← Gone South
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- [00:01]
Jed Lipinski
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- [01:05]
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- [01:41]
Jed Lipinski
On the afternoon of January 19, 1903, the editor of the State newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina left the newsroom to grab lunch. His name was Narciso Gonzalez. He and his brother had co founded the newspaper 12 years earlier, and he was known as a sharp, fearless critic whose columns set the political agenda in South Carolina. As Gonzalez passed the State Capitol building, he saw the Lieutenant Governor, a man named James Tillman, walking his way.
- [02:13]
Jack Hitt
They were ferocious enemies and had been for several years at this point.
- [02:18]
Jed Lipinski
This is writer Jack Hitt.
- [02:20]
Jack Hitt
Things have been sort of quiet between them for several months, but on this day, as they passed, Gonzalez sort of moves towards the inside of the building to sort of take the right turn to where he's gonna go get his lunch. And right when they came side by side, the Lieutenant Governor of the state of South Carolina pulled out a pistol and shot him once in the gut.
- [02:45]
Jed Lipinski
Gonzalez collapsed against the Capitol building. He's said to have shouted, shoot again, you coward. But Tillman's assistance whisked him away and Gonzalez was rushed to the hospital. He died four days later.
- [02:58]
Jack Hitt
This was, of course, national news. A political assassination of the first order. The chief journalist in the state murdered by the Lieutenant Governor.
- [03:09]
Jed Lipinski
The murder of Narciso Gonzalez is an old story. It took place over 120 years ago. But the tension between Gonzalez and James Tillman still runs through South Carolina politics. And it continues to play out across the country in ways that feel both familiar and unexpected. I'm Jed Lipinski. This is Gone South. Before we proceed here, a quick word on Jack Hitt. Jack is a legend in the world of long form journalism. He's a regular contributor to this American Life. He co hosted the podcast Uncivil about the hidden untold stories of the Civil War. He's one of my favorite writers and storytellers. Jack has lived in Connecticut for decades now, but he grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, and he has a fierce understanding of the state's history, its characters, its legends, and its deep, messy contradictions. The assassination of Narciso Gonzalez by Lieutenant Governor James Tillman in some ways encapsulates the mix of politics, ego and violence that shaped South Carolina's history. But to understand the power and impact it still holds in the state, you need to understand who these two men were.
- [04:29]
Jack Hitt
Like everything in South Carolina, to understand who somebody is, you have to understand who their parents and grandparents were, who their ancestors were and are. Because South Carolina really is a great state of Nepo babies. Everybody in the state has ancestors and claims them, discusses them, brags about them, or is ashamed of them. I say that as a South Carolinian myself. So let's just start with Narciso Gonzalez, the editor and founder of the state newspaper.
- [05:06]
Jed Lipinski
Narciso Gonzalez's father, Ambrose, was a Cuban born adventurer who joined private military expeditions to seize Cuba from Spain before the Civil War. Charleston's elite admired him for it.
- [05:20]
Jack Hitt
In fact, he was funded by a lot of the southern planters who saw just seizing the island as one of the great investments of all times, right? Cuba was just a network of sugar plantations and a source of immense wealth. And so the idea that Ganzi, as they called him, Ambrose Gonzalez, the thought was Ganzi is soon to be the governor of Cuba.
- [05:41]
Jed Lipinski
Unfortunately for Ambrose, his plan to take over Cuba failed. In 1850, he and a band of revolutionaries invaded the town of Cardenas But Spanish reinforcements drove them back and forced them to flee to Key West. Ambrose survived, but his revolution died on the beach behind him. Gonzalez's mother was an Elliot, one of Charleston's wealthiest families. His grandfather, William Elliot, was a famous Charleston aristocrat and plantation owner. He was also a sportsman and a man of letters. His book, Carolina's Sports by Land and Water, including incidents of devil fishing, wildcat deer and bear hunting, is still in print. But the fortune Gonzalez's family inherited was crushed by the Civil War.
- [06:30]
Jack Hitt
And in those four years, everything collapsed around them. They moved back and forth from Cuba to South Carolina, finally after the war, winding up at their plantation, which was now, as somebody described it, a community of paupers. I found this one description. They lived in tents in the pine trees, ate terrapin, that's turtle, to break the monotony of bacon. They complained of their lazy and undependable black workers who now of course, had to be paid. And they longed for just enough capital to maybe acquire a sawmill and eke out a living. One of them wrote in a letter, we are a doomed people.
- [07:13]
Jed Lipinski
Still, Narciso Gonzalez was a precocious kid. He read Shakespeare, Plutarch and Walter Scott. After the war, he and his brother learned to operate telegraph machines, the Internet of its day. As a young man, he took a job as a telegraph operator at a small railroad outpost, tapping out news and messages along the rail lines. It was that job that got him into journalism.
- [07:38]
Jack Hitt
Down in Southern South Carolina, 700 or so black workers in the rice fields near the Cumbee river went on strike because the landowners were going to cut their pay. This was a big story. And Narciso, because he was a telegraph operator, was able to sort of intercept all these reports from all over the place.
- [07:58]
Jed Lipinski
Gonzalez wrote up a report and sent it to the competitor of the Charleston News and Courier, the biggest newspaper in the state at the time.
- [08:06]
Jack Hitt
And it gets published way before anything happens in the newsancurier and kind of makes him famous.
- [08:13]
Jed Lipinski
The News and Courier eventually hired Gonzalez. By the 1880s, he'd made a name for himself as one of the most popular political writers in the state. So that's Narciso Gonzalez. What about James Tillman, the guy who shot him? According to Jack, James was also a Nepo baby. His father, George was a South Carolina state senator. But it's his uncle, Ben Tillman that you really need to understand, because it's Gonzalez's epic years long battle with James Uncle Ben that set the stage for his assassination. Ben Tillman, who would later become Known as Pitchfork, Ben came from Edgefield County, a rough and rural corner of South Carolina that was worlds away from the cosmopolitan Charleston where Gonzalez grew up.
- [09:02]
Jack Hitt
Just so you get an idea of how different his upbringing was from Narciso's, as a young kid, his father had already killed a man and been convicted of rioting. He dies of typhoid fever in 1849. One of his sons was killed in a duel. Another was killed in a domestic dispute. A third died in the Mexican American War, and a fourth brother died of disease. And then Ben gets a cranial tumor when he's a young kid and has to have his eyeball removed. And for the rest of his life, very conspicuously, he never covered it with a patch, at least not in any of the pictures. So Ben Tillman, this emerging politician, has one eye.
- [09:45]
Jed Lipinski
In the 1870s, South Carolina was still in Reconstruction. Under the new 1868 Constitution, black men could vote and hold office, and a Republican government backed by formerly enslaved people ran the state. White Democrats were determined to overturn that and restore white rule. Ben Tillman's home of Edgefield county was on the leading edge of this effort, and the place quickly became known for its political violence.
- [10:12]
Jack Hitt
One of the theories or plans to get rid of the Republican government in South Carolina was called the Edgefield Plan. And the Edgefield Plan simply was to terrorize black voters. That was the essence of the plan. And that meant starting these militia groups and rifle clubs. And so Ben Tillman started his. That had a lovely name. It was called the Sweetwater Sabre Club. But they were absolutely ruthless. They intimidated black voters, they assaulted people, they killed political figures.
- [10:42]
Jed Lipinski
As a young militia member, Ben Tillman was involved in one of the nastiest massacres in the state's history. Months before the 1876 election, hundreds of armed white men calling themselves Red Shirts surrounded a black militia armory in the town of Hamburg. When the militia refused to hand over its weapons, the whites opened fire. Several black men were killed, and at least six were executed. Afterwards, Wade Hampton, the former Confederate general running for governor that year, became the movement's political symbol. To white Democrats, he represented a redemption of the South, a return to white rule after a decade of black political power. The Red Shirts openly campaigned for him, using violence and intimidation to suppress black votes. In the wake of the massacre, Hampton narrowly won the governor's race, marking the end of Reconstruction in South Carolina. The Red Shirts were never charged.
- [11:42]
Jack Hitt
And later, when Tillman was asked to describe what happened in Hamburg, he was honest enough to say this. The leading white men Of Edgefield, he said, had decided to seize the first opportunity that the negroes might offer them to provoke a riot and teach the negroes a lesson by having the whites demonstrate their superiority by killing as many of them as was justifiable. So he's out of the closet. That's what they're doing.
- [12:14]
Jed Lipinski
Men like Ben Tillman were thrilled to see Democrats regain control. But there was a problem. In the post reconstruction years, political and economic power was concentrated in Charleston. It was the state's financial center and home to its most influential newspaper. Even though the capital was in Columbia, Charleston's elite shaped much of what happened in state politics. People in the upstate and rural counties felt ignored and shut out, as Jack puts it. Their resentment of Charlestonians ran deep.
- [12:47]
Jack Hitt
They didn't have the glamour and the sort of pomposity of Charleston aristocracy. You know, Charlestonians referred to themselves as bourbons in the 19th century, modeling themselves on the French aristocrats of the previous century. And they took on all the trappings in the language of an aristocratic class. The blue bloods downtown and the rest of the state sort of resented it. You know, John c. Calhoun was from the upstate. This is a man who never really liked Charleston. I think he referred to it as a town of sodomites and drunks. And he wasn't entirely wrong. And so there was always this sense of like a we're just richer, but also better. You know, it's a port town. We have access to the rest of the world. You're locked up there in your crazy sort of redneck enclosures.
- [13:33]
Jed Lipinski
If Narciso Gonzalez was the personification of a Charleston bourbon, Ben Tillman personified the resentful upstate farmer. In the mid-1880s, Tillman began to fight back. He delivered a series of speeches attacking what he called the Charleston ring.
- [13:50]
Jack Hitt
When he gives one of these speeches, one of the local papers said that it electrified the assembly and was the sensation of the meeting. And sort of overnight, Ben Tillman becomes the leader of this new movement, the agrarian movement in South Carolina. And you know, Tillman, his movement has kind of two goals. One is to push the elites out of office, and the other is to permanently forbid blacks from voting.
- [14:18]
Jed Lipinski
In 1890, Ben Tillman was elected governor of South Carolina. One of the first things he did was to purge the old Charleston elite from state government and concentrate power in the upstate. Needless to say, Narciso Gonzalez and his Bourbon allies in Charleston were furious. By then, Gonzalez was living in Colombia, covering the political scene for the News and Courier, but partly to combat Tillman's rise. He decided to found his own newspaper, the State. From day one, the State became Tillman's loudest and most unrelenting criticism. It was the start of a years long feud that would end in Gonzalez's death.
- [15:08]
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Jed Lipinski
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Jed Lipinski
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- [16:17]
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- [18:06]
Jed Lipinski
Narciso Gonzalez was a born writer. He loved working as a journalist, and he fully embraced his role as the editor of the state newspaper.
- [18:15]
Jack Hitt
You know, in the past, other correspondents would sign their names with these sort of like, Federalist paper sort of nicknames, like Rusticus or Brutus or Veritas. Narciso signed his columns ngg. He wanted everyone to know, yeah, that's me. And he loved writing about everything South Carolina. He wrote about temperance meetings or crop conditions. He covered funerals. He wrote health reports about famous people, current books, and of course, any act of violence. He was big on crime. Some of the headlines from this time just shows you what kind of violence and mayhem he liked to cover. Like, these are just some of the headlines from that time. Blown up and burned his arm, ground off, weighted in blood, cremated in their beds, bullets in the bowels. So, you know, he knew how to run a newspaper. And his newspaper did become and still is the number one paper in the state.
- [19:13]
Jed Lipinski
In his newspaper, Gonzalez supported causes that put him at odds with Tillman's politics of violence and disenfranchisement. He argued for expanding black education, ending child labor, giving women the right to vote, and strengthening labor unions. He criticized Tillman nonstop, mocking his rustic upstate supporters as woolcap boys and Tillmaniacs.
- [19:37]
Jack Hitt
There's a million issues that Gonzalez and Tillman fought over, but the one that really kind of became the centerpiece for both of them was the issue of prohibition.
- [19:47]
Jed Lipinski
Prohibition, which was well underway in the 1890s, was a tricky issue for Tillman as a populist governor. He needed a way to please both prohibitionists, many of whom supported him as well as his many voters who still liked to drink. So Tillman came up with a bizarre solution. He put the state in charge of alcohol.
- [20:06]
Jack Hitt
It would make its own bottles that have the state seal on each bottle. But a corollary to that is that anyone who made their own home brew were now criminals because the state was in the liquor business. And of course, to enforce these new rules, he created his own sort of kind of secret police. There were these specially assigned constables who were in charge of finding illegally made booze and invading people's homes and arresting people and putting them in jail. And so there were these goon squads that were sort of running around the state.
- [20:41]
Jed Lipinski
Naturally, a lot of people in South Carolina didn't like this idea. Narciso Gonzalez was one of them. He called the governor a petty tyrant in his newspaper and warned readers that Tillman's goon squads could invade homes, insult women, and even kill young men with zero consequences.
- [21:00]
Jack Hitt
All of this culminates in what's called the Darlington riot of 1894. A crazy moment where 23 of these special cops were sent into private homes to look for citizens making illegal booze. And this just quickly escalated into a complete fiasco.
- [21:16]
Jed Lipinski
When the people of Darlington learned that Tillman's cops were invading their town, they formed a posse to resist them. Tillman panicked. He declared a state of insurrection and sent a militia into Darlington. But when the militia discovered that a local mob had risen up, they threw down their arms and fled.
- [21:34]
Jack Hitt
And when this mutiny happens, Gonzalez is just cheering it on in the papers.
- [21:39]
Jed Lipinski
Tillman, in turn, blamed the chaos on what he called Gonzalez's inflammatory reporting. He debated declaring martial law and shutting the state newspaper down on the grounds that it was, quote, dangerous to the public peace.
- [21:54]
Jack Hitt
And some of the language that he uses here. My enemies have taken to their bosoms a viper in the shape of a newspaper which distills day by day poison into their system and will not let the fever subside. They give me credit for nothing. They try to sting me with abuse, slander and misrepresentation. This is Tillman losing his mind.
- [22:14]
Jed Lipinski
Not long after the Darlington Riot, the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled the state's control of alcohol unconstitutional. Instead of accepting the decision, Tillman packed the court with his own justices, who promptly reversed the ruling. The political fight over alcohol continued for years and only inflamed tensions between Gonzalez and the governor. Despite the relentless criticism from the state newspaper, Tillman remained a popular governor. White voters admired him for restoring their political dominance, enforcing white supremacy, and promising to keep black citizens out of power. He was elected U.S. senator in 1894. The following year, he pushed through a new South Carolina constitution that stripped black citizens of the right to vote and effectively locked Jim Crow into law for generations. The year after that, Tillman decided to run for president. He gave a famous speech at the Democratic National Convention for which he was booed and mocked.
- [23:14]
Jack Hitt
This is where he gains his nickname when he claims that he wants to jab President Grover Cleveland with a pitchfork. Actually, what he said was he wanted to jab his pitchfork into that bag of beef. Grover Cleveland. That's pitchfork. Ben Tillman. That's the nickname he carried for the rest of his life.
- [23:32]
Jed Lipinski
Tillman clearly wasn't ready for the national stage when he was snubbed at the convention. The state newspaper carried it on every page. And yet, for all his hostility toward Tillman, Gonzalez had a sort of grudging respect for the man. In one editorial, he admitted that Tillman was an exceptionally able leader and a student of human nature.
- [23:55]
Jack Hitt
And weirdly, Tillman kind of has the same attitude. You know, he does call him a treacherous Spaniard who makes the charges of betrayal and unbrotherly conduct against me, only advertises his own depravity and blackness of heart, this kind of thing. And then he says, but I have always given Gonzalez credit for being honest and straightforward and a man of backbone and principle, though he is my enemy. So, you know, they did hate each other, but they did acknowledge that each of them was like the master of their craft.
- [24:28]
Jed Lipinski
But Ben Tillman's nephew James didn't share his uncle's respect for Gonzalez. In the year 1900, while Ben Tillman's power was still at its height, James was elected Lieutenant governor of South Carolina. The role would put him on a collision course with the editor of the state newspaper and end in one of the most famous political assassinations in the South.
- [24:57]
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- [25:28]
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- [26:20]
Jed Lipinski
Before running for Lieutenant Governor of South Carolina, James Tillman had been many things. He'd been a farmer, a lawyer, and a military officer in the Spanish American War. He'd also edited a newspaper called the Edgefield Chronicle, which he mostly used to promote himself and attack his Uncle Ben's enemies. James was not well known on the political scene. During his campaign, he pledged to carry out his uncle's mix of white supremacism, populism, and machine politics. Narciso Gonzalez didn't pay much attention to him. But when James won the election, he fell into Gonzalez's crosshairs.
- [26:58]
Jack Hitt
And the thing is, everyone knew that he was kind of a drunk and a gambler and he loved him some cockfights. So, you know, of course, this all puts him in the sort of wrong category, in the classic sort of Tillman category of people that Narciso just did not want in power.
- [27:16]
Jed Lipinski
Just as he'd done with his uncle, Gonzalez started churning out scathing editorials about James Tillman's subpar character and spotty military record. When he learned that Tillman had applied for membership at an exclusive local club to which Gonzalez belonged, Gonzalez got his application rejected. In response, Tillman challenged Gonzalez to a duel.
- [27:38]
Jack Hitt
Tillman sends a guy to ask Gonzalez if he would accept a challenge to a duel. So you can't challenge a guy to a duel. That's a crime. So he sends a guy to ask Gonzalez, if Tillman challenged you to a duel, would you accept it? In which case, you know, they could run off to some foreign place and carry it out. But Gonzalez is not stupid, and he blows that off. But Tillman does not forget this.
- [28:03]
Jed Lipinski
It wasn't long after this that James Tillman announced his plan to follow in his uncle's footsteps and run for governor.
- [28:10]
Jack Hitt
And now this makes Gonzalez lose his mind. He starts referring to Tillman the little in his newspapers, constantly noting that this particular Tillman is unworthy of being Ben Tillman's nephew. So all of a sudden, Ben Tillman is okay in comparison to Jim. Ben was a gentleman and a patriot, writes Gonzalez. He said at one point, I have nothing against Jim Tillman except that he is a man without character and therefore unfit for public office and both disgraceful and dangerous in it. This is classic Gonzalez. I'm not going to insult you too much, except entirely.
- [28:49]
Jed Lipinski
In the months before the election, Gonzalez ramped up his attacks on James Tillman. And the pages of the state. He accused him of misusing public funds and falsifying Senate records. He tracked down negative reports about Tillman in other newspapers and reprinted them. But his most damning accusation was that Tillman had stolen from something called the Ladies Monument association of Edgefield, a kind of precursor to the Daughters of the Confederacy.
- [29:17]
Jack Hitt
After the war, certain widows usually would hire a couple of men and a wagon, and they would go to these old battlefields and dig up the bones of their loved ones and try to identify them and bring them back to their hometowns and then bury them. And they were just called Ladies Memorial Associations. And I mean, no one, north or south, could argue that this was anything but sacred work. And so to be accused of stealing money from the Ladies Memorial association of Edgefield, his own homeland, there could be no greater insult.
- [29:56]
Jed Lipinski
James Tillman placed fourth in the Democratic primary. He publicly blamed Gonzalez for his loss, saying, but for the brutal, false and malicious newspaper attacks headed by NG Gonzalez, I believe I would have been elected.
- [30:11]
Jack Hitt
And so with that, everything is quiet for five months. Then one day, that day, January 19, 1903, Narciso Gonzalez heads out for his walk. Like I said, it was a cold day. Had a coat on. He had his hands in his pockets, as did the others. And when he turned the corner, he and Tillman pass each other. He gets shot, shouts, shoot again, you coward. And then he's taken off, and four days later, he dies of peritonitis.
- [30:46]
Jed Lipinski
Peritonitis is a dangerous infection in the abdomen, the kind that can quickly turn a survivable injury into a fatal one. Back then, it wasn't uncommon for gunshot victims to die of peritonitis because doctors would poke around inside the wound with unwashed hands and unsterilized instruments. President Andrew Garfield, who was shot 22 years earlier, died of the same thing. Thousands of people showed up for Gonzalez's funeral. Newspapers around the country raised money for his legal defense.
- [31:17]
Jack Hitt
The New York World led a sort of giant campaign to get other papers to hire the best lawyers in the south, which, of course, was immediately condemned as Yankee interference.
- [31:29]
Jed Lipinski
In the meantime, James Tillman turned himself in. The trial was set for September of 1903, but the scales of justice were tipped in Tillman's favor. The defense got a pro Tillman judge appointed to the case. When it came time to choose a jury, they got another pro Tillmanite, to pose as a photographer and meet with prospective jurors.
- [31:51]
Jack Hitt
He would just tell them that he was a photographer and wanted to show them samples of his work. And so he would just leaf through a bunch of pictures. But in those pictures were photographs of Narciso Gonzalez and James Tillman. And he would watch their reactions when they were showed the picture and then kept a notebook of that. And that's how they selected the jury.
- [32:15]
Jed Lipinski
The prosecutor was a man named William Thurmond, father of the longtime South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond. As it happened, William Thurmond had also killed someone six years earlier. A man had called Thurmond a dog and a scoundrel, and Thurmond retaliated by shooting him. And he'd gotten off. But that wasn't all.
- [32:37]
Jack Hitt
So William Thurman, who six years before, as a prosecutor, killed somebody and got off, who was his lawyer? James Tillman.
- [32:47]
Jed Lipinski
Oh, my God.
- [32:49]
Jack Hitt
Now fast forward six years later, and William Thurman is the prosecutor going after Tillman.
- [32:57]
Jed Lipinski
So in summary, the defense had picked the judge. They'd hired a fake photographer to screen the jury, and the prosecutor had not only killed a man, but he'd avoided a murder conviction thanks to the defendant, James Tillman. Despite all this, the evidence against Tillman for murder was strong. A witness testified that after losing the governor's race, Tillman had vowed to shoot Gonzalez down like a mad dog. He'd openly blamed his defeat on what he called Gonzalez's brutal, false and malicious editorials. And four months later, he shot him. The motive seemed pretty clear, but Tillman's side argued self defense. They claimed that Gonzalez, who'd had his hands in his pockets, had made a menacing movement which Tillman took as a threat. They also introduced Gonzalez's editorials as evidence that homicide was justified by such inflammatory attacks.
- [33:52]
Jack Hitt
You see this in a lot of these dueling or near dueling murder trials where the defense is, well, he started it because he said a bad word, and that is considered an assault. Calling someone a dog or a scoundrel or a liar or a fraud is as much an assault as punching somebody in the nose. And so if it escalates from there, it's totally defensible. And that was Tillman's claim, and he got off.
- [34:20]
Jed Lipinski
In the wake of Tillman's acquittal, Gonzalez's friends in Colombia raised money for a memorial. The city installed a granite cenotaph to him just off the State House grounds. It's still there today. The shooting ended James Tillman's political career. He withdrew from public life, moved to Asheville, North Carolina, and died at the age of 43. But his uncle Ben Tillman's power never faded. He stayed in the US Senate for another 13 years and lived out the rest of his life as the chief architect of Jim Crow in South Carolina. And though Charleston remains the wealthiest corner of the state, it never regained its place as the center of political power.
- [35:04]
Jack Hitt
The political power in South Carolina continues to this day to reside in the hands of kind of those upstate bullcaps. The great grandchildren of these original Tillamaniacs, as Narciso called them, still riled up about those distant elites cheating them out of their fair.
- [35:31]
Jed Lipinski
If you have information, story tips or feedback you'd like to share with the Gone south team, please email us@gonesouthpodcastmail.com that's gonesouthpodcastmail.com for bonus content. You can follow us on Facebook, TikTok and Instagram at Gone South Podcast. You can also sign up for our newsletter on substack at Gone south with Jed Lipinski Gone south is an Odyssey original podcast. It's created, written and narrated by me, Jed Lipinski. Our executive producers are Leah Rees, Dennis, Maddy Sprung Keyser, and Lloyd Lockridge. Our story editor is Katie Mingle. Gone south is edited, mixed and mastered by Chris Basel. Production support from Ian Mont and Sean Cherry. Special thanks to Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney and Hilary Schuff. Thank you for listening to Gone South.
- [36:29]
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- [37:01]
Katie Ring
Some crimes are so shocking they don't just make headlines, they forever change our society. I'm Katie Ring, host of America's Most Infamous Crimes. Each week I take on one of the most notorious criminal cases. Each case unfolds across multiple episodes, released every Tuesday through Thursday, from the first sign that something was wrong to the moment the truth came out or didn't. Listen to and follow America's Most Infamous Crimes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.