A Confederate cavalry officer and later general, Wade Hampton (1818-1902) was one of South Carolina’s most prominent planters.  He ran for Governor of South Carolina and lost a close election to James Lawrence Orr in 1865.  At the end of the Radical phase of Reconstruction, in 1876, he ran again as a Democrat, against incumbent Republican Daniel Chamberlain. The election was so close that South Carolina had two governors for a short time, until President Ulysses S. Grant withdrew Federal troops from South Carolina, thus conceding the election to Hampton, and ending Reconstruction in South Carolina. Hampton prepared the following report of conditions in the South for President Andrew Johnson in 1866.

The strong but paternal hand which had controlled him [i.e., “the negro”] through centuries of slavery, having been suddenly and rudely withdrawn, the only hope of rendering him either useful, industrious or harmless, was to elevate him in the scale of civilization, and to make him appreciate not only the blessings, but the duties of freedom. This was the prevalent . . . sentiment of the South. . . .

That much more had not been done to carry this sentiment into effect is due solely to the pernicious and mischievous inference of that most vicious institution, the Freedmen’s Bureau. . . . The whole machinery of this bureau has been used by the basest men, for the purpose of swindling the negro, plundering the white man and defrauding the Government.

There may be an honest man connected with the Bureau, but I fear that the commissioners sent by your Excellency to probe the rottenness of this cancer will find their search for such as fruitless as was that of the Cynic of old. The report of these Commissioners furnishes ample justification for the ill-will, the distrust, and the contempt with which the people of the South regard this baleful and pernicious institution.

Source: Wade Hampton to Andrew Johnson, 1866, in Walter Fleming, ed. Documentary History of Reconstruction (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1906), I, 368-69. (Document 4.9.8)