Reconstruction, Public Memory, and the Making of Clemson University on John C. Calhoun’s Fort Hill Plantation

Clemson University has functioned partly as a site for memorials to Confederates since its establishment on John C. Calhoun’s Fort Hill plantation in upstate South Carolina as a public land-grant institution in 1889 on the eve of the Nadir, the lowest point in race relations in the US. For many years, the university has presented its founder Thomas Green Clemson, Calhoun’s son-in-law, as a Renaissance man, agricultural scientist, and visionary philanthropist, while largely ignoring his roles as slaveholder and Confederate Army officer. The university has also been reluctant to acknowledge publicly its earliest trustees’ and professors’ identities as Confederate veterans, its founder’s participation in the sharecropping system that routinely exploited former slaves...