A local Democratic politician, General Matthew C. Butler, a Confederate general who had lost his leg in the war and had reportedly once been a pillar of the Ku Klux Klan, was selected to prosecute Adams. Butler offered a deal: the whole matter could be settled if Adams ordered his National Guard regiment to surrender its arms. Adams said he would do no such thing, and anyway, since the weapons belonged to the state, he had no authority to turn them over to Butler, a civilian. Judge Rivers offered what he thought was a peaceable compromise: box up the militia’s arms and send them to Governor Daniel Chamberlain. Butler rejected the suggestion. He wanted those guns out of the hands of Company A, and he wouldn’t believe they were unless they were delivered to him personally.
The number of white men in town was growing. They were coming from Augusta, Georgia, just across the Savannah River, as well as from nearby Edgefield County, where Butler lived. And the white men had brought a cannon. “We are going to redeem South Carolina,” Adams heard them sing in the streets. Adams and his company, armed, took shelter in a small brick armory.
The crowd, now a mob, surrounded it. Some were on horseback, their pistols raised. They shot out nearly all the windows in the building. Adams and his men returned fire, killing a white man in the crowd. When Adams’s men heard someone outside call for two kegs of powder, they began jumping out of the windows, hoping to run to safety in the woods or down by the river.
There was mayhem in the town. Henry Purvis, a state representative, later said that almost every black man’s house was looted (including his); furniture was broken, clothes stolen. Hiding in a neighbor’s backyard, Adams said he saw a group of whites shoot James Cook, the black town marshal, then bash his head in with muskets and remove his boots and watch. He saw other white men fire at black people or beat them with sticks. Of the men fleeing the armory, twenty-five were captured before daylight while the moon shone as bright, said Adams, “as ever you seen it shine.”
Allan Attaway, David Phillips, Albert Miniart, Moses Parks, and Hampton Stephens were shot in cold blood in a nearby hayfield, said Adams, because they were the town’s leading Republicans; Pompey Curry was also shot, but he survived. Adams later explained to a Senate investigating committee that local Democrats had been joining with the various rifle clubs formed to intimidate Republicans, particularly black Republicans, and prevent them from going to the polls. They had begun their campaign in Hamburg. “There had to be a certain number of niggers killed, leading men,” Adams said, “and if they found out after the leading men was killed that they couldn’t carry the State that way, they were going to kill enough so they could carry the majority.”
“The white men have declared that the State has got to be ruled by white men,” he continued, “we have got to have just such a government as we had before the war, and when we get it all the poor men and the niggers will be disfranchised, and the rich men would rule.”
The Senate investigating committee also heard testimony from a number of witnesses—Democrats—who impeached Doc Adams as a loafer, a trifler, a liar, and a man apt to pick a fight. After the riot, one white man and at least six or seven black men were dead. Congressman Robert Brown Elliott, who had returned from Washington to serve in the South Carolina legislature, helped organize a rally, and black men and women gathered in Charleston at Citadel Square, collecting money for the widows and orphans of the victims and demanding that Matthew Butler be arrested, tried, convicted, and punished. The Reverend Richard Harvey Cain of the African Methodist Church asked if blacks should give up their arms, and the crowd yelled that no, they knew how to use their Winchester rifles, and the 200,000 black women in the state knew how to use a knife. Daniel Chamberlain, the Republican governor of South Carolina, figured nothing would happen to Butler; moreover, he knew what lay ahead: Hamburg presaged the campaign of blood and violence that in the coming months would be directed against Republicans generally and him in particular.
Yet Chamberlain had enjoyed the support of moderate South Carolina Democrats even if some regarded this Massachusetts man a carpetbagger. (“Who is Mr. Chamberlain,” jeered a native South Carolinian. “Is he a citizen of the State? and if so, how long?”) The son of a farmer, Chamberlain as a youth had taught school in order to earn enough money to go to Yale, and he had been an early abolitionist who had heard Wendell Phillips speak about fifty times. Then, while he was studying law at Harvard, the war broke out. Chamberlain enlisted in 1864 and served as an adjutant under Colonel Charles Francis Adams, Jr., in the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry, a regiment of black soldiers in South Carolina. After the war, he had stayed in South Carolina and started his own cotton plantation. Employing the freedmen, he was hopeful as the idealistic Wilkie James had been. His plantation had gone nowhere—but not so his vision of an integrated, fair government in the South. In 1868 he had served as a delegate to the state constitutional convention from a black district and subsequently was elected for two terms as the Palmetto State’s attorney general.
He was bald, he wore a long mustache, he looked directly at you when he spoke, and by 1874 he had been elected governor. Supported by such powerful black leaders as the recently elected war hero Congressman Robert Smalls (the “boat thief” who had stolen the rebel Planter) and Robert Brown Elliott, Chamberlain had nonetheless agreed with Democrats that the Republican legislature had been unfairly and disproportionately levying taxes, and he promised to reduce taxes, curtail government expenditures, and reduce state debt—that pleased conservatives—as well as to provide public services, improve public education, and to protect civil and political rights for everyone, which pleased Republicans. It seemed a partnership was actually possible.
Though Chamberlain did reduce taxes and defray the state debt, he also slashed the salaries of public officials and cut funding for schools. Plus, lowering taxes meant that he could not provide services desperately needed by poor whites and the black community, whose support he was beginning to lose. And there were other problems. When he refused to ratify the Republican legislature’s appointment of two black circuit trial justices on the grounds that they were corrupt, he alienated his Republican allies. Chamberlain held his ground. Nominating two men known to be dishonest would play right into the hands of the state Democratic Party, which had begun to reorganize itself. Of course, Chamberlain did not help his own cause, either with blacks or other Republican supporters—or, later, with historians—when he told the New England Society of Charleston, “The civilization of the Puritan and the Cavalier, of the Roundhead and the Huguenot, is in peril.”
Throughout the South, all-white Democratic administrations known as “redeemer” governments had been undoing the work of Radical Reconstructionists. They were, by their own description, “redeeming” their states—that is, they were the self-appointed harbingers of a new era, which was the old era in slightly different garb. Slavery was not coming back, to be sure, but the Redeemers planned to restore white rule, and, as the Radical editor George William Curtis, writing in Harper’s Weekly, put it, they saw “the possible return of the Democratic Party to power as an opportunity of ‘putting the negro into his place.’ ”
In that they had help from Northern journalists. In 1874, James Shepherd Pike’s Prostrate State: South Carolina under Negro Government ripped through the country with a lurid tale of how carpetbaggers and ignorant blacks—whom carpetbaggers were said to manipulate—were condemning the once grand state of South Carolina to a future of anarchy and theft. “Sambo takes naturally to stealing,” Pike explained. “Seven years ago these men were raising corn and cotton under the whip of the overseer,” he scoffed. “Today they are raising points of order and questions of privilege.”
Charles Nordhoff, another respected Northern journalist—who, like Pike, had been a Greeley supporter—also traveled south to confirm his prejudices and those of his readers in his The Cotton States in the Spring and Summer of 1875. It too was a blistering appraisal of Reconstruction, which he too called a failure. Corrupt, carpetbagging
whites had manipulated the infantile black population while together they raided the strongboxes, munching peanuts all the while.
Though South Carolina had been the particular target of such animus, Governor Chamberlain had won approval, at least at first, from Northerners. Liberal Republicans praised the cultured Yankee who had attended Harvard, The Nation momentarily declaring him “one who is really defending civilization itself against barbarism in its worst form.” Since the terms “civilization” and “barbarism” implied “white” and “black,” it’s no surprise that the editor of the Charleston News and Courier, a Chamberlain fan, also hailed him as standing “like a wall of adamant between the public robbers and the honest and law-abiding people of this state.” But by pleasing both Republican and Democrat moderates, Chamberlain was alienating the “straight-out” conservative Democrats (or “Stalwarts”) who, made anxious by blacks in the legislature and the military, had been forming paramilitary rifle clubs to combat what they called a cringing compromising with principle. That principle was white supremacy—civilization. “Let the last Southern State, one of the thirteen that declared herself free one hundred years ago,” railed one newspaper, “be again a white man’s State.”
When the Stalwart Democrats and the Republicans finally came to bloody collision in Hamburg in the summer of 1876, Chamberlain declared the killings to be far worse than “the slaughter” of Custer and his soldiers, who had at least been killed “in open battle.” By contrast, the Hamburg victims were defenseless men gunned down in cold blood. Telegraphing Grant as soon as he heard of the killings, Chamberlain went to Washington, presumably at Grant’s invitation, and met with the president, who told him to write a formal letter requesting troops.
In the letter, Governor Chamberlain explained how the massacre had caused “widespread terror among the Colored race and the Republicans of this state,” for, as he pointed out, though many whites—Democrats and Republicans—had denounced the violence, they couldn’t put a stop to it. Only the president could do that. “Will the general Government take such precautions as may be suitable, in view of the feeling of alarm already referred to, to restore confidence to the poor people of both races and political parties in the State,” Chamberlain asked, “by such a distribution of the military forces now here as will render the intervention of the general Government prompt and effective, if it shall become necessary, in restoring peace and order?” He wanted troops.
Since Grant was out of town when Chamberlain’s letter reached the White House, Secretary of State Hamilton Fish answered him—and refused the request. Sending troops was unconstitutional. Grant, when he returned, wouldn’t disagree. Calling Hamburg “a barbarous massacre, cruel, bloodthirsty, wanton, unprovoked,” as well as “a repetition of the curse that has been pursued in other Southern States,” the president nonetheless equivocated; he would give Chamberlain the assistance “for which I can find law, or constitutional power.” In other words, he wouldn’t be able to do much.
Grant did not want to be seen as an autocrat. Democrats and some Republicans had been accusing him of Caesarism, particularly after he had sent troops to New Orleans during a riot on the eve of the 1874 elections; supremacist organizations known as the White Leagues and the White Lines had shot six Radical Republican officials—men from the North—that August, and in September they had staged an armed rebellion outside the Custom House and taken possession of the statehouse. The Republican governor, William Pitt Kellogg, had had to flee. There had been about a hundred casualties. “To say that the murder of a negro or a white Republican is not considered a crime in Louisiana would probably be unjust,” said Grant—though he quickly noted that the perpetrators had gone free. Grant sent General Sheridan to Louisiana to look into the matter (and to bolster the Kellogg administration). After the election produced a predictably disputed outcome, with the Democratic and Republican election boards each returning different results, on January 4, 1875, with bayonets fixed, soldiers removed five Democratic members from the Louisiana House for taking their seats illegally. There are instances, said Grant, when the military and federal government simply have to interfere with wanton murder.
Democrats were, of course, furious. So was General Sheridan, who blasted “the terrorism now existing in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas.” If Congress would pass a bill “declaring the ringleaders of the armed White Leagues . . . banditti, they could be tried by a military commission,” he fumed. “The ringleaders of this banditti, who murdered men here . . . , should, in justice to law and order, and the peace and prosperity of this southern part of the country, be punished.”
Banditti? Sheridan’s letter sparked a firestorm of protest. Those good men protecting their homes had been vulgarly compared to wild and marauding Indians (also called banditti). At Faneuil Hall in Boston, Liberal Republicans and Democrats called for Sheridan’s removal. They condemned Grant and praised the White Leaguers. When Wendell Phillips, hat in hand, made his way to the platform, he was shouted down, heckled, and hissed. Grant and Sheridan, the crowd yelled, had acted unconstitutionally. Phillips said he wasn’t there to defend the administration but the black people of Louisiana. Wendell Phillips is still on the warpath, said a Montana paper. William Lloyd Garrison took up his pen to write a letter to the Boston Daily Journal. “Lawless and defiant White League organizations,” he wrote, “are accurately described by General Sheridan (himself no sentimentalist) and without any sympathetic leaning either toward negroes or Indians) as ‘a banditti.’ ” To those organizations, he noted, “the end sanctifies the means, however desperate and bloody; and that end is first, midst, last, and always, ‘A WHITE MAN’S GOVERNMENT.’ ”
The New York Times was unruffled. “Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison are not exactly extinct from American politics,” it said, “but they represent ideas in regard to the South which the majority of the Republican party have outgrown.” What the majority of the Republican Party had “outgrown” was the rhetoric of the higher law—and it had outgrown Reconstruction. No one better espoused the need to bury the latter than the tall, spare, ever loquacious Senator Carl Schurz. In a long, repetitive, and sometimes supercilious speech, he too claimed the use of federal troops in Louisiana unconstitutional, a grave violation of the laws of the republic, and an infringement on the liberty and autonomy of a state government. “If this can be done in Louisiana,” he warned, “and if such things be sustained by Congress, how long will it be before it can be done in Massachusetts and Ohio?” As for the ceaseless rash of bloodletting in Louisiana and elsewhere in the South, the fault lay with the federal government and its support of every vagabond—Schurz’s term—or rapacious crook who declared himself a Republican and descended on Washington with a sob story about some offense or another. The good men of the South “are not a people of murderers and banditti,” he cried. “Only the most morbid fanaticism, will call them so.”
His hackles raised, Grant nonetheless heeded men such as Schurz insofar as he claimed not to wish to interfere in local politics. But he was blunt and direct about the need for federal troops in the South. “To the extent that Congress has conferred power upon me to prevent it, neither Kuklux Klans, White Leagues, nor any other associations using arms and violence can be permitted to govern any part of this country,” he told the Senate. “Nor can I see with indifference Union men or Republicans ostracized, persecuted, and murdered on account of their opinions, as they now are in some localities.” Inaction produces evil, he said. He could not have made his case any clearer.
Calm and almost bullish in his confidence as general during the war, Grant was calm and almost bullish now. Yet he had to retreat to a certain extent, lest he too be called a morbid fanatic who further endangered the Republican Party. A compromise was reached: Louisiana Republicans would control the state Senate and Democrats the House; and Governor Kellogg, though virtually ineffective, would keep his office.
For in the last year, the political climate had drastically changed. After
the Panic of 1873, when Democrats had seized control of the House of Representatives, partly as a result of the depression, it had become difficult if not impossible for Grant to buttress Reconstruction—or to stem the withdrawal from it. Already skittish, congressional Republicans, particularly the Liberals, were retrenching. And though Grant publicly backed Charles Sumner’s own last stand, his civil rights bill, which prohibited racial discrimination in such public places as schools, churches, hotels, burial grounds, and also in jury selection, faced severe opposition. A rules change allowed it to pass, albeit without the clause mandating integrated schools and without corresponding enforcement legislation.
Grant signed the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Declared unconstitutional in 1883, it was nonetheless a forerunner of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, historic legislation that did not, however, pass for almost a century. And the civil rights legislation went more or less unnoticed in the South, where in 1875, fully aware of Reconstruction’s congressional twilight, Mississippi supremacists killed and expelled Northern men and Republicans, to say nothing of black Republican leaders: rallies were broken up; people ran for their lives; Charles Caldwell, once a slave and then a delegate to the state’s constitutional convention, was shot in the back on Christmas Day. Republican governor Adelbert Ames, a brave West Pointer highly decorated during the war—who happened to be the son-in-law of the Radical and much-hated Ben “Beast” Butler—almost begged for federal troops to stop the killings. Grant refused, even though the Stalwarts were sweeping Democrats into county and state office. Democrats “support or oppose men, advocate or denounce politics, flatter or murder, just as such action will help them as far as possible to recover their old power over the negro,” Ames protested, “and to do this they must disfranchise the negro, not necessarily by law, but practically.” “Practically” meant by show of force, and that brutal show of force was called the “Mississippi plan.”
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