Captain Nat Butler, a brother of General M. C. Butler, under whose direction the execution of Coker took place, ordered the fatal shots while the victim was in the middle of his last supplication on earth to Him who alone can give or has any right to take away.
Before being horribly murdered Coker was reminded that he had but very few minutes to live and was asked by Captain Butler if there was anything which he could do for him. With great calmness, he is said by a member of one of his executioners to have replied: “Yes, sir, here is my cotton house key; I wish you would please send it to my wife and tell her to have our cotton ginned and pay our landlord our rent just as soon as she can.”
Butler is reported as saying in reply; “Very well, Coker, I will attend to this. Now is there anything else?”
“Yes, sir,” said the Negro, “I would like to pray.”
“All right, get at it quick,” Butler answered by way of giving his consent.
Before the doomed man could finish his prayer, the order, “Make ready, men, aim, fire,” was given and Simon Coker, still in a kneeling position, with pleas of forgiveness half finished on his lips, passed from earth into eternity.
When the body was found a ghastly wound in the forehead as if it had been made at close range was noticed. Evidence subsequently disclosed that it had been made by one Dunlap Phinney, who delighted in acknowledging the deed and humorously remarked in recounting the terrible crime that he did it because he wanted no more dead “niggers” to come to life again and turn witness as Pompey Curry had done when he “played possum” with the same men in the Hamburg riot.
And this outrage, like others previously perpetrated, and still others committed later on, occurred under the very eyes of the soldiers in blue stationed in the South in the interest of maintaining the rights of those citizens who had been made free by the force of their arms, in deadly combat with the same men now being allowed to deny the Negroes all that freedom implied and all that made the war worthy of being fought!
Perhaps the hand of God had less to do with the non-interference of the government in the rioting than the influence set at work by the misrule of those in power of the State government. Every intelligent soldier knew of the chaotic condition of the country as a result of the open handed robbery and connivance with crime on the part of the State officials and decided possibly that the reign of lawlessness prevailing was no worse than the infamous conduct of the government under the constituted authorities. At any rate, the “Red Shirts” were allowed a wide latitude in defiance of all authority, and Mart Gary’s and Butler’s doctrine of spreading terror among the Negroes as the only means of rescuing the State from the misrule prevailing triumphed famously.
Preceding the arrival of the national military authorities, travel and the peaceable pursuit of business was made as hazardous by the inefficiency and corruption of the constituted authorities as it had been made by the creation of the reign of terror by the “Red Shirts.” Radical officials, instead of the Negro, should be held accountable for many of the real grievances complained of by the white people. In the hope of winning his vote the Negro was promised by most of these time-servers and self-seekers almost everything under the sun which he could desire, including not only the proverbial forty acres and a mule but absolute protection in attempts at inter-marriage with the whites. He was urged not only to assert his rights but to defend them even if it became necessary to shoot to death whole communities of white people in doing so. With this instruction and the additional assurance that the government at Washington would protect them in every thing they might do, is it any wonder that the conduct of these simple, trusting, unsuspicious children of ignorance, ready to believe any thing told them and as ready to act on false assumptions as on the other sort, should have become very obnoxious to their former masters, and especially to that class known as the “Poor Buckra?”