But history records that the authorities with unlimited power signally failed in asserting any power at all; that the party in power with unlimited means at its command for accomplishing great undertakings of public enterprise accomplished only the complete demoralization of the whole South, financially and morally.
After sitting a whole year the legislature of Alabama at the end of its session passed a bill authorizing the endorsement of the State’s credit, for the purpose of encouraging the development of railway construction and transportation to the extent of $16,000 per mile. Only one road was completed. Five were built a few miles and abandoned. Through the issue of bonds for one purpose or another, as for instance, the building of railroads organized and owned principally by the men voting the bonds, the public treasury was fleeced to the limit. This, combined with the stupidity, cowardliness and corruption of the military authorities hastened on the hurried collapse of organized government and substituted in its place a reign of terror and lawlessness without a parallel in Southern history.
CHAPTER VIII.
Hamburg and Ellenton Riots.
Several riots and some of as foul murders as ever disgraced the lives of men attended the uprisings around Aiken.
Among the most important of these were the Hamburg, the Ellenton and Ned Tennant riots, all occurring within a few miles of Miss Schofield’s school.
The Hamburg riot occurred in July, 1876, and proved to be one of the most tragic events, as it was one of the most disastrous occurrences for the Negro race and the Republican Party of the South that occurred during the entire period of Reconstruction. Seven Negroes and one white man were killed out-right, while one white man and two Negroes were seriously wounded.
This sounded the alarm of danger in the South for the experiment being made with the Negro for self-government and urged immediate action by Congress for the protection of its policy there, if not its newly made citizens who at the first challenge had shown conclusively the incapacity to protect themselves.
The riot was precipitated by two young white men, Henry Getzen and Thomas Butler, who were driving through Hamburg on the return from Georgia to their homes in South Carolina, just across the State line in the vicinity of Augusta. At the time a company of one hundred Negro men in command of Captain Dock Adams was drilling on the principal street of the town of Hamburg, and a large proportion of the Negro population, as usual, was out admiring the spectacular performance. It is claimed by the white men that the company was drilling “company front” and so filled the street from side-walk to side-walk, which permitted them no room to pass; and that Captain Adams instead of ordering his troops to fall into “Column fours” or “column platoons,” he ordered them to “charge,” at which command, Butler, a son of Mr. Robert Butler, shouted from his seat in the buggy, with revolver drawn, that he would shoot to death the first man that stuck a bayonet in the horse. With a hundred bayonets gleaming in the sun and several hundred of the colored race looking on, the Negroes knew the butchery of the whites was an easy matter, but being desirous of avoiding a conflict which they knew only too well was instigated at that time for the purpose of arousing the already over enraged whites to an action that would later on mean either the annihilation of themselves or their old masters and mistresses, whom some of them still loved and admired with the same affection and admiration that caused most of them throughout the battle for their freedom to remain at the fire-side and defend the homes of those out in a war fought to continue them in a state of bondage, the Captain ordered a halt and opened the ranks so that the buggy could pass. Completing the exercises, the soldiers were marched to their armory and dismissed. Adams then went, as was his right to do, to a Justice of the Peace, “General” Prince Rivers, a Negro, an ex-Union Soldier, commander of the Negro militia, the State Senator from Aiken County in the General Assembly and also the Trial Justice for his district, and swore out warrants for Getzen and Butler, charging them with interfering with his company at drill.
Hearing of this, Butler hurried home and informed his father of what had happened, who went in haste to the same Trial Justice and secured a warrant for Adams for obstructing the highway. News of the “cowing” of the Negro militia and the subsequent issuance of warrants for the captain of the company and the white men and the setting of the trials of each for a hearing was spread all over the surrounding country in a very short time, and excitement was intense on both sides as to what the outcome would be.