Robert Kingston Scott (8 July 1826 – 12 August 1900) was the Republican Governor of South Carolina from 6 July 1868 to 7 December 1872, succeeding James Lawrence Orr and preceding Franklin J. Moses Jr..
Biography[]
Robert Kingston Scott was born in Armstrong County, Pennsylvania in 1826, and he practiced law in Henry County, Ohio and joined the anti-slavery Liberty Party. He served as colonel of the 68th Ohio Infantry Regiment during the American Civil War, serving in John A. Logan's division in the Western theater and being captured during the Atlanta campaign, later jumping from a prison train and rejoining the Union Army. He ended the war as a Brigadier-General, and he worked for the Freedmen's Bureau in South Carolina during Reconstruction before entering politics. He served as the Republican Governor of South Carolina from 1868 to 1872, and he formed Black militias to suppress white supremacist resistance to the Reconstruction regime; the powerful Ku Klux Klan assassinated his ally, the Black leader Benjamin F. Randolph, and most whites in South Carolina were bitterly hostile towards his government. He moved to Napoleon, Ohio in 1877 after the Democratic Redeemers came to power, and he died in 1900.