“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.
Another leading white man was Matthew Calbraith Butler, a former Major General in the CSA. Butler’s grandfather, as did his father, served in the House of Representatives before the war. One uncle was a U.S. Senator, and another was once Governor of South Carolina. One of his cousins, Preston Brooks, assaulted Senator Charles Sumner in 1856 on the floor of the U.S. Senate with a cane, so there’s that. But by heritage alone, Matthew Butler was a leading white man.
Butler served under Wade Hampton during the war, forming a relationship that would continue when the war ended. Butler lost a race for Lieutenant Governor as a member of the purportedly pro-Black, Union Reform Party. The original plan was for Republicans to nominate a Black Lieutenant Governor, but the two Black potential candidates approached Butler to run in their stead. It wasn’t safe to be a high-profile Black candidate, and the Union Reform Party hadn’t earned the trust of the recently freed slaves. Many of the white members of the Party only joined because a Democrat could not win at that time.
Benjamin Tillman was a different sort of leading white man. His family owned an inn and had 2,500 acres of land, along with almost a hundred slaves, to operate the plantation. When the Civil War ended, the Black Codes ensured most formerly enslaved people returned to work, and Ben kept whipping them as if he still owned them. The Tillmans believed in solving disputes with violence. His father killed a man in a duel and was once charged with starting a riot. One of Ben’s brothers died in a duel, and another, George Tillman, killed a man who accused him of cheating at cards. George was sentenced to two years in jail, where he continued to practice law and was elected to the state senate while in prison. George served several terms in Congress after getting his release.
By 1876, Ben Tillman owned more land than anyone in Edgefield County. He rode through his fields on horseback with a whip in order to “drive the slovenly Negroes to work.” He didn’t always use the word Negroes. Immediately after the war ended, things were almost the same because Black people couldn’t vote, though the 14th Amendment supposedly gave them the right. Congress eventually acted to enforce the rights of Black people with the federal troops still in place after the Civil War. Butler and Gary, both lawyers, came up with the “Edgefield Plan” or “Straightout Plan” to take back what they thought was rightfully theirs. Tillman was an early and enthusiastic recruit.
These three “leading men” secretly brought their plan to Democratic clubs in every county in South Carolina. They corresponded with the authors of the Mississippi Plan to learn from their experience. The plan was clear that Blacks and Republicans who were perceived to be problems should be killed. Every Democrat was responsible for influencing or preventing at least one Black vote.
Hamburg, South Carolina, was a majority-Black town in Aiken County, across the Savannah River from Augusta, Georgia. Freedmen had moved to Hamburg to escape the violence in rural areas. There was a Black militia formed in the belief the 2nd Amendment included them. Part of the Edgefield Plan was to disrupt Black people’s events, including a 4th of July Parade of Hamburg’s Black militia.
Two carriages driven by white men in red shirts drove through the Black militia, causing a disruption, including an exchange of words. The Red Shirts filed a complaint in court, claiming the Black militia was blocking the road and refusing passage to all white men. A hearing was held in a local court on July 6th and continued until July 8th. That continuance gave the Red Shirts the time they needed to prepare.
Over 100 Red Shirts from Edgefield and Aiken County were armed and waiting outside the courtroom when the militia arrived for the hearing. Inside the courtroom, leading white man Butler, representing the plaintiffs, demanded the Black militia disarm and turn over their guns to him personally. The Black militia refused and took refuge in the armory in the Sibley building near the Charlotte, Columbia, and Augusta Railroad bridge. Armed Red Shirts surrounded the building, and there was an exchange of gunfire during which one white man was killed.
The militia inside the armory got word that the Red Shirts had “borrowed” a cannon from the Georgia National Guard and slipped out of the armory during the night. The Red Shirts gathered up over twenty random Black people and took them to a spot where they debated their fate. Four men, Allan Attaway, David Phillips, Hampton Stephens, and Albert Myniart, were selected for execution and murdered one at a time. Leading white citizen Ben Tillman took his group of Red Shirts 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.
Overall, seven Black men were killed that day, and the one white man, Thomas McKie Meriwether. A grand obelisk was erected in Meriwether’s honor at J.C. Calhoun Park in 1916. Each side of the base bears an inscription. One side reads:
“In life he exemplified the highest ideal of Anglo-Saxon civilization. By his death, he assured the supremacy of that ideal to the children of his beloved land.”
Another reads:
“This memorial is erected to the young hero of the Hamburg Riot by the state under an Act of the General Assembly with the aid of admiring friends.”
Another reads:
“In youths glad morning the unfinished years of manhood stretching before him, with clear knowledge and courageous willingness, he accepted death and found forever the greatful remembrance of all who know high and generous service in the maintaining of those civic and social institutions which the men and women of his race had struggled through the centuries to establish in South Carolina. What more can a man do than to lay down his life.”
The last reads:
In his life he exemplified the highest ideal of Anglo-Saxon civilization. By his death he assured to the children of his beloved land the supremacy of that ideal. “As his flame of life was quenched, it lit the blaze of victory.”
It should be noted that the leading white men of the South Carolina legislature proclaimed Meriwether a hero 40 years after his death during the Hamburg Massacre they graciously called a riot. Many Black citizens and at least one relative of Meriwether have called for the obelisk to be removed, but the South Carolina Heritage Act passed in 2000 prevents the removal of any Confederate monuments.
Historian Mark M. Smith estimated that in 1876, over one hundred Black people were murdered related to activities of the Red Shirts. That included the Ellenton Massacre in September of that year. The Presidential election that year had many irregularities, including more votes cast in some counties than registered voters. Three states, Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, had disputed returns, and their electoral votes were not counted, leaving Democrat Samuel Tilden ahead in the popular vote and one Electoral Vote shy of the total needed to become President. This resulted in the Compromise of 1877, which gave Republican Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency after agreeing to remove federal troops safeguarding Black people from the South. This effectively ended Reconstruction and ushered in Jim Crow.
Leading white citizen Benjamin Tillman, who went on after the Hamburg Massacre to serve 24 years in the U.S. Senate, had this to say, apologizing they were forced into committing this atrocity.
Mr. President, I have not the facts and figures here, but I want the country to get the full view of the Southern side of this question and the justification for anything we did. We were sorry we had the necessity forced upon us, but we could not help it, and as white men we are not sorry for it, and we do not propose to apologize for anything we have done in connection to 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’s 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.
We did not disfranchise the Negroes until 1895. Then we had a constitutional convention convened which took the matter up calmly, deliberately, and avowedly with the purpose of disenfranchising as many of them as we could under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. We adopted the educational qualification as the only means left to us, and the Negro is as contented and as prosperous and as well protected in South Carolina today as in any State of the Union south of the Potomac. He is not meddling with politics, for he found that the more he meddled with them, the worse off he got. As to his “rights” — I will not discuss them now. We of the South have never recognized the right of the Negro to govern the white men, and we never will. We have never believed him to be equal to the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him. I would to God the last one of them was in Africa and that none of them had ever been brought to our shores. . . .Senator Benjamin Tillman
The difference in voter suppression then was the lack of pretense. No thought of being governed by anything other than a sense of superiority they felt was well justified. Ben Tillman said Southerners would never recognize the rights of the Negro, and in many cases, I can’t prove him wrong. Rather than acknowledge the facts, we often change them. I choose to take the leading white men of Edgefield at their word.
Lots of history here, William. We still have Tillman Hall at Clemson University and another Tillman Hall at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, SC. "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman led a reign of terror in the state, without a doubt. Here is an interesting follow up read for you if you haven't come across it. https://www.upcountryhistorical.org/items/show/75#:~:text=Clemson%20trustees%20changed%20Old%20Main's,anniversary%20of%20the%20institution's%20opening. I am not sure we will ever shake Ben Tillman from our lives in SC. But as our state motto Dum Spiro Spero notes "While I breathe, I hope."
People have the wrong idea about the Sumner/Brooks caning incident, which was decidedly NOT an affair of honor between two gentlemen. Brooks snuck up behind Sumner while he sat at his desk writing, and brained him with a metal-topped cane. It was the sort of cowardly attack you might expect from someone who supports slavery.