Wigg, James

Legislator. Wigg was born a slave in Beaufort County around 1850. As a young boy during the Union occupation of the Sea Islands, he earned money waiting on the U.S. Army officers stationed on Hilton Head Island. He was evidently a clever youngster and gained the favor of the abolitionist General David Hunter. After the war, Hunter took Wigg to Washington and enrolled him in the Whalen Institute. Wigg proved to be an apt student of theology and was described as “an earnest follower of Swedenborg,” the eighteenth-century Swedish scientist and mystic.

Wigg returned to Beaufort County after his formal education. He became a large landowner and prosperous cotton farmer on St. Helena Island during the 1880s. In 1888 he was elected school commissioner for Beaufort County on the “People’s Ticket,” a fusionist political movement comprised of moderate black Republicans and moderate white Democrats. Wigg was elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives from Beaufort County for the Fifty-ninth General Assembly, serving one term from 1890 to 1891. During the election of 1892, Wigg fell out with the “People’s Ticket” and ran as a Republican for Beaufort County sheriff against a black fusionist candidate, George A. Reed. He lost to Reed by 107 votes. During the 1892 election campaign, Wigg was described as a “very uninfluential yellow man” by the Beaufort newspaper, the Palmetto Post, a Democratic organ and fusionist mouthpiece.

When the Tillman wing of the South Carolina Democratic Party called for a constitutional convention in 1895 to disfranchise African Americans, Wigg was selected as a delegate from Beaufort County. During the convention Wigg, along with Robert Smalls, William J. Whipper, Thomas E. Miller, and Isaiah R. Reed, maintained a heroic but futile rearguard action against the dominant Democratic majority. Wigg, described as “an adroit needler of white delegates,” made his most telling points at the convention by challenging the Democrats to impose a true property test and true literacy test for voting in South Carolina. He claimed that such tests would produce only a small majority of white votes in South Carolina. Such tests honestly applied would have retained an overwhelming black majority in Beaufort County. Wigg’s amendments were rejected by the convention. In the end, the Beaufort delegates refused to sign the South Carolina Constitution of 1895.

Political opportunity for Beaufort’s black leadership gradually disappeared after 1895, and the Sea Island cotton economy declined as well. Wigg disappeared from the public record, and his date of death is not known.

Miller, Edward A. Gullah Statesman: Robert Smalls from Slavery to Congress, 1839–1915. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995.

South Carolina. Constitutional Convention, 1895. Journal of the Constitutional Convention of the State of South Carolina. Columbia, S.C.: C. A. Calvo, 1895.

Tindall, George Brown. South Carolina Negroes, 1877–1900. 1952. Reprint, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003.