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. James Cook, Hamburg's Town Marshal, was shot and killed in the street. The White supremacist militia rounded up around two dozen black citizens, some from the militia, and at about 2 a.m, took them to a spot near the South Carolina Railroad and bridge. There, the whites formed what was later called the "Dead Ring" and debated the fate of the black men. The whites picked out four men and, going around the ring, murdered them one at a time; these men were as follows: Allan Attaway, David Phillips, Hampton Stephens, and Albert Myniart. The Sweetwater Sabre Company, led by Ben Tillman, was chosen to execute black state legislator Simon Coker of Barnwell. After being told of his impending execution, Coker asked the unit to give instructions to his wife regarding cotton-ginning and that month's rent. He was then executed mid-prayer. Several others were wounded either during their escape or in a general fusillade as the ring broke up. According to the State Attorney General's report, freedman Moses Parks was also killed here; the US Senate investigation said he had been killed earlier near Cook. A coroner's jury indicted ninety-four white men in the attack, including "M. C. Butler, Ben R. Tillman, A. P. Butler, and others of the most prominent men in Aiken and Edgefield Counties, South Carolina, and Richmond County, Georgia." They were never prosecuted. The official report by the Attorney General of South Carolina ends with this statement: Outrage at the events led to the US Senate calling for an investigation. It gathered testimony in hearings held at Columbia, South Carolina and published its findings in 1877. Reactions Republicans were stunned by the massacre at Hamburg. 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. The massacre attracted nationwide attention (such as in Harper's Weekly, August 12, 1876 and in The New York Times). A much larger massacre of freedmen by white paramilitary groups took place from September 15 to 21 in the town of Ellenton, also in Aiken