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Biography of Wade Hampton, III
Name: Wade Hampton, III
Birth Date: March 28, 1818
Death Date: April 11, 1902
Place of Birth: Charleston, South Carolina, United States
Nationality: American
Gender: Male
Occupations: politician, general, federal senator, governor
Wade Hampton, III
Wade Hampton III (1818-1902) was a Confederate general, South Carolina governor, and U.S. senator. In the 1880s he dominated politics in his native state.Wade Hampton III was descended from a prominent South Carolina family. Born on March 28, 1818, in Charleston, he graduated from South Carolina College. He took up law studies briefly but abandoned them for the life of a planter and became a typical antebellum Southern aristocrat, with large land-holdings, many slaves, and several terms in his state's legislature.With the coming of the Civil War in 1861, Hampton raised and commanded the elite "Hampton's Legion." Although he was wounded in action several times, his valor and determination brought him steady promotion. By 1865 he was a lieutenant general. By war's end he was commanding all cavalry in Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. Hampton was an expert horseman and renowned for his physical strength. An associate described him as "…showed first 150 words…
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…showed last 150 words…enabled Hampton to begin his 2-year term in office.Hampton was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1878 and served for 13 uneventful years. From 1893 to 1897 he was U.S. commissioner of railroads. He died on April 11, 1902, in Columbia.Historian Douglas Freeman wrote of Hampton: "To strangers he was reserved though always courteous, the gentleman as surely as the aristocrat; with his friends he was candid, cordial and free of any suggestion of the Grand Seigneur." Further Reading Manly Wade Wellman, Giant in Gray: A Biography of Wade Hampton of South Carolina (1949), the best study of Hampton, lacks balance. Hampton's wartime exploits are fully discussed in Edward L. Wells, Hampton and His Cavalry in '64 (1899), and Douglas S. Freeman, Lee's Lieutenants: A Study in Command (1942-1944). For Hampton's postwar career see Francis B. Simkins, The Tillman Movement in South Carolina (1926), and William W. Ball, The State That Forgot: South Carolina's Surrender to Democracy (1932).
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