Capitol Men

by Philip Dray

  Black Thursday's chief victim, however, was Governor Chamberlain. The surprise election of eight Republicans, including the despised Moses, had so shaken South Carolina that Chamberlain's cautious efforts to build a partnership of conservatives and independent Republicans stood out suddenly as tepid half-measures. It was widely agreed that the affair had been the doing of roguish blacks seeking to demonstrate their independence from the governor and to gain greater judicial control of Charleston and the low country—a plan, according to the News & Courier, "to Africanize the state and to put the white man under the splay foot of the negro and hold him there"—and if Chamberlain's administration could permit such a thing, whether by design or ineptitude, it must be rejected, along with the black rascals.

  Chamberlain knew that terrible damage had been done. In a letter to President Grant, he compared the absurdity of Moses's election to the improbability that New Yorkers would accept the elevation of Boss Tweed to a judgeship. "One immediate effect," Chamberlain acknowledged to the News & Courier, "will obviously be the reorganization of the Democratic Party within the state, as the only means left, in the judgment of its members, for opposing ... this terrible crevasse of misgovernment and public debauchery."

  Considerable sympathy accrued to Chamberlain, who clearly had been ambushed and who in desperation tried to issue an emergency order nullifying the ascent of Moses and Whipper (in the end he blocked them from assuming their judgeships by refusing to sign their commissions). In a bizarre, self-glorifying appraisal of what he perceived to be his own historic role in facing down the abuse of the Elliott forces, whom one paper had dubbed "The Black Band," Chamberlain informed the New England Society of Charleston that

  I cannot attend your annual supper tonight; but if there ever was an hour when the spirit of the Puritans, the spirit of undying, unconquerable enmity and defiance to wrong ought to animate their sons, it is the hour, here, in South Carolina. The civilization of the Puritan and the Cavalier, of the Roundhead and the Huguenot, is in peril. Courage, Determination, Union, Victory, must be our watchwords. The grim Puritans never qualified under threat or blow. Let their sons now imitate their example.

  The News & Courier seemed willing to credit him for the effort, but most of the state's conservatives were having none of it. Black Thursday told whites that a carpetbagger governor could not, would not, keep the lid on black political mischief, and as Chamberlain himself had predicted, it emboldened them to pursue a Straightout approach that sought to drive every vestige of Republicanism from their midst. "A rumpus has begun in South Carolina which will end in the white people getting control of the state," noted the Cincinnati Commercial. "For a long time the whites have wanted a sufficient excuse to rise up and overthrow the African government under which they live, and now they have it."

  The Fourth of July, 1876, was a momentous day, the century-mark of a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. As elsewhere across the United States, the residents of Hamburg, a black South Carolina village located across the Savannah River from Augusta, Georgia, were in an exuberant mood. Hamburg had in antebellum days been an important cotton shipping port and link between train and ferry, but after a bridge was built spanning the Savannah, trains no longer stopped there, and the once-thriv ing town waned in significance. By the end of the Civil War it was, according to one history, a "ghost city" of about five hundred residents, "inhabited almost exclusively by Negroes and governed completely by Negro officers." The latter included Prince Rivers, a Union army veteran and former state legislator who was now the town's magistrate, and Dock Adams, who captained the Hamburg militia. Rivers, like Robert Smalls, enjoyed a local reputation for a colorful act of "self-emancipation" during the war, stealing his master's horse and fleeing across Confederate lines to join a Union regiment. His commander, the New England abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson, had once described Rivers as "a man of distinguished appearance ... six feet high, perfectly proportioned, and of apparently inexhaustible strength," adding, "If there should ever be a black monarchy in South Carolina, he will be its king."

  Early on that Independence Day in Hamburg, Dock Adams was parading his militiamen on a city street when two white men, Henry Getzen and Thomas Butler, rode up in a carriage and insisted that the militia break ranks and make way for them. Suspecting that the whites were simply trying to provoke a scene, Adams informed them that the militia had a right to parade and that the carriage should go around; but ultimately he relented and ordered his men to open their ranks and let the buggy through.

  Adams had good reason to think the two whites were looking to start trouble. July Fourth, an embodiment of the nation's creed of human equality, had always been a source of discomfort to Southern whites and a focal point for their fears of black rebellion. Since the war, the holiday had grown substantially in meaning for the freedmen, as had the festivities, which often included day-long barbecues, the firing of cannon, and public readings of both the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation. But even such humble demonstrations of patriotism could cause friction. On a July Fourth only two years earlier, in Edgefield's Meriwether Township, not far from Hamburg, a flamboyant black militia leader named Edward Tennant (known for the ostrich plume he wore in his hat) had disturbed whites with the "excessive" noise of his fife-and-drum band. When angered white citizens shot into his home that night, Tennent called out his militia; by daybreak on July 5, two hundred armed blacks had gathered. A local white vigilante group, the Sweetwater Sabre Club, roused by fear of a general assault, quickly assembled their own force of seventy men. A deadly clash was averted only when a U.S. army officer intervened.

  Once Getzen and Thomas had whipped their buggy through his men's ranks, Dock Adams assumed he'd seen the end of the matter. He was surprised to learn, a day or two later, that the white men had accused him of having blocked a public highway; Prince Rivers ordered him to appear in court. On July 8, the day of the hearing, several vigilante "rifle clubs" showed up in Hamburg, along with Edgefield's Matthew C. Butler, a former Confederate general who had come as the attorney for Getzen and Thomas. Butler, whom some called "the handsomest man in the Confederacy," was Francis Pickens's son-in-law and had managed Pickens's successful 1860 gubernatorial campaign. But neither the war nor Reconstruction had been kind to him. At the Battle of Brandy Station, Virginia, in June 1863, a Union shell landed under his horse, blowing the animal to smithereens and damaging Butler's leg below the knee, forcing its amputation. He came home, it was written, "twenty-nine years old, with one leg gone, a wife and three children to support, seventy slaves emancipated, a debt of $15,000, and, in his pocket, $1.75 in cash." In 1870 he experienced the further humiliation of losing the election for lieutenant governor to the black candidate, Alonzo Ransier. Edgefield blacks viewed Butler as "one of the most malignant of the unreconstructed rebels" who, easily angered, was wont to address them with "a most highly sulphurated vocabulary." Even his white neighbors knew that "with all of his beautiful manners, when he wanted to he could be the most cold-blooded, insolent human being that mortal eyes ever beheld."

  Butler, conferring with Rivers, insisted that Dock Adams's militia, which had turned out to support its leader, disarm before any hearing was held. Rivers advised Adams of Butler's demand, recommending that under the circumstances it would be best if the militia complied. But when Butler refused as a matter of principle to assure the black militia leader that his men would not be molested if they stacked their guns, Adams in turn declined to disarm, a response Butler perceived as insolent. With the situation about to turn "squally," the blacks withdrew to a brick structure that served as the local armory. "During this time, while the militia were taking refuge," noted an eyewitness who later sent an account of the affair to Robert Smalls, "the white desperadoes were coming into the town in very large numbers, many armed with guns, others with hatchets and clubs, not only from the adjacent county of Edgefield, but also from the city of
Augusta, Georgia, until they numbered over 1,500 well-armed and ruffianly men." This figure seems unlikely, but cer tainly the blacks were outnumbered by the whites who surrounded the armory where they waited.

  The rifle clubs loyal to Butler immediately laid siege, sending a group of skirmishers close to the building. Adams and his men returned fire, and one of their shots struck in the forehead a twenty-three-year-old white Georgian named McKie Meriwether, killing him instantly. Meriwether's father, who was present, screamed in anguish and rushed forward to pull his son's body from the firing line. "[McKie's] death exasperated his friends to the highest degree," noted the News & Courier, "and, their fire making no impression upon the house, they sent to Augusta for an old cannon, a six-pounder, playing it in an exposed position within fifty yards of the house." The cannon, a local antique used on ceremonial occasions, was loaded with rocks, nails, and whatever else came to hand, and discharged several times at the militiamen's stronghold. Although it caused little damage, it made enough noise to panic those inside, who, in the gathering darkness, attempted to escape out the back windows and disappear into a cornfield. Dock Adams managed to elude capture, but within half an hour most of his men had been hunted down, including some who had crawled under a neighboring house.

  A kangaroo court was promptly held to adjudge the blacks' "guilt." Some of the captives recognized whites in the group and pleaded for mercy, to little avail. Henry Getzen, one of the men who had sworn out the complaint against the militia, fingered Allan'T. Attaway, the commissioner of Aitkin County and a black militia member, as one of "those of the meanest character and most deserving of death." Attaway's mother had rushed to the scene to help her son, and according to a report made by the state attorney general William Stone and sent to Governor Chamberlain, "begged for his life, but in vain." Reported Smalls's informant, "[Attaway's own] pleadings were met with curses and blows, and he was taken from the sight of his comrades and a file of twelve men fired upon him. He was penetrated by four balls, one entering his brain...[and] after he was dead the brutes in human shape struck him over the head with their guns and stabbed him in the face with their bayonets." Four other men—David Phillips, Albert Minyard, Moses Parks, and Hampton Stevens—were led off a short distance and shot to death. Another chosen for execution, Pompey Curry, was shot as he attempted to escape, but he survived by feigning death.

  The rifle clubs then joined with local Augusta whites—who were, it was reported, "inflamed with liquor"—to riot through the town, destroying storefronts, stealing furniture, tearing down fences, and even cutting the ropes of the public wells. Prince Rivers's home was looted. James Cook, the black chief of police, was slain, his head bashed in with muskets. The bodies of Cook, Attaway, and the other black dead were mutilated, an act witnesses ascribed to the whites' rage at the death of young McKie. A few of the marauding whites terrified black children with an offer to feed them pieces of the men they had killed.

  The incident at Hamburg galvanized South Carolina politics. At first moderate whites denounced it; the News & Courier wrote sympathetically that the only offense committed by the black militiamen was "in being negroes and bearing arms." It condemned the cowardly killing of "negro prisoners who were shot down like rabbits long after they had surrendered," while reminding readers that the whites' natural intelligence and superiority over blacks made the use of the "shot gun and bludgeon" unnecessary. But Governor Chamberlain saw immediately that the massacre had created a trap: if he did not express disapproval of what had occurred, he would be false to his own values and to his constituents, but to denounce Butler and the rifle clubs and demand their prosecution risked further alienating the state's conservatives. It was readily apparent that Butler had provoked the trouble; however, Southern whites still tended to view any black resistance to white authority as unacceptable, no matter what the circumstances, and black militias were widely seen as disreputable. As the Charleston Journal of Commerce observed, no one could expect unruly black men "to be treated as prisoners of honorable warfare according to the laws of nations." In addition, for anyone to suggest that Butler, a gentleman and veteran soldier, as well as other whites, had lied about what had taken place would be construed as a monstrous insult. When a Republican newspaper did call for Butler's arrest, even many moderate whites leapt in, passionately defending a native son who had forfeited a limb for the Confederacy.

  Still, Chamberlain had no choice but to speak out. "Shame and disgust must fill the breast of every man who respects his race or human nature, as he reads this tale," he wrote in a letter that was made public. "What hope can we have when such a cruel and blood-thirsty spirit avails in our midst for its hour of gratification? Is our civilization so shallow? Is our race so wantonly cruel?" But his initial fears were confirmed: instead of statewide revulsion at the Hamburg massacre, the incident only hardened existing attitudes while vanquishing any hope of collaboration; some Democrats were already warning that Chamberlain would use Hamburg as a pretext to increase the number of federal troops in the state before the November elections. "We have supported Governor Chamberlain's reform measures, and we have frankly expressed our opinions of the Hamburg riot," said the News & Courier, "but we must protest against any move that wears the appearance of taking advantage of a local disturbance to prop up the waning fortunes of South Carolina Republicanism."

  Robert Brown Elliott was hampered by no such concern. He had moved swiftly to organize public sentiment over the massacre, appearing along with Daddy Cain and William Whipper at a rally in Charleston's Citadel Square on July 17 "to express our indignation, and to adopt resolutions setting forth the enormity of General M. C. Butler's outrage in Hamburg So'Ca'." The rally protested "the late unwarrantable slaughter of our brethren at Hamburg ... an unmitigated and foul murder" by Butler and the "lawless men ... ex-Confederate soldiers ... outlaws and semi-barbarians who, ever since the war, have practiced wrong and outrage upon the helpless, unoffending colored people because of their emancipation by the war." The rifle clubs were accused of having deliberately provoked the clash. From the podium Cain demanded to know if whites would stand for blacks insisting they give up their arms, as Butler had demanded of blacks at Hamburg. "No!" shouted the crowd. "No!" Cain answered back. The whites know their rights, he declared, but the blacks are learning from them rapidly.

  POSTER FOR A RALLY IN PROTEST OF THE HAMBURG MASSACRE

  "Remember," Cain told his followers, "there are 80,000 black men in this state who can bear Winchester rifles and know how to use them, and there are 200,000 black women who can and girls who have not known the lash of a white master, who have tasted freedom once and forever, and that there is a deep determination never, so help their God, to submit to be shot down by lawless regulators." Cain had so fired up the crowd that ecstatic cheers burst out when a number of men from the rally blocked a horse car trying to pass along King Street. Police swooped down to arrest one of the instigators, but other protestors quickly intervened, chanting, "This is not Hamburg! This is not Hamburg! This is not Hamburg!" and hurried the man away into the safe anonymity of the throng.

  Elliott called for a convention to be held three days later in Columbia to protest the murders. From this gathering came "An Address to the People of the United States," written by Elliott, which recounted the details of the affair. Signed by three score black citizens, the address dismissed the idea of Hamburg as a local misunderstanding, characterizing it instead as the fruit of the rifle clubs' long-running efforts to terrorize the African American settlements in the upcountry. The document implored the state's leading whites to reject rifle club vigilantism, invited all Americans to look on black South Carolinians' plight with concern, and sought President Grant's assistance in suppressing further violence.

  Chamberlain enclosed a copy of "An Address to the People of the United States" with a letter he sent to Grant inquiring whether additional federal troops might be available for posting in South Carolina. The governor knew that Washington had begun to sp
urn such requests, but he was duty-bound to try. As it happened, Congress at that moment was discussing the redeployment of federal soldiers from the South to the West, an issue made more poignant by a military disaster in Montana only two weeks earlier—the annihilation of General George Armstrong Custer's Seventh Calvary at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. To Chamberlain, the Indian fighters' fate offered a tempting parallel to Hamburg, the latter "a darker picture of human cruelty than the slaughter of Custer and his soldiers." Custer's men "were shot in open battle," Chamberlain pointed out. "The victims at Hamburg were murdered in cold blood after they had surrendered, and were utterly defenseless."

  The debate in Congress about troop deployment reflected the nation's evolving priorities and did not bode well for African Americans. As William Gillette explains, there had been twelve thousand federal troops in the South in 1868, but that number had been halved by the next year. More were siphoned off for western duty in the early 1870s, leaving about thirty-four hundred; by the time of the Hamburg crisis in summer 1876, there were likely fewer than three thousand soldiers in a region stretching from the Carolina Piedmont to the Mississippi Delta; although the number of garrisons was increased, no new troops were introduced, meaning that those available were spread out over an even greater area. And the soldiers left in the South tended to belong to "slow-moving infantry outfits rather than the fast-moving cavalry, which was reserved for the Indian wars."

  Representative Joseph Rainey, in urging his congressional colleagues to increase troop levels in the South, could bear personal witness to the soldiers' importance. Traveling by horseback to a Republican rally one day in the town of Bennettsville, South Carolina, he and about sixty fellow Republicans were confronted suddenly by an armed contingent of more than a hundred whites who had gathered from the surrounding counties; a few had crossed the border from North Carolina. They brandished shotguns, ax handles, and other weapons. Not a moment too soon, a company of federal troops rode into view. They had been tipped off about the confrontation and quietly defused what could have been a very bloody scene. "The presence of the troops was most providential," Rainey told the House. "I am confident that members of both parties who are alive at this time, if it had been otherwise, would have been numbered among the dead."