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During my freshman year at Davidson College, I discovered that I was probably named for Confederate General Wade Hampton. At the time, the 1970s, I didn’t think much of it. 

My father was born in New Jersey, my mother in Indiana, and we didn’t move to Wilmington, North Carolina from Arizona until I was 7 years old. I remember my father coming home from work about six months after we moved and saying to my mother, “My God, they’re still living the Civil War here!”  

The next time I thought about Wade Hampton was last summer while driving home from work listening to Ron Chernow’s “Grant” on CD. On that drive, I learned that Gen. Hampton, who was immensely loved by his veteran comrades, led 20,000 militia successors to the Ku Klux Klan during his 1876 campaign for governor of South Carolina. 

Just five years prior, President Ulysses S. Grant had succeeded enacting the Civil Rights Act of 1871, which authorized federal armed forces to combat the Ku Klux Klan which had been terrorizing blacks throughout the South. 

This militia in South Carolina was called the Red Shirts, a paramilitary arm of the Democratic Party. Along with “rifle clubs” throughout the South, they put an end to Reconstruction in 1876. The murder of 150 African-American South Carolinians that year was part of the suppression of votes that not only ensured Wade Hampton’s election but also put the nation on a firm path to a century of Jim Crow denial of basic civil rights for black people. 

It was slavery by another name. 

That same year, my great grandfather was born in January and named for the beloved general. He was the first Hampton Auld. I was the fourth. His father had been born in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, fought in the Civil War, and was present for the surrender at Appomattox.  

Our family was blissfully ignorant of the “War Between the States,” Robert E. Lee, and most definitely ignorant of Wade Hampton. My namesake was seen as the “savior” of white South Carolinians and went from general to governor to senator. A county was formed and named for him, as were streets, parks, high schools, and boulevards. Statues of him stand in the U.S. Capitol and on the capitol grounds in Columbia, South Carolina. 

Scarlett O’Hara’s son in “Gone with the Wind” is named Wade Hampton Hamilton. My great grandfather was named for him and I was the last to be given this name. 

By the time I arrived home after listening to “Grant," I decided to change my name, legally. I understood that four generations of Hampton Aulds began with a defeated Confederate soldier’s pride in his general and glorification of what became known as the “Lost Cause.” 

I’ve lived my whole life fully aware of the unfairness and injustice at the heart of our society. Because I didn’t want to dishonor my late father or grandfather, I took my father’s middle name, Charles. It became official in August 2019.    

In these days when removing monuments to the Confederacy is being understood more and more as the right thing to do, I’m glad I took this personal step to uproot and discard a name that in itself was a monument to the horrors inflicted upon our fellow black citizens of America. I can’t help but imagine what American history might have been over the past 144 years if the nation had fully ended slavery. 

Even all these years after the civil rights reforms of the 1960s, white privilege still lies at the base of life in America. For me, I just wanted to tear down the highly personal monument to the Confederacy in my own family history. 

Davidsonville resident Skip Auld is the CEO of the Anne Arundel County Public library. This column was also submitted to the Richmond Times Dispatch.