After the Civil War, Black Americans in Union County emerged from more than two centuries of chattel slavery to buy land, build churches and schools, and, for eligible men, register to vote, serve in the militia, and participate on juries. In 1868, Black voters elected three formerly enslaved men to represent Union County in the state legislature. White people threatened by Black freedom answered these gains with racial terror, attacking and lynching Black people for asserting their rights, leaving plantations, participating in politics, seeking economic independence, violating white social customs, being accused of crimes, or simply to enforce white supremacy. At least 15 Black people were lynched in Union County from 1865 to 1877, including Sax Joiner in 1865 for allegedly writing a letter to a white woman, and Reverend Lewis Thompson, an AME Zion preacher and teacher in Goshen Hill, who in June 1871 was threatened, then abducted, tortured, and lynched after a death note ordered him to stop preaching. One of the most devastating episodes came in early 1871, when white mobs seized 12 Black men from the county jail on January 4 and February 12 and hanged or shot them at the hanging grounds before any determination of guilt. These men—Captain J. Alexander Walker, Charner Gorden, Andrew Thompson, Sylvanus Wright, Barret Edwards, Thomas Byers, Aaron Thompson, Joseph Vanlue, Ellison Scott, William Fincher, Mac Bobo, and possibly Amos McKissik—were South Carolina state militia members accused of killing Mat Stevens while he was illegally transporting bootlegged whiskey. Months later, the U.S. Congress investigated racial violence in former Confederate states, including this jail raid massacre; despite intimidation, witnesses such as Eliza Chalk and Samuel Nuckles testified, even as some Black residents had already fled. No one was held accountable, but Union County’s Black community resisted through migration, persistence, and institution-building, sustaining opposition to white supremacy through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and beyond.