A thread: On July 4, 1876, a Black National Guard unit marched in a parade through the town of Hamburg, SC galling a spoiled young white man, who ordered the unit off of “his street.” He swore out a complaint against the unit’s leader, Dock Adams, for blocking the road.

When it came time for Adams’ hearing four days later, a former confederate general named Matthew Butler showed up with hundreds of armed men, and more arriving by the minute. When Adams, who knew what was happening, did not show up to court, the rifle clubs surrounded the barrack

“Now, by God, I want those guns and I will be God damned if I don’t have them,” Butler said.
His men began firing on the barracks. When a militiaman fired back and killed a white man, the general sent someone to get a cannon.

Eventually they captured most of the Black militia members, but they did not find Dock Adams, who was hidden away, watching.
“Finally they said, ‘Well we had better go to work and kill all the n**** we have. We won’t be able to find that son of a bitch,’” Adams later recalled.

“They called them out one by one and would carry them off across the railroad, and stand them up there and shoot them.... M.C. Butler was telling them what men to kill. They were shot, I guess, about four o’clock in the morning," Adams recalled.

"Pitchfork" Ben Tillman said the massacre was a “sacrifice to the fanatical teachings and the fiendish hate of those who sought to substitute the rule of the African for the rule of the Caucasians of South Carolina.”

“The purpose of our visit to Hamburg was to strike terror, and the next morning when the negroes who had fled to the swamp returned to the town, the ghastly sight which met them of 7 dead negroes lying stark and stiff definitely had its effect,” Tillman said.

“About the time we kill four or five hundred men we will scare the rest," Adams heard one of the men say.
“You could hear them singing it on the streets,” Adams recalled. “This is the beginning of the redemption of South Carolina.”

The white supremacist rifle clubs were acting in accordance with a larger plan to “redeem” the state, laid out by another former confederate general from Edgefield named Martin Gary.

Gary’s plan: “Determine whether it is necessary to kill every white radical in this county, 2 Every mulatto radical, 3rd Every negro leader—make no individual threats but let this be known as a fixed, settled thing.”

Tillman and more than 100 other men were charged by the local Black magistrate judge Prince Rivers with crimes related to the Hamburg Massacre—a few for the actual murders, most as accessories after the fact.

Before their court date, Tillman had all the women in Edgefield dye shirts red so that when they rode into Aiken 130 strong, they would all be wearing bright scarlet “bloody” shirts. (Stephen Budiansky's book "The Bloody Shirt" provides a great account of this)

They galloped through the streets of Aiken like hell’s angels for two days in their red shirts, hoisting a grotesque banner—a cross, with a red shirt, bullet holes, and a Black man’s head in effigy. One one side it read “Only the Guilty Need Fear.”

Then, freed of charges, they directed their energies to terrorizing Republican gubernatorial campaign of Daniel Chamberlain, arriving at rallies, armed, demanding "equal time." At one, they tried to kill Black congressman Robert Smalls, chanting "kill the n****"

In Sept 1876, in the town of Ellenton, Tillman and Butler killed more than 100 Black men. Federal troops intervened and stopped the massacre. But Tillman wasn’t done and he and two comrades kidnapped a Black state senator named Simon Coker and took him to be executed.

“Here is my cotton house key,” Coker told them when they asked his last wish. “I wish you would please send it to my wife and tell her to have our cotton ginned and pay our landlord rent just as soon as she can.” Then he started to pray. He took "too long" and they shot him.

“It will appear a ruthless and cruel thing to those unacquainted with the environments,” Tillman said. “[But] the struggle in which we were engaged meant more than life or death. It involved everything we held dear, Anglo-Saxon civilization included.”

On election day, Tillman, Gary, and Butler all kept armed troops at polling places to prevent African Americans from voting. They also stuffed the ballot boxes in Edgefield, so that more people voted for Hampton than actually lived in the precinct.

“Gary’s doctrine of voting early and often changed the Republican majority of 2,300 in Edgefield to a Democratic majority of 3,900,” Tillman later boasted. “It was Edgefield’s majority alone which gave to Hampton a chance to claim to have been elected.”

With both sides claiming victory, Wade Hampton, the white "redeemer" marched with an army of Red Shirts and set up a parallel government in Columbia. The white supremacists spread a rumor that two Black gangs—the Live Oaks and the Hunkidories—were coming up from Charleston

Hampton used the story to threaten the genocide of the state’s Black population, letting the Union officer in charge of the federal troops, that, if the gangs arrived, he could not insure of life of any Black man in the state.

Eventually, as a compromise in disputed presidential race, the governor's office was given to Hampton, who deposed Prince Rivers form office and brought charges against Smalls, bringing 800 Red Shirts to Beaufort to harass the congressman.

“The triumph of Democracy and white supremacy over mongrelism and anarchy is most complete,” Tillman said when he was elected governor of South Carolina in 1890. In 1895, Tillman was a prime architect in the state's new Jim Crow constitution.

A few days ago, two people were arrested trying to destroy a statue of Tillman. Today, on the anniversary of the events that started the Hamburg massacre, is a good day for every white person to call for the removal of the statue

This is the history that the president honors when he defend these statues. This is the history you honor if you do. At least you should know it. Fuck Pitchfork and all his ideological descendants.