The Black Prince: The Emancipated Life of Prince Rivers (1824-1887) of South Carolina

FAIN: FZ-292855-23

Stephen William Berry
University of Georgia (Athens, GA 30602-0001)

Writing a biography of Prince Rivers (1824-1887) who was by turns a slave, color sergeant of the First South Carolina Volunteer division of the Union Army, a South Carolina state legislator, and first mayor of Hamburg, SC. 

Prince Rivers may be the most consequential American about whom Americans know almost nothing. An enslaved carriage driver from Beaufort, South Carolina, Rivers escaped to become color sergeant, Company A, First South Carolina Volunteers -- the highest-ranking Black member of the first Black regiment mustered into Union service. After the war, as the "Black Prince," "The Power of Aiken County," and the leader of the 'sanctuary city' of Hamburg, South Carolina, Rivers created one of the boldest and most successful experiments in interracial democracy in the history of the United States. Largely forgotten today, Rivers will join Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Nat Turner, and Frederick Douglass in the pantheon of the early Black freedom struggle.