Thomas Sumter: Ubiquitous Asshole, Revolutionary-War-Era Donald Trump

Banned Histories of Race in America

Last week was filled with speculation of a potential Trump arrest. While that arrest didn’t happen, there was a nation-wide effect. A sort of national recollection. We seemed to be magically transported to those three-hundred or so soothing, self-delusional moments when the country meme-shifted from THIS IS FINE to WE GOT HIM. And now that we’re all once again noticing the flames and slowly sitting back down, putting our cartoon hats back on our cartoon dog heads, I’d like to tell you a story about a man named Thomas Sumter.

It was the late 1760s when Thomas Sumter escaped a Virginia debtor’s prison. On the run in South Carolina, he met and almost immediately married local blue blood Mary Cantey Jameson. She was described as “a wealthy, crippled widow eleven years his senior.” Thomas moved onto her family plantation and started making moves right away. He bought thousands of acres of land, opened up a giant store, built a couple of mills and a plantation of his very own! By the mid 1770s Thomas had leveraged his blue-blood-in-law status into a position as the local justice of the peace. Life was looking pretty good for this complete fucking dirt bag.

And then the Revolutionary War began.

One lovely day the Red Coats showed up to one of Mary and Thomas’ plantations. The Brits set fire to the place and freed some of the many Black people enslaved by the couple. Thomas didn’t like that, so he joined up with the patriots. Within a few months he was commissioned as a brigadier general and it was this moment when Thomas made the full transition from complete fucking dirt bag to world-class turd.

Now, I know “brigadier general” might conjure images of noble, steel-jawed, leaders of men inspiring loyalty and self-sacrifice atop muscular steeds with wind-blown manes fighting off the British with every last drop of blood sweat and tears they could muster – and then some! But as you might guess, that wasn’t really Thomas Sumter’s deal. He was more the gang-lord-type, dressing up real nice and strutting around while letting the other colonial generals and their men do the fighting and dying so he and his crew of hired bandits could go around looting supply depots. Like I said, world class turd.

Now, in hiring these bandits, you might assume Sumter used his paralyzed wife’s family’s money, but you’d be very wrong and how dare you?

Thomas Sumter was a big important boy now and the South Carolina legislature recognized that! This is why in February of 1782, they formalized Sumter’s Law, a recruiting scheme promising ownership of a Black person to every white man who signed up as a private to serve under Thomas. Signing up as an officer, however, would get a white man three Black adults and one Black child, which must’ve been pretty enticing to some really cool kind of guys.

Something else – you didn’t even have to enlist in order to benefit from Sumter’s Law. Recruiters were offered one Black person for every 25 white men they signed up! This unholy enterprise was a huge hit drawing in prospective human traffickers not only from all over South Carolina, but North Carolina and Virginia as well!

A couple of quick things. First, there’s a temptation to believe that’s just how things were back then, but they absolutely were not. Many South Carolinians at the time thought Sumter’s Law was monstrous. In fact, fellow South Carolinian Revolutionary War brigadier general, Francis Marion called the law “inhuman” — and that piece of shit was an enslaver his damn self!

Second thing: Sumter and the South Carolina legislature combined their total amounts of enslaved Black people to fund their brand-new bigot brigade. Can you guess how many they had?

Zero.

That’s right! They were promising something they didn’t even have. The whole thing was a giant scam on every level in every direction. I know. Imagine not being able to trust pirates or politicians. It’s almost as though the wealthy have no other motive but spiteful and exploitive self-interest!

Anyway, I think it was right around this point when Thomas acquired the moniker “Gamecock”. There are lots of stories about how he got this nickname, but it was probably his tendency to flap around squawking. And the likelihood of people betting on how long he’d live, which probably lost a whole lot of people a whole lot of money because Thomas Sumter survived the war.

Are you sitting down? Because you will collapse in shock when I tell you that Sumter went on to have a career in the U.S. House of Representatives. Please remain seated because he then had a whole other career in the U.S. Senate. And in what can only be evidence of a cruel or absent god, Sumter died on his plantation at the age of 97, having been the oldest surviving general of the Revolutionary War.

There are towns and counties named after him in Florida, Alabama, Georgia and of course, South Carolina. There are countless monuments to him and schools with his name throughout the state. This includes Fort Sumter, where, famously, the first shots of the Civil War were fired. The state is also home to various sports teams called “Gamecocks”, none of which — as far as I can tell — are named ironically.

Following in theme, the city manager form of government (the white supremacist municipal system covered in my podcast “99 Years”) debuted in the South Carolina town of Sumter in 1912.

The awful truth is that out of all the celebrated Great American Patriots, there are probably more Trumps than non-Trumps. It’s a real bummer, but maybe it’s easier to not think of Sumter as a Trump so much as Trump as a Sumter. Does that help or does that make it just so much worse?