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
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