(Top) Benjamin Tillman, South Carolina governor when the hurricane hit, circa 1895, courtesy of the South Caroliniana Library. (Bottom) A carte-de-visite of South Carolina's 1868 Reconstruction-era legislature, created by Mercer Brown, 1876, courtesy of the Library of Congress.

South Carolina in 1893 was in a precarious position, and the hurricane was a further destabilizing force. The state was in the midst of dealing with the country’s major economic depression. And, most significantly for Black residents of the Lowcountry, the group worst hit by the hurricane, the state was in the middle of a significant political transformation. South Carolina’s Reconstruction Era government had been led by Black and white Republican politicians and had, through a new state constitution in 1868, instituted significant civil rights reforms that guaranteed the end of slavery and enfranchised Black men. But former Confederate General Wade Hampton III led a coup that overthrew this biracial government in 1876. The new all-white government passed a flurry of anti-Black voting laws in the 1880s, and avowed white supremacist Benjamin Ryan Tillman became governor in 1892, which further dimmed the political rights of African Americans.

South Carolina had long had an African American majority because of the centrality of slavery to the state’s colonial and antebellum economy. Enslaved laborers produced massive fortunes in rice, indigo, and cotton fields that enriched a small handful of elite whites, who used their ill-gotten wealth to expand their power over the state’s politics. While the Civil War smashed slavery and temporarily diminished the fortunes of white elite, new struggles emerged between former enslavers and formerly enslaved Black South Carolinians over labor, land, and civil rights. That South Carolina was a majority Black state mattered, especially in the Lowcountry, where places like Beaufort County were over 90% African American. It was a tool that African Americans, who were now citizens with the right to vote, could wield in negotiating power in the decades that followed the Civil War.

(Top) Hurricane survivors posed in front of Whitehall Plantation, photograph from The Storm Swept Coasts of South Carolina, Beaufort, South Carolina, 1894, courtesy of Beaufort County Library. (Bottom) Women and Children standing near the Combahee river, photograph from the The Storm Swept Coasts of South Carolina, near Beaufort, South Carolina, 1894, courtesy of the Beaufort County Library.

Therein lay the problem for white elite South Carolinians who required Black labor but resented Black humanity. So when the hurricane swept away a couple thousand African Americans and devastated the land of those who survived, some white leaders in the state saw the hurricane’s aftermath as an opportunity. Harry Hammond, a foremost agricultural policymaker in South Carolina and son of the staunchly pro-slavery senator and governor James Henry Hammond, was one of those who saw the hurricane’s aftermath as a moment to seize from Black citizens the land and political power they had managed to gain during Reconstruction. Just two weeks after the storm Hammond wrote in The State newspaper that the “peasant proprietory [sic] of the Sea Islands had reached the end of their career,” and claimed they had proved themselves unfit to inhabit the region. Rather than rebuilding their own homesteads, he argued, they should be given train tickets to the upstate where “all may engage” in farm labor in white-owned fields. There, they would be “spread out among the white population.” The Lowcountry would lose its Black majority, its Black landowners, and its Black voters, and according to Hammond’s plan, the state could be delivered into the hands of white rulers for good.

It might have seemed like a simple calculation. And of course, Hammond’s plan did not come to fruition; but it did demonstrate one way that powerful white South Carolinians hoped to harness the hurricane’s damage to Black dispossession. But what ensued in the Lowcountry after the hurricane became much more complicated as relief efforts unfolded.