Page 61 →Charleston’s Nineteenth-Century Germans

Charleston’s almost forgotten community of nineteenth-century German immigrants of predominantly North German origin underwent a process of acculturation and assimilation that naturally required its members to accommodate local customs and mores. The German immigrants to Charleston came to the United States in search of freedom and prosperity, but after 1861, they found themselves in a rebellious Confederacy defensive of its character and institutions. The following account of the life of a German immigrant to Charleston, one Bernhard Heinrich Bequest, reveals how the “redemption” of the postwar Confederacy affected the immigrant, gradually transforming him into a conservative Southerner inclined to align himself with the native-born disciples of the “Lost Cause,” the latter actively promoting and celebrating the Confederate past. Bequest’s story demonstrates how this particular immigrant’s life in Charleston was representative of the process of acculturation experienced by many in the nineteenth-century German ethnic community: Their becoming Charlestonians ran in parallel with the course that the Confederate South took in transitioning from its defeat to its reinvention, secured in the halo of its romanticized Lost Cause past.

The unprecedented rates of immigration of Europeans to America during the nineteenth century had begun to decline by the late 1850s, and the Civil War in the United States stifled the number of immigrants choosing America as a destination and decreased the percentage emigrating from German lands. Those trends notwithstanding, one North German teenager risked a late departure from Bremerhaven to arrive in Charleston just as the firing on Fort Sumter signaled the beginning of the war. Seeking his fortune but not quite ready to settle in Charleston, this young German emigrant was quick to take advantage of the Confederacy’s war effort to earn his keep as a blockade runner.

According to an account in a volume on Confederate military history authored by a former brigadier general, young Bernhard Bequest “took to the sea” as a teenager. When he arrived in Charleston “two weeks after the capture of Fort Sumter,” that is, toward the end of April 1861, he was not yet Page 62 →seventeen years old.¹ The Gauss, one of the ships captained by the legendary Heinrich Wieting, had departed Bremerhaven in mid-March carrying only eleven passengers. Given his age, it is likely that Bernhard Bequest got to Charleston as a member of the ship’s crew.

The author of the biographical sketch was South Carolina–born Ellison Capers, as noted, a former brigadier general in the Confederate Army. According to Capers, “the Confederate flag was flying,” and it was only a few months later in 1861 that Bequest

hid himself on the little blockade-running steamer, Ruby, and on revealing his presence after the boat was at sea, was put to work as coal-passer during the trip to Nassau. At that port he shipped on the blockade-runner Stonewall Jackson, Captain Black commanding, which on the first trip out was sighted and chased by the United States cruiser Tioga, and compelled to throw overboard part of her cargo and put back to Nassau. This unfortunate vessel at her next attempt to reach Charleston was fired upon and struck as she was crossing the bar, and run ashore, where she was burned with the cargo, young Bequest making his way thence to the city with the mail pouch. His next voyage was from Wilmington, and reaching Nassau he shipped on the Fanny, Captain Moore, with which he made four successful trips. Later he was on the Cyrene, but being taken sick at Nassau, he returned to his home in Germany in June, 1864, and remained until September, when he sailed to Nassau by way of New York, and made a trip into Wilmington on the Rosso Castle. Sailing again on the Watson, they reached the Wilmington bar in time to witness the terrific bombardment of Fort Fisher, upon the fall of which fort blockade-running came practically to an end. Returning to Nassau, he opened a small store and remained there until October, 1865.²

Capers called his account of the young immigrant a “romantic story,” seemingly impressed that the German native had begun his seafaring life at the age of fourteen. The escapades of Bequest as related by Capers are, indeed, impressive, if only cursorily outlined. Each of the ships he is said to have worked on can be accounted for: The rescue of the mail pouch by young Bequest after the destruction of the Stonewall Jackson was noted in a report of the vessel’s capture in the Richmond, Virginia, Daily Dispatch, with a “Charleston, April 12” (1863) dateline. Capers’s Rosso Castle is more accurately the ship, Rothersay Castle; his Cyrene is the long-serving Syren. The Watson was still at work in early 1865 when Wilmington’s Fort Fisher fell in Page 63 →January. Maritime records show that the Watson sailed for Nassau in mid-February 1865, possibly taking Bequest back to Nassau where, according to Capers, he stayed until October of that year.³

The language of Capers’s account of Bequest’s blockade-running days is one of admiration of the latter’s youth and daring. In the course of his work on numerous blockade-runners, Bequest had apparently become an acknowledged actor in the Confederacy’s efforts to carry out its defiance of the Union blockade. At some point—likely postwar—the blockade-running immigrant’s story came to the attention of the brigadier general, who then registered his admiration by including his biographical sketch in the volume on South Carolina that was part of the formidable twelve-volume Confederate Military History: A Library of Confederate States History, edited and published in 1899 by fellow Confederate Brigadier General Clement A. Evans under the imprint of the Confederate Publishing Company.⁴

The reality of Bequest’s blockade running was likely not all that romantic, and it was doubtless not the case that he simply “took to the sea” looking for adventure. He came from a family of seafarers in the Hanoverian village of Geestendorf who, for generations, had lived and worked the North German coast as sailors of one kind or another. His great-grandfather, a Frenchman, was known as a “navigateur.” His grandfather had at one time been employed as a ferryman and sailor. His father worked as a ship’s carpenter, a boatman, a skipper, and a ship pilot.⁵ For certain, the sea was in his blood, but when he began his seafaring life at age fourteen, it was likely because his father had died in 1859, age thirty-nine. As the eldest of six children, the teenager would have been expected to assume his position as head of the family. But these were not the times—in North Germany and elsewhere—for the younger generation to accept traditional expectations. After his father’s death, opportunity for advancement in his native Geestendorf—which, by this time, had been incorporated into the city of Bremerhaven as the latter became the main port of embarkation for emigrants from German lands—would have been overshadowed by the pull of opportunity in the United States. That he should set out across the sea to arrive in Charleston in early 1861 undoubtedly had to do with the fact that he could make the crossing with Captain Heinrich Wieting, a fellow Geestendorfer, plus the fact that the teenager had relatives in Charleston and knew of other emigrant families from the Geestendorf community now settled there.

Bequest continued to work as a blockade runner until it became increasingly difficult for the Confederacy to evade the Union’s blockade of the South’s Atlantic ports. He had done quite well for himself on the Page 64 →Charleston-Nassau run and, according to the Capers account, had garnered sufficient financial means to start a business in Nassau. Undoubtedly, the blockade runner knew what he was doing beyond the challenges of the operation. Despite Capers’s enthusiastic report suggesting that Bequest jumped at the chance to serve the Confederacy, there is good reason to doubt that the young German came ashore in Charleston with a sense of loyalty to the rebellious states or that he developed one while working to supply it. For the mature teenager, the thrill of adventure and opportunity for financial gain likely outweighed any ideological drive to further the South’s rebellion. It is, in fact, hard to imagine why a young German would have felt compelled to defend the recently seceded South Carolina and its warmongers because of some romanticized patriotism for a country not yet his own. Bequest was working for himself and whatever ship’s Captain he managed to sign on with. It was not incumbent on this adventuresome German sailor to become a committed Confederate during the war to later become a German-American Charlestonian.

Capers confirms that he did, indeed, become a Charlestonian. After opening a small store, Bequest remained in Nassau until October of 1865, when he “came to Charleston and engaged in business and planting at the town of Mount Pleasant, on the bay.” Capers’s account continues: “Since 1885 he has conducted a successful business at Charleston, is a member of the German Artillery, and has twice served as king of the German Rifle Club. By his marriage in 1866 he has a daughter living, Teresa L., wife of John Gishen, and by a later marriage he has one son, John F.”⁶ Capers saw in Bernhard Bequest a daring young German who made his mark on behalf of the defeated Confederacy and then successfully established himself after the war as an upstanding Charleston business- and family man. Capers’s outline is accurate enough, but it elides the complexity of Bequest’s journey. More important, Capers shaped his story to give credibility to a toxic creed of oppression that Bequest may have embraced later in life, but for pragmatic rather than ideological reasons.

It is worth investigating what it was about the immigrant German that drew the attention of the influential former Confederate military officer and to consider why Capers chose to eulogize the foreign-born Charleston merchant along with other military leaders of the Confederacy. By including the brief Bequest biography in one of the volumes in the “library” of Confederate military history, the ex-brigadier general presented him as a noteworthy Confederate fellow traveler. In this way, his brief biography lends ideological support for the Lost Cause, and his daring adventures give rhetorical punch Page 65 →to the multivolume history. The actual tale of this member of Charleston’s nineteenth-century German community, however, is considerably more complex and provides insight into the relationship between the ethnic community and the cultural framework of postbellum Charleston and South Carolina.

After living and operating a small business of an undisclosed nature in Nassau, Bequest returned to Charleston to start over. The twenty-one-year-old’s decision to go back to the city where he had worked previously was doubtlessly influenced by the commercial stagnation in Nassau caused by the Atlantic blockade. Bequest would opt for opportunity in Charleston rather than muddle through the anticipated decline of Bahamian commercial conditions. Convinced that Charleston would provide a more stable business environment now that the war was over, Bequest nonetheless must have recognized the challenges he would face coming back to a city and community all but destroyed by the war. It was almost certainly a combination of his youth and a kind of immigrant courage that allowed him to believe that Charleston, despite its wracked state, was a place where he could be successful. The move to Charleston signaled his intention to become a citizen of the United States—which, at that point, had not formally been reunited and which had barely begun the process of healing—and, by capitalizing on the city’s new beginnings, make a future for himself. Like his earlier work as a blockade runner, his actions were driven by practical, material concerns, not Confederate ideals.

Bequest was back in Charleston by October 1865. In February of 1866, he married another North German immigrant from a small town not far from Geestendorf at the Lutheran church (St. Matthew’s) founded in 1842 by North German immigrants who preceded him. There is little question that the young couple’s married life was challenging. Immediately after the war, Charleston would have been an inhospitable host community. General William Tecumseh Sherman visited in May and wrote, “Anyone who is not satisfied with war should go and see Charleston, and he will pray louder and deeper than ever that the country may in the long future be spared any more war.”⁷ In September, a reporter from the North toured Charleston and described it as “a city of ruins, of desolation, of vacant homes, of widowed women … of deserted warehouses, of weed-wild gardens, of miles of grass-grown streets.”⁸ Nonetheless, conditions slowly improved. Within three years of his return, Bequest became a naturalized US citizen at age twenty-three. In 1868, he purchased property, as reported by Capers, in the rural village of Mount Pleasant across the Cooper River from the Charleston Page 66 →peninsula, and by 1870, the federal census recorded him with the anglicized name of “Benjamin,” age twenty-five, a merchant, with his wife “Sarah,” age twenty-two, “keeping house.” Both are officially noted as of German birth with parents of foreign birth. It was unsurprising that Bequest initially established himself as a merchant: doing so had been the antebellum pattern for many of the North German immigrants to Charleston. He would become an early commuter, crossing to Charleston by boat (likely his own sloop) from his residence across the bay to run a store in the city proper, as well as one in the village of Mount Pleasant.

A sense of the cultural sensibilities that Bequest encountered when he came to Charleston in 1865 can be culled from a letter written by Henry Slade Tew to his daughter in February 1865. Tew was a fellow storekeeper and, at the time, the mayor of Mount Pleasant.⁹ The letter was written approximately eight months before Bequest returned to Charleston and gives an account of the occupation of Mount Pleasant by Union troops. Tew describes the frightening circumstances in Mount Pleasant and acknowledges that the situation in Charleston was worse: “The burning buildings public and private, the repeated explosions, the gun boats and other vessels burning in the harbor all presented such a scene as but few ever witness in a lifetime, and surely one which none would ever desire to see repeated. Oh God! What a night of horror that memorable 17th of February was.” The residents in the village were fearful of “violence and insult” by the arriving Union troops, the “women and children … greatly apprehensive at the presence of the coloured troops…. Many of the negroes from the Plantations came down in the Army train, and together with those of the village made quite a multitude of shouting wild creatures whom the thought of freedom had changed from quiet to transports of uproarious joy.” When the troops moved to Charleston proper, the village was left with “only six men as a guard and our negroes noisy, stealing all they could lay hands on and moving into the houses that were vacant. It was a sleepless night to us.” On “Sunday 19th,” Tew and his family attended the Episcopal church, and, to their general dismay, saw “a mulatto girl with a white soldier” sitting in the pew in front of them. That very Sunday,

the Episcopal Church was taken possession of by negro troops. Their regiment is commanded by Col. Beecher the brother of H. Ward Beecher and Mrs. H. B. Stowe and we hear that his wife who is with him declines all acquaintance with the whites, but has called upon the colored ladies and invited them to her quarters—from this time forth until matters are settled I suppose that the Church is to be abandoned by the whites, as no Page 67 →one will care to subject themselves to the annoyance of having a colored gentleman or lady perhaps both walking into your pew and overpowering you with their odor or filling you with vermin.¹⁰

The letter serves as a testament to the idiosyncrasies of life in Mount Pleasant in 1865 and resonates with the biases, antipathies, and prejudices endemic in the South when defeat left a vanquished people feeling their way out of chaos and unable to adjust to new rules of order. Immigrants like Bequest would have found themselves in a new context with new rules. In time, Bequest would accede to the demands of the local culture, as well as those imposed on the host society itself.

Bequest and his wife were married only six years when she died in 1872, shortly after giving birth to the daughter mentioned in the Capers account.¹¹ Less than a year later, Bequest married the daughter (eleven years his junior) of a family that had immigrated to Charleston from the vicinity of Geestendorf before the war. Census records list Bequest as a “planter,” a farmer, likely raising produce to be sold in his store. In 1882, the couple moved from rural Mount Pleasant into the city proper, close to where Bequest had operated his in-town store. The one surviving child of the German-born couple was—like his half-sister—an American born in Charleston.

Bernhard Bequest’s story as briefly outlined here leaves plenty of room for details—the daily pursuit of “health and happiness” as an immigrant to Charleston. Although those immigrants who had come to Charleston during the years before the Civil War accommodated themselves to the unique character of the antebellum city, the first years of both Bequest couples’ existence in the defeated South coincided with the complete revision of everyday life under the aegis of Reconstruction. When Bernhard Bequest relocated to the city in late 1865, he was attempting to establish himself as a grocer in Charleston and a farmer in Mount Pleasant at the same time the state—affronted by being under US military command—was being reprogrammed under Andrew Johnson’s Presidential Reconstruction so that it could be admitted back into the Union.

It was a less-than-propitious time to undertake a new beginning. We can assume, nonetheless, that the German immigrant, new in town, had little choice but to adapt to the context in which he found himself. A month before Bequest returned to Charleston, a convention, held in Columbia, drew up the state’s new constitution, adopted its version of the Black Codes, and moved the state’s governmental offices from Charleston to Columbia.¹² Only shortly thereafter, South Carolina ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, which Page 68 →canceled slavery and released from bondage a perceptibly large population of Black freedmen. A year later, the state rejected the Fourteenth Amendment, effectively declaring that it was not interested in the matter of citizenship and equal protection for the formerly enslaved.¹³ When, in late 1866, the state passed legislation to name a commissioner who would encourage the immigration of European whites as a means to diminish the Black majority, Bequest might have questioned the white host community’s intent to further disempower its Black community, although his concerns were possibly put to rest when the city’s own German “influencer,” John Andreas Wagener, was appointed to the post in 1867.¹⁴ The unusualness of the 1867 “event” whereby former slaves were “allowed” to participate in the election of state and local officials would not have escaped him. After a few years living and working in Charleston, the immigrant Bequest would likely have appreciated the implications of the fact that the state’s 1868 constitution was drawn up by a convention whose elected Black representatives were a majority in a legislative body in which they had never previously participated. When Bernhard Bequest was naturalized in 1868, South Carolina’s population consisted of approximately 290,000 whites and 416,000 Blacks.¹⁵ By late 1870—likely to the dismay of the native-born whites in Charleston—a number of “firsts” were recorded for the state’s majority population: Jonathan Wright was elected to the State Supreme Court, Alonzo Ransier was elected as the state’s lieutenant governor, and Joseph Rainey was sworn to the US Congress—each an African American. The University of South Carolina would admit its first Black student in 1873.¹⁶

More likely than not, the newly arrived foreigner could feel overwhelmed by the “new” reality taking shape during the early postwar years. Not surprisingly, the German native would find comfort in his own, less politicized, heritage. Bequest sought out his fellow Germans by joining the Deutsche Schützengesellschaft in 1868. Recognized as the oldest rifle club in the United States, the Charleston club had been founded in 1855 and was a close-knit German society unto itself within the larger Charleston society. Belonging to the Schützen allowed the immigrant and his family to maintain something of their heritage in what, at times, must have seemed like an alien world. The Schützengesellschaft would become a cornerstone of life for many in the ethnic community, a center and nexus of social relationships that would sustain them whatever their personal circumstances might be.

Because of the war, the rifle club’s annual, much-enjoyed festival, the Schützenfest, had not been held for eight years. In May of 1868, a month after Bequest was voted in as an active member, the club, with permission from Page 69 →the federal government in Washington, again put on its festival. The German sharpshooters paraded in full complement down the streets of Charleston amid the acclamation of the crowds and the lively strains of music. Participating in the activities of the German Rifle Club would become the focal point of Bequest’s social life and define his identity within the German community. As was the case for many of his fellow immigrants, membership in the rifle club facilitated the members’ goal of establishing themselves within the Charleston community: Participation in the club’s activities and the favor that the club found in the community would facilitate the transformation of the German immigrant into a Charlestonian of German heritage.

Before the war, the annual Spring Schützenfest of the German Rifle Club had become a major event for Charleston’s inhabitants. Its revival in 1868 signaled that it had not lost any of its popularity in the local community. Effusive praise was the topic of the two-column article on the front page of the Charleston Daily News of May 8, 1869:

The fact that yesterday would be the concluding day of the Schuetzenfest, drew together the largest crowd that has ever been seen at the Platz. The trains, omnibuses, private and public vehicles were tasked to the utmost to convey the immense number of visitors. These were not confined to the Teutonic element. All nationalities and all classes flocked to the gay scene to enjoy the occasion, and witness or participate in its joys and amusements. The city was deserted; many stores were closed, and avenues of trade were as still and quiet as on Sunday. The very best spirit prevailed, and all seemed to enjoy themselves. It would be unwise even to guess at the amount of lager consumed. Kegs and barrels were emptied and replaced, and these again ran dry. Yet, to the honor of the Schuetzen be it said, there was not one riotous person on the ground. So much for lager, with our good Germans to drink it. No unpleasant incident jarred the harmonies of the day. The participants were all too good humored to get vexed with anybody. In the matter of courtesy, the German hosts were masters of the situation, and dispensed their heartfelt hospitality in a free and whole-souled manner.

At almost every annual Schützenfest, Bequest took a prize in the shooting contests. His talent with the rifle earned him first prize at the 1871 Schützenfest, when he became its King for the following year.

German men were regaled as heroes at the annual Schützenfests, and the members of the German Ladies’ Society played an equally important social Page 70 →role in the Charleston community. The report in the Charleston Daily News of November 1, 1870, on “The German Fair” put on by the Ladies’ Society speaks volumes about how Charlestonians regarded the Germans at the time:

The German Fair / A Triumph of Taste and Skill…. The sterling worth and unselfish feeling of the German citizens of Charleston are always displayed to best advantage when charity or religion appeals to the hearts which beat so warmly for God and Fatherland. They are thorough in their amusements. There is no lackadaisical enjoyment in the gala doings of the German. But when the religion of their fathers calls upon them for help and aid, their serious souls are stirred to the depths, and they labor with a zeal and devotion which no people can surpass…. The Germans are always staunch and true, and never have their finest qualities been shown to better advantage than in the Fair of the German Ladies’ Society, whose triumphant opening we chronicle today. The object of the Fair, we need hardly add, is to obtain the means of completing the new German Lutheran Church in King Street, whose tower already rears its head above the neighboring buildings.

The newspaper reporter concluded that “the opening night of the Fair of the German Ladies’ Society was successful beyond expectations…. The Germans of Charleston are never backward in giving their help to any measure which is for the good of the community.”

Despite the hyperbole inherent in newspaper reporting during this period, it is difficult to overlook the fact that, during these years, there was more than a modicum of judgment being passed by the host society on the German ethnic community. Charleston and its ruling class have not infrequently been accused of being paternalistic, and there is no lack of that in the aforementioned passages: They are a separate entity from Us, viewed and judged from a distance, as if the viewer in the center is looking at something on the periphery, ready and able to comment on them, “the Germans,” “their serious souls,” “the sunny splendor of their smile,” “their finest qualities,” “our most valuable citizens.” Although “the Germans” had, for some time, been making a very good impression on the natives, and even though they were well behaved and valuable members of the Charleston community, “old Charleston” would subconsciously keep the immigrants somewhat marginalized for yet a number of years. Nonetheless, and in spite of the host society’s perceived separation between themselves and the industrious immigrants, Page 71 →it is clear that the German community had become an important sector of Charleston’s populace.

During the politically tumultuous first decade of Bequest’s tenure in Charleston, the milestones of his personal life would take shape against the background of social expectations and attitudes of the Reconstruction years. As if to demonstrate a strong commitment to the native community that he wished to become a part of, three years after the war had ended and while Reconstruction was underway, the now-naturalized Bequest ran for the office of warden in the Mount Pleasant election in November of 1868, when Henry Tew was again elected as the town’s mayor. In the Charleston Daily News report of the election results, Bequest was one of eleven candidates for Warden: six were reported as Democrats, four were reported as Republicans and “colored,” and Bequest was reported as “white” and Republican. He received one vote—likely his own. The following day, the newspaper ran a retraction: “We are requested to say that the statement in the report of the Mount Pleasant election, published in our last issue, that Mr. Bequest is a Republican, is wholly incorrect.”¹⁷ The six Democrats had run away with the votes, the Black Republicans—likely “radical” Reconstructionists—were defeated, and the white immigrant with a mistaken political affiliation learned a lesson about playing in Reconstruction politics. In the next election in 1870, Bequest did much better, tying for the second highest number of votes (127) of the six wardens elected. The Charleston Daily News of September 13 reported that “the election passed off quietly. The parties chosen were all Reformers except the last.” Running as a Reformer was obviously preferable to running as a Republican. By age twenty-six, the German immigrant had assumed a more local identity. As would have been expected, in the course of five years, the host community had left its imprint, although it would not yet have transformed him into the fellow traveler to which ex-Brigadier General Ellison Capers would later lay claim.

Operating as a local merchant and public servant attuned to the politics of the community, Bequest would subsequently be elected mayor of Mount Pleasant. Not incidentally, his election in 1876 took place when the local and statewide politics led to the turbulent South Carolina gubernatorial battle between the “carpetbagger” incumbent, Daniel Chamberlain, and South Carolina’s Democratic scion, Wade Hampton. The deal with President Rutherford Hayes to withdraw federal troops from the State House in Columbia and put the Democrat Hampton in charge as governor effectively signaled the “redemption” of the state and its release from the intolerable demands of “Yankee” Reconstruction.¹⁸ An account of Mount Pleasant’s Page 72 →historic landscape notes that the 1876 election, which effectively overturned Black Republicanism and restored white Democrats to power in the district, state, and region, caused the town’s Black Republicans to seize the streets for an entire night while resident white Democrats, together with their few Black political allies, barricaded themselves in their homes.¹⁹ Absent evidence to the contrary, it is not unreasonable to suggest that Bequest played a small role in “overturning” Black Republicanism and “restoring” white Democrats to power, although it is doubtful that he stood for election intending to play such a role. It is safe to say that eleven years after his immigration, he was elected mayor because his constituents considered him a fellow Democrat, a respected villager who had demonstrated the German immigrants’ admirable qualities and who, it could be assumed, was one of their own. Given that the former German blockade runner had previously worked “on behalf” of the now-defeated Confederacy, it would have been typical of Mount Pleasant voters to assume that he had forsaken his heritage and become a Southerner devoted to the Confederacy’s peculiar history, its heroes, and its battlefields. While intending to be counted as a good citizen in the host community, Bequest would later find himself admired by fellow Southerners, such as ex-Brigadier General Ellison Capers, an “esteemed” ex-Confederate who considered the upstanding German immigrant worthy enough to be included among the Confederate brethren in the volume on South Carolina’s military history he was editing.

There is no dispute that the Southern states of the former Confederacy did not take Presidential—or any subsequent—Reconstruction efforts lying down. The indignities that Southerners had to suffer only strengthened their resolve to resist every modification that was to be made to their sacred past. Their defeat in the war made Southern elites increasingly more defensive about their right to exercise white supremacy and radicalized their response to being told how they should accept their loss and accommodate the new order. South Carolinians were recognized as the most profoundly resistant to the changes installed under Reconstruction, although it should be stated that Charleston’s nonnative population was, by and large, not to be counted among the indignant or radical.

Bernhard Bequest would not have been the only German immigrant to be challenged by, and likely accede to—indeed, benefit from—the character and mood of the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction years. Looking both backward and forward, the Bequest story demonstrates that although it took fortitude, determination, and a good measure of entrepreneurial spirit to become a successful businessman, it would also be necessary to tolerate Page 73 →and accommodate the values of the native-born community if one wanted to be accepted as a productive citizen. The immigrant had to accept the challenges of a society struggling to become part of a “new” South at the same time it was reluctant to forget its past and accept its future. Within the unsettledness of the radicalized political, social, and economic reconstruction that marked the last quarter of the century, Bequest—the immigrant German husband, father, and businessman—had little choice but to rise to the occasion.

In his analysis of how German immigrants became “white Southerners,” Jeffery Strickland claims that they were “a middleman minority community, occupying a middle tier on the racial and ethnic hierarchy below white southerners and above African Americans,” who after the Civil War “increasingly exhibited their desire to become white southerners.”²⁰ As a postwar resident landowner in Mount Pleasant since his immigration, Bequest could be considered a case in point: from his naturalization in 1868 to his service on the town council, to his election to Mount Pleasant’s mayoralty during the years when Democrat Wade Hampton and his conservative allies represented and monopolized the South Carolina political scene, Bequest’s desire to become a “white Southerner” was manifest in everything he did, as he and his fellow German immigrants accommodated the expectations of the host society.

As the Germans had gone through stages of asserting their cultural heritage on the local scene—for example, establishing the Schützengesellschaft and other paramilitary “social” organizations—they had, indeed, occupied a middle ground by inviting the enslaved and free Black population to attend and participate in the rifle club’s public functions. At the same time, however, they conscientiously displayed their martial uniforms and guns in exhibitionistic parades—the latter affirming the sense of white superiority assumed by the mostly native white crowds in attendance. By virtue of their increasing social and financial ascendancy, the Germans would become increasingly attuned to the platform of the Democratic Party. By 1871, they were sufficiently politically organized and recognized that one of their own—the much recognized, prominent, ethnic leader and former Confederate general John A. Wagener—could run for mayor of Charleston. In that election, a large-enough number of white Southerners endorsed Wagener’s candidacy that he would win a two-year term. By the middle of Reconstruction, however, Charleston’s Germans would be accused of having modified their initial openness to Charleston’s Black population by moving from the center to the right. African-American Republican politicians lashed out at the Germans for their efforts on behalf of the Democratic Party. The state’s Page 74 →Republican African-American lieutenant governor, Alonzo Ransier, proclaimed it “the basest ingratitude in General Wagener and the Germans to support a ticket in opposition to the rights of the colored people.” Ransier argued that the Germans had betrayed the African-American community: “So far as the negro is concerned—let the Germans remember when they came here in their blue shirts—you patronized them, traded with them, and through your patronage they are enabled to-day to raise their heads and now desire to govern us.”²¹

As an immigrant German grocer-become-white Southerner, Bequest could enjoy certain perquisites. For example, he could take advantage of the lien laws that existed at the time.²² There is record of him—a kind of sharecropper himself, farming a leased plot of one and a half acres—in his capacity as store owner providing supplies on credit to Frank Wallace, a less fortunate sharecropping citizen of the new, postbellum South. As furnishing merchant, Bequest functioned both as supplier and creditor in his community, practicing as the lien laws intended. He had become a man of his time in South Carolina, a merchant playing the role the state had created for his—and certain others’—benefit.

As was the case with most of his fellow immigrant businessmen, Bequest was on the lookout for additional opportunities that would improve his financial base and solidify his position in the community. By the time Reconstruction was on the wane, he had established a wood and lumberyard business in the city, prescient enough to predict that wood products would be in demand by a city physically constructing and reconstructing itself. The increasingly acculturated immigrant’s business acumen—or perhaps the readiness to take risks—is attested by the financial maneuvers he undertook to transition from Mount Pleasant storekeeper to the owner of a lumber business in the city itself. The sale of properties he had earlier acquired was, likewise, testimony to the immigrant inclination to own property, a privilege and right beyond the expectations of most European emigrants.²³

In 1886, the new Palmetto Company of the Fraternal Order of Knights of Pythias’s Uniform Rank was formed in Charleston. In January of 1887, the Company held an organizational meeting where the main order of business was taking measurements for the members’ uniforms—black frock coats and pants, white helmets and plumes, gilded belts, and swords and side arms. Bequest served as “Sir Knight Treasurer.” His role in organizing this new fraternal entity and his serving as its treasurer suggest that he was expanding his circle of contacts and involving himself in what might have been considered a more “American” fraternal association than his German-oriented Page 75 →rifle club. The similarities between the Schützen and the Pythians are, nevertheless, striking. The Schützenfest in 1885 was reported to have begun with “becoming military and Terpsichorean honors”—no doubt featuring splendidly impressive (to both spectators and “performers”) uniforms; the Pythians founding the Palmetto Company in 1886 were comparably thrilled with their handsome and imposing uniforms as well as with the prospect of marching in a parade to display their finery, swords, and side arms.²⁴ During the years after 1886, Bequest’s name is more often in the record in connection with the Pythians than with the Schützen, suggesting that he was possibly more comfortable in the company of the one fraternal group, dedicated as it was to “friendship, charity and benevolence,” as he transitioned into a citizen of Charleston at the end of the century. It could be argued that the former German sharpshooter was subtly modifying his identity through membership in a brotherhood that was more American, one that was “dedicated to the cause of universal peace and … pledged to the promotion of understanding among men of good will as the surest means of attaining it.”²⁵

In 1892 the members of the German Artillery—the venerable old and the sentimental young—celebrated the organization’s “semi-centennial” in October with an impressive parade, an event that received a lot of coverage in the local press.²⁶ If the columns in the News and Courier are accurate, most of Charleston’s citizens turned out to admire the marchers in their very impressive finery, and the adults, at least, to reflect on what the German Artillery stood for. The celebration once again certified that the Germans were held in high regard by the local citizenry. In a stirring speech before the parade got underway, Theodore Melchers, a member of one of the city’s prominent German families, presented a custom-made badge to the group’s leader, Capt. Frederick Wagener:

It is your untiring exertion which has made this company what it now is. It is through your influence and your work that to-day it owns this magnificent armory, second to none in the Southern States, and it is your untiring zeal which has made this day such a success. This beautiful jewel has been chosen with special care to commemorate your various services. You here behold the shield or battle flag of the ‘Lost Cause,’ surrounded by rays of glory, surmounted by the emblem of the Artillery, crossed cannons and the eagle—above which you see our national colors and those of Germany, united and held together by the coat-of-arms of our beloved State, South Carolina. These emblems are to denote that you fought as a true and brave defender of the ‘Lost Cause’: that you are a true son of the Fatherland, Page 76 →a loyal citizen of the United States, and a prince (a merchant prince) of South Carolina. Wear it near your heart as a perpetual memento of the love and esteem which your comrades bear you.²⁷

On this occasion, Bernhard Bequest rode with three of the German organization’s leaders in one of the eight carriages in the torchlight-parade spectacle celebrating the accomplishments of Frederick Wagener, a Confederate war hero who had fought bravely for the “Lost Cause” and then become one of Charleston’s leading businessmen.²⁸

Bequest’s honorary participation in this 1892 celebration of a fellow German as a “true and brave defender of the Lost Cause” affirms that, by the 1880s, he and likely many of his fellow compatriots had absorbed the “traditional conservative values of elite rule and local government” promoted and defended by South Carolina’s Confederate hero, Wade Hampton—whose 1876 election to the state’s governorship had framed Bequest’s own election to political office at the local level.²⁹ Later, when Hampton and his conservative followers were endorsing Black suffrage (which they expected to manage and “guide”), Bequest would have been receptive to the idea of extending the hand to the Black population as the Germans had done previously, notwithstanding the fact that Charleston’s Reconstruction Blacks felt betrayed by the Democrat-leaning Germans during the 1870s. The German-American businessman could much more comfortably side with the pro-Hampton elitists than affiliate with the antiaristocratic, less privileged whites who, in the 1880s, aligned themselves with the anti-Hampton demagogue, “Pitchfork Ben Tillman.” During this period, we cannot know whether Bequest continued to read the ethnic community’s German newspaper, the Deutsche Zeitung, to apprise himself of the political climate in Charleston. More likely, he satisfied his inherent (and learned) conservatism by regularly absorbing the “ardently pro-Hampton”³⁰ conservatism of Charleston’s News and Courier and its frequent promotion of Lost Cause issues.³¹

In June 1898, the Evening Post carried a condensed biography of the wood dealer:

In mentioning our citizens who have made a success by energy and business ability the name of B. H. Bequest stands among the leaders of Charleston’s prosperous men.

Mr. Bequest is a native of Germany, where he was reared and educated. In 1861 he entered Charleston harbor in the bark Goss under Capt. Vieting, that well known seaman (now deceased). The morning he entered the Page 77 →harbor the confederate flag was flying over Fort Sumter, and a short time after, Mr. Bequest, true to the cause he believed right, entered the Confederate service and experienced some thrilling adventures in the blockade service under Capt. Moore, steamer Fannie. He was on the Stonewall Jackson/Sirene with Capt. Black, and others.

Mr. Bequest is an old and tried seaman, having serviced in England, Scotland, Russia, Mexico, West Indies, etc.

After the war Mr. Bequest started in the grocery business on a very small scale at Mount Pleasant, remaining there for sixteen years. He was one of the leading citizens and enjoyed the confidence of the people. He was honored by the people, serving in the city council and four years as mayor.

In 1885 he came to Charleston and established his present business, which at that time was on a very small scale. But when, as before, hustling, coupled with untiring energy, and strict honest business principles won, and Mr. Bequest was enabled gradually to build up his now large and lucrative business. His plant is large and commodious, covering an acre of ground. He is a wholesale and retail dealer in oak and pine wood, oak and pine blocks, gravel and white sand, wood sawed and delivered to any part of the city. Vessels supplied at low rates. Mr. Bequest has all the modern conveniences for the successful prosecution of his work, the capacity of the plant being fifteen cords per diem.

Eight wagons are run and ten men given employment. To say that he has made a success is but to read the above.

Mr. Bequest stands high both commercially and socially in the city. He is a member of the German Artillery, a K. of P. Uniform rank, having been treasurer for many years. He is also a member of the German Rifle Club, having been king twice.

Mr. Bequest is also a member of several other organizations of the city, and a public spirited, progressive gentleman who believes in pushing Charleston and the Palmetto State to the front.³²

If this laudatory biographical summary of Charleston’s “Mr. Bequest” rings familiar, it is because the newspaper reporter has blatantly plagiarized the biographical account of the “successful” Bequest by Ellison Capers that initially brought the immigrant blockade runner to our attention.³³ In addition to following Capers’s biographical outline, the reporter also unambiguously mentions the “cause” to which Mr. Bequest was “true” and “believed right.” In 1898, there was no other “cause” other than the lost one.³⁴

Page 78 →As suggested earlier, the former Confederate brigadier general’s turn-of-the-century enthusiastic endorsement of the immigrant Bequest’s life in Charleston—from the latter’s youth as a blockade runner to his maturity as a successful businessperson—was tantamount to Capers’s appropriating Bequest for his purposes in presenting and memorializing the foremost men in South Carolina’s military history. Both Ellison Capers, the ex-Confederate brigadier general and editor of the account of South Carolina’s valorous military past, and Clement Evans, Capers’s fellow ex-Confederate brigadier general and series editor/publisher, were unhesitatingly happy to claim the immigrant as one of their own.

Engaged as he was in reliving and re-presenting the past, it was easy for Capers to relate to Bequest’s youthful “military” accomplishments as a blockade runner and, in particular, note that the mature, successful merchant was a member of the German Artillery. There were, in fact, other markers of militarism peculiar to the city’s German immigrants that would resonate with the guardians of the Confederate cause. It was a fact that Charleston’s Germans had long been associated with the city’s military presence. When the newspapers were calling the 1874 Schützenfest “The People’s Festival,” it was advertised as “a Grand Military Pageant.” In the annual parade, the Germans were more than noticeable among the host of paramilitary organizations marching by.³⁵ This blatant military pageant/display marching through the streets of Charleston was, at the time, a white show of force during some of the darkest days of Reconstruction.

By the late 1880s, when the Lost Cause “religion” was reaching its zenith,³⁶ a number of Charleston’s German “militia-like” groups (e.g., the German Fusiliers) were still active participants in the city’s protective services involved in keeping the peace.³⁷ It was not by accident that Charleston’s German volunteer militias, like other ethnic militias in “the martially charged culture of the South,” would early on assume a protectionist role.³⁸ Similar to the Schützen, these paramilitary organizations persisted for decades in “protecting” Charleston. The city’s perceived need of protection, combined with the Germans’ readiness to function as protectors was a case of mutual dependency: Charleston’s native white population had, since the early 1820s, been intent on defending itself against the threat of those under its control. That context, together with a resident ethnic population ready to offer its “military sense” in protecting the larger community against its enemies, was a mutually beneficial arrangement.

Undoubtedly, when Capers was editing his volume on South Carolina’s Confederate military history in the 1890s, he was aware of Bequest’s Page 79 →political orientation as mayor of Mount Pleasant; more specifically, that he was elected in 1876, the year when Wade Hampton played such a pivotal role in the state’s history. It was then that Hampton had effectively “redeemed” South Carolina, and Bequest, innocently or purposefully, had played his part in “overturning” Black Republicanism to restore white Democrats to power. It may have actually been the case that Bequest came to mayoral “power” on the coattails of, or at least the general enthusiasm for, Hampton. Charles J. Holden has argued that “South Carolina’s conservatives, like their antebellum forefathers, persistently fought to stem the national tide toward mass democracy. Their effort to reconfigure a regime of elite rule over the former slaves and poor whites succeeded in part through their constant promotion of Hampton and his war exploits and his role in the 1876 election.”³⁹ By virtue of their enthrallment with Wade Hampton, conservatives’ belief in elite rule dovetailed neatly with the general precept of the Lost Cause that held Confederate leaders to be the better men.

Bequest’s participation in the German Artillery’s 1892 ceremony honoring Frederick Wagener as a true and brave defender of the Lost Cause would have been reason enough for Capers to claim him as a fellow Confederate. Perhaps Capers himself was a participant in the ceremony, inclined to take it for granted that the entire membership of the German Artillery—all conservative Charleston Germans-become-Southerners—could be counted as devotees of the South’s Lost Cause. However he knew of Bernhard Bequest, Capers could see in the Artillery’s German immigrant a specimen worth co-opting as one of the notable “better men” of South Carolina’s past and present.

What happened with Bernhard Bequest would have been similar to what happened to many members of the nineteenth-century German ethnic community as they underwent the process of becoming citizens of the host community. The native-born who fought the war and remembered it long afterward found the German immigrants to their liking when their criteria for “adopting” them were met so admirably. It was inevitable during these times that the values and ideals the immigrants had come with would be overtaken by what developed as a postwar “religion” that ever so fervently focused on the Confederacy of the past.⁴⁰ Bequest was an exemplary case of the Charleston immigrant whose original intentions—to become a naturalized, successful, free, and independent American businessman—were diverted by the postwar host society’s attitudes, ideals, and beliefs. Consumed for decades by remembering its communal past and hesitantly facing a less sectional future, by the turn of the century, the host community’s Page 80 →manifest Lost Cause ideology had successfully captured the immigrant guest in its midst and brought the foreigner into the fold of the Confederacy’s defenders.

In the early morning hours of October 28, 1899, Bequest died unexpectedly in his home at the age of fifty-five. The funeral was held the next day—Sunday—at St. Matthew’s German Lutheran Church at three o’clock in the afternoon. The funeral notice in the Sunday morning News and Courier included the call to the Pythian Palmetto Company to attend “in citizens’ dress,” as well as to the Pythian Stonewall Lodge, whose members were to assemble at Pythian Castle Hall to pay tribute “to your late brother Member B. H. Bequest.” On Monday, October 30, the News and Courier took notice in its “All around Town” column: “The funeral services of the late Mr. Bernhard H. Bequest were held at St. Matthew’s German Lutheran Church yesterday afternoon, and the remains interred at Bethany Cemetery with Pythian ceremonies. Mr. Bequest was an estimable citizen of Charleston, and had been for many years in business here.” That he died “an estimable citizen of Charleston” was validation of a thirty-four-year-long struggle through the hard times of Reconstruction and the fading of Charleston into the backwash of the New South during the final decades of the century. A life that had begun with daring adventure and a vision of opportunity had progressed through service to the public and dedicated efforts as a landowner, merchant, and entrepreneur, ultimately to be acknowledged and admired by leading proponents of the Confederate Lost Cause as one of their better men.

Robert Alston Jones is a Charleston native and emeritus professor of German at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He holds degrees in German Literature and Language from Duke University and the University of Texas–Austin. He has recently published Charleston’s Germans: An Enduring Legacy, an examination of Charleston’s nineteenth-century community of German immigrants and the role it played in the evolution of ante- and postbellum Charleston.