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

The wounded were lying in the chapel attached to the residence, and every one of them had not only been horribly mutilated, but they as well as the dead, had been robbed of their clothing. . . . The mattresses were literally soaked in blood.

Part Two, Conclusion, of

Slaughter at Cainhoy

The Worst Racial Violence in the South Carolina Lowcountry During Reconstruction

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

Brick Church, a/k/a White Church, near Cainhoy, SC, site of a bloody political ambush Mon., October 16, 1876.

The day was beautiful and the trip very pleasant with Democrats “firing their pistols at such objects in the river as attracted their attention.” Little did they know how valuable that ammunition would be a couple hours later. When they arrived, many Democrats were low or out of ammunition, not suspecting any trouble.

There were 40 to 50 black Republican muskets hidden in the chimney of the old building to the left of the speakers stand. The whites had found them but not said anything about them under instruction from George Rivers Walker who said:

Walker goes on to say that Bowen, at first, had some success stopping the attack even though he believed Bowen was responsible for setting it up in the first place. The effort was short lived because:

Walker found himself in trouble when he heard a black say “‘Shoot that son of a b_____.'” He jumped behind a tree as the shot went off and ran “tree to tree for 200 yards back to the vestry” with  shots being fired at him constantly.

Another account said:

Another of the victims, a kindly old man in  his seventies named William E. Simmons, “an old, crippled and silver-haired white man”¹⁶ who had come out just to visit some friends and look at some property he had once owned got trapped in the vestry and was shot through the windows then:

Mr. Thomas Whitaker, mentioned earlier, who had been shot in the stomach at close range with buckshot then hacked so that big slices of flesh were missing from his body, dictated these last words to his mother. They were written as he was dying next to Rev. E. C. Logan “at whose residence the unfortunate man breathed his last:”

Sworn statements began appearing in the newspaper two days after the massacre such as the following:

State of South Carolina,

Charleston County,

Personally appeared J. C. Boyce, who being first duly sworn, testified as follows: I saw the first shot fired at the Brick Church, St. Thomas and St. Dennis, on the 16th of October, 1876. I am positive it was fired by the negroes. No gun was seized by the Butler Guards until the negroes with cocked muskets were advancing on the whites.

Sworn to before me this 16th day of October, 1876. George Rivers Walker, Notary Public.

Mr. William S. Venning, Jr. testified under oath in a sworn statement that he had arrived before the Democrats. Here is part of his testimony:

Black Democrat J. R. Jenkins, whose life had been saved by white Democrats when Jenkins was turned over to federal troops during the King Street riot five weeks earlier, testified that he “heard a colored man cry, ‘look out! look out!’ and rush forward and fire a pistol into the air.”

It was also reported by several witnesses that during the fight, Bowen disappeared among the blacks who were firing from the swamp.

None of the offenders, even the well-known Cyrus Gaillard, were ever brought to justice because it would have been Bowen’s responsibility to do so.

Bowen told Republican Governor Chamberlain that the whites had started the fight by shooting the old black Republican, Lachicotte. That was refuted in several sworn statements of witnesses who maintained Lachicotte was not shot until the fighting had been going on a while and he was shot in retaliation for him shooting a Democrat.

To sum things up, Bowen rode on the Pocosin with the Democrats and observed them wasting most of their ammunition amusing themselves. Upon arriving at Cainhoy, Bowen went straight to Brick Church and was seen among the blacks who had muskets, whispering to them and telling them to hide their muskets.

Guns that had been hidden by black Republicans in the kitchen to the left of the speakers platform were discovered by white Democrats but the whites suspected it was a trick so nothing had been done about them until whites spotted a “militia like” group of blacks moving out of the swamp behind the speakers platform with muskets cocked.

At that point the whites rushed to get those guns but they were apparently a trick all along. They were loaded with powder but no projectile, so it was as if they were loaded with blanks. Several people reported later that the guns had been loaded with powder only so were worthless in a fight.

It is likely, based on sworn testimony, that the blacks moving out of the swamp with muskets had done so on a signal, which was supposed to be the black Democrat Delany speaking.

However, black Republican McKinley was mistaken for Delany and things started as McKinley began speaking.

At the same time, one account has black women running out of the kitchen and shouting that the whites have found the guns and that starting it.

Another account has a brown-skinned Republican firing a shot in the air and that starting it.

No matter what, it seems certain that Delany was the signal for the black women to run out of the kitchen, or for the brown-skinned Republican to fire a shot to alert the black militia to come out of the swamp and start the attack.

In responding to Bowen’s statement that the whites killing Lachicotte started everything, a Dr. Thomas S. Grimke, in a sworn statement on the 19th of October, 1876, said that:

Neither the King Street Riot of September 6, 1876, the Cainhoy Massacre five weeks later or federal troops pouring into South Carolina during the presidential campaign could deter white and black Democrats from electing former Confederate General Wade Hampton their governor.

The News and Courier was right. Not only did the Democrats “carry the colored people with them” in 1876, Democratic policies put in place by Gov. Hampton persuaded large numbers of blacks to vote Democratic two years later.

Reconstruction in South Carolina ended when federal troops were removed in April 1877.²⁸ It is too bad that the damage caused by almost a decade of Republican violence, race hatred and corruption by carpetbaggers and scalawags in South Carolina and across the South, caused a backlash against blacks within a decade that lasted until the 1960s.

That is the real legacy of Reconstruction.

 

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¹ “Bloody Work at Cainhoy,” News and Courier, Tuesday, October 17, 1876.

² “The Crime at Cainhoy,” News and Courier, Wednesday, October 18, 1876.

³ “Bloody Work at Cainhoy,” News and Courier, Tuesday, October 17, 1876.

⁴ “The Cainhoy Slaughter,” News and Courier, Tuesday, October 24, 1876.

⁵ “Bloody Work at Cainhoy,” News and Courier, Tuesday, October 17, 1876.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ “The Cainhoy Slaughter,” News and Courier, Tuesday, October 24, 1876.

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² Ibid.

¹³ “The Crime at Cainhoy,” News and Courier, Wednesday, October 18, 1876.

¹⁴ “The Cainhoy Slaughter,” News and Courier, Tuesday, October 24, 1876.

¹⁵ “The Crime at Cainhoy,” News and Courier, Wednesday, October 18, 1876.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ “The Cainhoy Slaughter,” News and Courier, Tuesday, October 24, 1876.

¹⁸ Melinda Meek Hennessey, “Racial Violence During Reconstruction: The 1876 Riots in Charleston and Cainhoy,” South Carolina Historical Magazine, Vol. 86, No. 2, (April, 1985), 108-109.

¹⁹ “The Crime at Cainhoy,” News and Courier, Wednesday, October 18, 1876.

²⁰ Ibid.

²¹ Ibid.

²² Ibid.

²³ Ibid.

²⁴ Hennessey, “Racial Violence During Reconstruction,” 108-109.

²⁵ Alfred B. Williams, Hampton and His Red Shirts, South Carolina’s Deliverance in 1876 (Charleston, S.C.: Walker, Evans & Cogswell Company, Publishers, 1935), 272.

²⁶ News and Courier, Friday, October 20, 1876, editorial page.

²⁷ News and Courier, Tuesday, October 17, 1876.

²⁸ Louis B. Wright, South Carolina, A Bicentennial History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. and Nashville: American Association for State and Local History, 1976), 15.