Grant

by Ron Chernow

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. 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. The Republican governor, Daniel H. Chamberlain, was a lawyer from Massachusetts, a Yale graduate who had been an officer in a black Union regiment during the war. Writing to Secretary of War Cameron, he deplored the Hamburg massacre as a “butchery of unoffending and unarmed colored men by a brutal and bloodthirsty mob of white men.”8 He thought the episode more shocking than the massacre of Custer’s men, who were at least “shot in open battle. The victims at Hamburg were murdered in cold blood after they had surrendered and were utterly defenseless.”9 The homes of nearly every black family in town were pillaged while mutilated bodies of the murdered men broiled in sunlight for days, their families too petrified to retrieve them.