“The Leading White Men of Edgefield”

The Story of the Hamburg Massacre

File:Hamburg Massacre1.Gif. In Wikipedia. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hamburg_Massacre1.gif

“The leading white men of Edgefield decided to seize the first opportunity that the Negroes might offer them to provoke a riot and teach the Negroes a lesson by having the whites demonstrate their superiority by killing as many of them as was justifiable.” — Benjamin Tillman

So who were these “leading white men,” and to what lengths were they willing to go to “teach the Negroes a lesson?”

One of them was Martin Witherspoon Gary, a former Brigadier General in the Confederate States Army (CSA). Gary assumed a leading role in the Democratic Party’s efforts to elect Wade Hampton III as governor during the height of Reconstruction. Black eligible voters outnumbered whites in South Carolina. Gary engineered a plan to suppress Black voters via intimidation and violence.