LIFE

General Waddy Thompson

Judith Bainbridge

Waddy Thompson, Jr. was Greenville’s best known political figure before the Civil War.

A smart lawyer and a (mostly) skillful politician, his career had truly remarkable flip-flops.

Young Waddy Thompson was smart. The son of a judge, he was born in Pickensville (near modern Easley) in 1798, was reared in Greenville, entered South Carolina College when he was 13, excelled there, and graduated when he was 16.

Then he read law in Edgefield while wooing Emmala Butler, the daughter of one of the state’s richest plantation owners. They married in 1819, after he passed the bar and began legal practice there. About 1824, the young couple moved back to Greenville, and he became politically active.

In 1826, he was elected to the South Carolina General Assembly, where he and his colleagues dealt with the state’s economic downturn. They attributed it to “abominable” tariffs voted by the U. S. Congress, although modern historians generally agree that it was caused by massive out-migration to the “black belt” of Alabama and Mississippi and land depleted by years of cotton and corn-growing.

They were angry men. Thompson intemperately announced that since Kentucky representatives had voted for higher tariffs, he “would eat snow birds and walk the (judicial) circuit rather than eat Kentucky pork or ride a Kentucky horse.” (“Snow birds” were sparrows or juncos.)

He fervently supported Vice President John C. Calhoun’s theory that a state could nullify an act of congress. Thompson introduced a resolution in the General Assembly calling for a convention to nullify the “Tariff of Abominations.”

Most Greenvillians, including Mountaineer editor Benjamin Perry, also a lawyer, disagreed with his positions. He was not re-elected to the Assembly in 1828.

Nullification politics reached a boiling point in 1832, when South Carolina threatened military action against federal forces, and the governor appointed Thompson brigadier general of the state militia. (He was ever after referred to as “General Thompson.”)

To counteract Perry’s Unionism, he and his friends hired Turner Bynum, a young writer from Columbia, to start a local nullification newspaper.

A war of words followed, nearly leading to a duel between Thompson and Perry, who described Thompson as “a false-hearted demagogue, a man whose patriotism consists in noisy declamations” in an editorial. Virulent editorials did lead to a duel between Perry and Bynum that resulted in the latter’s death.

The nullification controversy died down the following year when no other state supported South Carolina and Congress passed a compromise tariff.

In 1836, Perry and Thompson ran against each other for Congress. Because Perry had been hurt in a carriage accident, he did little campaigning. According to historian Joe Earle, Thompson avoided party politics and personal attacks on Perry and had Calhoun’s active support. He won by 60 votes, although Perry carried Greenville County.

When Thompson ran again in 1838, Calhoun, unhappy with his position on Texas independence and annexation, withdrew his support, but Perry agreed with his stand, didn’t run against him, and the General was easily re-elected.

When his second term concluded in 1842, President John Tyler appointed him Envoy Extraordinary and Minister plenipotentiary to Mexico.

He went to Mexico City to work for the release of Texans captured during a failed mission to take Santa Fe. He quickly learned enough Spanish so that he could make his first speech to Mexican cabinet members in their own language, made friends with President Santa Anna, got the captives freed, and fell in love with the country.  (The Texas Historical Society has a long website praising his exploits).

He tried, less successfully, to negotiate the purchase of California, to annex Texas peacefully, and to prevent war with Mexico. He resigned in the spring of 1844. According to A. V. Huff, when he returned to Greenville, he was honored at a spectacular dinner at the Mansion house — presided over by Benjamin Perry.

Times, men, and attitudes change.

He and his wife settled into their elegant home on a site beyond Christ Church. Thompson was primarily involved in overseeing his plantations in Edgefield; Madison, Florida (where he owned 1,300 acres and more than 80 slaves); and Greenville County.

His wife died in 1848. In 1851, he married Cornelia Jones, a young and beautiful native of Wilmington, N.C. In 1855 he sold his house and 128-acre estate along what is now East North Street to James Boyce for $27,000 (that’s about $675,000 today; it was VERY elegant). The property was later known as Boyce Lawn; it is now the Pettigru Street Historic District.

The Thompsons moved to Paris Mountain, where he owned more than a thousand acres. On a lovely site about two miles up Altamont Road, he built two identical houses with running water, huge rooms, and immense fireplaces, one for himself and one for his wife.

(No one understood then, either, since the couple seemed to be on good terms.)

He filled his house with Mexican mementoes — saddles, dueling pistols, and swords — and employed a fulltime gardener to create a walled garden filled with plants and shrubs he brought back from his travels. The Thompsons entertained lavishly during the summer, although they spent most winters at their Florida plantation.

Thompson remained involved in politics. By 1850, he had become as adamantly Unionist as he had been pro-nullification earlier. In fact, he and Vardry McBee invested in a newspaper (The Southern Patriot) that Benjamin Perry founded to oppose secession.

The General was a man of principle, even when those principles were unpopular: a Nullifier when Greenville was Unionist; opposed to the popular Mexican War in the 1840s, a Unionist when Greenville went for Secession.

Unionist or not, the Civil War ruined him. His plantations could not be worked without slaves, and it took money to keep up his Paris Mountain estate. Although he advertised widely that he would open a law office in the fall of 1865, it did not succeed. Perhaps practicing law was just too much for the 68-year old attorney who had not argued a case in decades.

In 1866 he sold his Paris Mountain property — two houses and nearly a thousand acres for $900 — and auctioned off his household furnishings before moving his family to his Florida plantation.

Within a year the Florida legislature elected him circuit solicitor. In 1868, he had a fatal heart attack during a trip to Tallahassee. Waddy Thompson was buried at John’s Churchyard there (and, mostly, forgotten here.)