with which to clear public roads, dig ditches, and rebuild houses. Women were organized into sewing societies that repaired donated articles of clothing and turned “ticking into mattress covers” and “homespun into garments.” The Red Cross emphasized that its mission was to stamp out dependence. “They must not eat the bread of idleness,” proclaimed Barton of the storm victims. “We must not leave a race of beggars, but teach them the manliness of support, and methods of self-dependence.” Fearing that memory of the Reconstruction-era Freedmen's Bureau, which had become associated with a decadent vision of federal largesse, Red Cross volunteers appeared to operate from the premise that it was better to be too stringent than too generous.Footnote ²⁷ The Red Cross's parsimony was both philosophical and pragmatic. Although reports of the Sea Island storm appeared in all of the nation's major papers and appeals for relief were made by both South Carolina politicians and the Red Cross, the federal government and the American people at large responded with less support than they had after previous disasters. Following the 1889 Johnstown Flood in Pennsylvania, which killed 2200 people and left close to 40,000 in desperate need of food and shelter, the Red Cross had received $39,000 in cash and more than $200,000 in supplies. Counting all private donations, the organizations that collected funds for the Johnstown victims accumulated to almost $3 million. In comparison, the Red Cross only received $30,000 in both cash donations and supplies for the more than 30,000 people who were left destitute by the Sea Island storm.Footnote ²⁸ Despite their outward emphasis on scientific charity, Clara Barton and her colleagues in the Red Cross privately recognized the limits of depending on private donations. Although there was little precedent for the government intervening in disaster relief efforts, Barton appealed to both the state and federal authorities for aid. She first memorialized the South Carolina General Assembly about the dire circumstances facing the Sea Islands and the need for the “the guardians of the people's weal” to act on behalf of the storm victims. Unfortunately, the legislature adjourned for its Christmas vacation without appropriating any funds. In October, Barton traveled to Washington, DC, to ask Congress to help the people of the Sea Islands. “The ground is wet and sour,” she reported. “The people are living on this damp ground in tents, under sheds and tree limbs. … Malaria in acute form is there; typhoid, typhus, and pneumonia will, in the near future, be epidemic.” Barton asked the legislators to appropriate $50,000 in aid. George Washington Murray, the black congressman who represented South Carolina's “Black Seventh,” had introduced a similar resolution in the House of Representatives on September 11, but it was ignored by his peers.Footnote ²⁹ Barton's resolution was sponsored by Massachusetts Senator George Hoar, who was one of her neighbors, and co-sponsored by South Carolina Senator Matthew C. Butler. “Every hour lost,” Hoar argued “will result probably in some human being perishing.”Footnote ³⁰

When brought to the floor of the Senate, the disaster relief bill spurred debates on what role, if any, the government could have during both natural and economic disasters. William Alfred Peffer, a populist senator from Kansas, asked that the bill's scope be enlarged to include the entire country and the appropriation be made large enough to help all the idle men in the United States, alluded to the widespread economic misfortune that was plaguing the nation. Ultimately, the debates ceased and the Senate never voted on the appropriation bill. As Barton told a friend who encouraged her to appeal to the governors of states across the nation for additional aid, “It would be political suicide for any chief magistrate at this moment in the existing state of things, to ask for assistance for any people outside of his own. None would dare to do it where the poor of their community are crying for help.” With the economic crisis worsening, Red Cross officials not only struggled to raise funds in a moment when few had little extra to give but also faced an existential crisis about how to apply its core philosophy during a moment when scientific charity could not meet the needs of the vulnerable.Footnote ³¹

The shift in national opinion away from tackling past racial grievances did not prevent several high-profile Republicans from using the Lowcountry's wartime legacy in African American memory to bring attention to the Sea Islanders’ plight. Within a week of the storm, the aging black abolitionist Frederick Douglass published a letter “on behalf of the sufferers” in the Brooklyn Eagle. “I am moved to make this appeal for immediate help,” Douglass implored. “These people need money, food, and clothing, and all who can do so are urged most earnestly to respond at once to this call for help.” He encouraged donors to send funds to Robert Smalls. “Into no greater hands could they be placed with greater certainty of being promptly and faithfully distributed,” he declared.Footnote ³² Douglass's swift response and his reference to Smalls suggest that Smalls and Douglass had remained in contact with one another in the years following Reconstruction and that they understood each other to be fellow travelers in the diminishing band of black leaders still willing to make full-throated arguments for black political rights. Smalls had written to Douglass just days earlier to apologize for missing the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, “my time being taken up looking after the storm sufferers and fixing up my places and making them habitable.”Footnote ³³

Some white northerners mobilized memory of Beaufort County during the 1860s to raise awareness of the black Sea Islanders’ plight. William Channing Gannett, a Unitarian missionary who had spent three years on Port Royal Island during the Civil War, appealed for storm relief by emphasizing the progress that had been made in the region since emancipation. “Now, after a generation of freedom, the land is mostly owned by blacks in little farms of ten to forty acres,” Gannett wrote. “The great majority live in their own houses, scattered over these farms, instead of in the huddled negro quarters of the old plantation. On St. Helena Island alone, I believe, four to five hundred sewing machines click, and here and there a small parlor organ may be heard.” During a visit to St. Helena Island in February 1893, Edward Poor, a correspondent with the Friends’ Intelligencer, observed a prosperous and independent black majority living harmoniously with the white minority, thereby giving the lie to the specter of black domination propagated by Lost Cause writers. Poor argued that the storm “should awaken special interest in those of our people who have followed the efforts of the colored race to elevate and improve their condition.”Footnote ³⁴ While white northerners like Elkington and Gannett offered coverage of the Sea Islands that emphasized the long-standing connections between Beaufort County and the North's involvement in emancipation and Reconstruction, other writers highlighted how fundamentally disconnected the Sea Islands were to the rest of the nation. Joel Chandler Harris, one of the nation's most preeminent southern color writers, was asked to write two articles for Scribner's Monthly, one of the nation's leading literary magazines, on the storm and its aftermath. The first of these articles, “The Devastation,” sought to capture both the horror of the storm's destruction and what Harris regarded as the anti-modern charm of black life on the Sea Islands. Already renowned among northern readers, Harris provided white middle-class readers a literary escape into a rose-tinged, harmonious antebellum world that served as a sharp contrast to the political and social disorder that they believe now afflicted late nineteenth-century American society.Footnote ³⁵

In his account of the 1893 Sea Island storm, Harris portrayed the Sea Islands and their black residents as mysterious and beyond the comprehension of most whites. “Gentle, patient, smiling, and good-humored, the Negroes have no complaints to make,” he wrote. “They discuss the storm among themselves, but not in a way to impart much information to a white listener.” Emphasizing the opaqueness of Lowcountry black life, Harris places himself into the article at several points to serve as a white guide through the unfamiliar black world. Harris took great care to not only report the details of the storm's aftermath but also lyrically capture both the topographical distinctiveness of the Sea Islands and the linguistic particularities of the Gullah dialect spoken by the Sea Islanders. According to one review of the series, “No one other than the author of ‘Uncle Remus’ could have given here and there the verdical touches of negro dialect and temperament which go to make up a complete picture of the isolated, hapless community.” Blurring the line between sober reporting and sensational entertainment, Joel Chandler Harris offered white middle-class readers a touchstone to see the exact line that demarcated the nation's racial periphery from its Anglo-Saxon center.Footnote ³⁶

Harris's second Scribner's article, “The Relief,” praised the work of the Red Cross. Harris agreed with the stringent allocation of assistance and saw Barton's organization as the most efficient and modern version of humanitarian aid. Harris emphasized the conflict between the approach taken by the Red Cross and the expectations of the Sea Islands’ black residents. “Some of the older ones, remembering the days when the Freedmen's Bureau was in operation, came to the conclusion that the government had charge of the relief funds,” he wrote.” In another instance, Harris claimed to have witnessed an elderly black man in line for food object that “Mockin’ bud been eat mo’ dun dat!” The man “remembered the days when the Government poured out its bounty through the Freedmen's Bureau,” Harris claimed. Like Joseph Elkington, Harris witnessed the spread of a grassroots rumor about government intervention, but Harris took the reporting of this rumor one step further by pinpointing linkages between the Red Cross relief effort and the memory of the Freedmen's Bureau held by the generation of Sea Islanders who had lived through the Civil War and Reconstruction.Footnote ³⁷

The contributions of William Channing Gannett, Edward Poor, and Joel Chandler Harris wrestled with the assumption that both the people and the landscape of the Sea Islands would be seen as out of step by white middle-class northerners. In this way, their stories of the Sea Islands not only served as pieces of investigative journalism or calls for more relief; they were also part of a larger effort to codify racial and regional differences. Occurring at the same time as the apex of North-South reconciliation; creation of southern Jim Crow laws; implementation of assimilationist policies toward indigenous peoples in the American West; exclusion Chinese immigrants from citizenship; discrimination toward non-Protestant European immigrants; and colonization of peoples living in American territories in the Pacific and Caribbean Oceans, elites repeatedly used the press to redefine the nation's cultural center as white and those on the cultural periphery as non-white. Elite anxiety about the national borders, racial boundaries, and imperial expansion was perhaps best encapsulated by Frederick Jackson Turner's “frontier thesis.” Presented at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association the same year as the Sea Island Storm, Turner argued that the frontier, as “the meeting point between savagery and civilization” had been a crucible for the formation of a distinctive American culture. Like Turner, the writers who provided seemingly objective descriptions of black life in the South Carolina Sea Islands after the hurricane also offered prescriptive assessments about the boundary of American civilization and to what extent this boundary could be permeable.Footnote ³⁸

THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY'S ASSAULT ON THE RED CROSS

At the same moment when black residents of the Sea Islands and elite northern writers fought to preserve what David Blight calls the emancipationist memory of the Civil War and Reconstruction and make the case for black citizenship, operatives in South Carolina's Democratic Party undermined the Red Cross relief effort. As Clara Barton's organization established control over the local humanitarian mission, some white Democrats began comparing the American Red Cross to the military occupation led by the Union Army during Reconstruction. These comparisons became increasingly hostile and increasingly racialized as the Red Cross relief work extended into the winter. By the spring of 1894, claims that the Red Cross was discriminating against the poor whites of the Lowcountry were appearing in the state's major newspapers. These charges echoed the rallying cries against “Black Reconstruction” and “Negro Domination” made by the state's Democratic Party during the 1870s. The Red Cross's leadership understood the historical parallel being deployed by Governor Tillman and his followers and charged that allegations of anti-white bias were part of tactics designed to bring white yeomen into the still-divided Democratic Party. This fight between the Red Cross and the Tillman wing of the Democratic Party not only recapitulated earlier struggles in the state over the fate of Reconstruction, but also foreshadowed the upcoming battle over black political rights in the 1895 state constitution convention.Footnote ³⁹

Even as the enormity of the 1893 storm became clear to the state and national media, many white South Carolinians discouraged local relief organizations from providing direct aid to black victims. An article in the Charleston News and Courier argued that “the distribution of free rations to the negroes on the islands will demoralize them and promote idleness on their part to their own detriment and that of the white farmers.” The writer expressed fear that direct aid would meddle with the Lowcountry's already precarious market in black labor power and require white farmers to offer higher wages. Citing a rumor that black workers had already begun to strike for higher wages, the writer called upon long-standing objections that widespread landownership and access to political power discouraged black residents of the Lowcountry from working for white employers. Governor Tillman also voiced this concern. In response to a telegram imploring him to seek federal aid, the governor responded, “The necessity for national aid to sufferers does not yet exist. I do not think it will. Contributions are very liberal and I think we can get along without it.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Tillman's critique of federal intervention would have drawn a clear parallel to the memory of Reconstruction in the minds of his white constituents.Footnote ⁴¹

While Tillman later backtracked and asked the Red Cross to spearhead the relief effort, many white South Carolinians did not welcome the national organization. White yeoman farmers in the Lowcountry assumed that the Red Cross was operating in bad faith and favoring black victims over white. In November, rumors of discriminatory practices began to emerge in the press. Thomas Martin, a white resident of Beaufort County, wrote a letter to the Charleston News and Courier highlighting what he saw as systemic bias against whites and favoritism toward blacks. Among the many unsubstantiated claims made by Martin included an accusation that the Red Cross was giving aid to black Sea Islanders who already collected pensions from the U.S. government, “drove double buggies,” and had property holdings worth more than $1,000. For Martin, this was not only a failure of oversight, but also evidence of overt discrimination against white South Carolinians on the part of northerners. “Remember this peninsula has more white farmers and people than colored,” Martin declared about the Bluffton township in the mainland section of Beaufort County. His assumption that the Red Cross was playing favorites was supported by what he regarded as partisan bias in the composition of the Bluffton relief committee. Members of the committee included Pompey Riley, a black Republican pension agent; John Lindsey, a black pensioner and political leader; London Simmons, also a black pension recipient and Republican leader in Bluffton; and Moes Bruin, whom Martin described as a “creme de la creme hog thief.”Footnote ⁴²

Eugene Gregorie, a white planter from the Pocotaligo section of Beaufort County, asked William Elliott, a prominent white Democrat from Beaufort, to seek an audience with Clara Barton to discuss the “common evil” the Red Cross was inflicting upon the area's white planters. Gregorie and his fellow planters believed that “indiscriminate issue of rations to the lazy negroes of this section” was hurting their ability to recruit black workers during the pivotal spring planting season. Gregorie had reportedly witnessed men fraudulently claiming false dependents in order to secure rations and remain outside the agricultural labor market.Footnote ⁴³ The accusation that the Red Cross was upsetting a supposedly harmonious balance between labor and capital echoed a charge repeatedly made against Reconstruction-era governments.Footnote ⁴⁴ As leaders of an organization that prided itself in being nonpartisan, Red Cross officials took these accusations seriously. J. C. Hemphill, editor of the News and Courier, asked John MacDonald of the Red Cross to respond to Martin's criticisms. After emphasizing that “the Red Cross cares not one iota whether a man is republican or democrat … Methodist or atheist, black or white,” MacDonald described the nonstop hostility white leaders in Bluffton had directed toward the organization. When he first arrived at the town's wharf to survey the storm's damage, he had overheard local white men murmur, “That boat has brought the men belonging to that Cross concern which proposes to feed all these worthless niggers.” MacDonald defended the probity of the black relief committee. Pompey Riley, a black pension agent, was able to identity other agents in the county and ensure that the Red Cross did not distribute aid to those already receiving pensions from the U.S. government. John Lindsey, a black Sea Island resident who had lost his house and livestock in the storm, not only worked for the Red Cross's relief committee, but also used his own resources to help care for individuals in Beaufort who were worse off than himself. In addition to defending the relief effort, the Red Cross and its allies also highlighted evidence of local whites hampering the organization's outreach. “We have held a meeting and I bet no more rations will be issued in Bluffton,” a white storekeeper had told Pompey Riley. Another storekeeper had told a black volunteer with the Red Cross, “You are a Red Cross man, they are leading the people to hell all the time.” MacDonald hypothesized that the white storekeepers in Bluffton were assailing the reputation of the Red Cross because they wanted to force the storm sufferers to purchase from them on credit.Footnote ⁴⁵

Rachel Mather, a white school teacher who had lived on the Sea Islands since Reconstruction, also saw how the storm had upset the state's racial order. In the aftermath of the storm she had turned her school for African American girls into a relief distribution center. Seeking to help all in need, Mather witnessed the precarious place of white farmers who, on the one hand, desperately wanted to hold onto some semblance of their antebellum social standing but, on the other, found themselves in the same perilous economic position as the county's smallholding black farmers. “I done hear in Colleton County that you give the niggers lots of old things; they need them bad enough too, but I suppose you hans't [sic] any objections to helping us too if we got a white skin,” declared one white farmer. Another “respectable looking farmer” told Mather, “I never begged before, [and] I wouldn't now only I can't see my children starve.” In better times, Mather argued, these white farmers “would die rather than solicit help of a so-called ‘nigger teacher.’” The enormity of the storm's destruction pierced the racial divide in the state and exposed the common plight of poor whites and blacks. “These desperate crackers and long suffering negroes will combine” Mather warned, “and there will follow fearful scenes of violence and rapine—tragedies that will shake the proud old Palmetto State to her foundation, and involve the nation in another bloody contest.” Her fearful spectacle of a violent uprising not only alluded to the Civil War, but also spoke to the fear among both national business leaders that the labor conflicts and populist uprisings of the 1890s revealed an irreconcilable conflict between capital and labor, as well as white elites in South Carolina who feared that shared economic interests would one day unite blacks and poor whites.Footnote ⁴⁶

Sensing that the future of white supremacy was at stake, South Carolina's political leadership continued to wield the cudgel of racism to bring poor whites back into the fold of the Democratic Party. During the spring of 1894, new reports of discrimination against poor whites began to emerge in the state's Democratic papers. The Columbia Daily Register published an article titled “Cursing the Red Cross! Bitter feeling against It in Beaufort County.” The article, which was written by an unnamed “special correspondent” and cited only one named source (Thomas Martin), savaged the work of the Red Cross and claimed that the organization was in league with Beaufort's black Republican machine. “Bob Smalls,” who was identified as one of the key benefactors of this conspiracy, had “risen largely in the estimation of the negroes of Beaufort in the last few months.” Pointing to his recent failed congressional bid, the unnamed correspondent argued that the charitable efforts of the Red Cross would give the politically moribund Robert Smalls enough support to revive the local Republican Party and potentially disrupt the state's current balance of power.Footnote ⁴⁷ Rather than respond to the Daily Register, Red Cross officials hoped to bring national attention to the unfair attacks. John MacDonald believed that the charges were politically inspired and could be traced directly to Governor Tillman. Tillman, who was still reeling from the backlash against his ill-fated campaign to bring all liquor sales under the control of state-run dispensaries, was now a candidate for the U.S. Senate. According to MacDonald, Tillman hoped to with the nomination by casting himself as the defender of the state's yeomen farmers and poor whites. Although the coalition that had twice elected him to governor could not directly elect him to the U.S. Senate, it is likely that Tillman sought to politicize the Red Cross's relief effort to mobilize his base to put pressure on other elected officials in the state. The Daily Register’s writer, MacDonald charged, was a partisan “tool” who lived in Columbia, South Carolina, hundreds of miles away from the Sea Islands. Claiming to have scoured the entirety of Bluffton township, The Daily Register writer returned to Columbia only twelve hours later and penned the article charging the Red Cross with “every crime in the calendar.” MacDonald denounced that Tillman's scheme, which played politics with the relief effort in order to gain Democratic votes in the Lowcountry, as “diabolical and fiendish.” Speaking for Clara Barton and the entire Red Cross, MacDonald told P. V. DeGrew of the United Press that he and Barton “would be exceedingly glad” to have these facts brought out in the northern papers, many of which were reprinting extracts from the Daily Register story and spreading rumors that the Red Cross was allowing white people in Beaufort County to starve.Footnote ⁴⁸

By the time MacDonald wrote to DeGrew, the Red Cross was preparing to leave Beaufort County and wanted to highlight the success of its relief effort. “We have been occupying the field for eight months, and have done greater and better work than was ever done on a relief field,” MacDonald claimed. Although the Red Cross had fed tens of thousands of people, salvaged hundreds of thousands of acres of farm land, and put 35,000 people in “a better condition than they have ever been before,” the charges of racial bias threatened to destroy the organization's hard-earned reputation for nonpartisan service. “This unscrupulous demagogue, this blatherskite, this Tillman,” MacDonald spewed, “is doing all that he can to belittle our work and pose before the community as the only man who has saved this country.”Footnote ⁴⁹ While it was clear that Tillman and his allies were trying to erase the Sea Islands’ Reconstruction era legacy of black racial uplift, many African American residents in the region sought to remember the high price paid for emancipation. On May 28, 1894, black South Carolinians from across the state descended upon the town of Beaufort for Decoration Day. First observed in 1865, Decoration Day honored the Union soldiers who had given their lives in order to preserve the Union, destroy slavery, and move the country toward its founding ideals.Footnote ⁵⁰ Because of its particular history with wartime Reconstruction, Beaufort's black citizens produced some of the nation's most elaborate Decoration Day observances, and 1894 was no exception. Five National Guard companies and five Grand Army of the Republic posts came from as far as Columbia, Charleston, and Augusta, Georgia, to participate. Each of the National Guard companies was accompanied by its own marching band, and the entire procession was led by former congressman Robert Smalls on a two-mile parade through the town to the Beaufort National Cemetery.Footnote ⁵¹

Throughout the 1894 Decoration Day observance, speakers cheered representatives of the Red Cross who were in attendance. After marshaling the parade into the national cemetery, Robert Smalls called attention to Clara Barton, who was not only the founder and president of the Red Cross but also had been a nurse for the Union Army and had been stationed near the Sea Islands during the war. “When Miss Barton and the Red Cross arrived,” he recalled, “the buzzard promised to be the fattest animal on the land; now the song birds feed on the growing crops and all were happy.”Footnote ⁵² Richard J. Hinton, the day's keynote speaker, forcefully illuminated the connection between the 1893 hurricane and the place of the South Carolina Sea Islands in American memory. A former abolitionist who had moved to the Kansas Territory at the height of the “Bleeding Kansas” conflict, Hinton later served as a captain in the 2nd Kansas Colored Infantry. To the people gathered at Beaufort, he made the following remarks that connected the Sea Islanders’ perseverance following the storm to their longer post-emancipation struggle for freedom and democracy:

THE SEA ISLANDS AFTER THE RELIEF EFFORT

When the Red Cross left the Sea Islands in June 1894, the landscape of the region remained scarred. Large-scale cotton production, which had been declining since the Civil War, took an even more precipitous drop following the 1893 storm. Production on the family farms held by black Sea Islanders also dropped as the seeds provided by the Red Cross and department of agriculture did not thrive in the local soil.Footnote ⁵⁴ The phosphate industry, which offered high wages to men on the Sea Islands and served as one of the most important employers during Reconstruction, collapsed when Governor Tillman refused to give the companies a tax reprieve following the storm. As both farming and agricultural wage work became untenable, black Sea Islanders increasingly left the region to find work in Charleston, South Carolina; Savannah, Georgia; and, ultimately, the major urban centers in the northeast. Between 1900 and 1910, St. Helena Island alone experienced a 25 percent decline in its population as more than 2000 residents left for better opportunities.Footnote ⁵⁵ The mass outward migration was coupled with a renewed political attack by the region's enemies. In 1890, South Carolina's Democratic Party was divided and still under threat from being defeated by a third party that could unite black Sea Islanders and poor whites. While Tillman preached the gospel of white supremacy throughout his four-year tenure as governor, no moment gave him and his allies a larger platform to defend white constituents than the 1893 Sea Island Storm relief effort; in attacking the specter of negro domination in the Beaufort County—as well as the white northerners who would support black South Carolinians over white South Carolinians—Tillman not only improved his own political standing by winning a seat in the U.S. Senate the following year but also laid the groundwork for single-party rule in the state. In the state's November 1894 election, the new coalition of white elites and poor farmers voted for a constitutional convention that would replace the 1868 document. Created at the height of radical Reconstruction, South Carolina's 1868 constitution established South Carolina's first public school system, protected the civil rights of all of the state's citizens, and gave all male citizens age twenty-one and older the right to vote. The 1895 constitutional convention created several new voting provisions that disfranchised the remaining black voters in the state—who were largely concentrated in the Sea Islands. By 1900, only 3434 of Beaufort County's 32,000 black residents were registered to vote. While this small fraction still outnumbered the 927 white registered voters in the county, the new constitution effectively destroyed the Republican Party in Sea Islands and the Democratic Party now controlled all of the elected offices.Footnote ⁵⁶

The relief effort that followed the 1893 Sea Island Storm served as a battleground for several forces that would come to define the twentieth century. For African Americans, the islands represented the most important promises of the post-Civil War era—landownership and the ability to form an independent, self-sufficient community. For officials within the Red Cross, the Sea Islands were a site where scientific charity could be demonstrated to work, thus giving the organization greater national and international legitimacy. For white elites in the Democratic Party, the storm relief effort represented the continued threat of black political power and an opportunity to finally unite disparate groups of whites across the state against common enemies who reminded them of the foes they had battled under Reconstruction.

Like other environmental disasters, the 1893 Sea Island Storm exposed as much about the cultural and political landscape as it did about the natural world. The South Carolina Sea Islands were devastated not only by the hurricane that killed thousands but also under the inattention by the federal government and racism from state officials. This combination of explicit racism on the part of local officials and state neglect from the federal government would become a dreadful template for Progressive Era responses to the natural disasters. Following the 1900 Hurricane that struck Galveston, Texas; the 1927 flood that ravaged the Mississippi Delta; and the 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane that devastated the Florida Everglades, black disaster victims continued to suffer the greatest harm and receive the least amount of support from the government and private organizations.Footnote ⁵⁷ Ultimately, in understanding pleas for empathy during times of calamity, if not social justice, historians of natural disaster must understand both the weapons of the weak and the structural forces that preserve and exacerbate bias and discrimination. As anthropogenic climate change continues to wreak havoc on already vulnerable communities in our current moment, earlier battles over disaster response may help us better understand what is at stake when the relationship between state policy, private action, and the environment is ignored.Footnote ⁵⁸