Born in 1829 in Barnwell, South Carolina to a planter family, Hagood attended the private Richmond Academy in Augusta, Georgia. He attended the South Carolina Military Academy, graduating in 1847 at the top of his class. He was admitted to the bar in 1850, but never practiced law because he preferred the life of a cotton planter, attending to his plantation acres and the work of enslaved African Americans.
After defeating Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the all-black 54th Massachusetts Regiment at the second Battle of Fort Wagner in July 1863, commanding Confederate General Johnson Hagood had the bodies of nearly all the dead Union officers returned to their lines, as was customary. But he deliberately had Shaw's body buried in a mass grave with his black soldiers, which was considered an insult. Like many Confederate officers, he believed that the African-American soldiers were fugitive slaves and characterized the attack on the fort as a slave revolt led by Shaw. Hagood reportedly told a captured Union surgeon that ordinarily the officer's body would have been released for burial, but said, "We buried him with his niggers." At the end of the war, Hagood's troops were serving under General Joseph E. Johnston in North Carolina. He may have surrendered with Johnston at Durham Station in April, 1865, although Hagood's brigade was then commanded by its senior colonel at the time. No record of Hagood's parole has ever been found.
Postbellum political career
After the war, Hagood resumed operating his plantation. Like other planters, he struggled with the change to free labor after slaves were emancipated. Many freedmen who had been associated with his plantation continued to work for him, but others left for towns and urban areas. He resented the administration of Radical Republicans during Reconstruction. He actively campaigned for fellow Confederate general Wade Hampton in the 1876 gubernatorial contest and was elected on the Democratic state ticket as Comptroller General. The campaign season was marked by white violence against freedmen, to suppress their voting and defeat Republicans, and many county returns were noted for fraud, where intimidation of freedmen had continued by Democrats at the polls. Hagood served one term. In 1880, he was nominated by the state Democrats for Governor and easily won the gubernatorial election that fall, as Democrats again suppressed black voting and the federal government had withdrawn its troops in 1877. Hagood's major achievement in his two-year term, to December 1882, was the reopening of The Citadel in 1882. Hagood died in Barnwell on January 4, 1898. He was buried at Church of the Holy Apostles Episcopal cemetery.
Legacy and honors
Johnson Hagood Stadium at The Citadel was named in his honor.
Hagood, South Carolina is named for him, as well as several streets throughout South Carolina.
