Benjamin Ryan Tillman (August 11, 1847 - July 3, 1918) was a politician of the Democratic Party who served as Governor of South Carolina from 1890 to 1894, and a United States Senator from 1895 until his death in 1918. A white supremacist who opposed civil rights for blacks, Tillman led a paramilitary group of Red Shirts during South Carolina's violent 1876 election. On the floor of the U.S. Senate, he frequently ridiculed blacks, and boasted of having helped to kill them during that campaign. In the 1880s, Tillman, a wealthy landowner, became dissatisfied with the Democratic leadership and led a movement of white farmers calling for reform.

With the Confederacy defeated, South Carolina ratified a new constitution in 1865 that recognized the end of slavery, but basically left the pre-war elites in charge. African-American freedmen, who were the majority of South Carolina's population, were given no vote, and their new freedom was soon restricted by Black Codes that limited their civil rights and required black farm laborers to bind themselves with annual labor contracts. Congress was dissatisfied with this minimal change and required a new constitutional convention and elections with universal male suffrage. As African Americans generally favored the Republican Party at the time, that party controlled the biracial state legislature beginning with the 1868 elections. That campaign was marked by violence--19 Republican and Union League activists were killed in South Carolina's 3rd congressional district alone.  In 1873, two Edgefield lawyers and former Confederate generals, Martin Gary and Matthew C. Butler, began to advocate what became known as the "Edgefield Plan" or "Straightout Plan". They believed that the previous five years had shown it was not possible to outvote African Americans. Gary and Butler deemed compromises with black leaders to be misguided; they felt white men must be restored to their antebellum position of preeminent political power in the state. They proposed that white men form clandestine paramilitary organizations--known as "rifle clubs"--and use force and intimidation to drive the African American from power. Members of the new white groups became known as Red Shirts. Tillman was an early and enthusiastic recruit for his local organization, dubbed the Sweetwater Sabre Club. He became a devoted protege of Gary.  From 1873 to 1876, Tillman served as a member of the Sweetwater club, members of which assaulted and intimidated black would-be voters, killed black political figures, and skirmished with the African-American-dominated state militia. Economic coercion was used as well as physical force: most Edgefield planters would not employ black militiamen or allow them to rent land, and ostracized whites who did.

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