Hurrah for Hampton!: Black Red Shirts in South Carolina during Reconstruction

This post-revisionist study examines the motives and the concerns of the ex-slaves in South Carolina who supported a movement that eventually led to white supremacy.

Although most freedmen throughout the states of the former Confederacy were Republicans loyal to the party of the Federal government that had emancipated them, they were factions of African-American voters who aligned themselves with local white Democratic leaders. one such group of black conservatives joined the “Red Shirts,” w...