Dr. Stewart came out of the cabin and sat down on the earth beside Solomon Pinkney and did not speak for a long time. The two old men, the white doctor and the black freedman, sat side by side on the ground in the October sunlight without looking at each other, the sheriff and the remaining workmen standing a respectful distance away.
At last, Solomon looked at him and asked, in the careful voice he had used to speak to white men all his life, whether the bodies were those of a woman and a boy. Dr. Stewart said yes.
Solomon asked whether the boy had light hair. Dr. Stewart said he could not be certain due to the condition of the remains, but what hair was present appeared fair. Solomon nodded once and then he began to cry. He was 76. He had not cried, according to his grandchildren, later interviewed, in any of their lifetimes.
He cried without sound for nearly 20 minutes. Then he stood up, put his hat back on, and told Sheriff Hayward and Dr. Stewart what he had heard on the night of January 17, 1863. He told it slowly in the same careful voice, stopping twice for water. He named the men, described the sounds, and with an accuracy later corroborated by the coroner's findings, exactly where the bodies had been placed on the bed, which one had been killed first, and how he knew. When he finished, Sheriff Hayward took off his own hat, and the three men stood together in the long October shadows and did not speak for a long time.
The investigation that followed lasted exactly 17 days and then it was over. Beaufort County Sheriff Oscar Hayward took Solomon Pinkney's statement on October 29, 1908 and filed it with the county court. Dr. Stewart filed his coroner's report on the 30th. Both documents clearly named Augustine Ravenel, deceased in 1863, as the probable perpetrator and identified two additional, unnamed individuals as his accomplices. The local paper, the Beaufort Gazette, ran a story on October 31 under the headline “Grim Discovery at Old Raven Place”, describing the finding of the remains and alluding in the careful language of 1908 South Carolina, to the possibility a crime had been committed.
The Charleston News and Courier picked up the story on November 2. A reporter from the Savannah Morning News came to Beaufort County on November 4 and interviewed Solomon Pinkney at length. Then on November 17, 1908, the story disappeared. The Beaufort Gazette ran no further articles. The Charleston News and Courier printed a brief notice on its back page stating the remains had been interred at county expense in an unmarked grave at a nearby cemetery, and no further investigation was warranted given the death of the principal suspect 45 years earlier.
The Savannah Morning News never ran the interview its reporter had conducted. When Solomon Pinkney's grandson, Samuel Pinkney, attempted in 1934 to obtain Sheriff Hayward's original report from the Beaufort County Courthouse, he was told the file could not be located.
What happened next can now be pieced together from later evidence. Clotilda Ravenel, the daughter of Augustine and Henrietta, was by 1908 a widow living in Charleston and the mother of three sons, two of whom were prominent in South Carolina politics. Her brother Augustine Jr. had died in 1901, but his sons, her nephews, were officers in the state banking system. The Ravenel family had, in the 45 years since the war, rebuilt its fortune through timber, banking, and marriage. It was not a family that could afford a newspaper story circulating about a murder committed by its patriarch.
Through mechanisms never documented, but not difficult to imagine, the story was made to go away. Sheriff Hayward, who ran for reelection in 1910, did not mention the case in his campaign. Dr. Stewart, who died in 1912, never spoke of it publicly. The reporter from the Savannah Morning News was reassigned to the agricultural desk and left the paper within the year. What the Ravenel family could not control was Solomon Pinkney.
Solomon lived until 1927, dying at 79, and in the last decades of his life He told the story of what he had heard through the wall on the night of January 17, 1863, to anyone who would listen: his children, his grandchildren, his church at the African Methodist Episcopal congregation in Green Pond. And on one occasion in 1921 to a young graduate student from Fisk University traveling through the Low Country collecting oral histories of formerly enslaved people whose notebooks were eventually deposited in a university archive and not cataloged until the 1970s.