Unlocked: Thomas Sumter, Grifter, Coward, American Hero
Just wait until you hear about Sumter's Law!
Sometimes the lives of historical figures can give perspective on current events and holy shit, is Thomas Sumter one of those figures. Please enjoy (maybe not the right word) this quick telling of Sumter’s life, un-paywall’d from the vault!
It was the late 1760s and Thomas Sumter had just escaped a Virginia debtor’s prison. On the run in South Carolina and desperate to end living as a fugitive, Sumter met and immediately married local blue blood Mary Cantey Jameson, described as “a wealthy, crippled widow eleven years his senior.”
Taking full advantage, Sumter moved onto her family plantation and started making big moves. He bought thousands of acres of land, opened a giant store, built a couple of mills and a plantation of his very own! By the mid 1770s Sumter had also managed to leverage 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 arrived at one of Mary and Thomas’ plantations. The Brits set fire to the place and freed some of the many Black people the couple had enslaved. As you might imagine, 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.
Of course, “brigadier general” could 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 limitless blood sweat and tears! But that wasn’t really Sumter’s deal. No, he was more into dressing up real fancy and strutting around while letting the other colonial generals and their men do the fighting and dying. Meanwhile, he and his crew of hired bandits went 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 Sumter. Signing up as an officer, however, would promise 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 more 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! Even their promises of evil were empty. The whole thing was a giant scam on every level in every direction. How disappointing! Imagine not being able to trust pirates or politicians. It’s almost as though the wealthy have no motive other than 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 survive, which probably lost a whole lot of people a whole lot of money because, somehow, Thomas Sumter survived the entire 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.
South Carolina 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’s a pretty good chance there are 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?