Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen by Philip Dray

Author:Philip Dray [Dray, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2010-02-11T05:00:00+00:00

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 spurn 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

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