Hamburg, South Carolina

Hamburg was founded in eighteen twenty-one by Henry Shultz on the South Carolina side of the Savannah River, directly across from Augusta, Georgia. After the Civil War the town became a haven for freed Black residents and a stronghold for the Republican Party during Reconstruction. That made it a target.

On July eighth, eighteen seventy-six, more than one hundred armed white men from surrounding Edgefield County descended on Hamburg, surrounding the Black militia company that drilled there. Twenty-five Black men were captured in the fighting that followed, and six Black men were killed in the violence that followed, several of them shot after they had already surrendered. One white attacker also died.

Wade Hampton, the Confederate general running for governor of South Carolina, used the massacre to mobilize white voters across the state. He won. Democrats reclaimed control of the state government, effectively ending Reconstruction in South Carolina.

The town of Hamburg was annexed into North Augusta and ceased to exist as an independent community in eighteen seventy-seven.