More than half a century after the fact, a book on local history alleged the fire was started by the building's solitary white male prisoner, who was reportedly in jail for unpaid debts.

All three, Sheriff Samuel P. Mathews, deputy Jacob S. Beck, and assistant James P. Barrineau, were acquitted on charges of negligence and murder by a jury in a Williamsburg County court.

[12] The white plantation owners were colluding to depress the wages they now had to pay agricultural workers; in turn, the black men and women of the Williamsburg District began holding mass meetings "to decide upon a plan for offsetting the scheme.

"[13] According to Reconstruction historian Eric Foner: A federal officer investigating reports of impending insurrection in Kingstree, South Carolina, concluded that exaggerated fears 'spring from dread, on the part of the planters, of the freed people asserting their rights of manhood.'

Blacks bearing arms or, as at Kingstree, marching 'with red colors flying' to demand better contract terms, symbolized the revolutionary transformation in social relations wrought by emancipation.

[16] Due to an idea now known as Haitianism, conservative southerners of the era believed that "our negro slaves, who had been kind, faithful and true to us during the war,"[17] might well be transformed by the Emancipation Proclamation into "the savages that impaled white babies and raped their mothers in Santo Domingo.

[15] The anti-black violence in Williamsburg County was part of a widespread revanchist movement in South Carolina: "...vigilantes killed numerous African Americans during Reconstruction.

He advised the speedy opening of the jail, and the first door was opened, but the smoke rushed out in such torrents that it was impossible to enter...It has been a most unfortunate occurrence and, happening at a time when the country is torn by intestine feuds, a construction may be placed upon it by the Radical party to answer their own ends...It is a source of great regret that by a strict adherence to the red-tape principle so much valuable time was lost, and when the preliminaries were finally settled it was too late to do more than witness the destruction of the building.A 1923 history of the county claimed that the fire had been started "sometime in the night," by the one white prisoner housed in the building, in an attempt to burn an hole through the wall and escape.

[23] Contemporary accounts regarding the lone survivor conflict slightly in details: According to the Kingstree Star, a civilian named M. McBride entered the building and unlocked the second-floor "room" of Robert H. Flinn, "a white man...confined on bail process.

[20] According to the Kingstree Star, McBride "twice fell by suffocation before he reached the foot of the staircase",[21] with the Charleston Daily News adding that "his humanity nearly cost him his life, as he was insensible for one and a half hours as consequence of having inhaled the smoke.

"[20] Once it was determined that it was impossible to enter the building from the ground floor, "nearly all the citizens of the village" and the U.S. Army soldiers in the town garrison attempted a rescue from outside.

[25] The Charleston Mercury, the newspaper owned by Robert Barnwell Rhett, one of the political Fire-Eaters of South Carolina, and edited by his son R. Barnwell Rhett Jr., published a brief, vivid, and graphic account that was dated January 9 and suggested the dead inmates were responsible for the fire: Their shrieks and screams as they were gradually shut off from all hope of escape were sickening to the helpless spectators, and with the hissing and crackling of the flames, which seemed to take a savage delight in their work, formed a scene that, in horror, might have rivaled Pandemonium itself.

The general commanding directs that you cause an immediate and thorough investigation of this affair; that in the meantime you arrest the sheriff and jailer, and if the facts prove to be as stated, that you hold them in military confinement under the charge of murder until the civil authorities shall be ready and willing to try them.

The county judge at the time may have been John G. Pressley or Charles W. Wolfe Sr.[23] All three defendants were acquitted on April 12, 1867, by a jury that deliberated for an hour beginning at 10 p.m.[35][36][37] Responses to the verdict varied, with a newspaper in Ohio reporting in May:[38] It will be recollected that twenty-two freedmen were burned to death in the Kingstree jail last January.

[38]While recent scholar of Reconstruction said that:[19] The postbellum order disturbed whites that heretofore benefited from a caste system built upon the foundation of slavery.

[19]A Thomas Nast cartoon called Southern Justice (published in the March 23, 1867, issue of Harper's Weekly) advocated for continued military occupation of the defeated Confederacy, and included an artist's imagined depiction of the scene inside the third-floor cells.

"[39] Black activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper visited Kingstree on a lecture tour and mentioned the jail fire in a letter dated July 11, 1867: It was a very sad affair.

[23] Following the construction of a new county jail building, a grand jury empaneled in 1875 reported that "there has been a great negligence upon the part of those charged with the custody of criminals and offenders against public peace and welfare.

"[23] The grand jury's report listed three suspicious escapes: Bill Shaw, "convicted of a grave offence and sentenced to the penitentiary"; Charles Cooper, charged with murder, removed from jail "without sufficient authority or warrant of the law, and carried to the Salters Depot on the North Eastern Railroad and there allowed to escape"; and Tom James, jailed on larceny charges, who was allowed "outside the prison walls without a guard.