His somber appearance at The Citadel, South Carolina’s military college and Mr. Hollings’s alma mater, was not the 2020 debut the former vice president and his aides were planning. But his eulogy underscored Mr. Biden’s deep ties to this pivotal state with its high percentage of black voters — and the promise and peril of his candidacy.

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Mr. Biden once described Mr. Hollings as his best friend in the Senate. And as he recalled in strikingly subdued tones Tuesday, it was Mr. Hollings and his wife, Peatsy, who helped persuade him to remain in the Senate when his wife and daughter were killed in a car accident shortly after he was first elected in 1972.

“Aside from my family, the first people to bring me back from that black hole I was in were Fritz and Peatsy, that’s not hyperbole,” he said.



That friendship is what first brought Mr. Biden to South Carolina, where Mr. Hollings would introduce him to many of his political allies. Eventually, Mr. Biden began vacationing in the state, usually staying on one of the barrier islands near Mr. Hollings’s native Charleston. The relationships Mr. Biden developed here now form the nucleus of his support network in the first-in-the-South primary state.

Those connections were on vivid display as the former vice president stood before hundreds of mourners in the cadet chapel. It was an audience that included scores of influential state and local Democratic officials such as Representative James Clyburn, a fellow eulogist and the highest-ranking African-American in Congress.