The Ellenton Riot began about a month after the Hamburg Massacre, on September 16 of 1876. Like the Hamburg Massacre, it was in South Carolina and involved angry, armed, racist whites massacring African Americans. The main difference seems to be that in the Ellenton Riot, the body count of dead African Americans was much greater.
In fact, you might think of this post about the Ellenton Riot of 1876 as a direct continuation of last week’s post on the Hamburg Massacre. (Read that post with this link.) Which was, in turn, a continuation of yet another post, that one about the 1875 Clinton Massacre. (Read that post with this link.) That’s because all three are connected thematically.
The Excuse for Killing People This Time
In September of 1876, whites in South Carolina circulated a rumor that African Americans had assaulted an elderly white woman. The rumors were baseless. No such assault took place. It didn’t matter. Local whites armed for battle.
In 1876, South Carolina was flush with gun clubs and rifle clubs. These organizations existed for little purpose other than terrorizing African Americans when the situation demanded. White Southerners lost the Civil War. But these clubs allowed them to use violence to uphold the racial order they were used to once slavery was over.
The false rumors spreading seemed the perfect reason for these rifle clubs to attack black people. That is exactly what happened. For four days, September 16 to 19, these clubs scoured the countryside. Ostensibly, they sought those supposedly guilty of assaulting the woman already mentioned. But in reality, their purpose was indiscriminate violence.
The whites attacked people performing all manner of activities—working in fields, families eating at home, group meetings, and even churches. No one with dark skin, it seems, was safe.
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The Cost of the Ellenton Riot
After four days, the U.S. Army finally arrived to restore order. But by then, angry whites had murdered as many as one hundred people. Two whites died. (Some local African Americans had banded together for protection and were able to return fire.) Estimates of blacks killed go from a minimum of thirty to over one hundred.
The state government, led by Republican governor Daniel Chamberlain, sounded the alarm. But words were, it seems, all the state government had to offer the families of the murdered people.
Probably, Chamberlain hoped that the federal government would get involved in order to uphold the authority of his state government, especially considering the Hamburg Massacre had occurred only two months prior. Clearly, things weren’t under control in South Carolina. The only official action he took, however, was a public call for the rifle clubs to disarm and disband. That did not occur.
The national government’s response, as you know if you’ve read about the Clinton Massacre and the Hamburg Massacre, proved equally pathetic. It would move troops to wherever trouble had broken out, sometimes, but took no action to bring any murderers to justice.
In fact, none of the killers faced consequences. State prosecutors did nothing to punish the murders. Federal prosecutors likewise whiffed on prosecutions for civil rights violations.
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The Other Purposes of the Ellenton Riot
One purpose was obvious—the attempt to scare African Americans into accepting an inferior status in South Carolina. But more than that was behind events like the Ellenton Riot.
It was also important to racist Southerners to make Reconstruction state governments seem corrupt and unable to maintain order. That way, they could associate the freedom of the former slaves with a rise in disorder, crime, and wastefulness. The next step was to make the argument that only restoring government by whites could bring back the stability that prevailed before the Civil War.
The corollary, of course, was that the former slaves had no legitimate role in this orderly society besides the role given them by whites, just as they’d had none under slavery. This served the purposes of political and economic elites in South Carolina. They wanted a docile labor force. That goal was elusive as long as African Americans had a voice in politics and the national government was paying attention to what happened to the former slaves.
In essence, then, the strategy in South Carolina became one of relentless troublemaking. White South Carolinians were willing to terrorize African Americans longer than the national government and the courts were willing to protect them. In the end, they got their way.
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