Word: thurmond
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...Strom Thurmond's Southern politics was bred in his bones. His grandfather, George Washington Thurmond, a corporal with Lee, had trudged home from Appomattox to find Columbia in the ruins left by Sherman's march. Eighty-four of Columbia's 124 blocks had been gutted by fire. Some 1,400 buildings had been destroyed...
...Candidate's Roots. Grandpa Thurmond had known the poverty of the post-bellum South and the bitterness of the days when the Carpetbaggers swarmed in. South Carolina's legislature had been packed and dominated by illiterate and bewildered Negroes. Grandpa Thurmond and his neighbors had heard the voice of Pennsylvania's sadistic Thaddeus Stevens thundering out the need for holding the South "as a conquered people," for forcing the South to "eat the fruit of foul rebellion...
...Grandpa Thurmond's son John saw the South meet violence with violence. John studied law and hitched his star to "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman,* South Carolina's demagogic Governor and Senator. Ben Tillman had a short answer for the Negro problem. He told the U.S. Senate: "We shot them. We are not ashamed of it ... We will not submit to Negro domination under any conditions that you may prescribe...
...John Thurmond became Tillman's attorney and boss of Edgefield County. One day, when a drummer for a drug company used "hot language" about John being a Tillmanite and threatened John with a knife, John shot him dead. The jury's verdict: not guilty of murder...
John's wife was a charter member of the W.C.T.U., and a leader in the First Baptist Church of Edgefield. On the small farm which John bought to supplement his modest earnings as an attorney, they brought up three sons and three daughters. James Strom Thurmond was the next to eldest...