CHARLES M. CUMMINGS
The Scott Papers:
An Inside
View of Reconstruction
In the light of contemporary turbulence
over racial integration, resurgent southern
Negro voting power, and upgrading of
black history special significance accrues
to the private papers of Robert Kingston
Scott which were acquired in July 1969
by the Ohio Historical Society.1 Scott
was a Henry County, Ohio, physician who
became a brevet major general for
service in the Civil War, then headed the
Freedmen's Bureau in South Carolina, was
elected as that state's first Reconstruc-
tion governor in 1868, and was reelected
in 1870. After 1872 he remained in Co-
lumbia as a businessman until 1877. At
that time the ex-Confederate Democrats
recaptured control of the capital and
began a sweeping scrutiny of the irregulari-
ties of his administration and the two
subsequent Carpetbagger regimes. Scott
then returned to northwestern Ohio. In
Napoleon in 1881 he was acquitted in a
second-degree murder trial for killing
the drinking companion of his fifteen-year
old son on Christmas Day 1880. Between
1877 and 1900, when he died, Scott was
actively engaged with other Ohioans in
land and mercantile enterprises in Abilene
and Hutchinson, Kansas, and in Toledo
real estate.
In South Carolina, Scott was intimately
involved in the Federal Government's
devices to improve the welfare and
advance the political status of the Negro, in
the schemes and maneuvers of the Radical
Republicans to maintain supremacy
over reformers and conservative
Democrats in ruling the state, in the bloody re-
sorts to violence by the Ku Klux Klan
and militant blacks, and in the skulduggery
of northern carpetbaggers. He also
participated in efforts by educated mulattoes,
illiterate blacks, and former
Confederates to profit personally from opportunities
offered by a disrupted economy, a
defeated ruling aristocracy, and a gullible and
malleable electorate. The Scott Papers
are pertinent to all of this.
Writers on Reconstruction since Scott's
death have generally dealt harshly with
him. Usually the basest motives are
ascribed to him and his character appears in
1. The Scott Papers are the gift of R.
K. Groschner, Grosse Point, Michigan, nephew of Scott's
daughter-in-law, Jeannette Ulrich Scott
(1872-1948). Scott's only surviving child, R. K., Jr., died in 1906
without issue.
Mr. Cummings is retired managing editor
of the Ohio State Journal, Columbus, Ohio.
lurid colors. Some authors yield to partisan antipathy and white supremacy preju- dices to cast him as the prime villain of the era.2 Others make him the passive dupe of smarter, but equally greedy conspirators and boodlers.3 The persistent folk myths of his Maumee Valley hometown still portray him as a conniving knave.4 |
114
OHIO HISTORY
Lacking any mitigating testimony, Scott
has gone without a hearing or an advo-
cate. No study of his era has tried to
understand or explain, much less defend
him. Since he can now take the stand in
his own behalf through his private papers
in a climate somewhat modified by
changing attitudes, it would appear that a re-
appraisal is in order. Such
reassessment, however, is beyond the scope of this
article, which aims only to present a
summary of the new evidence and suggest
wherein this may buttress a more
balanced judgment of the man and the events
in which he had a part.
There are more than 2500 items in the
Scott Papers, processed by the Archives
and Manuscripts Division of the Ohio
Historical Society into fourteen boxes, each
with an average of seven folders
arranged chronologically through more than fifty
years. About half of the collection
refers to Scott's Reconstruction administration
and its aftermath. This is the principal
value of the papers. The balance touches
upon his Civil War career as colonel of
the Sixty-Eighth Ohio Volunteer Infantry
and brigade commander in Sherman's army,
and his personal business dealings
in real estate and business ventures in
Ohio, South Carolina, and Kansas. Some
papers relate to the celebrated murder
trial and to his family and kin. Most are
letters, telegrams and other
communications sent to Scott. There are some draft
copies in his own sprawling handwriting
of letters directed to others. Mortgages,
deeds, canceled checks, notes, bills,
accounts, and statements bear witness to his
variegated undertakings and to his
opulent style of living which are subjects for
florid comment by some hostile authors
and fanciful tales by descendants of his
neighbors.
There are gaps in time and content in
the documents before and after Scott's
governorship, but these seem due to
Scott's own failure to retain such missing
papers at the time of receipt, to the
attrition of nearly seventy years of storage,
and to shifts in location and changing
custodians. There is no evidence of any
studied effort by anyone at any time to
edit, censor, or eliminate derogatory
evidence.5
None of the other leading actors in the
tragic drama of South Carolina Recon-
struction bequeathed any personal
documents either to incriminate or exculpate
2. This category might include James
Shepherd Pike, The Prostrate State: South Carolina Under
Negro Government (New York, 1874); F. A. Porcher, "The Last Chapter in the History
of Reconstruction
in South Carolina," Southern Historical Society
Papers, XII (April 1884), 173-181; John A. Leland, A
Voice from South Carolina (Charleston, 1879); John S. Reynolds, Reconstruction
in South Carolina,
1865-1877 (Columbia, 1905); Claude G. Bowers, The Tragic Era:
The Revolution after Lincoln (Cam-
bridge, 1929), 349-350, 359-360. See Robert
Franklin Durden, James Shepherd Pike (Durham, 1957),
211-215, for a modern evaluation of Pike's book, long a
classic authority cited by Reconstruction writers.
3. Edward P. Mitchell, Memoirs of an
Editor: Fifty Years of American Journalism (New York, 1924).
This articulate but garrulous autobiography of a former
editor of the New York Sun, on pages 325-327,
relates a story told him in February
1878 by Franklin J. Moses, who succeeded Scott as governor of
South Carolina in 1872. Although
Mitchell says of Moses that "no more finished villain . . . ever existed,"
he quotes Moses' remark that Scott was
"weak and pliant, and subject alike to alcoholic and female
allurements." This hearsay
testimony of a discredited witness has been repeated uncritically and usually
verbatim by all writers on Scott since
1924. See, for example, Bowers, Tragic Era; Francis Butler
Simkins
and Robert Hilliard Woody, South
Carolina During Reconstruction (Chapel Hill, 1932), Francis Butler
Simkins in Dictionary of American
Biography, XVI, 498-499; and Ezra Warner, Generals in Blue (Baton
Rouge, 1964), 428-429.
4. Nat J. Belknap, "Downtown,"
column in Northwest Signal (Napoleon, Ohio), November 14 and
17, 1969.
5. R. K. Groschner to author, February
5, 1970. Mr. Groschner says the papers remained undisturbed
in a box in the attic of his aunt's home
in Napoleon during her lifetime and were given intact to the
Ohio Historical Society in 1969.
Scott Papers
115
themselves. Franklin J. Moses, Jr., the
nauseous ex-colonel in the Confederate
army who succeeded Scott in 1872 and
justly earned the sobriquet of "Robber
Governor,"6 drifted
North in 1875, later served prison terms in Boston, New York,
and Detroit for petty crimes before his
death by asphyxiation in 1906 in a Win-
throp, Massachusetts, rooming house.7
Beyond his attempts to sell unsubstantiated
information about his associates to the
New York Sun in 1878, he left no known
evidence.8 Daniel Henry
Chamberlain, Massachusetts-born, Yale and Harvard edu-
cated attorney general during Scott's
two terms and third and last Reconstruction
governor, 1875-1877, left no more than a
brief apologia in the Atlantic Monthly
in 1901, focusing on his virtues and
ignoring his sins.9
The Scott Papers, then, apparently are
the only surviving means available to
students to peer behind the scenes into
the political chicanery, legislative manipu-
lation and corruption, railroad
promotions and dealings in state securities and
land, and any other questionable
operations for which Scott long has been con-
demned.
There are some titillating disclosures.
Some political colleagues who worked
against him behind his back and other
outright partisan foes were not averse to
begging Scott for loans, note
endorsements, or gifts of money. He was better off
financially than many of them because of
his lucrative land ventures in Henry
County, Ohio, and Monroe County,
Michigan.10 Judge Richard B. Carpenter,
Kentucky-born carpetbagger and Reform
Ticket candidate for governor against
Scott in 1870 with Confederate General
Matthew C. Butler, was the principal
witness against Scott in the
congressional probe of South Carolina's muddled af-
fairs in 1872. He blamed Scott "and
his ring" for land frauds, irregular railroad
security and bank note dealings and
abuse of pardoning power and employment
of the black militia along with voting
frauds to win reelection in 1870.11 Yet about
the same time, Carpenter was writing a
begging letter to Scott from New York,
signed "Fraternally yours"
pleading for $350 and protesting he had not been losing
his money at gambling.12 Again
in 1877, after he had been replaced as circuit
judge by ex-Confederate General James B.
Kershaw, Carpenter in Washington
asked Scott for $100, promising to favor
him if he were named by President Hayes
as United States District Attorney for
South Carolina.13 Other letters from Car-
penter indicate sporadic efforts to
ingratiate himself with a man he frequently
condemned.
6. Reynolds, Reconstruction in South
Carolina, 267; Pike, Prostrate State, 45, denigrates Moses as
"an Israelite" who "got
his place by dancing at Negro balls."
7. Simkins and Woody, South Carolina
During Reconstruction, 545.
8. Mitchell, Memoirs of an Editor, 325,
describes Moses as "the most despicable of the crew," and
says he left the consideration for his
services up to the Sun, but the editor indicates no payment was
made.
9. Atlantic Monthly, April 1901. Another pro-Chamberlain article signed
"By a South Carolinian"
in the Atlantic Monthly, February
1877, may also have been written by him.
10. Eighth Census of the United
States, 1860: Statistics of the States (Washington,
1866), for Henry
County, Ohio, lists Scott's total
property at $6,600; letters to him from Henry County Probate Judge
James G. Haly, his agent in Napoleon for
1865-1877, indicate more extensive holdings. Scott himself
states that in 1866 he could
"command $100,000 at any time." Box 9, Folder 5, Scott Papers.
11. Simkins and Woody, South Carolina
During Reconstruction, 451; Reynolds, Reconstruction in
South Carolina, 136. Testimony of Carpenter, rankling from his defeat
for governor by the Radicals in
1870 to the congressional investigators,
forms most of the source material for Pike, Prostrate State, 140,
157, 172-174, 183, 186, 192-193, 221,
228, 230-231.
12. Carpenter to Scott, September 14,
1871, from St. James Hotel, New York, Box 6, Folder 9, Scott
Papers.
13. Carpenter to Scott, December 3,
1877, Box 8, Folder 3, ibid.
116
OHIO HISTORY
Likewise ex-Governor Moses, who offered
to sell a scurrilous story in 1878 that
Scott fraudulently signed state bonds in
the St. James Hotel in New York under
the joint influence of alcohol and
burlesque queen Pauline Markham,14 sent a flat-
tering request to Scott for a $400 loan
in August 1868 and defaulted on a $5,000
note which Scott had to pay in 1870.15
The wife, deserted by Moses when he fled
the consequences of his acts as Speaker
and Governor, sent a piteous appeal for
help to Scott back in Napoleon in April
1878. Chamberlain, while governor, peri-
odically beseeched Scott to renew a note
he had given him for an unspecified
amount. Each time Scott complied.16
In the ambience of sullen stubborn
resistance by the whites to black political
power and school integration,
demonstrations, terrorism, arson and murder on
both sides, all of which still plague
the South a century later, Scott enjoyed some
personal toleration and, in times of
crisis, some support from representatives of
the old order. Wade Hampton, the
Confederate ex-lieutenant general and grand
seigneur in the slavocracy, who personified the white cause
against the blacks and
their northern operators, added the
weight of his influence to Scott's efforts to
restore calm after B. F. Randolph, Negro
legislator, and others were murdered by
whites in the summer of 1868.17
When Hampton was battling Chamberlain for
possession of the governor's chair in
1877, he asked Scott, in a personal note, to
act with his representatives in visiting
President Hayes to ask for removal of Fed-
eral troops from the state capital.18
Scott agreed. The new president acquiesced, the
soldiers left, and Carpetbag rule was
ended, thanks in part to Scott with whom
it had begun.
Five months later as the triumphant and
vengeful Democratic legislature's in-
vestigators obtained an indictment
against Scott and three others on charges of
fraudulently issuing three warrants for
$48,645 to non-existent payees in 1871,
Governor Hampton sent assurances to
Scott in Napoleon that he would not sign
a requisition to compel Scott's return
to South Carolina to stand trial.19 Expres-
sions of support for Scott came to him
at the same time from many leading white
citizens including bankers, businessmen
and his Masonic brethren, most of them
ex-Confederates and violent foes of
Carpetbag rule.20 Scott was never tried and
the charges later were dropped.
Similar tokens of sympathy and esteem,
after partisan fires had cooled, came
from South Carolinians in 1880 when
Scott made national headlines with the
Christmas Day shooting. Congratulations
poured in when he was acquitted the
following November.21
14. Quoted by Mitchell, Memoirs of an
Editor, 326. Prior to the publication of this book none of
Scott's detractors told this juicy
story.
15. Moses to Scott, August 1868, Box 1,
Folder 8; Scott to F. W. McMaster, April 6, 1878, Box
8, Folder 4, Scott Papers.
16. Correspondence in Box 8, Folders 1
and 4, ibid.
17. Correspondence in Box 1, Folder 8.
The circumstances of conversations between Hampton and
Scott at that time are detailed
subsequently in a statement, October 12, 1870, in Box 6, Folder 1, ibid.
18. The letter, handwritten by Hampton,
is dated March 3, 1877, Box 8, Folder 3, ibid.
19. Hampton's letter, missing from the
Scott Papers, was enclosed in another sent from Columbia,
South Carolina, by Colonel F. W.
McMaster, Confederate hero of the Battle of the Crater (Petersburg
Mine Assault), who added that Hampton
"regrets that Governor Scott's name was brought out" by the
inquiry and that Hampton "will do
all he can to suppress the prosecutions." Box 8, Folder 3, ibid.
20. These are found under various dates
in 1877 and 1878, Box 8, Folders 4, 5, and 7, ibid.
21. Correspondence in Box 8, Folder 7, ibid.
See also J. M. Haag, The State of Ohio v. Robert K
Scott (Toledo, 1882), 15ff. Haag was one of Scott's counsel
in the murder trial and published this tran-
script of testimony after the acquittal.
Scott Papers 117
There is revealing testimony in the
Scott Papers on his part in the murky night-
mare of state securities, sterling and
conversion bonds, land scrip, Blue Ridge Rail-
road stock and similar facets of the
frenetic financing of the Carpetbag era. Aside
from the glaring atmosphere of
duplicity, the whole is akin to a child's game with
play money using handsomely engraved,
signed and sealed paper to redeem other
ornate testaments of indebtedness
equally worthless. That Scott retained some
sense of fiscal solvency in the
saturnalia there can be no doubt. It is exhibited in
many of a hundred or so papers on these
subjects.
The same viewpoint of Scott is pointed
up in more than sixty communications
with H. H. Kimpton, the state's
financial agent in New York appointed in 1868,
not because he was a Yale classmate of
Chamberlain's, as generally asserted, but
because of powerful backing by the
Radical Republican leaders Thaddeus Stevens
and John A. Bingham of Ohio, William H.
Bristol, state treasurer of New York,
and Wall Street bankers Henry Clews and
the Taylor Brothers.22 Long after the
indictment of Kimpton by the Democrats
in 1878 for fraud and the frustrated
attempts to bring him to trial, he
continued to represent Scott as his New York
broker into the mid-1880's.23 Some
additional light on the devious deals of the
backers of the Blue Ridge Railroad--an
enterprise which might be regarded as a
Dixie counterpart of the northern
operations of Harriman, Fisk, Gould, Morgan,
et al, and equally amoral--is found in some fifty letters,
notes and telegrams.
Also, there is a little known story
which could be written from the Scott Papers
about him and others from northwestern
Ohio in connection with their land spec-
ulations in Kansas in the 1880's. A few
of these men had sought power and easy
fortune in South Carolina under the
Carpetbag governments, notably George
Waterman, Scott's brother-in-law, and L.
A. Bigger, a Napoleon attorney. Hastily
removing from South Carolina as the
Democrats took over, these men and others
from the Maumee Valley played leading
parts in land deals, little short of fan-
tastic, in Abilene and Hutchinson,
Kansas. Immigrants, lured by the railroads,
were flocking in; business boomed and
land values spiraled dizzily upward. Mr.
Bigger wrote Scott in April 1886 that
the price of a quarter section of land had
increased 250% in six months.24 Money
on loan brought two to three percent
monthly interest. The boom continued for
several years enriching a score of Henry
County and Toledo opportunists and their
wives.25 Scott financed a shoe store in
Hutchinson with Waterman, managed by
Scott's son, R. K. Jr., whose irregular
habits were a constant source of nagging
worry to his parents.26 Scott also bought
and sold lots and acreage in Abilene
with Samuel Heller, a Napoleon merchant
with whom he had been partners in
1860.27
On the personal side, the collection
contains affectionate letters from his wife,
Rebecca Jane Lowry Scott;28 from
their son, called "Arkie" for his initials, R. K.;29
22. Letters endorsing Kimpton, dated
April 28, May 2, 5, 7, 11, July 2, 1868, Box 1, Folder 5, Scott
Papers.
23. Kimpton to Scott, December 24, 1883,
Box 9, Folder 1, ibid.
24. L. A. Bigger to Scott, April 14, 18,
and 24, 1886, Box 9, Folder 1, ibid.
25. Bigger to Scott, Box 9, Folders 1
and 2, ibid.
26. R. K., Jr., to Scott, June 22, 1887,
and William F. Daggett, Jr., to Scott, June 26, 1887, Box 9,
Folder 2, ibid.
27. Samuel Heller to Scott, May 9, 13,
1887, Box 9, Folder 2, ibid
28. Three letters from Jane (Mrs. Scott
usually used her middle name) to Scott, in Box 8, Folder 5,
ibid
29. "R. Kie" to "my dear
papa," June 22, 1887, Box 9, Folder 2, ibid.
118
OHIO HISTORY
and from the schools, such as Michigan
Military Academy near Pontiac and Ken-
yon College at Gambier where the son was
enrolled as a student with scant suc-
cess.30 Canceled checks show
that the father continuously paid debts contracted
by the irresponsible young man.31 Other
letters bespeak the abiding friendship of
fellow soldiers of all ranks. There are
numerous appeals for charity from individ-
uals and institutions, both white and
black.
The validity of any reexamination of
Scott and his times, so strikingly parallel
to the present in many ramifications,
cannot help but be enhanced by the Scott
Papers. And it seems not extravagant
prophesy to assert that from any study using
them that there will emerge a character
far different from the Scott stereotype of
the southern school of Reconstruction
interpretation which saw him only as "a
man of some ability and culture"
with "an impediment in his speech,"32 "a willing
agent" of "untiring efforts to
stir up the evil passions of the Negroes against the
whites,"33 "arrogantly
self-assertive . . . soldier of fortune" who "cleverly applied
his demagogy to negro credulity,"34
and who "instituted his custom of official
receptions in the executive mansion at
which white and black of both sexes inter-
mingled on terms of social
equality."35 Instead, one will discover a more complete
picture of his abilities, his integrity,
and character taken in context of the times.
30. School bills and receipts, Box 8,
Folder 5 and Box 13, Folder 9; letter, Lawrence Rust, Kenyon
College, October 7, 1880, Box 8, Folder 6; tuition to
C. H. Barnwell, May 1877, Box 13, Folder 9, ibid.
31. Canceled checks, Box 12, Folders 3
and 4, ibid.
32. Henry T. Thompson, Ousting the
Carpetbagger from South Carolina (Columbia, 1926), 32 fn. 64.
33. Porcher, "Last Chapter in
Reconstruction in South Carolina," 177.
34. Bowers, Tragic Era, 349.
35. Reynolds, Reconstruction in South
Carolina, 121.
CHARLES M. CUMMINGS
The Scott Papers:
An Inside
View of Reconstruction
In the light of contemporary turbulence
over racial integration, resurgent southern
Negro voting power, and upgrading of
black history special significance accrues
to the private papers of Robert Kingston
Scott which were acquired in July 1969
by the Ohio Historical Society.1 Scott
was a Henry County, Ohio, physician who
became a brevet major general for
service in the Civil War, then headed the
Freedmen's Bureau in South Carolina, was
elected as that state's first Reconstruc-
tion governor in 1868, and was reelected
in 1870. After 1872 he remained in Co-
lumbia as a businessman until 1877. At
that time the ex-Confederate Democrats
recaptured control of the capital and
began a sweeping scrutiny of the irregulari-
ties of his administration and the two
subsequent Carpetbagger regimes. Scott
then returned to northwestern Ohio. In
Napoleon in 1881 he was acquitted in a
second-degree murder trial for killing
the drinking companion of his fifteen-year
old son on Christmas Day 1880. Between
1877 and 1900, when he died, Scott was
actively engaged with other Ohioans in
land and mercantile enterprises in Abilene
and Hutchinson, Kansas, and in Toledo
real estate.
In South Carolina, Scott was intimately
involved in the Federal Government's
devices to improve the welfare and
advance the political status of the Negro, in
the schemes and maneuvers of the Radical
Republicans to maintain supremacy
over reformers and conservative
Democrats in ruling the state, in the bloody re-
sorts to violence by the Ku Klux Klan
and militant blacks, and in the skulduggery
of northern carpetbaggers. He also
participated in efforts by educated mulattoes,
illiterate blacks, and former
Confederates to profit personally from opportunities
offered by a disrupted economy, a
defeated ruling aristocracy, and a gullible and
malleable electorate. The Scott Papers
are pertinent to all of this.
Writers on Reconstruction since Scott's
death have generally dealt harshly with
him. Usually the basest motives are
ascribed to him and his character appears in
1. The Scott Papers are the gift of R.
K. Groschner, Grosse Point, Michigan, nephew of Scott's
daughter-in-law, Jeannette Ulrich Scott
(1872-1948). Scott's only surviving child, R. K., Jr., died in 1906
without issue.
Mr. Cummings is retired managing editor
of the Ohio State Journal, Columbus, Ohio.