Silas Lynch () was Lieutenant-Governor of South Carolina under the United States in 1871.
Biography[]
Silas Lynch was born in the northern United States to a white father and a black mother. Congressman Austin Stoneman, an abolitionist, took him in as his protege and secured his election as Lieutenant-Governor of South Carolina in the Reconstruction era. Under Lynch, almost all of the members of the House of Representatives were African-Americans, with 101 blacks being against 23 whites in the 1871 session. In a series of equality laws, he made it a rule that all whites had to salute black officers on the streets and that intermarriage between blacks and whites was to be allowed, and the Ku Klux Klan under "the Little Colonel" Benjamin Cameron rose up in South Carolina, lynching the US Army Captain Gus Smith and sending his body to Lynch. Lynch launched a crackdown against the KKK, and he imprisoned Cameron's father for having a KKK uniform in his house, a crime punishable by death. Lynch lost the support of Stoneman when he told him that he wanted to marry his daughter Elsie, and he was captured by the Ku Klux Klan during their uprising against Lynch's government. His militia were chased off by Klansmen, and black voters were scared off during the next election day, leading to Lynch losing power.