EDGEFIELD, S.C. — Historic Oakley Park was built in 1835 by Daniel Byrd, a Virginian who came to Edgefield and became a very successful cotton planter. The beautiful mansion later was the home of Gen. Martin Witherspoon Gary, a Confederate officer and later a politician and father of the Red Shirt movement that helped in the election of Wade Hampton as governor in 1876. Items in the house include period antiques and relics. The mansion he bought after the Civil War is now a museum run by the United Daughters of the Confederacy to remember the Red Shirts who helped end Reconstruction in South Carolina. It’s a small museum, full of furniture from the late 1800s, portraits of the men who lived there and other Confederate icons such as Gen. Robert E. Lee and President Jefferson Davis and his wife, Varina. It houses a large collection of swords and guns, including a rifle carried by future Gov. Ben Tillman during the July 1876 Hamburg Incident. The privately run museum is in downtown Edgefield, Gary one of the chief leaders of the Red Shirts, gave a speech from his home’s balcony to thousands, urging them to challenge the blacks and Republicans running the state after the Civil War and elect Democrat Wade Hampton as governor. The Red Shirts chose their attire to be visible. Similar groups formed in other Southern states as whites who fought for the South or were sympathetic went from accepting a humbling defeat in the war to regaining after 10 years of Radical Republican Military Dominance. The impasse was broken when President Rutherford B. Hayes ordered the federal troops withdrawn from South Carolina. “It was a very tumultuous time. It was history, and you can’t erase it,” said Elizabeth Ready, who runs the museum and is a member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy in Edgefield. Oakley Park paints the Red Shirts as people trying to restore South Carolina from its Civil War demise and save it from corrupt Republicans and carpetbaggers. History is history. Those who fail to learn from it either by ignoring it, or changing it, are doomed to repeat it. Scalawags and carpetbaggers kept their boot on the neck of the south for a decade. The South had to do something to get rid of them. All civilized Christians have a moral compass and a gift of knowing when evil prevails as Im sure those of the Red Shirts did also.
Posted on: Thu, 15 Jan 2015 22:28:41 +0000
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