Murder in Concord, South Carolina

I looked for the Anderson family marker in the Concord Cemetery, but couldn't find it. There are eight Andersons buried somewhere in the Concord Cemetery, but the patriarch of the family, Billy Anderson Sr., isn’t among them.    There are records for   Mary Anderson, who died in in 1853 aged 37, and for her husband, Billy Jr., who died the following year.  Their orphaned children were taken in by family members, including  Sarah Anderson, born in 1846,  who was murdered in 1861 and buried in Concord Cemetery.
After her parents died, Sarah lived with her grandparents. In 1861, Sarah was sent over to stay with their neighbors, the Lathams, to help them with their cotton picking.  Later in the week, one of the Latham children came to visit the Andersons, and Grandmother Anderson asked how Sarah was “getting along picking cotton,” and she was told that Sarah never arrived at the Lathams.  One of their slaves, Mack, overheard them and said:
“I speck she’s daid, as I saw some buzzards down the branch this morning.”
They found Sarah's body, and Mack was charged with cutting her throat. More accurately, he was accused of leaving Sarah for dead in a gully, and then returning later to find her still alive. According to the version recounted more than 60 years later by Sarah’s nephew, Dr. R. L. Anderson:
“He returned that night and found her still alive; she had literally torn the bark from a sapling trying to arise.  He finished her and threw her body in the nearby gully…. Mack, a young mulatto slave, was arrested, jailed and tried for the murder.”
Here's where this story takes a twist. Sarah’s grandfather, Billy Sr., hired lawyers to defend Mack, the accused killer “to the limit of their ability.”  Dr. Anderson was clearly puzzled by the defense of “this fiend” by his great-grandfather.  The actions of Billy Sr. sullied the Anderson name.  “His disgrace became publicly known and my father never mentioned his name if he could avoid it.”
In a follow up column another Concordian, Mr. J.T. Faris,  wrote,  "My mother held me in her arms, and as a child  I witnessed the hanging of Mack Anderson.  My father was one of the armed guards. Though not quite three years old when it occurred that unnatural sight made an indelible impression on my mind, as vivid today as when I saw the black cap pulled over the doomed negro’s eyes, the trap sprung and the body dangling in the air.  This is the earliest recollection of my life.    
Faris was clearly haunted by the hanging, for he spent much time as an adult investigating the case further.  The central question was why would Billy Anderson Sr. hire white attorneys to defend the killer of his granddaughter?  Faris writes,  
“The reasons were three and simple. 1. Billy really believed Mack was innocent. 2. Mack was his own son by a young slave woman.  3. Mack was a strapping young buck in his twenties and easily worth a thousand dollars in gold.”
The trial was held in nearby Yorkville and the former sheriff Robert Graves “obtained the evidence for the prosecution.  After a bitter and hard-fought legal battle, Mack was convicted strictly on circumstantial evidence.”
A scaffold was erected on the site of the murder.  There are three versions of what happened on the day of the execution.  Dr. Anderson says that Robert Graves grabbed  the supposed murder weapon a butcher’s  knife and said
“‘As you perish in death thus shall perish your _____- knife. ‘ He then drove the knife into the upright of the gallows until the blade broke, then again and again until none of the blade remained…. Some say he drove the pieces into a pine and that over forty years after there was a warty cancerous growth on the tree, where the pieces of the blade were driven in.”
A second version said that when the hour for execution arrived, the current sheriff, Alfred Stillwell,  spoke “some words of regret or something. Then Robert Glenn reached out his hand and said ‘Give me that hatchet!’ and with one swift blow severed the retaining rope and the fiend plunged to eternity.”
The final version from J.K. Feris tells a different story of the events on the scaffold:
.... I saw the black cap pulled over the doomed negro’s eyes, the trap sprung and the body dangling in the air.  This is the earliest recollection of my life.  Mack was prevented from giving details of the tragedy for which he was executed.  As he began to talk the crowd of angry men began to cry ‘Hang him! – Hang him!’ whereupon the sheriff obeyed and Mack was prevented from telling anything.”
The tattered remains of these archived,  undated newspaper articles recount events that occurred perhaps 70 or 80 years earlier.  J.K. Faris claims to have been a witness to the execution in 1861.  The three versions of the events on the gallows are as tangled as these incomplete newspaper clippings.  I suspect the facts of the case were never clear, but herein lies core of the tale:  The elderly white man defends the black accused killer of his own granddaughter. I can’t help but conjecture that Mack Anderson was Billy Sr.’s son and therefore the uncle of Sarah Anderson.  Mack alerted everyone to the possible location of the body, and that was enough to convict him.  He trusted that his father would manage to free him, but at the last moment realized that Billy Sr. could do nothing for him.  Mack protested his innocence, but there was no answer against an angry mob.