Post # 15 ~ The Gyascutus Is Broke Loose!

The Tale as told by John Abney Chapman

The story transcribed here is lifted straight from John Abney Chapman's The History of Edgefield County - From the Earliest Settlements to 1897, published in 1897, pages 241-243. Chapman set the story in Hamburg, SC, around 1848. The tale of the Gyascutus was a favorite folk-tale of the time. It didn’t really happen in Hamburg; Chapman was making a point.

It puts me in mind of The King and The Duke

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There is a story or tradition connected with the history of Hamburg that, with propriety, might be related here, as it was a source of great amusement when it was first told. Doubtless

Post # 16 ~ Gyascutus or Whig?

Gyascutus Activism

I learned from Tom Downey's book, Planting a Capitalist South: Masters, Merchants, and Manufacturers in the Southern Interior, 1790-1860 (2005), about currents of thought in Hamburg that alarmed many upstate planters. Political activism by Hamburg merchants and bankers (joined by like-minded businessmen from Augusta) angered the agrarian majority in South Carolina and Georgia, staunch Democrat party voters. Downey wrote of the Hamburg Whigs:

Their platform accused Van Burenites [Democrats] of hereditary pretensions and stifling the republican principle of rotation in office. In their stead, Hamburg Whigs called for political reform and an end to the corruption and cronyism they associated with the Democratic Party.

"Set-to between the champion Old Tip & the swell Dutcheman of Kinderhook - 1836." Political cartoon from the 1836 presidential campaign. LOC

Abundant evidence of this growing friction is found in newspapers from 1835-1860. Early on, the Hamburg Whigs were accused of supporting a national bank, which would erode states’ rights. Even worse, Hamburg merchants vigorously resisted South Carolina's popular, emotional call for secession. They opposed nullification, separate-secession, and the Democrat political machine. (And that was true. Henry Langford Jeffers and his colleagues worked for "co-operationist" goals for decades. But in 1860 they laid it aside - after Secession they joined with their state and their people.)