Martha Schofield, pioneer Negro educator / Historical and philosophical review of reconstruction period of South Carolina

by Matilda A. Evans

The tact, the power and magnetism with which this woman met and disarmed her enemies were the same forces wielded by her in drawing to herself the great following at the North so necessary in the accomplishment of her great educational mission in the South. Afterwards it served in attracting to her the help of those who only a few years before sought to do her injury only. With her powers of mind and heart, enriched and mellowed by a Christian spirit that plainly indicated that she held malice for none, but charity for all, she won the love, respect and admiration of everybody who came under her influence.

The absolute fearlessness and splendid self control maintained by her during the rioting in Aiken preliminary to that great Judicial farce, the trial of the members of the mob at Hamburg, is said by those who witnessed it with her as having been courageous, if not heroic. Her conduct on this occasion modulated by such propriety as required the exercise of the greatest common sense, shows her to have been well fitted for leadership in a time of great unrest and supreme anxiety.

Hundreds of excited Negroes on this eventful occasion flocked to her like biddies to the mother hen in time of danger. Her school was a veritable shelter in the time of storm when large bodies of white men on horses dressed in white uniforms decorated in red, with crosses and skeleton heads approached and rode through the town. The leader riding in front carried a huge banner made of a shirt large enough for Goliath. It was spotted all over with large red spots indicative of pistol wounds. On either side was placed a Negro dough-face ornamented at the top by chignons. This banner turned high in the air, round and round, in the swift ride through Aiken from every side that the Negroes looked, all that they could see was a bleeding, grinning, dying Negro.

The only thought among them was, how much longer each of them had to live, and so they rushed in multitudes to Miss Schofield whose interpretation of one of the inscriptions on the banner somewhat allayed their fears and restored quiet among them.

One of the inscriptions said: “Awake, Arise or Be Forever Fallen.” The other contained this: “None but the Guilty Need Fear.”

Among the excited Negroes were old men, ex-slaves, and young, strong, manly fellows; but these, along with the weeping and moaning women and crying, bellowing children, rushed to the grounds and buildings of the Schofield school, all quaking with fear, one old fellow, exclaiming, “Lawd, God-er mi’ty, I sho cant stan dis!”

And all the while this extravagant defiance of the police power of the city and military authority of the United States was happening, great bodies of the government’s own soldiers were standing idly by and looking on! The impotency of the whites in uniform had brought the same disgrace to the flag with which the Negro militia besmirched it at Hamburg.

The white Union troops cheered the marauding mob, and even formed in line and marched to the court house with them, where the rioters, or many of them, were to be arraigned on the charge of murder.

The company was afterwards severely reprimanded for this conduct, and while they never again set up cheers for the “Red Shirts” or fell in ranks with them, it was common knowledge that a cordial relation existed between them and the whites.

Under this condition of affairs it should not have been expected that anything more than a ridiculous farce could have been made of the court hearing given the party of lynchers. Besides, the Radicals in power at the State Capitol were charged, not without much evidence to support the charges made, with corruption of every sort, including bold, out-right stealing and conspiracy to commit murder, and were, therefore, in no condition to throw stones. The few Negroes intelligent enough to present the case against the mob at the bar of justice were intimidated alike by the whites of the South and the Radical whites of the North, as well as by the action of the military authorities, who allowed the brutalities to proceed with impunity just as they had gone on before their arrival in the country.