The Hamburg Massacre and the End of Reconstruction

July eighth, eighteen seventy-six, was a Saturday. The Black militia company of Hamburg, South Carolina, was drilling in its armory when a white farmer named Henry Getzen appeared with a demand: clear the street so his carriage could pass. The militia captain, Dock Adams, refused. The armory's doors opened onto the street and Adams had as much right to that space as Getzen. That exchange was the ostensible cause of what followed. The actual cause had been organized months earlier.

The Red Shirts were the paramilitary arm of the South Carolina Democratic Party, and their purpose was unambiguous to everyone who observed them. They were organized, funded, and directed to restore white Democratic political control over a state that had elected a Black majority legislature in eighteen sixty-eight. Their method was violence, the threat of it and the application of it, systematically deployed to make voting dangerous for Black South Carolinians in the eighteen seventy-six elections.

The Hamburg Massacre was the signal. Red Shirt forces surrounded Adams's armory in the early evening. A fight broke out. Adams's men tried to escape through the back. Four of them who were captured after surrendering were taken aside and shot. Their names were Allen Attaway, David Phillips, Albert Myniart, and Hampton Stephens. The killings were organized. They were a message.

The message was received. The eighteen seventy-six election was won by Democratic candidate Wade Hampton through documented violence and ballot fraud. Federal troops were withdrawn in April of eighteen seventy-seven. The Reconstruction constitution of eighteen sixty-eight, with its mandated public education and equal rights in public accommodations, was dismantled over the following two decades. The eight years of Black political power in South Carolina ended on that Saturday in Hamburg. It would not return in any comparable form for nearly a century.