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Martin Witherspoon Gary with Vanessa Williamson

This Guy Sucked

Thu Nov 13 2025

Summary

Podcast Summary: This Guy Sucked

Episode: Martin Witherspoon Gary with Vanessa Williamson
Host: Dr. Claire Aubin
Guest: Vanessa Williamson (Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution; Author, The Price of Democracy)
Date: November 13, 2025

Overview:

This episode of This Guy Sucked investigates the legacy of Martin Witherspoon Gary, a former Confederate general and architect of post-Civil War racist politics in South Carolina. Host Dr. Claire Aubin and guest Dr. Vanessa Williamson discuss how myths around taxes, “taxpayer” rhetoric, and white supremacist politics intersected during Reconstruction. The conversation draws a direct line from post-Civil War Southern politics to present-day anti-tax arguments, showing how the language of fiscal conservatism often masked (and still masks) efforts to disenfranchise marginalized groups.

Key Discussion Points & Insights:

1. Why Study the History of Taxes? (02:03–06:40)

Dr. Williamson shares that her fascination with taxation began during the Tea Party movement’s rise. At a Tea Party rally, she observed a Gold Star mother equating her sacrifice for the nation to paying taxes, revealing a deep, almost moral anger at tax obligations.
Quote:

“[T]here's something that happens when you actually just hate taxes... what you're really saying is you hate the government and in particular you're saying you hate the government that responds to the needs of other people.” (04:21 – Vanessa Williamson)
Taxes provide a unique moral and cultural touchstone in American political discourse—revealing anxiety about government legitimacy, citizenship, and who deserves to belong.

2. Retconning the Boston Tea Party & American Tax Myths (06:40–10:28)

The popular understanding of the Boston Tea Party as an anti-tax protest is a myth. It was in fact a reaction to a tax cut for the East India Company, fueling fears of monopoly, not high taxes.
Quote:

“The original Tea Party... it was not about high taxes. It was about a tax cut... it would allow [the East India Company] to become a monopoly. Sam Adams talks about this Tea Act... as introductive of monopolies that were a danger to public liberty.” (07:30 – Vanessa Williamson)
This misconception feeds a broader (false) narrative that Americans have always been fervently anti-tax.

3. Birth of the “Taxpayer” Identity and its Racial Politics (10:28–13:03)

The concept of the “taxpayer” as an identity emerged post-Civil War, primarily as a rhetorical tool for white elites seeking to delegitimize multiracial Reconstruction governments in the South.
Quote:

“The development of the idea of a taxpayer... is very wrapped up in a new kind of argument... to discredit the multiracial democracies of the American South.” (10:28 – Vanessa Williamson)
Former Confederates reframed themselves as “taxpayers” to regain political power after losing military and political authority.

4. Who Was Martin Witherspoon Gary? (13:03–15:13)

Gary, born to a wealthy South Carolina planter family, was a Confederate general who refused to surrender at Appomattox, later dedicating his life to restoring pre-war white supremacy.
Quote:

“He refused, famously, to surrender at Appomattox... Gary rides away... goes and finds Jefferson Davis and resigns his commission to the Confederate former Confederate president.” (13:42 – Vanessa Williamson)

5. Reconstruction’s Challenges and Rise of Taxpayer Rhetoric (18:15–23:46)

The devastation of the South required investment—public schools, infrastructure—but former elites never accepted the legitimacy or taxation of Reconstruction governments.
“Taxpayer” rhetoric allowed elites to:
1. Recast themselves as patriots, not traitors
2. Unify rich planters and poor whites
3. Appear respectable and nonpartisan to the North
This language disguised racial motives and reframed anti-democratic campaigns as fights for fiscal responsibility.

6. The South Carolina Taxpayers Convention & the Edgefield Plan (27:19–35:44)

Gary chaired the Taxpayers Convention, which, despite ostensible focus on corruption and electoral reform, was a cover for organizing violent efforts to overthrow Reconstruction governments.
Quote:

“...Gary and his buddies set up this thing called the South Carolina Taxpayers Convention... nominally nonpartisan... they hold these conventions in 1871 and 1874... and they managed to get a couple Republicans to come who, frankly... should have known better.” (27:19 – Vanessa Williamson)
The “Edgefield Plan,” masterminded by Gary, explicitly orchestrated voter intimidation, violence, and murder to suppress black political participation and reinstall white supremacy.
Quote:

"Democratic military clubs are to be armed with rifles and pistols. Every Democrat feel honor bound to control the vote of at least one negro by intimidation purchase keeping him away or as each individual may determine…” (51:45 – Vanessa Williamson, reading Gary’s plan) “Never threaten a man individually if he deserves to be threatened. The necessities of the time require that he should die.” (52:48 – Gary, via Vanessa Williamson)

7. Redemption and the End of Reconstruction (35:44–42:12)

The violence and fraud of Redemption, culminating with the 1876 election, signaled the overthrow of black political power in the South.
The federal government (Rutherford B. Hayes administration) chose capitulation over protecting black citizens or multiracial democracy.
Quote:

“Hampton said, every Republican tax collector in the state will be hungry by morning... the President of the United States would think, you are threatening members of my party... But…it was capitulation time.” (39:13–39:46)

8. Rhetorical Legacies and Enduring Racist Strategies (42:03–50:00)

The alliance of white elites and poor whites was forged by the mythos of shared “taxpayer” status, masking the real project: restoring elite dominance and disenfranchising black citizens.
This language and strategy echoes in contemporary anti-tax, anti-government rhetoric.
Historians (and the hosts) argue for a more honest retelling, rejecting the “failure” framing of Reconstruction in favor of acknowledging its overthrow by force.

9. Corruption of the Taxpayer Crusaders (53:18–56:55)

The “taxpayer” conventions proved rife with self-dealing; leaders like Gary and Butler personally profited from state bonds under the guise of “fighting corruption.”
Redeemer governments that replaced Reconstruction were notoriously corrupt, with treasurers embezzling entire state revenues.

10. Tools of Disenfranchisement (60:20–65:20)

Discussion of the origin of the “grandfather clause”—created to allow illiterate or poor whites to vote while disenfranchising black voters.
Quote:

“Grandfather clauses... were discriminatory voting laws... that exempt people whose grandfathers had been eligible to vote before the war…so it’s like…everything we say and do in America is based in these horrible, horrible things.” (60:20 – Claire Aubin)
Poll taxes and “policy innovations” became techniques for mass disenfranchisement during and after the Redemption period.

11. Black Political Agency and the Hope of Reconstruction (65:20–70:15)

Vanessa shares the story of Texas State Senator Matthew Gaines, a formerly enslaved man, who advocated for the right to pay taxes as the foundation of political participation.
Quote:

“Before, I didn’t pay taxes because my enslaver paid my taxes for me. And now I pay taxes... I would rather pay something and have it be a burden on me... than be in the position I was in before where someone was paying taxes for me... but that I was not free.” (65:20 – paraphrased by Claire Aubin, originally from Matthew Gaines)
Black Americans saw taxes—and the ability to pay them—as fundamental to their new, hard-won citizenship and democracy.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

“When you've come to the point that you just hate taxes, conceptually, in any form, you hate them, what you're really saying is you hate the government—and in particular, you're saying you hate the government that responds to the needs of other people.” (04:21 – Vanessa Williamson)
"[The Boston Tea Party]... was not about high taxes. It was about a tax cut..." (07:30 – Vanessa Williamson)
“He refused, famously, to surrender at Appomattox... this guy Gary rides away. He's not going to be there to surrender.” (13:42 – Vanessa Williamson)
“Never threaten a man individually if he deserves to be threatened. The necessities of the time require that he should die.” (52:48 – M.W. Gary via Vanessa Williamson)
“They were using this like convention that was nominally about being anti corruption to in fact enrich themselves through corruption.” (54:24 – Vanessa Williamson)

Timestamps for Major Segments

00:00–02:03 — Introduction; why talk about taxes?
06:40–10:28 — Myths about the Boston Tea Party and taxes
10:28–13:03 — Emergence of "taxpayer" identity after Civil War
13:03–15:13 — Martin Witherspoon Gary’s biography & refusal to surrender
18:15–23:46 — Reconstruction, taxation, and elite resistance
27:19–35:44 — Taxpayers Conventions and the Edgefield Plan
35:44–42:12 — Redemption, violence, and the end of Reconstruction
51:45–52:59 — Reading from Gary's 1876 plan (“Never threaten a man individually if he deserves to be threatened…”)
53:18–56:55 — Corruption among “taxpayer” elites and aftermath
60:20–65:20 — The origin and impact of the “grandfather clause”
65:20–70:15 — Senator Matthew Gaines’s advocacy for taxation as freedom
71:55–74:03 — Contemporary legacy of anti-tax rhetoric; concluding thoughts

Takeaways

The myth of America’s inherent anti-tax stance was constructed for political purposes after the Civil War, specifically to destroy Black political power.
Martin Witherspoon Gary was a primary architect of violent Redemption and the anti-tax "respectability" veneer that enabled it.
Many anti-tax arguments, “taxpayer” rhetoric, and policy choices of today have direct continuity with white supremacist strategies of the late 19th century.
The language we use ("taxpayer," "grandfather clause," etc.) carries powerful, often disturbing historical legacies.
The fight over the meaning and distribution of taxes is fundamentally a fight over democracy, inclusion, and justice in America.

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Transcript

A (0:00)

A list of sensitive themes and topics included in this episode can be found in the episode description. Welcome to this Guy Sucked, the show where we prove that it's never too late to have haters and you can't libel the dead. I'm your host, Claire Aubin, and I'm a historian, writer, and most importantly, certified hater. On this show, we talk about people from throughout history with legacies that need a little updating. Whether it's because of their politics, their behavior, or their impact on society and culture, these guys actually kind of sucked. And we bring in a new scholar every week to tell us why. With me today is Vanessa Williamson, who is a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution as well as a senior fellow at the Urban Brookings Tax Policy Center. She studies taxation and democracy in America and has a brand spanking new book out, which I have been lucky enough to read and have it here on my desk with me called the Price of Democracy. Welcome to the show and congratulations on the book.

B (1:15)

Well, thank you so much. I'm so glad to be here.

A (1:18)

Yeah. And I was saying this before we started recording, but I did not expect to feel as passionately as I do about the history of taxes, like, as I do now after reading the book.

B (1:29)

This is. It's everything I could ask for that you would say. I'm like, please be passionate about taxes. It's my dream. Yeah.

A (1:35)

I feel strongly, like, I obviously felt strongly about them before the way that everyone kind of feels strongly, which is part of the argument of the book. Right.

B (1:42)

Yeah.

A (1:42)

But I don't think I really understood how thoroughly all of American history is intertwined with and affected by taxes, like truly every single aspect of American culture, which I think is really an incredible thing that you've managed to like get across in the book. For someone like me who is like, look, taxes aren't my.

B (2:02)

Thank you.

A (2:03)

What made you interested in studying taxation, like, in the first place? Like years ago, when you first started thinking about this as an academic research interest, what was the driver of your initial interest in it?

B (2:16)

So I was actually this dates me. But in the early years of the Obama administration, there was this. The Tea Party movement.

B (28:51)

You didn't need to. You didn't need to give them this kind of COVID Right. You should have known. But anyway, so they hold this taxpayers convention, and it's all about how the poor taxpayers of South Carolina. Carolina. Are really being abused by this terribly corrupt government. And to be clear, there was a lot of corruption in South Carolina. Would continue to be a lot of corruption in the government that followed that was all white, right? Like, this is. We're getting into the Gilded Age. There's a lot of corruption. There's also just, you know, I mean, the state was in shambles, Right? But they're like, oh, but the diagnosis is what's important. Right? And also, of course, there's a lot of corruption in the north of this period. Like, this. It is not. It is not a Real shining moment for governance in the United States. Between the Civil War and the Progressive Era, that's not a great time for governance. But the diagnosis is what matters, right? Because the diagnosis wasn't, oh, you know, we should have civil service reform or like, we should participate in the government. All these people are highly educated folks. They could have participated in the government and improved it. Right? No, the diagnosis was that the problem is that the taxpayers weren't in charge. So the taxpayers convention happens, and Gary is in charge of the Committee on Elections. And as you can imagine, he was really committed to elections. The validity of elections. Yeah. No, so he. So what they propose at the first convention is something called cumulative voting, right? And this was. I mean, it's basically a somewhat proportional system, which in principle is fine. And Gary himself talks about it. So they proposed this thing, and what it would have meant is that because white people were a minority, they lost. They didn't have much power. And this would have meant that they had a number of seats that was approximately equivalent to the percentage of the population they were, which in principle is a perfectly fine way to run a government. The former governor of South Carolina complains when they propose this cumulative voting system. He's like, but we should have all the power. What are you talking about? This is crazy. Like, what are we. And Gary is like, you're completely right. Like, yes, we are proposing cumulative voting, but the reality is what we're. This is half a loaf. Okay?

A (33:19)

Yeah. I want to pause for a second and talk about this period because a lot of people who have listened. We did the episode on Birth of a Nation with Kelly Carter Jackson earlier. So we talked about Reconstruction quite a lot in that episode. If people want to go back and hear me talk about Reconstruction. But this period is known as the redemption period, which is something that a lot of people are not familiar with. They might know about Reconstruction, but they don't really understand A lot of the backlash, and the backlash is, is what leads to the politics that we have today. Like this is where a lot of these things start to foment, basically, like because of all these enormous strides for racial and income equality in the south, like I said before, the opening of public schools that anybody can attend, the election of people other than white landowners to public office, all these things that you and I have talked about, what inevitably happens, because this is America and everybody's an asshole all the time here, is that there's this huge backlash. This resentment grows and grows, particularly among ex Confederate officers, planters and merchants, which are groups that have a lot of overlap in the sort of Venn diagram of Southern racists. And this political violence comes out of what they start to call redemption, which is 1873 to the 1890s.ish. They want to redeem their states from the corruption of what they see as black, or what they see, say is the corruption of black political agency and enfranchisement. So this is like, like you've said, it's a counter revolution, essentially the systematic attempt to overthrow and successful overthrow of Reconstruction governments via violence, intimidation, political manipulation. And to tie together what we were saying before, like when we're saying violence, we are talking about assassinations and a lot of like really serious, serious violence. And by 1876, which we haven't quite gotten to, but we'll get to via the edgefield plan, by 1876, almost all Southern states are fully under redeemer control. So this is an incredibly successful tactic that they take. And they use things like being a taxpayer and the taxpayers convention as the veneer that legitimizes what they're doing. Right. They say actually all these things are just done in favor of protecting taxpayers, protecting real citizens, real politically motivated and engaged people, non corrupt people. We're actually just murdering for good. And we're not murdering at all, actually, but if we were, it would be for a good reason, you know. And the federal government basically just rolls over.

B (36:12)

So Chamberlain this guy, he was a Northerner, he was an abolitionist. He had led black troops in battle. He had fought as a Union officer. And he comes, like many other Northerners after the war to help rebuild and probably to make his fortune, whatever. And so he's one of these guys, he's one of the Republicans who gets pointed at as attending the taxpayers convention. He found it very uncomfortable. He found it in many ways trying is how he described his time with the taxpayers convention. But he ends up running for governor. And he clearly hasn't learned his lesson from interacting with these folks at the conventions. Because when he runs for governor, what he does is he runs on a campaign to appeal to whites. And specifically he's going to roll back a bunch of the education stuff. He's going to cut spending on public schools. He's going to turn the public college that was the state college that was basically only attended by black people into what he called a good high school. So he was going to tighten belts and he was going to do austerity and all this stuff to try and appeal to the Witherspoon Gary's of the world. And so Daniel Chamberlain, who had participated in these taxpayer conventions and had tried to convince them to look into Klan violence, of course they released a report saying there isn't any. He runs for governor and he wins, and he puts in place this austerity campaign. But he is also representing, you know, he's a Republican. He has black members of his cabinet, including Cardozo, his Treasury secretary, who's fighting corruption, fighting the good fight to, to make this government work. He's serving as governor. He's moved dramatically to the right in an attempt to appeal to these sort of taxpayer types. What happens, of course, is that the taxpayers, on the one hand, while presenting themselves as merely concerned about corruption, are simultaneously writing the Edgefield plan. Right. And the Edgefield plan is an explicit plan to overthrow the government by having armed vigilante bands in the style of the Klan. Not always exactly the Klan, they were also the red shirt. There were also various other groups, but, you know, sort of paramilitary forces threaten. And if threatening didn't work, murdering black voters and office holders. And it succeeded. Right. So in 1876, Chamberlain's running for re election and he's running as Wade Hampton, who's a. Another Confederate general who had spent a lot of time talking about how the government was run by people who didn't pay taxes. And in Edgefield, this campaign of violence is so successful that there are 2,000 more votes for Hampton than the total number of white voters in the state. So they had either falsified ballots. Well, probably a combination. Had falsified ballots, had intimidated black voters into voting the other ticket. And the election was so close that this differential meant that there was a contested result. And so there's Chamberlain, the elected Republican. And on the other side, we've got the Democrats and their campaign organized by Gary the Edgefield plane. And they go to Washington to try and convince the federal government to keep troops there, because otherwise the government's going to be overthrown. And famously, this is the very end of Reconstruction and the President won't do it. Rutherford B. Hayes gives up.

A (46:20)

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A (57:26)

What can be really frustrating as a historian when we talk about the Reconstruction period, right. Is there very often is a framing around the failure of Reconstruction, Right. I recently went to a talk with Eric Foner. Wild that I was in the same room as Eric Foner. Insane. He's really nice, by the way. He's a really nice guy. He shook my hand. He's really cool. I've touched him. Cool. Everyone listening. Only historians will think this is cool. But he was talking about this and being like, well, there are so many spaces when we talk about reconstruction where it's not a failure, right? Like the access to political power at all by black people is not a failure, right? But when we talk about the failure of reconstruction, and I'm saying this in scare quotes for people listening, it's not a failure because it's a torpedoing, right? Like it is an active insurgency that torpedoes Reconstruction. It's not like something that naturally falls apart over time. There are people who destroy it intentionally, right? So we need to move away from the idea that it, like, failed because it one, didn't fail and two, was exploded by someone basically, like intentionally and very purposefully and systematically. And they write plans where they say, here's how you kill anyone who, who might have voted for the guy that we don't like. Right? So it's, it's a lot of what I think about when I think about the American past and when I think about the legacies of things like Reconstruction is the rhetorical framing of it, right? And I think what you're talking about here is really important because you talk about the rhetorical framing of taxpayer. Right? And I'm talking about the rhetorical framing of failure and how, like, these obscure the actual meaning and the actual behaviors that are happening at this Point in time such that later we look back and go, like, well, I don't know what happened. It's like, because people really tried hard for you to not know what happened or tried really hard to obscure what they were doing so that it would have a veneer of respectability over it.

A (60:21)

I mentioned before we started this that I wanted to make a quick digression. And actually talking about literacy has allowed me to make the digression that I wanted to make, which is I learned something while doing the research for this book that has totally messed with my head, which is I didn't know where the term grandfather clause came from. And I was talking to Vanessa about this. I'm sorry that you've already heard me talk about this. I wanna talk about the term grandfather clause because I think it's a fascinating thing that has filtered into language both here and abroad. And like so many things that we've inherited in American culture, like this comes out of something incredibly racist. So everyone, please permit me this one minute digression. So the term grandfather clause clause, for those of you who didn't know this, like me and just want to have your mind blown for a second, originated in black disenfranchisement and poor white enfranchisement. Grandfather clauses, like the term grandfather clause and the legal framing grandfather clause, were discriminatory voting laws that were enacted in the south after the Civil War to prevent black Americans from voting while allowing illiterate or poor whites to do so because they were based around literacy tests and rules that would prevent people from voting if they were not literate. However, they create these literacy requirements and property requirements for voting, but they exempt people whose grandfathers had been eligible to vote before the war. This effectively disenfranchises illiterate or non land owning black voters whose grandfathers obviously could not vote before the war, but enfranchises or allows poor or illiterate white people to do this because their grandfathers might have been literate before the war or might have been landowning. And so it's like we all use things like. Like maybe, maybe other people don't. But I use the word like to grandfather in all the time. And I had no idea that this is just like entrenched. What the fuck, man? Sorry you're swearing, but what is that? Why is the everything is like this? I don't know, maybe you don't feel this way, but I'm always just like, everything we say and do in America is based in this, in these horrible, horrible things. So that's my digression. Everyone should now know what grandfather clauses are.

B (66:46)

Yeah. I mean, honestly, if you ask me, I'd like people to know the true story of the Boston Tea Party. But if there were a character in my book, I would like people to know, it's Matthew Gaines. He's very unusual. He's a black legislator in Texas. He's very unusual in that he was a field hand. He wasn't doing a non menial job. He read in secret. The fact that he could read was not known to his enslavers. And he did absolutely backbreaking work. And within a few years of emancipation, he escaped several times and was always caught again. He received absolutely appalling treatment as a result. But when emancipation came, he became a state senator representing his county in Texas. And the speech that you're talking about was him talking to his constituents who were also poor blackfield hands, about the new taxpayers bill. And the tax bill is going to be used by the redeemers to overthrow reconstruction in Texas. It was easier to overthrow Reconstruction in Texas because it was not a majority black state. And so they just had to convince poor whites to go along with it. And one of the important voting blocks was Germans, German immigrants to Texas. And so they were, who had been pro union and who had been, you know, forced to fight this, you know, had recently arrived in the United States and forced to fight for slavery, which they didn't even support. And so they had been Republican voters. But this tax bill had come in and it was expensive. And so this was going to be the former Confederate's wedding issue to retake power. Gaines is talking to his constituents. So he's standing in front of the courthouse in this rural district and there's a crowd assembled in front of him of field hands, and he's trying to tell them why it's worth it to pay taxes, because they're worried, because there's a poll tax and that's going to be so expensive for them. And so he's talking about he had managed, in the years after emancipation, he had managed to buy a bit of land. And so, yeah, he talks about how proud he is of that and how proud he is to be a taxpayer and how it's his privilege to pay taxes on it. And so he brings copies of the tax plan and he hands them out. He's go home and read it tonight by torchlight, because he knows they're going to be working, they're not going to have time to read it by daylight, they're going to read it by torchlight. Go home and read it and you'll see that they're not half taxes enough.