Echoes of Reconstruction: When South Carolina’s University Educated Both Black and White
Emerging Civil War is pleased to welcome back Patrick Young, author of The Reconstruction Era blog.
Henry E. Hayne was born free in 1840 to a Free Colored Woman named Mary, and James Hayne, a wealthy white man. He lived in Charleston where his father arranged for him to get some education, and he went on to be a tailor. People who knew him before the war said that he frequently “passed” as a white man and, when the Civil War broke out, he enlisted in the Confederate Army as white. Hayne later said that he intended to desert the Confederate forces and enter the Union lines. In July of 1862, he made good his escape, seeking refuge at Beaufort, South Carolina, which was occupied by the Union Army.
Henry Hayne soon joined the 1st South Carolina Regiment, a Black regiment made up primarily of formerly enslaved persons. The unit was commanded by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a Unitarian minister and a proponent of the abolition of slavery. Higginson was a member of The Secret Six, supporters of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. The minister had also been involved in violent action to free slaves in Massachusetts. Before Higginson joined the army, his experience as a civilian had put his life in danger on several occasions. As a military commander he provided educational opportunities for his men.
Hayne later said that “I went with the South far enough to get out of it.” If he had not disguised his race, he would never have been allowed to enlist in the Confederate Army or later enlist in the Union Army. Hayne served well in the First South Carolina and he was eventually promoted to the rank of commissary sergeant.
After the war, Hayne, like many veterans of the Union’s “Colored Regiments,” won advancement during Reconstruction. In 1868, he won election as a state senator from Marion County in the South Carolina legislature. In 1872, he became South Carolina’s secretary of state. In his positions with the state government, Hayne was actively desegregating South Carolina’s institutions.
In October of 1873 Hayne sought to enroll at what is now the University of South Carolina’s medical school. On March 3, 1869 the governor of the state had signed legislation banning the prohibition on African American students. The school had sought to maintain the racial hierarchy after the Civil War. The university was known for educating the offspring of the state’s wealthy slaveowners and even though slavery was abolished, the same class of men wanted the school to be a training ground for their sons. Many of the students and professors at the university were Confederate veterans, and they were antagonistic towards the new state government, which was elected with Black participation.
For the next four years not a single Person of Color enrolled at the school. The Republican legislature, which included many Black representatives, decided to make the school more welcoming to non-whites by appointing a Black majority to the university’s board of trustees.
Hayne enrolled in the medical school over the objections of the students and alumni. Four white professors resigned rather than teach him in their classes. The trustees defended the admission of the first Black student. The state had nearly the same number of Black citizens as white. Keeping higher education for only one race flew in the face of equal rights and left half the population without access to higher education. The trustees issued a statement saying that the university “is the common property of all our citizens without distinction of race.”
The university had been restricted to white male students until Reconstruction. The legislature opened a program where women could get a degree as teachers at the school. Black and white women were enrolled. More staff quit, and the board of trustees hired Richard Greener, the first Black Harvard graduate, as a professor to replace one of the now-departed professors.
Hayne was the first Black student at the university, and Greener was the first Black professor. However, in 1877 the Redeemers, the political movement of Confederate veterans, took back power in the state. New Governor Wade Hampton, a Confederate general, began closing down integrated venues. The university was closed for a number of years, only to reopen under Jim Crow laws where Blacks were again excluded. Soon after Redemption, Henry Hayne left the state of his birth, the state where he served in the 1st South Carolina Regiment, the state whose elected official he was, to move to Illinois.
Modern South Carolinians remember September 11, 1963 as the day the University of South Carolina was first desegregated. Many seem to have forgotten that Hayne and the integrated South Carolina legislature had pointed the way ninety years earlier.
Sources:
What We Have Gotten Wrong About Reconstruction
