The Original Black Panther: Prince Rivers and the Lost City of Hamburg by Stephen Berry
published by University of Georgia Press 302 pages (2026)
Stephen Berry has a rising reputation among Civil War Era historians. A professor at the University of Georgia, he has been exploring ways to present scholarly work in more engaging ways. This new book The Original Black Panther: Prince Rivers and the Lost City of Hamburg does that. It is good for Civil War and Reconstruction scholars and college students, but it can also be used with advanced high school students.
Prince Rivers was a member of the United States Colored Troops (U.S.C.T.), an organizer in the post-war South, as well as an elected representative. While we can find biographies of several famous African Americans of the Civil War Era like Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Sojourner Truth, there are almost no biographies of the men and women who stayed in the South during the war and Reconstruction. The denial of an education to slaves and the persecution of Blacks trying to go to school resulted in almost no writing by many freedpeople. Stephen Berry tries to correct this in this biography of Prince Rivers. All that survives of Prince Rivers’ autobiographical writing could be contained on one page. Berry used torturous methods to find the real Rivers even though normal sources for a biography are not available.
Prince Rivers was born in Beaufort, South Carolina, which became a hotbed of freedom during the Civil War. Beaufort is the second oldest city in South Carolina and it is set on an island where the primary agricultural products were cotton, rice, and indigo. Many of the white owners of the plantations on the island lived elsewhere, for example Charleston, rather than be permanently in Beaufort. While the work of the slaves was tightly controlled, life after the work was finished was left to the slaves. The Blacks here and in the other Sea Islands developed the unique Gullah-Geechee culture, which continued and mixed African cultural practices like language, music, and food with American culture. According to historian Guion Griffis Johnson, there were ten times as many slaves on the island as whites.
Rivers was born sometime between 1822 and 1825. As with many other slaves there is no birth record. He worked as a household servant, allowing him to learn reading and writing. In his late teens he “married” Elsie and together they had a dozen children. Ten of those children died before they reached adulthood due to the harsh conditions of enslaved life. Because Rivers was literate, in his twenties he prepared a petition to the governor which he presented in 1856. A witness said that “the Governor sent him home to his master, telling him the State could not interfere with the relations existing between master and slave.” While he was unsuccessful, this incident shows that even as a slave he was looking to the government to correct the wrongs done to Black people. It also shows that other Black people considered him a leader.
Five years later the Civil War broke out. By the end of 1861, Beaufort had become a target of Union forces. The largest United States naval armada in history up till that time was sent there and quickly overwhelmed the Confederates. As the Confederates retreated, the white land owners and overseers pulled out too.
Rivers was the carriage driver at his plantation. After the Union victory in the Battle of Port Royal, his “owner” had him bring out the carriage to drive his family to where they were hoping to escape. Rivers did this. When the “owner” left the carriage, Rivers’ life as a slave was over. Rivers unhooked the horse from the carriage and he rode back on the horse. The city he arrived in now had 10,000 freed slaves. By January 1862, a boat arrived with 53 teachers, doctors, and ministers from the North to serve the free people of the captured islands. General David Hunter began recruiting Black troops in May. Several months later Rivers enlisted. He said, when asked if Blacks would fight, “I know we would. Only let us know for sure—for sure, mind you—that the white people mean right; let us know for sure that we’re fighting for ourselves, and I know we will fight.”
Rivers went to New York with General Hunter to speak about the recruitment of Blacks but when people saw him on the streets in his army uniform he was attacked.
Seth Rogers, the regimental surgeon wrote about Rivers in a January 3, 1863, letter home saying “Serg’t Rivers, our Provost Sergeant, is as black as the ace of spades and a man of remarkable executive ability. He is the one from whom some Philadelphia soldiers attempted to strip the sergeants’ stripes and found [it] wiser and safer to leave him alone.”
Thomas Wentworth Higginson became the commander of the first Black regiment from the South. Higginson was a Unitarian minister, an active Abolitionist who had freed a slave held in Boston, and a member of the Secret Six which supported John Brown’s expedition at Harper’s Ferry. When Higginson arrived in South Carolina, he relied on Rivers to discipline his regiment. Berry writes:
“Rivers and Higginson saw the political landscape the same way; both believed that “the destiny of the negro race might rest” on the performance of the First South Carolina [Regiment]. Like Higginson, Rivers loved his men, but he didn’t court their love. His men didn’t need a friend; they needed to be ready. “As to actual discipline,” Higginson said after watching Rivers put the men through yet another drill, “it is doing no injustice to the line officers of the regiment to say that none of them receive from the men more implicit obedience than Color-Sergeant Rivers.””
Higginson came to deeply understand the refugee African Americans that had joined his command. Higginson wrote that his Black soldiers:
“who have tested their courage in the lonely swamp against the alligator and the bloodhounds, who have starved on prairies, hidden in holds, clung to locomotives, ridden hundreds of miles cramped in boxes, head downward, equally near to death if discovered or deserted,—and who have then, after enduring all this, gone voluntarily back to risk it over again, for the sake of wife or child,—what are we pale faces, that we should claim a rival capacity with theirs for heroic deeds?”
Since Blacks could not become officers, Higginson relied on his Black sergeants. Rivers was the color sergeant for his company. He was also in charge of recruitment. Higginson said that Rivers was “inexhaustible,” and he relied on him for intelligence and advice. Unfortunately, Higginson’s physical condition deteriorated through 1863 and he was “invalided” and had to go home. He was replaced by Major Charles Trowbridge, who, according to the men in the regiment, allowed at least one white subordinate to use physical violence on his men. Rivers and some of the other men in the First South Carolina wrote to Higginson about this. In his diary, Higginson wrote that Trowbridge “does not feel the respect for their personal feelings that we do, mimics their own dialect to them, calls them ‘boy,’ patronizes them & in general seems like a good-natured overseer who will resent every tyranny but his own,” however Higginson refused to take action against his successor. In spite of his dissatisfaction, Rivers served until the end of the war and continued to serve as a peacekeeper. The First South Carolina regiment was split up to suppress violence in the major towns and cities. They were confronted by a white male civilian population which was largely Confederate veterans who continued their revolt through guerrilla and terrorist tactics.
New President Andrew Johnson was sympathetic to the whites who would not give up their power to their former slaves. Rivers wanted to fight for Black power not through the army, which was entirely controlled by white men, but through the electoral process which could make those white men accountable to a Black electorate. In Edgefield County, where 60% of the population was Black, Rivers became the first African American voter register there. One of his endorsement letters said that; “I have known Sergeant Rivers for several years and can assure you that he is peculiarly fitted to perform the duties of a register…If you have read the Atlantic Monthly for a year past and have read Colonel Higginson’s articles published in it you have read considerable of Sergeant Rivers as Col. Higginson has seldom written an article for that magazine during the past year but that he has alluded to him. The Colonel regarded Prince as the ablest colored man in his regiment. I know considerable of the colored men in Edgefield District and think that Sergeant Rivers is the best colored man in the District for register. I trust you may feel at liberty to appoint him.” In November of 1867 he was elected to the South Carolina Constitutional Convention where this former slave would help form a new constitution for the state.
In the convention, Rivers backed full legal and civil equality regardless of race. He also wanted to get rid of laws against interracial marriage, end debtors prisons, and removal of property qualifications for voting. He also backed compensation for those held illegally as slaves after the Emancipation Proclamation had freed them. Rivers worked for reform with delegate Solomon George Washington Dill from Kershaw County. Dill was a former Confederate who believed that South Carolina could only move forward with the white and Black populations no longer separate. When Dill was ridiculed in the conservative Charleston Mercury newspaper for advocating racial equality, he rose up in the convention and told the audience that the men of the Mercury both raped their slaves and they compared Blacks to animals. Did this mean they were guilty of bestiality? Dill rejected returning to the ways of slavery saying “I want to get [us] out of the old channel and I intend to fight to the day of my death.” He was assassinated shortly thereafter.
After the new constitution was adopted, Rivers turned his attention to building Black power in the town of Hamburg, a port on the Savannah River across from Augusta, Georgia. Hamburg had been a thriving city in the 1840s both for its transport of cotton and its lucrative slave trade, but by the late 1850s it was in sharp decline. By the Civil War, it was virtually abandoned. When Rivers moved there, he reincorporated the town and removed restrictions on race. He was elected mayor, one of the first Black mayors in the United States.
Rivers also advocated for the creation of a new county around Hamburg in which Blacks could be free. Edgefield County was the local home of the Klan and many African Americans felt threatened there. He was appointed the head of a commission to draw up the lines of the county which became Aiken. The Aiken County charter refers to the human rights conditions in Edgefield that led to the creation of the new county; “it is a notorious fact that within the last few years dastardly murders and other crimes have been committed within the bounds of our county, and the perpetrators of the crimes have either been permitted to go unpunished and free, or in some cases have received inadequate and insufficient punishment…”
Rivers was elected to the state legislature from the new county. He also became the first African American admitted to the South Carolina Bar and became a judge.
Professor Berry says that Rivers wanted a town and a county where adherence to the law was paramount. As other parts of the state were “Redeemed” by white supremacists and even constitutional protections were removed from Blacks, he saw maintenance of equality under the law as the primary protection of Black rights. Berry writes that during Reconstruction “Hamburg was 80 percent Black, 20 percent white, and 100 percent politically stable.” He helped elect both white and Black councilman to the town board and while Hamburg was a sanctuary for newly freed Black families, whites continued to live there.
While the situation continued to improve in Hamburg, the state was experiencing a declining respect for the rights of Black people. Wade Hampton, the former Confederate general, and his allies, the terrorist Red Shirts, began a violent campaign to restore white supremacy in the state. The violence reached its apogee during the Centennial of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1876. The mass killing happened, you may have guessed, in Hamburg. Berry details the Hamburg Massacre which resulted in the killing of six African Americans, part of the murders of one hundred Blacks in Aiken County by white supremacists that year.
The local commander of the armed paramilitaries was former Confederate General Matthew Butler. After the state was “Redeemed” by Wade Hampton and the Red Shirts, Butler was chosen as United States Senator in 1878 and he would serve three terms.
President Ulysses S. Grant denounced the Hamburg Massacre which, he wrote “would scarcely be accredited to savages, much less to a civilized and Christian people.” However, he refused to authorize Federal intervention. On the other hand, the newly installed South Carolina Governor Wade Hampton had an aide send a January 22, 1877 letter saying “Sir: I am instructed by His Excellency the Governor, Wade Hampton, to inform you that he has removed you from the office of Trial Justice, for Aiken County. You will therefore, immediately upon the receipt of this letter, cease to exercise the functions of said office.” Five months later, Hamburg’s charter was revoked by the new Democratic state legislature.
Biographies of many Reconstruction Era Southern Black leaders are often heartrending. Against great odds they cast off slavery, escaped to where they were offered freedom often at great cost, advocated for those still left in slavery, risking their lives to destroy the Confederacy, and then trying to reconstruct the Black community in the years after the war as a free entity. Whatever they built, in Rivers’ case a Black majority town and a new county, were subject to retributive violence and legal eradication as the white supremacists took back power either through elections or coups. Berry brings an immediacy to the story he tells. The details about Rivers’ life, politics, and business ventures intertwine with the cresting wave of Black political power and its beating back by the men who started the Civil War.
Follow Reconstruction Blog on Social Media:
