Southern History Series: The White Man’s Revolution of 1876

Editor’s Note: This is a work in progress.

I feel like skipping ahead to Reconstruction this morning.

The following excerpt comes from Stephan Budiansky’s book The Bloody Shirt: Terror After Appomattox. It describes a moving scene in 1916 when a monument was dedicated in North Augusta, SC to McKie Meriwether who was the only White man who died in the Redemption of South Carolina:

“One day, fifty-one years after the liberation when the freedmen of Charleston had honored the Martyrs of the Race Course, there was another grand celebration on the streets of a South Carolina town, and school children again assembled and sang, and prayers again read and orations again delivered, and again there was a march to unveil a memorial to the dead.

The state of South Carolina had provided some of the money to erect the monument, but private donations were raised, too, and the Hon. B.R. Tillman had contributed twenty-five dollars, and Mr. Henry Getzen had too.

And on that day a thousand people came and cheered and shouted the rebel yell as the Honorable D.S. Henderson retold the stirring story of how young McKie Meriwether had “perished for the cause of liberty” in “The Battle of Hamburg.”

It was not a massacre in the brutal sense of that word, declaimed the speaker; “it was a rebellion against wrong, an armed rebuke to tyranny and oppression.”

Ignorance and vice had reigned in those dark days. The Supreme Court of the state had been given over to a “superannuated Jew, a shrewd carpetbagger and an ignorant black negro.” A Negro militia terrorized decent white people. Military satraps ruled the state at the point of a bayonet.

But there in Hamburg, “the very citadel of negro Republicanism,” the flame had been lit, and ignited “the white man’s Revolution” of 1876.

And then, at the top of a picture-perfect square at the top of the prosperous main street of North Augusta, some pretty schoolgirls in pretty dresses unveiled the obelisk, revealing carved inscriptions to “the memory of the young hero of the Hamburg riot,” who gave his life that the “civic and social institutions which the men and women of his race had struggled through the centuries to establish in South Carolina” might be passed on unimpaired, and the “supremacy” of “Anglo-Saxon civilization” assured.”

I’ve been there.

A few years ago, I stopped in North Augusta, SC to check out the monument to McKie Meriwether with some friends on the way back from Palmetto’s Patriot wedding:

Suppose for a moment that one day we win.

We would build monuments to the heroes who died for our liberty in the course of our struggle. This is what happened in White Man’s Revolution of 1876 in South Carolina. The next generation of White South Carolinians built monuments to the Confederate dead all over the state in the 1900s and 1910s. They also built this monument to McKie Meriwether who died to end Reconstruction.