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

by Matilda A. Evans

Although the evidence at this mock trial was sufficient to convict almost any man indicted of murder in the first degree, the kind hearted Judge instead of remanding the prisoners to jail, admitted them to bail in the sum of $2,000. This, it is believed, was done through the discovery by Judge Maher of the utter hopelessness of any attempt to prosecute the cases to a successful conclusion. Not only were the Negroes intimidated, but the court itself fell under the vice of this baneful influence, lying like a spectre, between justice and the freedom of the culprits. This feature of the case is made unique by the granting of any bail at all, and doubly so by the smallness of the sum fixed. It becomes a travesty upon justice, if there was ever one, when the character and financial responsibility of some of the men signing the bonds are considered. Chreighton Matheny, a man who did not own ten dollars in property in all the world was accepted as surety to the extent of $20,000.00! It is the only case on record in the whole judicial history of the universe where prisoners were allowed to go on the bond of each other. One of the leaders in the riot who delights in recounting the part he played in the murders at Hamburg and who was given his liberty on a spurious bond at this trial, says that the performance was a perfunctory and laughable travesty on law, but that the action was necessary, for if the attempt to put any of them in jail had been made every official in the court house and town obnoxious to them would have been killed and they would all have gone to Texas or some other hiding place.

If the judicial outrage at Aiken did not show a corrupt collusion between the whites of the South and the white Union soldiers sent from the North, certainly the relations of the Red Shirts and Yankee soldier made this evident a few weeks later when the Ellenton riot broke out. The pent up prejudice and passion lying dormant in the heart of the Negro and whites for ages broke loose in all its fury and swept the whole western section of South Carolina with a fan of fire, scattering desolation and ruin wherever it touched. The possibility of the outrages committed in the bloody drama of this riot is inconceivable except upon the hypothesis that a thorough understanding existed between the whites of the South and the soldiers of the North. In spite of the fact that the government was supported or thought it was supported, by the best soldiers the world had ever seen, by the men who met Lee at Gettysburg and Johnston and Hood at Atlanta, Resaca and Chickamauga, and also in spite of the fact that the Negro population in the section affected out numbered the white population by about ten to one, the murder of Negroes, accompanied by a reign of terror unapproached by any in history with the possible exception of the one attending the French Revolution, went on almost daily, the military authorities being unable or possibly disinclined to afford any measure of relief.

The failure of the government to meet its promises to the Negroes, especially those made by many unscrupulous imposters who immigrated to South Carolina and conspired with a number of native born white sons, among the latter ex-Governor Moses, to obtain control of the State government fell not so heavily upon the spirits of the leading, thinking colored people as the failure of the government to preserve law and order and insure them that security of life and liberty which are indispensible to peace and happiness and essential to the accumulation of wealth. It is not at all improbable that the government’s proclamation to the Negroes insuring them against molestation at the hands of their white neighbors was one of the contributory causes of the Hamburg riot and all the other disturbances that so seriously injured the Negro and the whole South. But the government and the soldiers in blue who made him the equal of his master and the white people among whom he lived could not or would not make him master of the situation in which his freedom had placed him.

That distinctive quality of the Negro, predominating his character more prominently than any other trait, of aspiring to authority, while a perfectly laudable ambition, served him no good purpose at the period of which this is written, but inflicted on him serious injury because of both the untenableness of his position and the inability of his government to make it tenable.

The majority of the educated white people of the South, as well as the ignorant, all speak out and say in 1916 what they asserted in 1876—that God made them of better clay than He made colored people and that they will shoot Negroes and steal their votes from the ballot boxes just as long as murder and robbery may be necessary to maintain their hold on the government, but there is not nearly so much chance of them being able to do this now as in the years gone by, simply because of the preparation of the Negro for the ballot which preparation is rapidly making him not only fit to vote but qualified to fill the position in which he once utterly failed for want of efficiency. Through education he is making his position, both as a citizen and a voter quite tenable, and by industry is spreading an influence that will multiply the wealth of the South, in the distribution of which he will share in proportion to his intelligence, industry and superiority of numbers.

No one saw more clearly than Miss Schofield that the amelioration of the condition of the race could be accomplished through education only and the disturbing effect of the riot on her work gave her deep concern and great anxiety. She had been in the South at the time of the mock trial of the Hamburg rioters long enough to know with exactness the prejudice and bitterness of the whites toward the cause dearest to her heart and observed at close range each and every move made, determined to courageously carry forward her work if in doing so it required the sacrifice of her frail little body, which she always spoke of as nothing but the temporary residence of a transitory soul upon which she was dependent here and hereafter, now and forevermore, for all earthly and eternal happiness.

No one, either white or black, came under her influence at this gloomy period without being deeply impressed with the divine inspiration that apparently guided her. All went away feeling verily that any harm to that woman or her school could be inflicted only at too great an expense, either in the loss of all self-respect or in remorse of conscience, if not actual conflict in earnest, with the authorities at Washington. She drove her tormentors away with kindness and kept them at a safe distance with the philosophy of MacBeth, which made all who cared to do her an injury feel that in murdering her work they would also murder their own sleep and peace both here on earth and throughout all eternity.

Could she have gained an audience with the men literally butchering the colored population alive, and have spoken to them of the enormity of their sins, it is possible that time at least, would have been given the poor distracted Negroes to bury their dead. But time for argument and reason was a thing of the past. Bodies lay for a week and even longer, uncoffined and unknelled. A Negro named Bryant who was killed by Captain Bush’s mob, near Ellenton, lay by the roadside from Saturday evening until late Monday afternoon, when a few brave colored men aroused sufficient courage to undertake to bury it. These had it in a pine box of cheap manufacture, just as the unhappy man had fallen, without a funeral robe or garment, in everyday old working clothes, perhaps all the clothes the poor fellow had in the world, and were on the way to a newly made hole in the ground near by, to lay it away from the mutilating hand of the marauders as well as to protect it from the pinions of the vultures on wings above, when a band of Red Shirts appeared on the scene and forced them to flee for their lives, leaving the body, stiff and stark, in all its gruesomeness to lie in state for the benefit of all Negroes who might pass by.

While this squad of the “Red Shirts” were busily engaged in intercepting the interment of the bodies of men which they had slain or had assisted in slaying, another body just a short distance away was equally as busy in the manufacture of new corpses, while some of the unfortunates were on their knees in prayer.

Among the most prominent of the Negroes falling a victim to the mutilators’ knives and the assassins’ bludgeons, with the dead and the dying lying all around and stenching the pure air of Heaven with the sickly odor of death, was Simon Coker, an unusually bright mulatto, leader of the Republican Party in Barnwell County and the representative of that County in the State Senate. He was shown the body of Bryant, dead for several days, and told that equal honors would be given his distinguished carcass when it had been made ready for exhibition. He was promised this distinction for urging Negroes to vote, to aspire to official position, and to stand for their rights, even in the face of death itself.