Slaughter at Cainhoy, The Worst Racial Violence in the South Carolina Lowcountry During Reconstruction, Part One

Old Mr. Simmons, a decrepit man of seventy, took refuge inside the vestry, but the devils must have dragged him out, chopped him with an axe, broke, by beating, almost all his bones, and then shot him while lying on the ground. . . .

Part One of

Slaughter at Cainhoy

The Worst Racial Violence in the South Carolina Lowcountry During Reconstruction

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

During the presidential campaign of 1876, a political meeting took place at beautiful Brick Church near Cainhoy, South Carolina, Monday, October 16, 1876. It ended shortly after it started when Republican blacks savagely attacked the mostly white Democrats and shot, beat, hacked, mutilated and robbed them, killing five white men out of the group and severely wounding several others. An eyewitness, confirming the brutality of the attack, stated:

. . . Mr. Whitaker met with a worse fate, for he was brought in alive, suffering fearfully from buckshot through his stomach, and huge hacks of flesh taken out of him by an axe or hatchet. . . .

Daly (18 years old) was also left on the ground when wounded. His head was hacked in five places when found.

All the victims had been stripped of their clothing and robbed.

The Brick Church, a/k/a White Church, north of Cainhoy in Berkeley County, S.C.

There was despair and hopelessness among Southern whites during much of Reconstruction, especially in South Carolina. Of 60,000 Confederate soldiers supplied by South Carolina to Southern armies in the war, 20,000 had been killed and another 20,000 maimed. The war in its totality had claimed 750,000 dead and over a million maimed. It is hard to fathom the grief and heartbreak from all that though Basil Gildersleeve, a Confederate soldier from Charleston who today is still considered the greatest American classical scholar of all time, tried in his book, The Creed of the Old South, published 27 years after the war:

Reconstruction had begun this way for most white Southerners:

Blacks and whites could have adjusted to their new relationship after the war but the most unscrupulous people in all of American history, carpetbaggers and scalawags out for plunder and political advantage, did not want peace. They could not make money and hold power with peace, so they created racial hatred and division using violence and lies for their political advantage, not unlike the Marxists in America today with their “systemic racism” invention, and racial hate like Critical Race Theory, and fraud like the 1619 Project.

If it is true that history repeats itself, then the methods of control during Reconstruction and the methods of control of American Marxists today match perfectly. Of course, it’s not exactly true that history repeats itself. It’s the manifestations of human nature that repeat themselves over and over throughout time because human nature does not change.

So, South Carolina endured the lawlessness and corruption of an entrenched Republican Party loaded with carpetbaggers and scalawags for over eight long years. White frustration was epitomized by lawyer George Rivers Walker, son of the British consul in Charleston, who was at Cainhoy. Walker identifies a black Republican named Cyrus Gaillard as the one who kept the massacre going by telling other blacks to keep shooting the whites.⁵ Walker laments that taking legal action against Gaillard would be a waste of time because:

Walker is referring to the Republican sheriff of Charleston County, Christopher Columbus Bowen, and his protege, Solicitor C. W. Buttz.

Christopher Columbus Bowen, corrupt Republican sheriff of Charleston County during much of Reconstruction.

Both Bowen and Buttz owed their positions solely to Republican political corruption, and Bowen maintained vice-grip control over black voters in Charleston County.

Later, Bowen was in the Confederate cavalry under Col. William Parker White. Bowen was court-martialed by White for forging a pass which extended a leave and enabled him to draw his pay.⁸ As a result, Bowen plotted to murder White. The plot was discovered and Bowen put in jail.

In 1872, Bowen was elected sheriff of Charleston County. Expenses had been “$20,000 a year to run the sheriff’s office” in 1868. After 1872, when Bowen took over, “expenses doubled to $40,000 a year.”¹³ Voting irregularities were also frequent with Bowen.

A respected Northern journalist was shocked by Bowen and Buttz and wrote to the News and Courier which published his statements October 15, 1874:

Bowen and Buttz were rotten to the core which is why white South Carolinians, along with thousands of blacks, had had enough of Reconstruction by 1876. Walker, who was almost murdered at Cainhoy, summed up the situation for all South Carolinians:

The Mississippi Plan Adopted

White Democrats were trying to discredit Republicans who were telling poor blacks that if whites get back in power, they will reestablish slavery and other such lies.

Racist Republicans also used violence and whippings on any black who did not vote Republican and on many blacks simply for being friendly to whites.

There were other methods of ostracism within the black community too, and all this added up to Republican intimidation to keep blacks voting Republican so carpetbaggers and scalawags could continue at the public trough.¹⁷ All of this is exactly like the Marxist left’s “Cancel Culture” today.

Democrat whites at Republican meetings were to be courteous to blacks but not deceive or flatter or make promises, just plain talk, man to man, which they reasoned would cause blacks to respect them.

Other parts of the Mississippi Plan included boycotts of Republican businesses and pressure on black employees of Democrats to vote Democratic, the same kind of pressure Republicans had been using for eight years.

However, at no time did Democrats threaten to whip blacks who didn’t vote Democrat nor did they encourage black women to reject black men for being Democrats, nor did they ever tell blacks that Republicans would eventually turn on them and sell them back into slavery.

The Mississippi Plan was immediately put into effect. Republican meetings that Democrats attended became known as “joint meetings” with “division of time.” Throughout the campaign, Democrats, black and white, went to Republican meetings and had their say.

This was not a good sign for Bowen and the Republicans as they “noted with growing dismay and fury the slow but steady additions to the number of negroes enrolling in Democratic clubs, for one reason of another.”²² As thousands of blacks began supporting Democrats during the campaign of 1876 and even riding as red shirts, violence against them by Republican blacks increased dramatically.

This black Republican violence against black Democrats was demonstrated in a bloody riot in Charleston on Wednesday, September 6, 1876, some five weeks before Cainhoy.

That night, the Democratic Hampton and Tilden Colored Club of Ward 4 met in Archer’s Hall (corner of King and George Streets). Outside, scores of armed and angry black Republicans had gathered and were threatening the black Democrats.

When the meeting was over, the black Democrats were put in the middle of the 45 or so whites, to protect them from the black Republicans, and they marched quietly up King Street toward Marion Square, called Citadel Green back then, with Republican blacks on both sides of King Street cursing and jeering at them the whole way. Journalist Alfred B. Williams writes:

The whites stopped, a black rioter ran up and “knocked the first white man he met in the head with a ‘slung shot,’ and the crowd immediately behind him fired a pistol into the crowd of whites, shouting that they would have the colored Democrats out even if they had to kill every man in the crowd to do it.”

The Citadel in 1865 on Citadel Green, today’s Marion Square. It’s now an Embassy Suites.

It became a hand to hand fight. Some policemen arrived but were “powerless to restrain the infuriated mob.”

Final casualties total one white man dead, over 50 beaten severely. No black Republicans had been killed and only a handful had been injured.³¹ The white man who died, Buckner, had been part of the escort protecting the black Democrats. He had a wife and child at home.

Whoever planned the ambush had their timing thrown off when the whites stopped to face the first mob. If the whites had gone just a block further up King Street, or their formation had fallen apart, or they had broken and run, there was no way they would have been able to get the black Democrats to safety at the Citadel. Since the black Democrats were the object of the mob, they certainly would have been murdered along with several whites who were determined to protect them.

Charleston Light Dragoon, 1888 sketch by Edward Laight Wells.

Five weeks later, with the election fast approaching, Democrats got careless and walked into another ambush, this time at Cainhoy, 12 miles up the Wando River from Charleston.

¹ “The Cainhoy Slaughter,” News and Courier, Tuesday, October 24, 1876, front page.

² Kenneth M. Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction, 1865-1877 (New York: Vintage Books, 1965), 186.

³ Basil L. Gildersleeve, The Creed of the Old South, 1865-1915 (Bibliolife Network; reprint, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1915), 26-27.

⁴ Claude G. Bowers, The Tragic Era, The Revolution after Lincoln (Cambridge, MA: The Riverside Press, 1929), 45.

⁵ “The Cainhoy Slaughter,” News and Courier, Tuesday, October 24, 1876, front page.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ Robert Douglas Mellard, Christopher Columbus Bowen: A Scalawag Discovers Opportunity in the New World of Reconstruction Politics, Master Thesis, University of Charleston and The Citadel, 1994, 15.

⁸ Ibid, 6.

⁹ Ibid, 16.

¹⁰ Ibid, 22.

¹¹ Ibid, 67.

¹² Ibid, 70.

¹³ Ibid, 88-91.

¹⁴ The News and Courier, October 15, 1874, as cited in Robert Douglas Mellard, Christopher Columbus Bowen: A Scalawag Discovers Opportunity in the New World of Reconstruction Politics, Master thesis, University of Charleston and The Citadel, 1994, 97.

¹⁵ “The Cainhoy Slaughter,” News and Courier, Tuesday, October 24, 1876.

¹⁶ “To Live and Die in Dixie,” News and Courier, August 26, 1876, front page.

¹⁷ David Duncan Wallace, South Carolina, A Short History, 1520-1948 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1951), 572.

¹⁸ Bowers, The Tragic Era, 513-14; “To Live and Die in Dixie,” News and Courier, August 26, 1876.

¹⁹ Melinda Meek Hennessey, “Racial Violence During Reconstruction: The 1876 Riots in Charleston and Cainhoy,” South Carolina Historical Magazine, Vol. 86, No. 2 (April, 1985), 107.

²⁰ “‘No Intimidation’,” News and Courier, September 1, 1876.

²¹ Ibid.

²² Alfred B. Williams, Hampton and His Red Shirts, South Carolina’s Deliverance in 1876 (Charleston, S.C.: Walker, Evans & Cogswell Company, Publishers, 1935), 37-41.

²³ Williams, Hampton and His Red Shirts, 121.

²⁴ “A Bloody Outbreak,” News and Courier, Thursday, September 7, 1876.

²⁵ Ibid.

²⁶ Ibid.

²⁷ Ibid.

²⁸ “A Night of Excitement,” News and Courier, Friday, September 8, 1876.

²⁹ Williams, Hampton and His Red Shirts, 122.

³⁰ “A Bloody Outbreak,” News and Courier, Thursday, September 7, 1876.

³¹ Hennessey, “Racial Violence During Reconstruction,” 106.

³² Williams, Hampton and His Red Shirts, 126-27.