In a field outside of Gettysburg on a hot July morning in 1863 a frightened Michigan teen-ager named Frank Pearson stood on a stump, trading shots with a Confederate cavalryman 125 yards away. The first two exchanges had drawn no blood, and Pearson was having trouble getting another round into his carbine. Ingenuously, he held up his hand, signaling time out. His opponent, the richest man in the South and possibly the Confederacy’s finest horse soldier, gravely lifted his pistol to the sky until Pearson had finished reloading.

That kind of courtesy was an essential part of Wade Hampton; so, too, was the cool steadiness that allowed him to shatter Pearson’s wrist with his next shot. For Hampton was the epitome of the ante-bellum Southern gentleman—generous, loyal, unquestioning in his dedication to his society, and a consummate fighting man. And he was more; almost alone in the bloody turmoil of Reconstruction, he advocated moderation and black suffrage. His fellow South Carolinians listened to him only for a little while, but when they did, they won back their state.

Wade Hampton was the third to bear his name. His grandfather had served as an officer in the Revolution, and his father had consolidated the family’s vast amalgam of corn, rice, cotton, and sugar plantations in Mississippi, South Carolina, and Louisiana, which were worked by three thousand slaves. Born in 1818, Hampton grew up at Millwood, the South Carolina plantation. He grew formidably; by the time he was twenty, he was so heavily muscled that his legs, according to one contemporary, “if he chose to close them in a grip, could make a horse groan with pain.” Possessed of near total physical courage, he is said to have developed his own style of bear hunting. After the hounds had cornered the beast, he would leap from his saddle, draw a knife, and engage it in hand-to-paw combat.

In 1856 the young planter was elected to the state senate, where he promptly made enemies by opposing the reopening of the African slave trade. He made more when, as his state drifted into the bloody-minded euphoria of secession, Hampton rigidly opposed the breach. But when it came, he resigned from the senate, and set about raising a legion. It was ready, handsomely outfitted and six hundred strong, in time for Bull Run.

Hampton had a disconcerting first sight of action: two Confederate brigades, broken and panicked, coming at him full tilt with thousands of Union soldiers close on their heels. Nevertheless, he formed up his men and fought a dogged rear-guard action that bought the shaken Southerners enough time to mend their ranks and hold. The confused, savage day ended with the Union Army in full retreat and Hampton so warmly praised by his superiors that, he said, “I have not ventured to write their remarks, even to my wife, lest I appear vain.”

Within a year, Hampton was made a brigadier