#94: Governor James Hamilton, Jr., Scipio Vaughn, and The History of Black Baseball
For South Carolina history lovers far and wide! Enjoy weekly SC history and upcoming SC historical events
Welcome to the first 100 days of the South Carolina History Newsletter! My name is Kate Fowler and I live in Greenville, SC. I have a 9-5 job in marketing, and outside of work, have a deep love of history. I started this newsletter as a passion project to learn more about our beautiful state and build a community of fellow SC history lovers along the way! To establish a foundation for the newsletter and to grow my expertise on a wide variety of South Carolina historical topics, this past February I challenged myself to post 100 newsletters in 100 days. After this coming May 21st, the newsletter will become weekly. Thank you for joining the journey!
Dear reader,
Welcome to Newsletter #94 of The South Carolina History Newsletter! I’m so happy you’re here.
As always, I’d like to also extend a special welcome to the following new subscribers — woohoo! Thank you for subscribing.
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Yours truly,
Kate
(Writing from Greenville, SC)
➳ Featured SC History Event
Please enjoy our featured SC History Event below, and click here to visit my SC History Events Calendar that organizes all the upcoming SC history events I have discovered. Please let me know if you’d like to add an event to the calendar! Reply to this email or send me a note at schistorynewsletter@gmail.com.
Thursday, May 23rd from 1:00 - 3:00 pm | “Camden Parlor Talk: The History of Black Baseball” | Camden Archives and Museum | Camden, SC | FREE
“As great as Jackie Robinson was, he was not the first American Black Baseball Player. This presentation will show the ways baseball has reflected the role of African Americans in baseball especially beginning in the 19th century, followed by the Jim Crow and Civil Rights Era where Jackie Robinson, Larry Doby and so many other black ballplayers led the way toward racial equality in the US. This multi-media presentation includes power-point slides, video, and music.
Dr. Stanton W. Green is Professor Emeritus and dean of liberal arts (retired) at Monmouth University, U.S.A. He served as lecturer at University College Cork in 1985. He holds a B.A. in Anthropology from the Stony Brook University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He taught for 18 years at the University of South Carolina.
Dr. Green has directed major archaeological research in South Carolina and Ireland and has published over 50 major papers and co-edited three major archaeological volumes. His latest publication (with C. Green and J. Schuldenrein) is Archaeology as a Public Good (2021) Archaeologies, Journal of the World Archaeology Congress. His is currently director of the Creadan Archaeology Project an international heritage project on the first settlers of southeastern Ireland.
He has also researched baseball history for the past 30 years speaking and publishing on the history of baseball and why it is so important to American History. He has spoken at the National Baseball Hall of Fame, the Little League Museum as well as many local historical societies, libraries and local community centers about baseball and American history.”
➳ SC History Fun Facts
I.
Did you know that SC Governor James Hamilton, Jr. was a famous duelist and early investor in the Republic of Texas?
Hamilton was born near Charleston on May 8, 1786, to James Hamilton, Sr., a rice planter, and Elizabeth Lynch.
He was educated at Newport, Rhode Island, and Dedham, Massachusetts, before returning to Charleston to read law under the tutelage of Daniel Huger and William Drayton.
Admitted to the bar in 1810, Hamilton began practice in Drayton’s office and later became a partner of James L. Petigru.
Volunteering for service in the War of 1812, Hamilton eventually rose to the rank of major.
On November 15, 1813, he married the Lowcountry heiress Elizabeth Heyward, gaining 3 plantations and 200 hundred slaves.
The couple had eleven children.
In a state known for its flamboyant politicians, Hamilton “was among the most colorful individuals to sit in the governor’s chair.”
As a member of South Carolina’s Lowcountry aristocracy, Hamilton “epitomized the chivalrous manner and deportment of planter society.”
A famous duelist, he successfully fought 14 duels, always wounding but never killing his opponents.
His prowess on the field of honor made Hamilton a much sought after second. Among the men he seconded were “George McDuffie, Oliver Perry, Stephen Decatur, and John Randolph of Roanoke in his celebrated duel with Henry Clay.”
Hamilton was also one of Charleston’s “most aggressive and reckless entrepreneurs, whose planting activities and land speculations were combined with extensive investments in numerous business, banking, and mercantile ventures.”
Hamilton’s political career began in 1819, when he was elected to represent St. Philip’s and St. Michael’s Parishes in the South Carolina House of Representatives.
Twice reelected, Hamilton resigned from the state legislature in December 1822 to fill a vacancy in the U.S. House of Representatives created by the resignation of William Lowndes.
In that same year, Hamilton served as intendant (mayor) of Charleston, where he oversaw the response to Denmark Vesey’s slave conspiracy.
As were most South Carolinians in the early and mid-1820s, Hamilton “was a strong nationalist and ardent supporter of Andrew Jackson.” He carried these views with him to Washington and, after the election of 1824, led the House opposition to the administration of John Quincy Adams.
Hamilton continued to represent Charleston and the Lowcountry in Congress until 1829, when he declined reelection and returned to South Carolina.
The passage of the Tariff of 1828 and his gradual conversion to states’ rights principles soon soured Hamilton on both an active federal government and Andrew Jackson.
In a speech delivered at Walterboro on October 21, 1828, Hamilton publicly renounced his earlier nationalism and called for “a nullification by the State” of the despised tariff. Claiming precedent for such action in the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, “the speech at Walterboro launched the nullification movement in South Carolina and placed Hamilton at its forefront.”
On December 9, 1830, the legislature elected Hamilton governor and he assumed leadership of the States’ Rights and Free Trade Party, which he organized into local associations to popularize free trade ideas. While governor, Hamilton also presided over the 1832 Nullification Convention, which voted to nullify the tariff within South Carolina’s borders.
After leaving office on December 10, 1832, Hamilton was made a brigadier general of the state militia by the new governor, Robert Hayne. In this role Hamilton prepared the state to defy federal authority with arms if necessary.
After the nullification crisis subsided, Hamilton turned his attention to “his far-flung business pursuits, most of which soured in the Panic of 1837 and left him deeply indebted.”
Hamilton also became interested in the affairs of the newly independent Republic of Texas. He loaned the republic money and in 1838 was appointed loan commissioner for Texas by President Mirabeau Lamar.
His duties carried him to Europe where he negotiated several commercial treaties and won recognition of the Republic of Texas from Great Britain and the Netherlands.
Relieved of his post in 1842, Hamilton spent much of the remainder of his life “shuttling between Texas, South Carolina, and Washington, D.C., trying to gain repayment of the money he loaned to Texas.”
On November 15, 1857, Hamilton was en route to Texas, traveling on the steamer Opelousas, when it was struck by another ship just off Avery Island, Louisiana. Within half an hour the Opelousas had sunk. “A gentleman to the end,” Hamilton gave his life jacket to a woman and child and helped them into a lifeboat. Seconds later a wave swept Hamilton from the deck of the sinking ship and he drowned.
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II.
Scipio Vaughn
Scipio Vaughan (1784–1840) was an African American artisan and slave who inspired a "back to Africa" movement among some of his offspring to connect with their roots in Africa, specifically the Yoruba of West Africa in the early 19th century.
Scipio was born as “an Omoba in 1784 in the Owu kingdom of Abeokuta in Yorubaland in West Africa.”
He was captured by European trans-Atlantic slave traders in 1805 and taken together with other captured slaves to the Velekete Slave Market in Badagry, one of Nigeria's slave portal, from where he was shipped in a slave ship to America and taken upcountry to Camden, South Carolina.
In Camden, he was sold as a slave to a white master, Wiley Vaughan and brought to live in Camden.
As per the prevailing tradition, he took the last name of his master and became Scipio Vaughan.
Scipio was so skilled as an ironmonger that he established a reputation in the area as a talented artisan for his work in fashioning iron gates and fences.
As a result of his exceptional gifts, his master Wiley Vaughan valued him so much that “he granted him his freedom, his tools, and $100 as stated in his will after his death.”
In 1827, Scipio Vaughan became a free man and remained one for the rest of his life.
In 1815, Scipio married Maria Theresa Louisa Matilda Conway. Of Native American descent, Maria was the second daughter of Bonds Conway. Bonds Conway was born in Virginia, had come to Camden from Virginia as the body servant of his Master Peter Conway. He was also the first free black of Camden and a successful small businessman and landowner.
Scipio Vaughan and Maria Theresa Louisa Matilda Conway bore and raised 13 children; 11 daughters and 2 sons. All were born in South Carolina.
On his deathbed in 1840, Scipio told his sons to return to his native Yorubaland in Africa. It is most likely that Scipio was “determined to reverse the effects of the transatlantic slave trade, through some members of his immediate family by rebuilding their roots in Africa in order to restore some of their lost dignity, pride, wealth, power and security.”
To grant their father's last request, James Churchill Vaughan, 24 years old at the time, and his elder brother Burrell Vaughan, enrolled with the American Colonization Society as emigrants to Liberia. The American Colonization Society was an American organization founded in 1816 by Robert Finley to “encourage and support the repatriation of freeborn people of color and emancipated slaves to the continent of Africa.”
James Churchill Vaughan and Burrell Vaughan left Camden in 1852 in an attempt “to escape the oppressive laws against colored men and sailed to Liberia in 1853.” There, they started a new life and James Churchill Vaughan soon became prominent.
Of his family who went back to Africa, Vaughan's descendants include the Nigerian nationalist Dr. James C. Vaughan Jr., and Nigerian educationist and royal Kofoworola, Lady Ademola (the wife of Nigeria's aristocratic chief justice, the Rt. Hon. Omoba Sir Adetokunbo Ademola).
Of his family who remained in the United States, Vaughn’s descendants included Jewel Stradford Lafontant-Mankarious (April 28, 1922 – May 31, 1997), who was the first African American woman to graduate from the University of Chicago Law School, the first female (and African American female) deputy solicitor general of the United States, an official in the administration of President George H. W. Bush, and an attorney in Chicago. In 1973, President Richard Nixon appointed Jewel to be the first-ever female Deputy Solicitor General. She also was considered by President Nixon as a Supreme Court nominee.
The American Vaughans started the incentive to trace their African heritage and re-unite with the African group of the Vaughan family. The Vaughans first attempt to convene a reunion started in August 1970, when several family members convened a meeting in Pittsburgh and decided to arrange an annual reunion of all their known relatives. They read the research of a deceased family member, Aida Arabella Stradford, a South Carolina school teacher, and “studied census figures, family Bible records and other documents.”
The Nigerian Vaughans and their American relatives stayed in touch through the years with periodic "Cousin" reunions. Today, the American Vaughans are now a network of more than 3,000 cousins from over 22 states — along with their Nigerian cousins.
One of the cousins was Roland J. Hill who said in a New York Times article “600 Cousins Meet to Celebrate Roots” (1982):
''We know where we came from and what we went through…It brings us a great deal of pride, and some anger too. But most important, we know we have a heritage.''
Please scroll to the bottom of this email for my sources for this section
Please leave a comment below!
➳ Quote from an SC historical figure
“Scipio Vaughan left his children with something else too: advice born of bitter experience—abuses endured, promises deferred, freedom always tempered. The sources available to historians contain none of Scipio’s own words, and in fact, considering the shortage of written records about individual slaves, it is remarkable that several traces of his life exist at all. But Scipio’s children and grandchildren repeated to each other and to their own descendants what he told them on his deathbed, passing his sentiments, if not his exact parting words, through the generations.95 “Don’t stay in South Carolina,” he reportedly told them. “Go to Africa, the land of our ancestors!”
— From author Lindsay, Lisa A. from her book Atlantic Bonds: A Nineteenth-Century Odyssey from America to Africa (2017)
Governor James Hamilton, Jr. article sources:
Busick, Sean R. “Hamilton, James, Jr. | South Carolina Encyclopedia.” South Carolina Encyclopedia, University of South Carolina, Institute for Southern Studies, https://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/hamilton-james-jr/. Accessed 12 May 2024.
Scipio Vaughn article sources:
Contributors to Wikimedia projects. “Scipio Vaughan - Wikipedia.” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., 19 Jan. 2018, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scipio_Vaughan. Accessed 12 May 2024.
Kerr, Peter. “600 Cousins Meet To Celebrate Roots.” New York Times, 28 June 1982, https://www.nytimes.com/1982/06/28/style/600-cousins-meet-to-celebrate-roots.html. Accessed 12 May 2024.
Lindsay, Lisa. “ Scipio Vaughan’s South Carolina.” Project Muse, 2017, https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/12/oa_monograph/chapter/1933764. Accessed 12 May 2024.
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