Ulysses S. Grant’s Outrage at the 1876 Hamburg Massacre of Blacks

On July 8, 1876, whites massacred freedmen in South Carolina. Ron Chernow in Grant (2017) summarizes:

[On July 4, 1876, Independence Day,] a scuffle arose [in Hamburg, South Carolina,] when two white farmers in a buggy protested that their path was barred by a parade of local black militia; before long, militia leaders were jailed for obstructing a public highway. White vengeance wasn’t yet sated. In the coming days, armed whites from South Carolina and nearby Georgia, including members of rifle clubs and saber companies, gathered in Hamburg to demand that local black militia relinquish their weapons. [On July 8,] the latter took refuge in a small brick building used as an armory and a drill room, but the swelling white mob blew out its windows with musket and cannon fire. Believing their assailants would soon blow up the building, blacks leapt from the windows or climbed down an escape ladder only to be gunned down in cold blood. Five men in a row were executed and three more wounded as they attempted to flee. James Cook, the black town marshal, was shot and his skull smashed in with muskets. (839–840)

In 1876, South Carolina was one of the few Southern states still under mostly-Republican control. On July 26, 1876, President Ulysses S. Grant wrote to the state’s Republican governor, Daniel H. Chamberlain. The letter reads in part: 

The scene at Hamburg, as cruel, bloodthirsty, wanton, unprovoked, and as uncalled for as it was, is only a repetition of the course that has been pursued in other Southern States within the last few years—notably in Mississippi and Louisiana—Mississippi is governed today by officials chosen through fraud and violence, such as would scarcely be accredited to savages, much less to a civilized and christian people—How long these things are to continue, or what is to be the final remedy, the Great Ruler of the Universe only knows. . . . There has never been a desire on the part of the North to humiliate the South—nothing is claimed for one State that is not freely accorded to all the others, unless it may be the right to Kill negroes and republicans without fear of punishment, and without loss of caste or reputation.
…..
Expressing the hope that the better judgment and cooperation of the citizens of the State over which you have presided so ably, may enable you to secure a [f]air trial and punishment of all offenders, without [d]istinction of “race, color, or previous condition of [ser ]vitude”—and without aid from the federal government—but with the promise of such aid on the conditions named in the foregoing—I subscribe myself. (Papers 199–200)

Earlier in the letter, Grant described the duty of “the Executive of the nation to give all needful aid, when properly called on to do so, to enable you to insure this inalienable right,” that right being, in Grant’s words in the letter, “the right to vote according to the dictates of their own consciences.”

Though Chamberlain requested troops from the federal government, Grant did not immediately send them, as indicated in the letter. He has been criticized for this. But it speaks at least in part to how in the later half of Grant’s last of eight years in the presidency, the North’s attention and commitment had moved farther away from Reconstruction.

Arguably, the corruption scandals involving members of Grant’s cabinet had also drained away some goodwill. Certainly, the scandals had been one cause of divisions within the Republican Party, and Grant in the 1872 election had faced a presidential opponent who had come from the Republican Party itself: Horace Greely. Greely, supported by Republican opponents of Radical Reconstruction, ran as the candidate of the Liberal Republican Party. The Democratic Party joined forces with it, in its own right nominating the Liberal Republican ticket and endorsing the Liberal Republican platform, hoping to beat Grant.

My thinking is that at the time that Grant wrote this, he felt it more prudent to send troops to protect freedmen closer to the time of the election, if circumstances then required it. And that to send them immediately might fan the flames of racial tensions. In short, knowing that the Northern public was increasingly turning against the military role in Reconstruction, Grant felt the need to use U.S. troops less freely than he did ahead of the 1872 election.

Ronald Shafer of the Washington Post tells in a July 4, 2022, article of the outcome of the Hamburg massacre:

A coroner’s jury in Aiken, S.C., charged 94 white men with murder in the Hamburg Massacre and other racial attacks in the state. None were ever prosecuted. Two of those charged were M.C. Butler and Benjamin “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, leader of the notorious Edgefield County Red Shirts. Butler and Tillman later became U.S. senators from South Carolina.

Hamburg no longer exists. A historical marker near the battle site calls the massacre “one of the most notable incidents of racial and political violence in South Carolina during Reconstruction.” History shows the Hamburg Massacre, sparked on the day Americans celebrated 100 years of freedom, helped kick off an escalation of racial violence during an election that ultimately led to the destruction of the freedom and rights of Black Americans in the South for nearly another century.