March 10, 1865

Darlington, South Carolina, March 10th, 1865, 30 days before the end of the Civil War,

the Confederacy hanged a 17-year-old girl for the crime of being happy.

Her name was Amy Spain.

She was light-skinned, described in the records as mulatto, and she belonged in the legal

sense of that word, to Major Albertus C. Spain, a Mexican-American war veteran and attorney

and a delegate to the South Carolina Sesson Convention.

The major kept a large property in Darlington.

A small courthouse town of about 500 souls tucked into the cotton and tobacco country,

76 miles northeast of Columbia, 10 miles up the road from Florence, where the railroads

crossed.

Darlington had been built around its public square.

A compromise born of an old argument between two men on horseback who rode toward each

other from opposite directions until they met.

The spot where they converged became the center of town.

The brick courthouse sat on the square, flanked by a Methodist church and a scattering of

merchant shops.

Spanish moss hung from the oaks along the side streets, a lone sycamore grew at the edge

of the courthouse lawn.

That sycamore is where Amy Spain died.

The road to that sycamore tree ran through the wreckage of the Confederacy itself.

In the first days of March 1865, the whole of South Carolina was shaking apart.

General William Tacumso Sherman had already burned a path from Atlanta to Savannah, then

turned his 60,000 men north into the Carolinas.

Columbia, the state capital, had gone up in flames on February 17th.

Americans army rolled northeast like a brushfire, tearing up railroads, torching cotton stores,

and leaving behind a 40-mile wide corridor of scorched earth.

His cavalry, under the command of Brigadier General Judson Kilpatrick, a man whose recklessness

and battle earned him the nickname Kilkavalry, fanned out ahead of the main columns, probing

for resistance.

In early March, a union detachment rode into Darlington.

There was no battle.

There was hardly anyone left to fight.

Nearly every white man of military age had already gone, and most of the remaining white

residents had fled at the first rumor of blue coats on the road.

The federal troops burned the train depot, the cotton platforms, and the railroad trestles.

One of Sherman's lieutenants, a former architect, had been ordered to destroy the town proper.

When he arrived and recognized a house he had designed before the war, he left the rest

of Darlington standing.

The soldiers did not stay long, but while they were there, the union commander told the

enslaved population of Darlington that they were free to help themselves to whatever their

former masters had left behind.

Amy Spain took him at his word.

She walked through the front door of the Spain House, the house where she had cooked and

cleaned and served without wages for every year of her 17 on this earth, and she began

to gather what she could carry.

Lennon's, sheets, pillowcases, flower and sugar, and lard from the kitchen stores, Mahogany

furniture from the parlor, other enslaved men and women did the same across town, moving

through the abandoned homes of Darlington with the dazed purposefulness of people who

could scarcely believe what was happening to them.

But Amy did more than take household goods.

She led the union soldiers to places where Darlington's white families had hidden their

valuables before they ran.

The buried silver, the stash jewelry, the money tucked behind false walls.

She knew where to look, she had spent her whole life in those houses invisible and observant,

and somewhere in the chaos and the exhilaration and the impossible giddy newness of it all,

she was heard to shout five words that would cost her everything.

Bless the Lord the Yankees have come.

Then the Yankees left.

The blue column moved north, pressing toward Fayetteville, and the battles still to come

at Averasboro and Bentonville, and behind them into the vacuum rode the gray.

Confederate cavalry under General Joseph Wheeler reoccupied Darlington.

The white citizens who had stayed behind during the union visit were waiting with names

and accusations.

Amy Spain, they said, had been the ringleader.

Amy Spain had organized the looting.

Amy Spain had guided the enemy to their hidden silver and their buried gold, she was arrested.

A Confederate military tribunal convened within days.

The proceedings were swift, no appeals, no delays, no prolonged arguments of law.

The charge read like something from a fever dream, treason and conduct, unbecoming a slave,

treason against a government that classified her as property, conduct, unbecoming a slave,

as though joyful defiance were an offense against nature itself.

Major Alberta C. Spain reportedly served as her defense counsel.

Whatever case he made, whatever arguments he offered on behalf of the girl he owned,

the record does not preserve them.

The tribunal had already decided what this was about.

Other enslaved people in Darlington had taken goods from white homes.

Other enslaved people had celebrated the arrival of the union, but the tribunal needed

a ringleader.

They needed an example.

They needed the rest of Darlington's black population to understand what happened when

a slave forgot her place.

The sentence was death.

On the morning of March 10th, 1865, they brought Amy Spain to the Sycamore tree on the

courthouse lawn.

A rope went over the limb.

The citizens of Darlington gathered to watch.

Harper's Weekly would later report that her execution was acquiesced in and witnessed

by most of the citizens of the town.

Amy Spain did not go quietly.

From the gallows, such as it was, just a tree and a rope, and the dirt of the public square,

she told the assembled crowd that she was going to a place where she would receive a crown

of glory, then she dropped.

Her legs kicked.

Her arms were bound at her sides.

No hood covered her face.

The town's people of Darlington watched her die in the plain morning light.

She was seventeen years old.

The war had thirty days left to run.

On April 9th, Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse.

By December, the 13th Amendment abolished slavery across the United States.

Nobody was ever charged for Amy Spain's death.

The Confederates cut her body down and returned it to the Spain family.

What happened next comes from a letter preserved by Catsy Spain, Amy's half-sister, born six

years after the hanging.

The family dressed Amy in one of their finest gowns and laid her in a coffin.

They marched the coffin down Orange Street to the Methodist cemetery of Darlington in

a private procession.

The Spain children sang songs.

They offered prayers, and Major Albertus C. Spain, the man who had owned her, who had

served as her defense counsel, who by some accounts was secretly her biological father,

read scripture over her grave.

The September 30th, 1865 edition of Harper's Weekly published an illustrated account of

Amy Spain's execution.

The artist, NN Edwards, sketched the Darlington Courthouse and the Sycamore Tree.

The article declared that her name is now hallowed among the Africans.

Northern newspapers reprinted the story widely.

For a season, Amy Spain was famous, then she was forgotten.

No monument marks her grave in the Methodist cemetery on Orange Street.

No plaque hangs on the public square where she died.

The Sycamore Tree is long gone.

Darlington is known today as the home of the Darlington Raceway, the oldest paved track

in NASCAR, where stockcars scream around an oval built on what used to be a cotton field.

The Courthouse still stands, the town still turns, and every march, the anniversary passes

without ceremony.

Amy Spain is believed to be the last enslaved woman legally executed in the United States.

She died for taking bed linens from a house where she had been held in bondage since birth,

for showing Union soldiers where the silver was buried, and for saying out loud what

she felt in her heart on the day she believed she was free.

Five words, 30 days too soon.

Bless the Lord, the Yankees have come.

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