# Martin W. Gary **Martin Witherspoon Gary** (March 25, 1831 – April 9, 1881) was a Confederate brigadier general, Edgefield lawyer, and South Carolina state senator who authored the **Edgefield Plan** — the written strategy for taking South Carolina back from Reconstruction by intimidating, defrauding and murdering Black voters. Known as the **"Bald Eagle of Edgefield"** for his temper, he led the "Straight-out" faction of the state Democratic Party, the wing that rejected any accommodation with Black political participation. Gary matters to this knowledge base because he appears on **both faces of the same project**, five years apart, and shows they were one project. In 1871 he was a leading member of the **Tax-Payers' Convention** in Columbia — the respectable, explicitly race-neutral argument that South Carolina's problem was propertyless men taxing propertied ones. In 1876 he wrote the plan for the shotgun. See [[Reconstruction and Its Overthrow]] for how the two fit together. ## The Edgefield Plan Gary's strategy — surviving as a manuscript titled "Plan of the Campaign of 1876," and called the **Edgefield Plan** after him — was a modified version of the Mississippi Plan, sometimes called the "Shotgun Policy." It organized white Democratic **rifle clubs**, the [[Red Shirts]], to operate under the cover of campaign events and polling-place order-keeping, and prescribed bribery, fraud, physical intimidation and murder to keep Black Republicans from voting. The South Carolina Encyclopedia describes it as deliberately pitting race against race. It worked. [[Wade Hampton III]] became governor, and Reconstruction in South Carolina ended. ## The break with Hampton Gary claimed credit for persuading Hampton to run and believed the 1876 victory was his. Hampton did not endorse the violent plan and, once governor, pursued a policy of public magnanimity toward Black South Carolinians that Gary despised. Hampton's machine blocked Gary's U.S. Senate bids in **1877** and **1879** and prevented his gubernatorial candidacy in **1880**. From 1877 until his death Gary was the Hampton machine's most bitter critic. He was elected to the South Carolina Senate from Edgefield County in **1876**, defeating Lawrence Cain, re-elected in **1878**, and served until **1881**. He died at the family home in Cokesbury on April 9, 1881. Gary's politics did not die with him. The Edgefield "Straight-out" position — that there was no legitimate Black political role to accommodate — was carried forward by his county's next national figure, [[Benjamin Tillman]], whose 1895 constitutional convention wrote disenfranchisement into South Carolina's fundamental law. ## See Also - [[Wade Hampton III]] — The candidate Gary's plan installed, and his enemy afterward - [[Red Shirts]] — The rifle clubs the Edgefield Plan organized - [[Benjamin Tillman]] — The Edgefield successor who finished the work legally - [[Reconstruction and Its Overthrow]] — The larger campaign, including the 1871 tax-argument recoding Gary helped lead - [[Paris Commune]] — The 1871 import that made the propertyless-voter argument plausible to Northern readers