The Red Shirts, like the Ku Klux, sprang into existence almost as by accident. General Hampton was to speak at Anderson. The Saturday before Colonel R. W. Simpson proposed to the Pendleton Club the adoption of a badge, suggesting a red shirt as cheap and conspicuous. Pickens men caught up the idea. Red store supplies ran out and another club donned white ones. The three clubs numbered a body of three hundred or more stalwart, fine-looking men of the hill-country, who had nearly all seen service on battlefields, and who rode like centaurs. Preceded by the Pendleton Brass Band, they made an imposing procession at the Fair Grounds on the day of the speaking, and were greeted with ringing cheers. The band-wagon was red; red flags floated from it and from the heads of four horses in red trappings; the musicians wore red garments; instruments were wrapped in red. The effect was electrical. In marching and countermarching military tactics were employed with the effect of magnifying numbers to the eyes of the negroes, who had had no idea that so many white men were alive. The red shirt uniform idea spread; a great red-shirted army sprang into existence and was on hand at public meetings to see that speakers of the White Man's Party had equal hearing with the Black Republicans. The Red Shirts rode openly by day and by night, and where they wound their scarlet ways women and children felt new sense of security. Many under its protection were negroes. Hampton strove hard to win the negro vote. He had been one of the first after the war to urge qualified suffrage for them. In public speeches he declared that, if elected, he would be "the governor of all the people of South Carolina, white and black." He got a large black vote. Years after, when he lay dying, friends bending to catch his last words, heard him murmur: "God bless my people, white and black!"