SC says goodbye to Hugh Leatherman, a State House giant from the Pee Dee
For four decades, people across the Palmetto State sought out Hugh Leatherman, the man who wielded the power of the state’s purse strings as the influential, longtime chairman of the Senate’s budget-writing committee.
On Friday, a week after Leatherman died at 90 years old, South Carolinians came to him for a final time.
Hundreds, from Gov. Henry McMaster, to members of the General Assembly and staff, to a former governor, government leaders and Florence community members gathered inside the Francis Marion University Performing Arts Center to say their final goodbyes to the veteran senator who represented part of the Pee Dee region for 41 years.
Hugh Leatherman, said the Rev. Jimmie Harley, was “a man who gave life his all. He invested his life wisely and properly.”
Leatherman died Nov. 12 of a non-COVID-19-related illness after a stay in hospice care after the discovery of inoperable cancer. The Florence Republican, who represented a part of Darlington County, was in his 11th term — making him one of the longest-serving South Carolina lawmakers and considered the most powerful because of the two decades he served as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.
Leatherman was influential in helping to lure mammoth economic development deals to the state and to his home county, from Boeing in North Charleston to the expansion of the Port of Charleston, which bears Leatherman’s name on one of its terminals.
But at home in Florence County, despite being a senator whose named evoked a seriousness that matched his power in the General Assembly, he was described Friday by clergy and his close friend of three decades Fred Carter as religious, humble, giving and a sincere and devoted family man.
“Forty-one years later, he’s become one of the most influential and successful elected leaders in the state. A simple Horatio Alger story? Not at all. Nothing about Hugh Leatherman was mythical, and his story was as complex as the man,” Carter, the president of Francis Marion University, said in his eulogy. “He possessed an amazing intellect, coupled with an enormous reservoir of compassion. He was usually the humblest person at the table, seldom got angry, and in 33 years, I can’t recall him ever raising his voice.”
Born on a cotton farm in rural Lincoln County, North Carolina, Leatherman started his political career in 1967 on South Carolina’s Quinby Town Council. He was first elected to the Senate in 1980 as a Democrat at the time, before switching parties in the ‘90s. He won his last term in 2020. Leatherman unsuccessfully ran for governor in 1986, failing to break through the primary — a campaign that Leatherman called his “biggest political mistake of his life,” Carter said.
In the mid-1990s, he switched political parties as part of a legislative Republican wave.
The party switch never hurt Leatherman’s career, as he became one of the state’s savviest politicians, chairing the powerful Senate Finance Committee for two decades and serving as Senate president pro tempore for about five years.
“He used politics as a means of formulating some of the state’s more meaningful policy – in infrastructure, economic development, education, higher education, trade and international investment, health care, workforce development, and so on and so on,” Carter said. “No one better understood the nexus between politics and policy, and no one was more shrewd strategically at applying it.”
It was his wife, Jean, his family, his Senate colleagues and staffers and his Florence community, though, he loved the most.
“Jean was the nucleus, and so much that was magical in his life radiated from her. She was also his compass and rudder, as he often acknowledged,” Carter said. “If Jean was the compass, you (the children, Shelia, Ken, Karen, Lynn, Amy, and Sarah) were the anchors.”
In what could be described as a fitting bookend to the veteran politician’s long career, the eulogy was followed with Nick Townsend’s rendition of “I Did it May Way,” a song popularized by Frank Sinatra.
A special election to fill the unexpired term of Leatherman’s Florence County seat in the Senate will be held March 29.
Primary elections are scheduled for Jan. 25 and runoffs Feb. 8, if necessary. Filing opens Dec. 3 and runs until noon Dec. 11.
Senate President Harvey Peeler, R-Cherokee, is expected to succeed Leatherman as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. With his position vacated, state Sen. Thomas Alexander, R-Oconee, is highly likely to become the next Senate president.
This story was originally published November 19, 2021 at 4:57 PM with the headline "SC says goodbye to Hugh Leatherman, a State House giant from the Pee Dee."
