and white. and eddie glaude, author of democracy in black. and david maraniss, author of barack obama: the story. sunday, noon to 3:00 p.m. eastern. on lectures in history, stephen berry teaches a class about coroners in the 19th century south. he discusses them as an agent of the state and talks about records created from their inquest. his class is about an hour and 10 minutes. >> well, good afternoon everybody. i am glad to see we are all alive and well. you have all survived now seven weeks of american history, death and dying and u.s. history. we have reached week seven.

i am stephen berry, your host for all things morbid. today, not any grimmer than any other day in this class, we are talking about the history of death investigation, the evolution of the system of death investigation in the united states, which really matures and comes to age in the dawn of the 19th, 20th century. how this becomes forensic science and ultimately becomes the "csi" series. now we all the pretty lurid sense of death investigations provided by local news. this graphic is everywhere, i found a million of these. always the same with the police tape and the chalk outlines. we have a very lurid sense of death investigation, if it bleeds, it leads school of journalism in the united states. i want to take the evolution of

this system very seriously and talk about how it developed over time. starting with the historical importance. and the most obvious area in which death investigation is critically important is to the criminal justice system, and this is the most familiar aspect of death investigation. coroners and medical examiners participate from the very beginning. they are there on the scene. they pronounce a cause of death. that sets the entire investigation in motion, and then they are there with the death investigation throughout the process until the very end when they may in fact testify at trial. we cannot imagine death investigation without them in that role. it would be anarchy, a single day, they decided all laws are off, you get away with whatever. that is what society would be.

he would have murderer. we need experts to have fairness, consequences and precision in the legal system. this is a very familiar aspect of death investigation in the united states, the role it serves in the criminal justice system. i want to call your attention to two other key roles death investigators have played throughout history, apart from the criminal justice system. these are less appreciated, i think. the first is in public health. death investigators are critical to the public health system, and throughout our history, the coroner and the medical examiner have been on the front line and battled with many of the most mortal threats, raising the alarm and uncovering correlations in epidemics no one else has seen. you have to imagine them, as too often happens, they are in a basement, morbid, dank little

place, doing their work. and what is washing across their examining tables year after year. the rest of us may, in a bad life, see a death or two. they see hundreds. they are the first to see patterns or shifts in how people are going out of the world. so they are the ones who sound the alarm. and i will give you a few examples, you can all multiply them a thousandfold. it is really coroners calling attention to all of the industrial accidents that we see as industrialization proceeds in our major cities. so in pittsburgh in 1957, they raise this against u.s. steel, seeing a rash of

the corporation does not want to advertise this fact. it is the coroners and the m.e.'s office who are seeing these things and leading the charge for improvement in industrial safety. and you may be familiar with the 1911 horrific fire at the triangle shirtwaist accuray company where 137 young women died, some of them of the flames. others perished from leaping out of the eighth story of that building as it was set on fire. nobody tells that story from the perspective of the coroner, really led the charge, they had seen the damage. they had seen time and time again, well before this one factory fire. they have been dealing with this phenomenon, and they were finally fed up. in 1911, they lead the charge for more industrial safety around the areas of factory fires. another example, in 1924, in newark, new jersey, performing autopsies, they discovered radium, the paint they are using

on watch dials, it was a great innovation. your watch dial would be painted with this radium paint and would therefore glow. but the way the workers worked with their brushes, they would always point the brush so they could get a fine enough line of paint. so they are constantly dipping this brush across their tongue that has had this radium on it. so they die of necrosis of the jaw, anemia and other problems. does the coroners that see not just one, like my daughter dies under mysterious circumstances, that is one instance. it is the coroner who sees tens, dozens of these kinds of cases and starts to see a pattern and starts to figure out what is in fact going on. more examples. they are the first ones for traffic safety laws. everybody gets their first car they are overjoyed.

they hit a tree shortly thereafter. so as soon as you have cars in the 1930s, there are massive accidents. there is no safety, stop signs, traffic lights. so you are seeing more and more traffic fatalities. there is one case here or there for those who experience it firsthand, but for the coroner, it is happening en masse. so the new york medical examiner, 1931, the greatest source of danger today is the operation of the automobile. or a wisconsin coroner, more lives were lost in milwaukee over the past five years in automobiles then all the contagious diseases combined. you get the sense of the coroners are like the canary in the coal mines. they really see the dangers as they come at us. i will give you a few more examples that were interesting to me. coroners are the first ones to raise the alarm about needle sharing. it is the crazy 1933 case of

heroin addicts in new york city who are getting malaria. the other first ones to see the pattern. they are the first ones to see an epidemic of child abuse and spousal abuse among the working class in the industrializing cities. they are the first to sound the alarm about s.i.d.s., sudden infant death syndrome. more and more babies dying for no apparently good reason. they sound the alarm about a.i.d.s. they get these cases where if it is needle sharing, they all seem to be addicts, i will make my investigation, but they have these track marks, but they have malaria. this is a curious combination. what could be going on here? the same thing with a.i.d.s. and the body there. and the coke wars, it is coroners saying whoa, this is a

rash of violence i have not seen in my time here before. what exactly is going on? a case we are familiar with, will smith is in a new movie based on a real pathologist that worked in an allegheny hospital in pittsburgh and started to diagnose brain damage, repeated trauma to the head in american football players. and it has become sort of a cause celebre, so this is that role that is not that lurid, police outline, chalk outline sense of how important death investigations are. seeing patterns, raising the alarm, as our society evolves, what new dangers are there that we need to deal with? and in a related area, diagnostics. because they work with corpses, not patients, death investigators have never really gotten, i think, the credit they deserve for their role in public

health or the respect they deserve from their medical peers. but the truth is, they make their medical peers better. and this has been true throughout history. i will give you one example. at the turn of the 20th century, massachusetts general hospital made a big push for all the patients to have autopsies. everyone who dies in this hospital is going to go down and have an autopsy. we will see if the clinician was right. the clinician says the person, adam, you have died of a.i.d.s. but the coroner says, no, no. they uncover how massively awful their clinicians were in terms of diagnostics. so they said, this has to go the other way. everyone as a part of medical education has to do autopsies and see this kind of thing first hand. they played a role in improving

medical diagnostics through the role of the autopsy, which is just the start of the panoply of tools in their toolkit as forensic science evolved over the course of the 19th century to produce, by the time of the 20th century, the modern day medical examiner. okay, i'm going to walk through some of these quickly. at a conceptual level, autopsies have been around forever. like the first neanderthal whose body drops dead and the other poking it with a stick. that has been around forever. they did an autopsy on caesar. they found it was second stab wound. autopsies have been around forever. it's the systematic use that changes everything. the two possible candidates for the father of the modern autopsy are there on the right-hand side

of the screen. one is rakitansky from 1804 to 1878. he presided over the pathology institute. he add ack access to a ton of cases. 70,000 autopsies he supervised. 30,000, he performed himself over the course of his career. he averaged two a day, seven days a week for 45 years. that is a ton of autopsies. he perfected it as a system. how can we do it the same every time so we don't have to introduce any error so we can ensure reproducible results? and to be honest, his disease theory was bad.

he hated the use of microscopes. he was in terms of diagnosing diseases and anthologies that kill people, he is not that great. in terms of systematizing the autopsy and publicizing it, making it an important part, he played a key role. 1821 to 1902, rudolph, maybe more important as the father of the modern autopsy. he is a german pathologist. moves from vienna to berlin because of virchow. he is really the one who sealed the deal on the case that cellular pathology is the disease. people used to think it was the humors, we are out of balance, we have these four humors. that is why they draw blood, to sort of re-establish balance. he is like, that is garbage. he worships the microscope. he loves it.

so in addition to autopsies, he brought the microscope to the center of death investigation. so he deserves to be called the father of the modern autopsy. both of these things come to the united states fairly quickly in the 19th century. the most influential is not depicted here. he started with both of these men and then came to canada and the united states he becomes the most respected and revered north american physician of his time. he not only performed autopsies. people made the cause celebre. he said i have been watching this case, is on medical case, for two months, and i am sorry i shall not see the postmortem. he could not do his own, which he would have loved more than anything else. everything that was wrong with him when they did an autopsy,

sure enough, he was not there. so when does it become systematized? that is part of forensic science and medicine, at the turn of the 20th century. same thing with floating the lungs, and has been around forever. anyone know what that is? okay, this is going to get morbid. we talked about that already. so in the case of babies who was born and you want to figure out if the mother has committed infanticide or the baby was born dead, you would take the lungs of the baby and you would submerge them in water. the idea was, if the baby had drawn breath, the lungs would be aerated, and they would float on the surface of the water. if the baby had never drawn a breath and had been born stillborn, then the lungs would sink. you can do the same thing with drowning victims. they drowned because they take in so much water, the lungs should sink as opposed to float.

they have been doing that since 1681. in the case of infanticide, we do not rely on this much more. it is inaccurate at least 2% of cases. as the body decomposes, gases are released. that is the bloating you see with the civil war corpse. same thing with the baby's lungs. so if the corpse is decaying, their lungs will have gases in them that will have them float. it's not great. 2% is not bad for that era in terms of the degree of error. unless you are one of the women was convicted in infanticide, then 2% does not look good at all. but this bloodstain pattern analysis, it was referred to as what "dexter" made famous.

8% of our weight is blood. any time you have trauma, you're going to release blood. it always has residues to make it difficult to clean. you can imagine bloodstains have been used for death investigations for time out of mind. this guy was killed here, dragged over here. he has blood on his hands. that is not what we are talking about here with the splatter analysis and blood typing. blood typing comes of age in 1907, "a," "b," "o," all of that. they use them for paternity, as you can imagine, is that my kid or not my kid? but they are also used in death investigation. and the bpa, blood stain pattern analysis, that comes in the 1880s. you have scientific papers focused on how blood coagulates, how quickly it dries, whether

arterial blood is brighter, and the splatter analysis, what motion has what results in the bloodstain on the wall? fingerprints too go way back, systematized at the turn of the 20th century. they signed anicent contracts in babylon, you would stick your thumb in the clay tablet, it is chiseled into. even in the 1200s, they knew fingerprints, in asia at least, they knew fingerprints were totally unique and would use them in death investigation. it did not come immediately to the united states until after 1902. there is this very famous case called the shepard case in which this guy murders the one in his apartment and then the glass cabinet door was open. he leaves a partial print on one of the shards. so they can prove, because it was partial, it was left after the glass had been broken. it was not there before.

it was not a print that had been broken in half. he put his finger on part of it. it was the first case in 1902, in france, where they convict someone on the basis of fingerprint analysis. juries were slow to accept it, as you can imagine. people had never thought about fingerprints. but it moved to the united states in 1906. in new york, they're fingerprinting every criminal that comes through new york city and making cases on the basis of fingerprints. other examples, alcohol, death investigators pioneered breathalyzer, way earlier than you would think. 30% of traffic fatalities probably have something to do with alcohol. in the 1950s and '60s, it is 50%. probably higher before that.

that picture, there's nothing more romantic. from 1927, an issue of science and invention. they have all of these guys racing to create a patent for a breathalyzer test. even forensic dentistry goes way back and becomes stabilized around 1900. the first case of using forensic dentistry in court, this is just absolutely crazy, the salem witchcraft trial. this is a guy, the reverend george burroughs, accused of witchcraft, there is evidence he was biting all of these people. they were probably biting themselves and accusing him. but they admit this, and use it in court. but he is convicted. he is hung later. he they say i'm sorry to his kids, and pay them. but it is an ignominious early

form of bite mark analysis and forensic dentistry. but we all know by the 1870's forensic dentistry and dental records are a key part of that murder investigation. all of this comes of age in 1903. i want you to see the historical importance of coroners m.e.s and what role they played in diagnostics. and forensic science. the toolkit they developed over that period. that said, there have been some real problems with our death investigation system in the united states, given its importance in granting all due respect for its successes. we have a deeply flawed system of death investigation in the united states. modern-day m.e.s and coroners may not always have the

legal authority to do an autopsy. they have prosecutors putting in their demands. they have organ transplant specialists, is he dead yet, is he dead yet? they have tough calls to make about euthanasia, assisted suicide -- modern-day medical examiners work in a difficult environment. they also have a rich history of corruption and incompetence. think about, it is flipping how important death investigation is. whoever controls the coroner's office controls the justice system. the wheels of justice do not turn until the coroner makes some kind of pronouncement about a cause of death and sets the wheels in motion. if you don't want the wheels to move, buy off the coroner. so here is a great case. in the 1950s, a man was found bobbing in biscayne bay blindfolded with a knife in his back. the coroner said it was a suicide.

you can imagine the mob bosses who could control a coroner. the investigation into this death would never get started. even a coroner did not go that low, they could routinely get kickbacks. particular undertakers, releasing crime scene photos, other bits of nastiness from their own exam table. and this is the gnarliest bit, quite frankly. it was not until 1958 we had the uniform anatomical gift act, which says coroners and m.e.s could not take anything out of the body. before it was put in the ground. not until 1958. we are sort of familiar with the grave robbers in the early 19th century that would steal whole bodies for uses at the medical college. we know that practice went out of favor.

but the degree to which they used organs from dead bodies to do pathology tests, that goes through the 1960s. there was a massive trade in human growth hormones, which you get from the pituitary gland. i wonder how many of the bodies have pituitary glands that were buried before 1968. coroners could make all kinds of money selling them on the black market. just some examples, one m.e. in the 1940s was in the habit of dropping dead babies on their heads to learn about science, but they are doing it without consent of the parents. in tacoma, washington, a man

routinely stabbed people and was writing a paper on knife wounds. trying to advance science. a milwaukee m.e. in the 1930s collected testicles to test theories about heroin use and sterility. so the end of the class we will read the book "stiff", i will ask you at the end of that class whether we are in a better place now or whether you would donate your body to science, she writes a lot about cases where if you donate your body to science, one possibility, not inevitable, you can avoid this, one possibility is your decapitated head will be used to test stuff. that counts as having donated your body to science. so there are flaws and problems

of incompetence too. death investigation in the united states is one of the least professionalized, least standardized areas of american medicine. this issue actually bubbles to the surface every once in a while and then we tamp it back down and pretend not to notice. i will walk you through a few high-profile disasters starting with john f. kennedy. there is probably no autopsy that has been met with greater derision than kennedy's. he was taken not to anywhere in dallas after he was shot but to bethesda naval hospital because he was a navy man, and his wife thought they would treat his body with greater dignity, and maybe they did. but they are a naval hospital, they are not accustomed to dealing with gunshot wounds, much less the president of the united states with a wound of this nature. and then they have secret

service people around, the kennedy family is around. they got a lot wrong. they thought there were only two bullets, they could not identify the wound track. the navy hospital pathologists operating in this confusing environment, it is a wonder the autopsy report turned out like it did. you won't remember this because you were not alive, but i do. michael jordan, one of the greatest athletes of all time, he's as good at basketball as anyone has ever been at anything. you can compare apples and oranges. he was absolutely fantastic. he was very close with his father. his father was murdered in 1993 in marlboro county, south carolina. the official coroner of marlboro county, south carolina, was a part-time coroner and part-time

construction worker. said he did not have enough room in the fridge for this very unfortunately decomposed body that had been carjacked and thrown into a swamp where it decomposed. he did not have anywhere to store it, so he put it in the oven. unfortunately, i'm not quite sure why. this became a major investigation. 1993, michael jordan was one of the greatest stars on the planet, and the loss of his father was a real black eye for pathology in the united states. the coroner in this case said, i guess i have done for the coroner's association what tonya harding did for figure skating. this was a disaster. and ripped from the headlines is antonin scalia.

who quite frankly should have had an autopsy. he was way overweight, had all kinds of risks. i'm sure a heart attack is probably what claimed his life, but like with kennedy, the conspiracy theory that followed in the wake of failing to do any kind of analysis is the problem. you know the story, right? this is fairly recent. he was hunting at a little mexican border town on a remote ranch. he was found dead by the ranch owner, who said, we discovered the judge in bed, a pillow over his head. and then it is remote texas, right? and again, texas. they don't fly him over, he was pronounced dead with a cause of death by phone. essentially, because that is the way our system works. it has all kinds of holes in it. and once trump hears about this,

he says it is a horrible topic, but they say they found a pillow on his face, which is a pretty unusual place to find a pillow. and then there is a conservative radio host, michael savage, saying this will be bigger. we need a warren commission, the notion that a supreme court none of that would happen if we had a standardized system of death investigation. these are just the high profile disasters. we don't have a system. that's part of the problem. as late as 2009, the national academy of sciences lamented death investigation in the united states is fragmented, inefficient, hodgepodge, and disjointed. we don't have a system. what we have is the medical

examiner whose goal should be, aren't always, justice and science. overlaid on top of a much older system. the system of the coroner. and it's the system of the coroner that i want to talk about for the rest of our lecture today. i don't want to turn coroners into the villains. many of the advancements i laid out in the beginning were done by coroners. they were on the front lines of public health. they came forward. i don't want to slight them. i want to talk about what is in their dna. the coroner's office going way back to time out of mind is not interested in justice or science.

which we would hope. it's only been interested in something else. something approximating it, but not exactly the same thing. does anyone know where the work coroner comes from? corona. that's latin for crown. in "hamlet" they call him a crowner. he is a representative of the king. what you can do is think way back into medieval england. the sheriff of nottingham is squeezing the peasants. taking their money. none of that money is going to the king. the king invents the coroner. the king needs someone who can go around the sheriff and make sure the revenue is running where it's supposed to. it's like the king's vulture.

flying around and whenever this is a dispute or problem the vulture descends to see if someone can represent the kings interest here. what would that have to do with deaths? whenever you have a death, property is released from under its legal moorings. did he commit suicide? that's a crime against religion. the king seizes the estate. if they found the dead norman on the village commons they assessed attacks on the whole village and that's where we get the word murder. comes from this very ancient system of the coroner. this is very inconsistent. france and germany had different systems.

only in places that have that british imprint, you have the office of the coroner. one of the things i'd like to suggest, the coroner is really a creature of the state. instead of thinking of the coroner as someone on the side of justice or science, and that's what's evolving in the period. really just a creature of the state. the state has other interests that it's protecting besides justice and science are other preoccupations in the coroner will be the tool of those interests. here we arrive at our assignment.

to illustrate the point, not necessarily science and justice but representing the state. we will do a little object lesson by doing a deep dive into coroners reports from the south. by using csidixie.org. it takes 1,582 inquests that were done in south carolina between 1800 and 1900. it digitizes them. you can read the original record.ym÷úkov:8

and i could feel that i was going in the floor.

we were all making our ways, just like everybody else in this box. and i became fixated by them and that's part of why i put this project together and i'm inflicting it upon you so that two. there's a business with the state, right, the dead body of of hb v:english. it's a weird way of writing it. in legal terms when you commit murder, you don't commit the murder against the person, you commit the murder against the the state is not money any more, but the state has an interest that it's protecting in all of rule of law. this is how i found them. there was a jumbled little mass. now we've gotp 1,582 of them tht you guys are going to jump into. let me show you how they work so

that you won't get confused when you're actually working on they assignment. everyone has what i call a cover sheet, it doesn't look like a form. it's pretty well standardized and standardized by law. in this case it's the÷ú state o south carolina district, which south carolina district, inquisition, that means taken, in the woods near williamym gardner. it always starts with that. they have to take place where the body lies. you're not suppose to move them. in this case, this inquest is # william gardner. you always get a date, the fourth day of january and the year of our lord 1817. you get a -- in this case it5s the justice of the kwau rum, i won't get into what that is. you get a dead guy, it's the body of÷ú alexander mcgee.

he escaped from his family. this is an era in which they would routinely treat people with problems at home so that it essentially locks their loved one up and escapes. >> no like mental -- >> right. right. >> movement for pen ten tri, fa simts with the death and blind insane, other kind of improvement, but not in 1817, you had to take care of it at ko home. in this case, as i said, he

escaped and died. so that's just the cover sheet and it's mostly boilerplate legally, it does give you some data. what i'm saying, that's just one of the pages and a typical coroner's report. in this case what you have is the ÷úopinion, what i would cal the minority report. . r(t&háhp &hc% been charged to take us to jail, essentially and was injured and couldn't walk fastym enough. so lashed around his neck and dragged him until he was dead. and 11 jurors that -- well,÷ú a this guy was like, are you kidding? undoubtedly and supportively, but he thought there were some boundaries atu! the end.

. you get the testimony of women and -- they can't testify at trial but they can testify here before a kor minor. so in this casezv -- its testimy that moves through to be that moves through to be documented,a version of what happened. we get cases where an inquest jury finds that a slave woman had died, but her daughter says, my mom was hit with a shovel. so we get traces of what really happens -- and you get some hinm

of it. >> william, he can't actually write his name, the coroner has written his name for him and right there, they're all white men. so you've got much more evident than just the cover sheet. we don't know know what an inquest looks like,÷ú there are not many people that left us a description of what it was like inquest, this is nothing we do now, somebody dies you leave the body there for a long time you and call another people and say, i saw that guy walk past me two hours ago or what not. we just don't do it that way.ko they did it that way and actually this is a car tune from 1826 and i actually think it's pretty good at getting at what an inqus] was like.

you won't be able to read this, one of the jurors sayszv -- ande must remain dead, sir, i shall proceed with the inquest. so what's going on here, what÷úo you notice. who is this guy, probably. this guy probably owns the äh(use. you have to be able to be able to decode the way they would draw things in the 19th centurym clearly high class given the wig and what not, this guy is the homeowner. this guy is code forslower class. they're the jurors of the e quest. they'll look at repulsive faces tr unkempt here.

these guys are poorer. . who sort of brought them all here to discover if someone mergered against them peace and dignity of the state. you get medical authorities in the form of the doctor who has already made pronouncement. this is a religiousym figure. religions legitimacy in here and sort of giving meaning to a mortality andzv explaining to u what we should do the feelings with bad things happen. so the authorities of religion, there's actually the authority to local knowledge too, so, okay, they don't have it. but they don't actually know --

they have an authority based on local circumstance. and then there's sort of this authority, to me, at least, death itself, because they're all crammed into this one safe and they're really facing death together in the same intimate ÷ú place. inquest was the product of this cultural process of graveling with debt and coming to some kind of conclusion. these guys they're not. this is by one of my friends laura edwards.÷ú post revolution south, just sort of think about this book as you're working on your inquest, her argument isym essentially,

well, most important in this series was the peace, not just, what is the peace, whatever true yesterday should be true tomorrow. so when you have a death, you have a rift in the peace and those 12 men, 13 men,p they are essentially trying to come to some sort of satisfactory conclusion and return us to the peace. so the state level law was made. at thecounty level where you have the coroner's request, their life is much more supple. laws are often ignored. that'sy/!e women in place can testify. it's not exactly the legal proceeding or a judicial proceeding, it's a proceeding of the community to restore order÷ to the community, so women testify in inquest because they know what was true yesterday and watch it maybe true tomorrow. it's very different than our

sense of the fbi or the sheriff's office, all of these people whose whole function is to compel us tozv obey the law. this is the endeavor altogether she's suggesting. okay. . i want to sort of aggregate those 1,582 cases for us to just give you a sense of what i learned from doing -- from seeing this a lot. all of the little bundles, what came out of that massiveym box. to tell you the truth, what came out of what i should have known before i started, what a social worker would have told me, 1,582 cases i data fied all of it to discover, like a social worker would have come to me and said, okay, tell me about this place. i said, okay, well, it's a land

of massive poverty. it's a land where most are it's a land where most are radically undera it's a land of rampant alcoholism. it's a land where they teach nobody to swim, where there are no social ÷úservices, where the are no treatments for addictions, where there's no access to birth control. and she or he would have told me, okay, i'm going to tell you exactly what it would look like from the morgue. they don't teach their kids to swim, so they're going to drown. they have no access to birth control. you'll have masisive numbers of unwarranted pregnancies, you have alcoholic fathers, you'll have a dez mating amount of spousal abuse and child abuse. and you'll have so so desperate that they willv: hang themselve. and so what i now know if you

are a white man at hartford county soet9 coroner is standing above your body, how did you die, a combination of alcohol and stupidity. so we had this idea, right, of the old south, particularly is this place of dooling so much sadder than that. if you are a white female, spartanburg, south carolina, same period, coroner standing above your body, how did you die? you hung yourself? if you were an african-american male, you hung÷ú yourself and weren't hung by somebody else. so if the land no social services, it's a place where white men are drinking themselves and dependents to death. and that's the way people go out

of the world in such a place.zv okay. your assignment is going to be to write-up one inquestzv as narrative story. take it as a starting point and use it to tell me something about life and death in the 19 century. do you just take one case and you try to peel it like an onion, tell its story, but also try to branch out. and to give you an example, i'm going÷ú to end with one story td from csi dixey and the inquest there. it is the story of the death of james ÷úcook, moses park, hampts even and albert in ham berg, south carolina inzv 1876. this is where it will end with one story from a set of inquest

in the csi case sentence. this map, i know, is probably hard for you all to see hamburg is write here. it is÷ú directly across from augusta. you can orient yourself from augusta. hamburg is directly across the way. here is the savannah river, which is rolling down that you see here and here, one of the most important cities in thezv dome south. so hamburg had settled in 1820 by henry shults who named the town native germany. it quickly became a hub of wagon traffic would come here pulling cotton from the interior of the south at first in 1820. wett don't have railroad yet, mt of that then going by river -- and then carries to÷ú charlesto

by boat, so that 1820. by 1825, they build this hamburg átáujz railroad. and this is the bno, it's a famous commentary the baltimore and ohio railroad. if you look on wikipedia right it will say ths the longest common carrier in the united states, because everybody gets about hamburg to charleston line. c as)tered in 1827 and the world's largest railroad in its completion in 1833 in a paid 68,000 cotton moved through hamburg each year. >> i'm guessing like this area, prior to that that had a lot of wagon traffic and economicallyz depressed. >> well and that's what we'll see especially afterward. what happens to hamburg is that it becomes right you're particular with these, where the

railroad essentially goes around it or finds another route and so by 1876 hamburg is a ghost town, essentially. what you have after the civil war is african-american specialize in these places. the pro! if you're african-american as to the civil war, it's part of the real estate. what real estate do you actuallm own, none. you don't own anything. so we're sort of all familiar with the degree to which the african-american church becomes the center of its -- not just religious life, but civic life, it's a real estate problem. that's the one building they have and own. it becomes a schoolhouse and rec center and a place where people gather. it is everything to them. they're doing far more than attacking just the spirit of the african-american community.

it's a real estate policy. african-americans specialize in these depressed little towns because they've been great once, right. they're totally left behind. you can buy this real estate and you can erect÷ú an african-american town where you can safeguard yourself, your kids and your community. so that's what hamburg isu! by 1876 and essentially had 600 residents. fifth of them are white an living in majority, african-american community. so here is the story that i would tell about hamburg in 1876. ju& 4, 1876, it's 100 years of the united states. and the president of the united states, grant, tells -- what shall we do? well, every town shouldmy have

militia mark and should write the town's history and we'll collect the town histories and it will be a biography of america and this is going to be great. that's the idea, july 4, 1876. áhey have an african-american militia, they read the declaration of independenceu! a they're marching here on the center square on african-american which they have bought with their own money. and right here the wagonwith two boys in it, a guy name tommy butler and henry get son and they're watching these guys march under their militia captain, a guy name dock adams. and this is one witness who remembered that marching, no

matter where they came from, adam, the militia capstan had them well drilled sochlt henry and tommy butler actually belonged to the butler plantation, to get there they have to come across the river from augusta andym then loop around to their father's plantation, which is over here. they're constantly having to come through on their way?xáo augusta and from the plantation. it's driving them crazy that this is such an african-american town, driving them crazy probably thatv: these are black men with guns, they're so well ordered and drilled and so happy on july 4, b1876. this represents everything that they don't want to see in the history of the united states. they drive their wagon directly into the parade. they could have gone around, this is actually a really large field. they could have gone around.

they don't. they drive exactly up to the÷ú parade and they demand militia and i don't know why i would do that, i mean, this is what the president of the united states had wanted all of his town to do. he says, it doesn't matter, sort of like that mentality. this is the rut i travel. i cannot be in a new place, in a new space, this is÷ú the rut i always÷ú÷ú travel.

>> prince riverssis one of the more remarkable stories of reconstruction. he's the town just, essentially, the trial justice and the town gomy from the mayor. he's also the general of the militia, so he wears a lot of hats. they come to his office to swear out the complaint, i want to give you a little bit of a back story, this is the best picture we have of prince river. he had been born 9nú slavery. he taught himself to read and write. he was a driver in buford south carolina. as soon as the civil war starts, heu! jumps on and rides into freedom. he joins the united states color troop and becomes a sergeant. he's attacked in new york because he÷ú has chevron and ev

whites there don't want to see a black officer. this guy was one tough hombre. his own commander said that they had no equals. there's not a white officer in this regimen who had more÷ú administrative ability, no novel described a man that his education had reached a higher point, i see no reason why he should not co]m9 the army of the patomic. if there should ever be a blackmon arky in south carolina, blackmon arky in south carolina, he would be its king. ⌟! we know. he was known as the black prince. he was the power, the most unreconstructed kouny in÷ú sout carolina has a county carved out of it and he's trying to make a go of interracial democracy in hamburg, in aiken county in

reconstruction. . he has the angry white men. he says well, maybe these guys are drunk or hot heads or let's let cooler heads prevail. let's go on back in few days. we'll have dock adams here and see if we can't settle this. a couple ofsdays later matthew, no relation you know how thes south is. shows up at prince river's ogfice. this guy totally unreconstructed, first run at congress, he lost to a black man. he tried to take itout on local blacks, they burned down his house, unreconstructed as i say,

with all of the beautiful manners when he wanted to be, he could be the cold blooded inhuman being. so you said he was there in general butler. i don't know if -- i don't know what's going on. he said he's there as the butler's lawyer but also there as general÷ú butler. he demands that the militia come to him, that they stack their arm and sur rinder those and dark adams apologized for how they were treated on the fourth of july. prince rivers asked if they did all of that+ú would butler vouc for their safety, butler said, it is owing to have the ability to have -- how are they treated this time on the fourth. here is our situation, most of

the militia is hold up, this is where the parade had been days before. they maybe haveht20 rounds of ammo. their guns are really quite cool. the gunman fought we think as such a break through on the shoulder of every man in the army. it's the winchester. that technology comes in right after the civil war. we think of it the gun that won the west. the african-americans in their armory have 120 rounds of ammo by comparison the people who started flooding and coming across the bridge from augusta, many of themare carrying winchester, we have strong countenance that they follow the law cals, bymy 6:00 p.m. they a well drunk and the folks in the armory are starting to worry

about what's going to happen. at aboutzv 6 kwlok they opened fire on the armory, they returned fire. maybe did or maybe didn't. he might have been killed by his own dude, we have no idea. any way, hefalls here, all bets are off. they drag a cannon across the bridge from augusta. they blow a hole.zv african-american militia man otherwise escape out, many of them are captured and they're carried to the dead ring, which is right÷ú there. and as it happens, we have surviving witness who was in the dead ring that day. one of the men there was lieutenant and the militia, this lieutenant was a man name charles hath away. he was in the dead ring and said

to a friend, what do you think of this, hat away asked the man that was sitting next to÷ú him,e ran a gambling operation. i don't know what to think of this. do you think they will kill all of us, yes, i do, i think so, just so. >> i moan, do you cope me. all you've goym to do is pray t guy and save your soul. they're going to try to kill youht -- there was actually terrific disagreement about what to do. some of them -- they want to open the ring up and turn it into a firing line and be done with zvit.

and with zvthat, a small attachment moved away there the ring. they probably consulted with general butler, certainly they drew up a list. as they're leaving to consult and to drop a list. he÷ú says do all you can for me. he begs and while the court marshal was meeting. yes, i will do all i can for you. izv will fix it now in a short while. they come back, hat away is the first name they call, they carry shoot him in the head. come back to the ring and they do it four more times. the last time they call a name,s they sound of his name and he's up and running, runs as fast as he can. he's gunned down and presumed

what better fun do you want that that, three had been killed and that's the reason that we havez verbatim from inside the dead ring. what do you do the next day? remember how we started the whole conversation. the wheels of justice do not turn until the coroner makes thv announcement. this is the place where african-americans actually control the coroner's office. massacre and about lynching, i wish we wrote more books about what you do the next day to pick up the pieces. and in this case, prince÷ú rive stood over the dead body of those six men and convened with the cars at quest. that's what you ÷údo. and you've got the pajss for 87 white men, including matthew

butler. he's your÷ú south carolina cent. that makes it here to the "new the straight outs, as they were roll back. there were no more lanes and the chain of justice, it tells us on joshua who was then interviewedt now it will be 100 years, so he knows exactly what they lost. it wasn't that it happened. it was that the government wasn't going to do anythings about it. what happened to rivers? he returns to drivingmf carriage. and so me the arch, it wasn't the people who were just butte liezed and killed,b its's to tae

a person like rivers and taught himself to read and write. who had been the mayor of a town who had been the mayor of a town in state legislature anda those things. from a carriage driver to a soldier, to a state legislature, to a mayor and to a carriage driver again,÷ú driving white people around. tall beaver have, you look like a piece of statutory, sop erect inform was he. so, what markers are memorial are on the gsóund, how should we remember what happened at hamburg. in 1916 they arrested a monument, massacre that was described by them her ri weather, the loan white who tried to kill himself to fire.

tried to kill himself to fire. and then enscribed, if÷xi the an glow sax elimination, by his death, he secured the supermacy of that, after witch they watched. >> andzv what monument remains? to prince rivers and all of the men, where is hamburg now. this is what happens to hamburg. in 1911, the river floods÷ú and basically augusta has the money and the federal pool, we've got the army, core of engineerssout. and the next comes through and hamburger washes away. all that they owned and all that theyp talked.

and now i'm -- north augusta and here we are around the site of theht massacre. this is the golf resort. well appointed streets, houses, right on the river and what it would have been for the african-american community to own this today, how many own this today, how many millions ofa be. i don't have anything against golf, maybe -- what markers remain on the land for us to remember. here is the execution site, remember that low old field where they shot down charles÷ú adaway and three others. why is running on that site. that is the jefferson david memorial highway. that is an example from the kind

of story you can write qom the inquest and i hope you will write in the death of and deathm investigation. i'll see you all on tuesday, thanks very much. ♪ v: on energy and environmental policy and climate issue might be impacted by the new congress and incoming trump administration,ko we'll talk about -- new congress mightym - and the republican and trump

administration will repeal and replace and the key players to watch in the months ahead. be sure to÷ú watch washington journal at 7:00 a.m. eastern. sunday, in depth willko feature live discussion on the presidency of barack obama for taking your phone calls, tweets, e-mails and facebook questions. our panel includes white house correspondent for the same. it operates the presidency of black and white. and race in america. presidents they're now race still enslaved to the american soul. surprise winningmy journalists associate arthur of the washington post. watch in depth live from news to 3:00 p.m. eastern on sunday, on espn, too.

cspan video÷ú library is a easy way to search and view. >> go to ÷úcspan.org which is t main site and look on the front page on the left side are all the hearingszv and presidential events of that day and then right underneath that on the left side, is a link that says recentko event and they appear but they were all new networks. you can search for a person's name, every person, 117,000 people have paid -- that contained all of their video. and on that page is÷ú a let's s you want -- it's -- we're about to leave and then you'll put in a word and they'll say they talked about climate change. >> members of the american black caucus tomorrow will receive the

signatures and public for those deman" support the clean power plant. >> and thatu! will get you to particular small pieces almost like paragraphs where they made their mark. >> second armoured brigade combat team. these american soldiers werep volunteers that swore to protect the united states. >> across the top we have a link that they are are video )áh @o o clips, you can find all the clips that people make are available to us. >> i certainly hope it's the son. >> yeah, i do. but i don't think so. >> there'su! another tab.

what a bizarre decision to invite trump down there. there are break downs, much like you would find on any other shopping web site and you can say i want to see au! particula person's name. you can see a committee -- or a tag for a policy. go to the degt side is very valuable for down. search, click and play on the cspan video library at cspan.org. >>