The Hamburg massacre (or Red Shirt massacre or Hamburg riot) was a riot in the United States town of Hamburg, South Carolina, in July 1876, leading up to the last election season of the Reconstruction era. It was the first of a series of civil disturbances planned and carried out by white Democrats in the majority-black Republican Edgefield District, with the goal of suppressing black Americans' civil rights and voting rights and disrupting Republican meetings, through actual and threatened violence.[1]
Beginning with a dispute over free passage on a public road, the massacre was rooted in racial hatred and political motives. A court hearing attracted armed white "rifle clubs," colloquially called the "Red Shirts". Desiring to regain control of state governments and eradicate the civil rights of black Americans, over 100 white men attacked about 30 black servicemen of the National Guard at the armory, killing two as they tried to leave that night. Later that night, the Red Shirts tortured and murdered four of the militia while holding them as prisoners, and wounded several others. In total, the events in Hamburg resulted in the death of one white man and six black men with several more blacks being wounded. Although 94 white men were indicted for murder by a coroner's jury, none were prosecuted.
The events were a catalyst in the overarching violence in the volatile 1876 election campaign. There were other episodes of violence in the months before the election, including an estimated 100 blacks killed during several days in Ellenton, South Carolina, also in Aiken County. The Southern Democrats succeeded in "redeeming" the state government and electing Wade Hampton III as governor. During the remainder of the century, they passed laws to establish single-party white rule, impose legal segregation and "Jim Crow," and disenfranchise blacks with a new state constitution adopted in 1895. This exclusion of blacks from the political system was effectively maintained into the late 1960s.
Background
Hamburg was a market town populated by a majority of freed blacks in Aiken County, across the Savannah River from Augusta, Georgia. Aiken was the only county in the state to have been organized during the Reconstruction era.[2] Following the end of the War, the defunct market town was repopulated by freedmen. (It had been made obsolete by the expansion of the South Carolina Railroad into Augusta.) Many blacks in the postwar period moved from rural areas to cities to escape white violence and gain safety in their own communities.
As Democrats sought to regain control of the state legislature, their leaders planned to disrupt Republican events, as outlined in Confederate veteran General Martin W. Gary's "Plan of the Campaign of 1876" (also known as the Edgefield Plan).[1] On July 4, 1876, Independence Day, two white planters drove in a carriage down Hamburg's wide Market Street, where they encountered a local militia company, which was drilling (or parading) under command of Captain D. L. "Doc" Adams.
Events
The men in the Hamburg Company militia were entirely black and mostly freedmen. A white supremacist group called the Red Shirts, led by Benjamin Tillman, who later went on serve a 24-year career in the United States Senate and whose term was marked by enacting racist legislation, instigated confrontations with the black citizens by claiming that said freedmen intentionally blocked passage of public roads and denied passage to any white man. Alternate sources say that a carriage of white men intentionally drove up against the head of the column to cause a civil disturbance. In any case, after an exchange of words, the Red Shirts, also called "white planters", passed through the ranks of the black parade.[3][4]:314
The Red Shirts then went to the local court, where, at a hearing on July 6, they accused the militia with obstruction of a public road before Trial Justice Prince Rivers. The case was continued until the afternoon of July 8. More than 100 whites from Edgefield and Aiken counties arrived at court, armed with "shotguns, revolvers, hoes, axes and pitchforks."[5] At that time, Matthew Calbraith Butler, an attorney from Edgefield, appeared as the planters' counsel. (Of the many men surnamed Butler who were involved in the incident, he was referred to as 'General' Butler, based on his service in the Confederate Army.) Despite the lack of any official standing, M. C. Butler demanded for the Hamburg company to disband and turn their guns over to him personally.[4]:314–315
As armed white men gathered in the vicinity, the militia company refused to disarm and took refuge in the armory in the Sibley building near the Charlotte, Columbia and Augusta Railroad bridge. The white militia surrounded the building. Perhaps 25 black militia and 15 others were in the building when firing began. In the exchange of gunfire, McKie Meriwether, a local white farmer, was killed.
Map for the Hamburg massacre. From Budiansky, 231
Outnumbered, running out of ammunition, and upon learning that the whites had brought a small cannon to the city from Augusta, the militia in the armory slipped away into the night. James Cook, Hamburg's Town Marshal, was shot and killed in the street.[6]:233–234[7]
The white supremacist militia rounded up around two dozen black citizens, some from the militia, and at about 2 a.m, took them to a spot near the South Carolina Railroad and bridge. There, the whites formed what was later called the "Dead Ring" and debated the fate of the black men. The whites picked out four men and, going around the ring, murdered them one at a time; these men were as follows: Allan Attaway, David Phillips, Hampton Stephens, and Albert Myniart. The Sweetwater Sabre Company, led by Ben Tillman, was chosen to execute black state legislator Simon Coker of Barnwell. After being told of his impending execution, Coker asked the unit to give instructions to his wife regarding cotton-ginning and that month's rent. He was then executed mid-prayer.[8]
Several others were wounded either during their escape or in a general fusillade as the ring broke up. According to the State Attorney General's report, freedman Moses Parks was also killed here;[4]:316 the US Senate investigation said he had been killed earlier near Cook.[6]:233–234
A coroner's jury indicted ninety-four white men in the attack, including "M. C. Butler, Ben R. Tillman, A. P. Butler,[9] and others of the most prominent men in Aiken and Edgefield Counties, South Carolina, and Richmond County, Georgia."[5] They were never prosecuted.
The official report by the Attorney General of South Carolina ends with this statement:
... the facts show the demand on the militia to give up their arms was made by persons without lawful authority to enforce such demand or to receive the arms had they been surrendered; that the attack on the militia to compel a compliance with this demand was without lawful excuse or justification; and that after there had been some twenty or twenty-five prisoners captured and completely in the power of their captors, five of them were deliberately shot to death and three more severely wounded. It further appears that not content with thus satisfying their vengeance, many of the crowd added to their guilt the crime of robbery of defenceless people, and were only prevented from arson by the efforts of their own leaders. (Allen 1888, 317)
Outrage at the events led to the US Senate calling for an investigation. It gathered testimony in hearings held at Columbia, South Carolina, and published its findings in 1877.[10]
Republicans were stunned by the massacre at Hamburg. The event deflated the "Co-operationist" faction of the Democratic party, which had anticipated a fusion with the reforming Republican Governor Daniel H. Chamberlain. Democratic support crystallized around the uncompromising "Straight-Outs," who had already launched the terrorist "Edgefield Plan," devised by General Martin W. Gary for South Carolina's Redemption.[11]
The massacre attracted nationwide attention (such as in Harper's Weekly, August 12, 1876, and in The New York Times). A much larger massacre of freedmen by white paramilitary groups took place from September 15 to 21 in the town of Ellenton, also in Aiken County,[4]:385–387 with estimates of 100 freedmen killed and a few whites.[12] In October 1876, there was a political conflict in Cainhoy, near Charleston, resulting in the deaths of one black man and three to six whites, the only such confrontation that year in South Carolina in which more whites died than blacks.[13]
Following the violent and bitterly contested 1876 election campaign, with suppression of black voting by actions of the Red Shirts and charges of fraud, white Democrats gained undivided control of the South Carolina legislature and narrowly won the Governor's office. They passed laws during the next two decades to impose legal segregation, Jim Crow, and, in 1895, adopted a new constitution, which effectively achieved black disenfranchisement in the state.
Aftermath
Politics
M. C. Butler's expectations and extent of involvement in the later events have not been proven. He was not conclusively placed in the "Dead Ring", but his association with the massacre damaged his later career in the US Senate.[14]:226 However, during the 1894 Senatorial campaign, Butler faced Benjamin Ryan Tillman, who led an Edgefield County "Rifle Club," which was part of the Red Shirts, for the Democratic nomination. Tillman had been indicted by the coroner's jury for his involvement and had become recognized in the area for his role in the Hamburg Massacre. He continued to boast of the "stirring events" of 1876,[6]:237 referring to this more than a decade later during his 1890 campaign for governor of South Carolina.[15][16] As he put it on the floor of the US Senate:
[A]s white men we are not sorry for it, and we do not propose to apologize for anything we have done in connection with it. We took the government away from them in 1876. We did take it. If no other Senator has come here previous to this time who would acknowledge it, more is the pity. We have had no fraud in our elections in South Carolina since 1884. There has been no organized Republican party in the State.[17]
Butler and Tillman argued vehemently during the 1894 campaign about which of them had participated more in the Hamburg massacre. In South Carolina politics at that time, it was seen as heroic for a white man to have participated in the event.[18] In 1940, the state legislature of South Carolina erected a statue honoring Tillman on the capital grounds. In 1946, Clemson University, one of South Carolina's public universities, renamed its main hall in Tillman's honor. Only after events in 2015, when a white supremacist named Dylann Roof murdered nine black church members during their prayer service, did Clemson vote to distance themselves from Tillman's "campaign of terror." In 2020, trustees of the university asked to rename the hall.[19]
Fate of the town
After these events, many blacks left Hamburg and it began to decline once more.[2] After a 1911 flood, Augusta began construction of a river levee, but Hamburg was left unprotected. Disastrous floods in 1927 and following seasons finally forced out the last residents in 1929.[20] In the 21st century, no visible remains exist of the former town of Hamburg, and it is largely covered by a golf course.[21]
Edgefield County is a county located on the western border of the U.S. state of South Carolina. As of the 2020 census, its population was 25,657. Its county seat and largest community is Edgefield. The county was established on March 12, 1785.
Aiken County is a county in the U.S. state of South Carolina. As of the 2020 census, its population was 168,808. Its county seat and largest community is Aiken. Aiken County is a part of the Augusta-Richmond County, GA-SC Metropolitan Statistical Area. It is mostly in the Sandhills region, with the northern parts reaching in the Piedmont and southern parts reaching into the Coastal Plain.
Edgefield is a town in and the county seat of Edgefield County, South Carolina, United States. The population was 4,750 at the 2010 census.
Benjamin Ryan Tillman was a politician of the Democratic Party who served as governor of South Carolina from 1890 to 1894, and as a United States Senator from 1895 until his death in 1918. A white supremacist who opposed civil rights for black Americans, Tillman led a paramilitary group of Red Shirts during South Carolina's violent 1876 election. On the floor of the U.S. Senate, he defended lynching, and frequently ridiculed black Americans in his speeches, boasting of having helped kill them during that campaign.
The Colfax massacre, sometimes referred to as the Colfax riot, occurred on Easter Sunday, April 13, 1873, in Colfax, Louisiana, the parish seat of Grant Parish. An estimated 62–153 Black militia men were murdered while surrendering to a mob of former Confederate soldiers and members of the Ku Klux Klan. Three White men also died during the confrontation.
Hamburg is a ghost town in Aiken County, South Carolina, United States. It was once a thriving upriver market located across the Savannah River from Augusta, Georgia in the Edgefield District. It was founded by Henry Shultz in 1821 who named it after his home town in Germany of the same name. The town was one of the state's primary interior markets by the 1830s, due largely to the fact that the South Carolina Canal and Rail Road Company chose Hamburg as the western terminus of its line to Charleston.
The Redeemers were a political coalition in the Southern United States during the Reconstruction Era that followed the American Civil War. Redeemers were the Southern wing of the Democratic Party. They sought to regain their political power and enforce white supremacy. Their policy of Redemption was intended to oust the Radical Republicans, a coalition of freedmen, "carpetbaggers", and "scalawags". They were typically led by White yeomen and dominated Southern politics in most areas from the 1870s to 1910.
The Mississippi Plan of 1874–1875 was developed by white Southern Democrats as part of the white insurgency during the Reconstruction era in the Southern United States. It was devised by the Democratic Party in that state to overthrow the Republican Party in Mississippi by means of organized threats of violence and voter suppression against African American citizens and white Republican supporters. Democrats sought to regain political control of the state legislature and governor's office 'peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must.' Their justifications were articulated on a basis of discontent with governor Adelbert Ames' Republican administration, including spurious charges of corruption and high taxes. However, the violence that followed was centred on the desire to return white supremacy to the state. The success of the campaign led to similar plans being adopted by white Democrats in South Carolina and other majority-black states across the South.
Joseph Hayne Rainey was an American politician. He was the first black person to serve in the United States House of Representatives and the second black person to serve in the United States Congress. His service included time as presiding officer of the House of Representatives.
South Carolina was one of the Thirteen Colonies that first formed the United States. European exploration of the area began in April 1540 with the Hernando de Soto expedition, which unwittingly introduced diseases that decimated the local Native American population. In 1663, the English Crown granted land to eight proprietors of what became the colony. The first settlers came to the Province of Carolina at the port of Charleston in 1670. They were mostly wealthy planters and their slaves coming from the English Caribbean colony of Barbados. By 1700 the colony was exporting deerskin, cattle, rice, and naval stores. The Province of Carolina was split into North and South Carolina in 1712. Pushing back the Native Americans in the Yamasee War (1715–1717), colonists next overthrew the proprietors' rule in the Revolution of 1719, seeking more direct representation. In 1719, South Carolina became a crown colony.
Matthew Calbraith Butler was a Confederate soldier, an American military commander, attorney and politician, and slaveholder from South Carolina. He served as a major general in the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War, reconstruction era three-term United States Senator, and a major general in the United States Army during the Spanish–American War.
Henry Shultz was a colorful entrepreneur in Northern Germany and the American South. He caused an important bridge to be built across the Savannah River at Augusta, Georgia, and founded the town of Hamburg, South Carolina.
The 1876 South Carolina gubernatorial election was held on November 7, 1876, to select the governor of the state of South Carolina. The election campaign was a referendum on the Radical Republican-led state government and their Reconstruction policies. Opponents disputed the challenger Wade Hampton III's victory, gained by a margin of little more than 1100 votes statewide. But he took office in April 1877, after President Hayes withdrew federal troops as a result of a national Democratic compromise, and the incumbent Daniel Henry Chamberlain left the state.
The Red Shirts or Redshirts of the Southern United States were white supremacist paramilitary terrorist groups that were active in the late 19th century in the last years of, and after the end of, the Reconstruction era of the United States. Red Shirt groups originated in Mississippi in 1875, when anti-Reconstruction private terror units adopted red shirts to make themselves more visible and threatening to Southern Republicans, both whites and freedmen. Similar groups in the Carolinas also adopted red shirts.
Martin Witherspoon Gary was a Confederate attorney, soldier, and politician from South Carolina. He attained the rank of brigadier general in the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War. He played a major leadership role in the 1876 Democratic political campaign to elect Wade Hampton III as governor, planning a detailed campaign to disrupt the Republican Party and black voters by violence and intimidation.
The South Carolina civil disturbances of 1876 were a series of race riots and civil unrest related to the Democratic Party's political campaign to take back control from Republicans of the state legislature and governor's office through their paramilitary Red Shirts division. Part of their plan was to disrupt Republican political activity and suppress black voting, particularly in counties where populations of whites and blacks were close to equal. Former Confederate general Martin W. Gary's "Plan of the Campaign of 1876" gives the details of planned actions to accomplish this.
The Election Massacre of 1874, or Coup of 1874, took place on election day, November 3, 1874, near Eufaula, Alabama in Barbour County. Freedmen comprised a majority of the population and had been electing Republican candidates to office. Members of an Alabama chapter of the White League, a paramilitary group supporting the Democratic Party's drive to regain political power in the county and state, used firearms to ambush black Republicans at the polls.
White Church, also known as The Brick Church, and formally as St. Thomas Episcopal Church and St. Thomas and St. Dennis Parish Church, is a historic church north of Cainhoy in Berkeley County, South Carolina.
Prince R. Rivers was a former enslaved man from South Carolina who served as a soldier in the Union Army and as a state politician during the Reconstruction era. He escaped and joined Union lines, becoming a sergeant in the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, a Union regiment in the American Civil War.
The Ellenton riot or Ellenton massacre occurred in September 1876 and took place in South Carolina in the United States. The massacre was preceded by a series of civil disturbances earlier that year following tensions between the Democratic Party and the Republicans. Author Mark M. Smith concluded that there was one white and up to 100 blacks killed, with several white people wounded. While John S. Reynolds and Alfred B. Williams cite much lower numbers.
1 2 Vandervelde, Isabel (1998). Aiken County: the only South Carolina County founded during Reconstruction. Spartanburg, S.C.: Reprint Co. ISBN0-87152-517-8. OCLC39763469.
↑ Haworth, Paul Leland, 1876–1936 (1906). The Hayes-Tilden disputed presidential election of 1876. Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger. ISBN978-0-548-22467-0. OCLC172978575.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
1 2 3 4 Allen, Walter, 1840–1907. (1888). Governor Chamberlain's administration in South Carolina; a chapter of reconstruction in the Southern states. New York: Negro Universities Press. ISBN0-8371-1537-X. OCLC33441.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
↑ Bass, Jack (2009). The Palmetto State: the making of modern South Carolina. Poole, W. Scott. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. pp.58–59. ISBN978-1-57003-814-3. OCLC290459602.
↑ This refers to Colonel A.P. Butler (1826–1902), seated as State Senator from Aiken County in 1877, not US Senator Andrew Butler
↑ United States Congress (1877). South Carolina in 1876, U.S. Congressional Serial Set, 44th–2nd S.misdoc 48. Government Printing Office, Washington. Report of the official US Senate investigation
↑ Martin, Samuel J. (2001). Southern hero: Matthew Calbraith Butler, Confederate general, Hampton Red Shirt, and U.S. senator (Firsted.). Mechanicsburg, PA. ISBN978-0-8117-5357-9. OCLC884726010.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
↑ Simkins, Francis Butler, 1897–1966 (2002). Pitchfork Ben Tillman, South Carolinian. Institute for Southern Studies. South Caroliniana Society. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press. ISBN1-57003-477-X. OCLC49976599.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
↑ Tillman, Benjamin (March 23, 1900). "Speech of Senator Benjamin R. Tillman". Congressional Record, 56th Congress, 1st Session. (Reprinted in Richard Purday, ed., Document Sets for the South in U.S. History [Lexington, MA.: D.C. Heath and Company, 1991], p. 147.). pp.3223–3224.
↑ Simkins, Francis Butler (1945). Pitchfork Ben Tillman: South Carolinian, p. 270.
Holt, Thomas (1979). "Chapter 8". Black over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina during Reconstruction. University of Illinois Press. pp.173–207. ISBN0-252-00775-1.
Simkins, Francis Butler (2002) [1944]. Pitchfork Ben Tillman, South Carolinian. University of South Carolina Press. ISBN1-57003-477-X.
Vandervelde, Isabel (1999). Aiken County: The Only South Carolina County Founded During Reconstruction. Reprint Company Publishers. ISBN0-87152-517-8.
United States Congress (1877). South Carolina in 1876, U.S. Congressional Serial Set, 44th–2nd S.misdoc 48. Government Printing Office, Washington. Report of the official US Senate investigation
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