Prince Rivers

Prince Rivers (1824–1887) was a corporal and later sergeant in the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, a Union regiment in the American Civil War.

Born into slavery in Beaufort, South Carolina, Rivers worked on a plantation as a coachman. He escaped from slavery by stealing the plantation owner's horse, riding through the Confederate lines to the town of Edgefield, in order to enlist in the Union Army as a volunteer in 1862.

Along with Robert Sutton, he became a non-commissioned officer in the newly formed 1st South Carolina Volunteers. His commanding officer, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, wished to promote him to commissioned officer but was prevented by his superiors from doing so because of Rivers' race. Higginson said of Rivers, "No anti-slavery novel has described a man of such marked ability. He makes Toussaint perfectly intelligible; and if there should ever be a black monarchy in South Carolina, he will be its king."

The 1st South Carolina Volunteers and other African-American soldiers were promised the same pay as other soldiers in writing, yet were paid less than half that pay by the U.S. government, until June 1864 when an Act of Congress granted them retroactive equal pay.

After the war, Rivers became a legislator and trial judge, closely involved with Reconstruction politics. He was registrar for Edgefield County, South Carolina in 1867. In the South Carolina Constitutional Convention of 1868, he was the representative for Edgefield. After a redistricting in 1872, Rivers was the representative for Aiken County.

In 1876, Prince Rivers was the judge in a hearing which was related to the Hamburg Massacre. Rivers became a target of the Red Shirts, a white Southern paramilitary organization. Though he tried to persuade the local black militia to give up their weapons, and the white militia to back down from open violence during the events that led to the Hamburg Massacre, his efforts failed and seven people died in the Massacre. His home was burned and property stolen or destroyed by the Red Shirts. He subsequently worked as a house painter and coachman until his death.

External Sources

 * Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. Army Life in a Black Regiment.