Benjamin Esau Wilson was a 75-year-old man living on a quiet farm near Lynchburg in Sumter County, South Carolina, when violence came to his door on the morning of January 7, 1897. A long-time resident and patriarch of a local family, he shared his home ground with his adult son Samuel Wesley Wilson and Samuel’s wife, whose household stood as one of the familiar white farmsteads on the road outside the little town.
That winter morning began as countless others must have done for Wilson, in the stillness of his bedroom, unaware that his name would soon be carried by telegraph and newspaper far beyond the fields he had worked for decades.
The chain of events that ended his life did not begin at his home, but with a man already feared in the region: Simon Cooper, a heavily armed Black sharecropper and outlaw who had been drinking and was wanted in connection with a recent killing. On the afternoon before the murders, Cooper went to Lynchburg determined to force a young Black girl to marry him. The girl and her mother escaped into the swamp, and frightened residents hastily formed a posse to track him when he fled back into the woods. Through the night he roamed the countryside, forcing several Black men at gunpoint to accompany him and shelter him, including a man named Boyle, from whom he took a horse and compelled Boyle’s teenage son Isaac to ride with him. As dawn came on January 7, Cooper rode out of the woods with rifle, pistols, and a pocketful of cartridges, looking for a new target.
From Boyle’s house Cooper turned toward the Wilson place, just a short distance away. According to later testimony, he drew up at the home and called to the elder Wilson through the window, asking to borrow the family buggy, claiming he was crippled and needed it to get home. Wilson refused him firmly. In an instant the scene turned from uneasy conversation to murder: Cooper raised his pistol and fired through the window into the bedroom. The bullet struck Wilson where he lay or sat in bed; neighbors and reporters would later describe finding the old man propped in that same bed with a shotgun still clutched in his hands, a frozen, futile gesture that suggested he had tried to defend his family but had no time before he was shot down.
Once inside the house, Cooper continued his assault. The account pieced together in Sumter from the first investigators’ reports painted a grim scene. When people finally entered the Wilson home, they found three members of the family dead: the elder Wilson in his bed, his adult son Samuel lying in another, his head split open, and Samuel’s wife on the floor with her skull smashed and her throat cut. The rooms bore signs of multiple gunshots and frantic struggle. One nearby farmer, Mr. Baker, later told reporters he had heard a series of shots from the direction of the Wilson place and had watched, helpless from a distance, as Mrs. Wilson was marched out to the buggy shed by Cooper to fetch harnesses, still in her nightclothes and barefoot despite the winter cold, before being driven back inside under his gun. She never came out alive.
Cooper did not stop with the Wilson household. Leaving the house, he met a Black man named Preston Smith on the road. Witnesses recounted how he ordered Smith to drop to his knees; when Smith refused, Cooper shot him with his rifle, then went to where he fell and slashed at him with a razor before retrieving an axe and burying it in the back of Smith’s neck, nearly severing the head. He then fired at Baker’s children as they stood on their porch across the field, missing them only by chance, before driving away in the Wilson buggy with his coerced companion. In the space of a single rampage, Benjamin Wilson, his son, his daughter-in-law, and Preston Smith lay dead, and the quiet road near Lynchburg was spattered with blood and spent shells.
News of the killings reached Sumter by mid-morning. Telegrams reported that “old Mr. Ben Wilson, his son Wesley, and Mrs. Wesley Wilson” had been murdered, and that Cooper had also killed two other people, a man and a girl, as he tore through the countryside. The report “aroused all Sumter,” and Sheriff R. E. Pierson hastily organized a posse, chartered a special train, and set out toward Lynchburg. As new sightings of Cooper came in from the rail town of Mayesville, the train was halted and the sheriff split his forces, some following the tracks toward St. Charles, others fanning out along the public roads between Mayesville and Sumter. The man they sought was drunk, heavily armed with Winchester rifles and revolvers, and repeatedly boasted that no one would ever take him alive.
By the following day, the manhunt ended at a small cabin near a place known as Green Swamp, a few miles from Sumter. Cooper had holed up there with weapons, a valise of cartridges, and flasks of whiskey. The posse’s first attempts to approach the cabin drew a storm of gunfire. The sheriff appealed by telegraph for heavier weaponry, and a cannon and makeshift sheet-iron shields were sent toward the scene. After hours of exchange, deputies managed to get close under covering fire. Cooper finally appeared in the yard with his gun, refusing to surrender; a marksman’s rifle shot struck his face, and the officers rushed the door. When they seized him, they found that he still had a loaded revolver hidden in his clothing and a razor tucked inside his shirt. In his pockets and around the house they discovered notes in his hand, chilling boasts that he had been “killing men for ten years” and intended to keep killing until he died.
Simon Cooper was technically under arrest at that point, but he never made it to a courtroom. Sheriff Pierson’s men loaded the wounded prisoner into a wagon bound for Sumter, believing they had averted a lynching by keeping tight control of the crowd that trailed behind. Yet when the procession reached Green Swamp, tension boiled over. Several men seized the deputy in charge, dragged him away from the wagon, and overpowered him while others pulled Cooper out by the legs. They threw a rope over a tree, hoisted the half-conscious prisoner, and opened fire in volleys until the rope itself was shot in two and his body fell riddled with bullets. Later, the corpse was dragged into Sumter, propped up and photographed, and eventually buried after an inquest in which no witnesses would name the lynchers. The coroner’s jury recorded that Cooper had died “at the hands of persons unknown,” an official fiction laid over what local newspapers frankly described as a mob execution.
In the days surrounding Cooper’s capture and death, other arrests flickered at the edges of the case but never resolved into meaningful prosecutions. Two Black men, Robert Wilson and Isaac Boyle, who had spent time with Cooper during his flight, were jailed in Sumter. Both men told long, frightened stories to the sheriff and reporters, insisting that Cooper had forced them at gunpoint to ride with him, stand guard for him, and carry messages, and that they would have been killed if they had refused. Investigators soon learned that Rob Wilson had gone into town the previous day with a roll of money, purchased a full set of clothes, shoes, a hat, a satchel, and whiskey, and then carried those supplies back out—suggesting, in the press’s view, that he had been aiding Cooper’s planned escape rather than merely obeying out of fear. Yet despite open talk of lynching both Rob Wilson and Boyle while they sat in jail, nothing came of it that night; the telegraph operators in nearby towns reported all quiet, and later newspaper accounts do not record any trial or conviction for either man in connection with the Wilson murders. Another man, Jake McLeod, was transferred to the Sumter jail for “safe-keeping” after rumors that he had harbored Cooper and passed messages for him, but he denied recent contact with the outlaw and likewise seems to have vanished from the record without formal charges.
For the killing of Benjamin Esau Wilson, the closest thing to a legal reckoning lay in the documentation left behind: the newspaper descriptions of his body found upright in bed with a shotgun in his hands; the telegraphed reports that carried his name to distant cities; the grave marker set in Lynchburg Presbyterian Cemetery; and the later summaries that list him alongside his son, his daughter-in-law, and Preston Smith as the dead of that January day. No jury ever weighed Cooper’s guilt, though his own boasts, the eyewitness testimony of those he coerced, and the physical evidence at the Wilson home left little doubt as to who pulled the trigger that morning. Instead, a mob answered the murders of Benjamin Wilson and the others with another killing—swift, brutal, and outside the law—leaving behind a crime without a formal trial, a family patriarch buried with his kin, and a community scarred by both the original massacre and the lynching that followed.
