Enter now, when the time was fully ripe for a leader, the rude man of the people.
How often he appears in the pages of history, the sure product of revolutions, bursting upward like some devastating force, not at all silken-handed or subtle-minded, but crude, virile, direct, truthful.
Tillman, the Prophet
So Tillman came in South Carolina. I can see him as he rode to the farmers’ fairs and court days in the middle eighties, a sallow-faced, shaggy-haired man with one gleaming, restless, angry eye. He had been long preparing in silence for his task—struggling upward in the poverty-stricken days of the war and through the Reconstruction, without schooling, or chance of schooling, but endowed with a virile-mindedness which fed eagerly upon certain fermentative books of an inherited library. Lying on his back in the evening on the porch of his farmhouse, he read Carlyle’s “French Revolution” and Gibbon’s “Rome.” He had in him, indeed, the veritable spirit of the revolutionist: in the days of the Patrollers, he, too, had ridden and hunted Negroes. He had seen the aristocracy come again into power; he had heard the whisperings of discontent among the poor whites. And at fairs and on court days in the eighties I hear him screaming his speeches of defiance, raucous, immoderate, denouncing all gentlemen, denouncing government by gentlemen, demanding that government be restored to the “plain people!” On one of the transparencies of those days he himself had printed the words (strange reminder of the Commune!):
“Awake! arise! or be forever fallen.”
He spoke not only to the farmers, but he flung defiance at the aristocrats in the heart of the aristocracy. At Charleston, one of the proudest of Southern cities, he said:
“Men of Charleston, I have always heard that you were the most self-idolatrous people that ever lived; but I want to say to you that the sun does not rise in the Cooper and set in the Ashley. It shines all over the state.... If the tales that have been told me or the reports which have come to me are one-tenth true, you are the most arrant set of cowards God ever made.”
And everywhere he went he closed his speeches with this appeal:
“Organise, organise, organise. With organisation you will become free once more. Without it, you will remain slaves.”
Once, upon an historic occasion on the floor of the United States Senate, Tillman paused in the heat of a debate to explain (not to excuse) his fiery utterances.