“The leading white men of Edgefield decided to seize the first opportunity that the Negroes might offer them to provoke a riot and teach the Negroes a lesson by having the whites demonstrate their superiority by killing as many of them as was justifiable.” — Benjamin Tillman
So who were these "leading white men," and to what lengths were they willing to go to "teach the Negroes a lesson?"
One of them was Martin Witherspoon Gary, a former Brigadier General in the Confederate States Army (CSA). Gary assumed a leading role in the Democratic Party's efforts to elect Wade Hampton III as governor during the height of Reconstruction. Black eligible voters outnumbered whites in South Carolina. Gary engineered a plan to suppress Black voters via intimidation and violence.
By Unknown author — https://repository.duke.edu/dc/strong?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=Martin+Witherspoon+Gary&search_field=all_fields, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11375383
Another leading white man was Matthew Calbraith Butler, a former Major General in the CSA. Butler's grandfather, as did his father, served in the House of Representatives before the war. One uncle was a U.S. Senator, and another was once Governor of South Carolina. One of his cousins, Preston Brooks, assaulted Senator Charles Sumner in 1856 on the floor of the U.S. Senate with a cane, so there's that. But by heritage alone, Matthew Butler was a leading white man.