Background
His second great-grandfather Thomas Hampton (1623–1690) was born in England and settled in the Virginia Colony.
United States representative politician
His second great-grandfather Thomas Hampton (1623–1690) was born in England and settled in the Virginia Colony.
He was the scion of the politically important Hampton family, which was influential in state politics almost into the 20th century. Hampton served in the American Revolutionary War as a lieutenant colonel in a South Carolina volunteer cavalry regiment. He was a Democratic-Republican member of Congress for South Carolina from 1795 to 1797 and from 1803 to 1805, and a presidential elector in 1801.
He was appointed to the United States Army as Colonel of Regiment of Light Dragoons in October 1808, and was promoted to Brigadier General in February 1809, appointed as the top military officer in the Territory of Orleans.
He used the United States. military presence in New Orleans to suppress the 1811 German Coast Uprising, a slave revolt which he believed was a Spanish plot. In the same year, he purchased The Houmas, a sugar plantation in Ascension Parish, Louisiana.
During the War of 1812, Hampton led the American forces in the Battle of the Chateauguay in 1813. On April 6, 1814, he resigned his commission and returned to South Carolina, after leading thousands of United States. soldiers to defeat, at the hands of a little over a thousand colonial Canadian militia and 180 Mohawk warriors, then getting his army lost in the woods.
Thereafter, he acquired a large fortune through land speculation.
At his death in the 1830s, it was said that he was the wealthiest planter in the United States. and owned more than 3,000 slaves. Hampton had a mansion, now known as the Hampton-Preston House, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, in Columbia, South Carolina. Hampton County, South Carolina, is named for the former Congressman.
The younger man served as the state"s first Democratic Party governor after the American Civil War and then was elected to the United States Senate.
During the war, he had a distinguished career as a general in the Confederate army.