There were other episodes of violence in the months before the election, including an estimated 100 blacks killed during several days in Ellenton, South Carolina, also in Aiken County.

During the remainder of the century, they passed laws to establish single-party white rule, impose legal segregation and "Jim Crow," and disenfranchise blacks with a new state constitution adopted in 1895.

Hamburg was a market town populated by a majority of freed blacks in Aiken County, across the Savannah River from Augusta, Georgia.

[1] On July 4, 1876, Independence Day, two white planters drove in a carriage down Hamburg's wide Market Street, where they encountered a local militia company, which was drilling (or parading) under command of Captain D. L. "Doc" Adams.

A white supremacist group called the Red Shirts, led by Benjamin Tillman, who later went on serve a 24-year career in the United States Senate and whose term was marked by enacting racist legislation, instigated confrontations with the black citizens by claiming that said freedmen intentionally blocked passage of public roads and denied passage to any white man.

[3][4]: 314 The Red Shirts then went to the local court, where, at a hearing on July 6, they accused the militia with obstruction of a public road before Trial Justice Prince Rivers.

[4]: 314–315 As armed white men gathered in the vicinity, the militia company refused to disarm and took refuge in the armory in the Sibley building near the Charlotte, Columbia and Augusta Railroad bridge.

Outnumbered, running out of ammunition, and upon learning that the whites had brought a small cannon to the city from Augusta, the militia in the armory slipped away into the night.

The Sweetwater Sabre Company, led by Ben Tillman, was chosen to execute black state legislator Simon Coker of Barnwell.

It further appears that not content with thus satisfying their vengeance, many of the crowd added to their guilt the crime of robbery of defenceless people, and were only prevented from arson by the efforts of their own leaders.

The event deflated the "Co-operationist" faction of the Democratic party, which had anticipated a fusion with the reforming Republican Governor Daniel H. Chamberlain.

Democratic support crystallized around the uncompromising "Straight-Outs," who had already launched the terrorist "Edgefield Plan," devised by General Martin W. Gary for South Carolina's Redemption.

[12] Following the violent and bitterly contested 1876 election campaign, with suppression of black voting by actions of the Red Shirts and charges of fraud, white Democrats gained undivided control of the South Carolina legislature and narrowly won the Governor's office.

They passed laws during the next two decades to impose legal segregation, Jim Crow, and, in 1895, adopted a new constitution, which effectively achieved black disenfranchisement in the state.

[13]: 226  However, during the 1894 Senatorial campaign, Butler faced Benjamin Ryan Tillman, who led an Edgefield County "Rifle Club," which was part of the Red Shirts, for the Democratic nomination.

Only after events in 2015, when a white supremacist named Dylann Roof murdered nine black church members during their prayer service, did Clemson vote to distance themselves from Tillman's "campaign of terror."