Daniel Henry Chamberlain (23 June 1835-13 April 1907) was the Republican Governor of South Carolina from 1 December 1874 to 11 April 1877, succeeding Franklin J. Moses Jr. and preceding Wade Hampton III.
Biography[]
Daniel Henry Chamberlain was born in West Brookfield, Massachusetts in 1835, and he left Harvard in 1863 to serve in the white-led, Black 5th Massachusetts Cavalry Regiment during the American Civil War. He moved to South Carolina in 1866 to tend to the affairs of a deceased classmate, and he served as a delegate to the 1868 state constitutional convention as a delegate from Berkeley County. He served as state attorney general from 1868 to 1872 and as Governor from 1874 to 1877, and, while he supported Black civil rights, he prioritized cleaning up the corrupt mess inherited from his predecessor, "the Robber Governor" Franklin J. Moses Jr.. He vetoed high tax rates, cut public servants' salaries by a third, supported "convict lease" programs rather than pay for penitentiaries, and shipped off lunatic asylum patients to county poorhouses to cut down on funding for mental institutions. Chamberlain, as a reformist Republican, sought bipartisan support, but the Democratic Party chose to back the white supremacist Redeemers rather than support Chamberlain's reform agenda, and Chamberlain disputed the results of the violent 1876 gubernatorial election, which saw the Democrat Wade Hampton III be elected governor. Chamberlain was forced to leave for New York City upon the withdrawal of federal troops from his state at the end of Reconstruction, and he became a successful Wall Street attorney and professor at Cornell. He later moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, where he died in 1907.