(Top) Newspaper article about the loss of life from the hurricane in Beaufort and Port Royal, South Carolina and Savannah, Georgia, "A Terrible Death List: a Cyclone Ravages the Southern Coast," The Press, Belleville, New Jersey, September 2, 1893, courtesy of the Library of Congress. (Bottom) Newspaper article about the hurricane damage along the South Carolina and Georgia coast, "Fearfully Fatal: the Storm that Struck the Southern Atlantic Coast," Rock Island Daily Argus, Illinois, August 30, 1893, courtesy of the Library of Congress.

The deadliest hurricane in South Carolina history struck the Lowcountry on the night of August 27th, 1893. This massive storm swirled across the Atlantic Ocean, plowed through the Bahamas, and crashed into the coast between Savannah, Georgia, and Beaufort, South Carolina. It brought with it winds of at least 120 miles per hour and a devastating storm surge. While it is difficult to discern a precise death toll, at least 1,500 to 2,000 people, all but a couple dozen of whom were African American, perished that night. African Americans comprised the overwhelming majority of deaths in part because of the Lowcountry’s demography. For example, in Beaufort County, the epicenter of the hurricane’s damage, over 90% of the population was Black. However, African Americans also lived and worked in places that were exposed to the elements, and so many drowned because their locations of labor manufactured environmental vulnerability. This was largely due to historical patterns of settlement connected to the geography of slavery in the Lowcountry: African Americans lived on former plantations near or within former slave quarters, on whatever property they could afford after emancipation, and on land near their places of work along waterways. These properties and lands were often low-lying, whether near the tidal rivers that supported rice agriculture, on ocean-facing barrier islands where sea island cotton thrived, or marshes where phosphatic rocks could be scraped from the muck. The hurricane’s storm surge rushed into these places with such violence that survivors likened it to a “tidal wave.”

Of those Lowcountry residents who survived, tens of thousands faced conditions of deprivation, along with an enormity of grief. The African American sheriff of Beaufort County, George Reed, gave an account of the hurricane’s destruction that detailed the horrific toll it had taken on the Lowcountry. He had ridden the night out on his two-story home and emerged to the “screams, shrieks, and cries all over the town” as people began to learn of the death of loved ones. He heard stories from survivors who were “only saved by climbing to the tops of trees and lashing themselves there,” and, once he had collected himself, began to assist in finding and burying the bodies of the people who had perished in the storm. “By noon,” one newspaper reported, “every one on the chain of islands had become a grave-digger.” Lowcountry residents had lost family, loved ones, and community members, and these terrible losses were compounded by the destruction of the necessities of survival. Houses, barns, sheds, livestock, gardens, cash crops, sources of fresh water: the hurricane had inflicted damage on them all. The future was now more uncertain than before.