Freedom's Detective Page 15
Chilling as it was, Hester’s testimony was not original. Several others recounted the same incidents to the committee that day.
His appearance seems to have been a cover for the true purpose of his trip north: Pool recruited him to take North Carolina’s plea for federal detectives to President Grant, in the discreet form of a letter signed not by Attorney General Akerman, or any North Carolina Republican, but by Pool’s political ally, Republican Senator John Scott of Pennsylvania, the Ku Klux Committee chairman.
After testifying, Hester boarded a northbound train with the ultimate destination of West Point, New York. Grant was attending his son Fred’s graduation from the United States Military Academy, and he had agreed to receive a messenger from Senator Scott there.
The son of a Methodist minister, Hester’s roots lay in “respectable” North Carolina Piedmont society.22 Otherwise, though, the thirty-year-old was an unlikely emissary to the president of the United States. He left home in 1855, at the age of fourteen, purportedly fleeing because he killed one of his father’s colts and tried to shoot his brother. Still in his teens, he fought with the United States Army against the Seminoles in Florida, then, in 1856, joined the United States Navy. Left ashore in Rio de Janeiro after contracting yellow fever, he recovered and worked on railroads in Brazil and Argentina. Hester volunteered for a belligerent faction when civil conflict erupted in Buenos Aires; escaped a prisoner of war camp; and found his way to England on a British merchant bark. The ship sailed into an Atlantic hurricane, whereupon Hester took the wheel and piloted it safely home.
In 1862, Hester quit the crew of a British merchant ship in Gibraltar and signed on to the Confederate frigate Sumter. While the Sumter was still at anchor, he sneaked into the captain’s cabin and shot the sleeping man in the head. Some suspected he did so because the officer had caught him stealing; others, because Hester coveted command himself. Hester contended he had acted to thwart the captain’s defection to a Union vessel. The British jailed Hester at Bermuda, then handed him to Confederate authorities, who not only declined to press charges but hired him to smuggle goods through the Union naval blockade of the South. In December 1864 the United States Navy captured and burned Hester’s ship, but released him, reportedly in return for a promise to spy for the Union.
Back in North Carolina after the war, Hester came up with a scheme to raffle off former property of bankrupt planters, as well as silverware he bought on credit in New York. The plan fell apart when the New York creditors charged Hester with fraud. Former owners of his burned-up blockade-runner tried to sue him. Hester settled these disputes out of court but, as 1870 ended, he was bankrupt.
The United States Marshal for North Carolina approached Hester at a Raleigh boardinghouse and offered to make him a deputy. Hester agreed and became a Republican. He needed work, and believed, as he later put it, that “the Ku Klux or Democratic Party [was] murdering innocent citizens on account of their loyalty to the government.”
Impressed with the results Hester produced as a deputy marshal, North Carolina Republicans abandoned their request for a New York– or Washington-based detective, and planned instead to recommend that the federal government deploy Hester to infiltrate the Klan if President Grant gave Attorney General Akerman the go-ahead.
On June 9, 1871, Grant’s staff ushered Hester in to West Point’s guest quarters.23 The six-footer with light blue eyes and a brown beard handed the president Senator Scott’s letter. Grant opened it and read:
Mr. Hester, of North Carolina, will bear this to you & explain fully the service, which he believes may be rendered to the country. We are satisfied of the character & competency of Mr. Hester, & respectfully recommend that such directions in the premises be given to the Attorney General as to make him feel authorized in the matter, at once. The Attorney General hesitates for want of instructions, & Mr. Hester is sent at my instance to communicate with you. There is an appropriation of $50,000, made at the last Session, to aid in prosecuting offenses against the criminal laws of the United States. This matter should be put into operation without delay, in order to insure success, & secrecy is indispensible [sic]. For this reason, I have deemed it best to send Mr. Hester in person.
Grant listened as Hester provided a grassroots report on Klan violence in North Carolina, and explained the need for undercover work. His story fit all too well with the information the president had already compiled and sent to Congress in January, and with subsequent pleas for assistance he had received from the state’s officials and other Klan victims. The proposed $50,000 cost was the same amount the Republican government of Mississippi budgeted for its state anti-Klan detective unit in 1870, which had since been disbanded.24 The expenditure seemed especially modest relative to the political stakes: in addition to the impending August 3 state referendum, North Carolina, with one of the South’s largest concentrations of white Republican sympathizers, would be crucial to Grant’s reelection campaign in 1872.
The president saw no reason to say no. He reached for a pen and scrawled a note on the reverse side of the letter: “Respectfully referred to the Atty. Gn. who will please carry out the desires of the writer,” he wrote, signing it, “U.S. Grant.” Hester carried the document back to the Department of Justice in Washington.
A few days later, on June 15, President Grant instructed an aide to send Attorney General Akerman another message: the president had been thinking about the question of where to send detectives since his meeting with Joseph G. Hester, and he had decided not to limit their use to the Carolinas. They should be sent to Alabama, as well.
* * *
In New York, Hiram C. Whitley remained unaware that Washington contemplated a covert operation against the Ku Klux Klan.
Through the first half of 1871, Whitley focused on the same kinds of crimes that had occupied him and his detectives since he became Secret Service chief in May 1869. He could claim real progress, especially since mid-1870, when Solicitor Banfield had approved his reorganization plan, and Congress had increased his funding. In March 1871, Whitley told the New York Herald that the Secret Service had made eight hundred total arrests between May 1869 and the end of February 1871. Of that number, he said, slightly over half involved accused counterfeiters of currency or federal excise tax stamps, including one hundred twenty-nine deemed manufacturers or wholesalers. The majority had been convicted at trial or pled guilty.25
His men had seized half a million dollars’ worth of counterfeit currency, as well as many engraving plates used for manufacturing false bills in every conceivable denomination. For good measure, the Secret Service cracked down on black-market cigars, confiscating four hundred thousand untaxed stogies, shutting down sixty clandestine factories for producing them, and seizing two steamships caught smuggling tobacco into the port of New York.
And, having secured the backing of top officials in the Treasury Department, Whitley was hard at work on his undercover pursuit of Joshua D. Miner.
With his trusted subordinates in charge of branch offices from Boston to San Francisco to New Orleans, Whitley could plausibly boast, as he did to the New York Herald, that the Secret Service was “national in character” and “permeate[d] the entire country.” Based on what Whitley told him, the New York Herald’s reporter noted that the division’s “officers are selected with special reference to their honesty and integrity and their peculiar fitness and adaptability to the duties required of them.” The Secret Service had risen to “the leading detective organization of the country, within whose ranks it is nothing less than an honor to be enrolled.” William S. Fullerton’s cross-examination in the Miner trial, and Abraham Beatty’s embarrassing accusations, still lay months in the future.
Another important change at the Secret Service had occurred in 1870: as of July of that year, Whitley no longer worked exclusively for the Treasury Department. July 1870 was the month Congress created the Department of Justice—in the process granting the atto
rney general shared authority with the secretary of the Treasury over Whitley’s direct boss, the solicitor of the Treasury. By extension, this meant that the Secret Service chief answered to Amos T. Akerman, and that the latter could employ his detective force, “national in character” as it was, to assist the coming crackdown on the Klan.
In addition to the legal and bureaucratic advantages, there was another reason Akerman would entrust this assignment to the Secret Service: having been one of George W. Ashburn’s Republican colleagues in Georgia, he knew Hiram C. Whitley’s record. He remembered that the Secret Service chief was one of the very few men in the federal government with experience investigating the Klan.
With presidential approval for the detective mission secured, Akerman summoned Whitley to Washington on June 19, 1871, to let him in on what were still highly secret plans. As he memorialized his conversation with Whitley in a subsequent letter, the attorney general explained the appropriation to investigate “crimes against the United States,” and his authority to allocate it. “On account of your expertness in the detective system,” Akerman flattered Whitley, “I desire your assistance in effecting the end of this appropriation.” Akerman added that he had “reason to believe” that Congress meant “certain sorts of crimes which are reported to be more frequent in the Southern states than elsewhere”—Klan terrorism.26 In Akerman’s view, the Secret Service’s role would be to give federal prosecutors in Klan cases the same sort of specialized investigative support that they got from internal revenue officers in internal revenue cases, or from post office agents in postal cases.
He staked Whitley to an initial $20,000 and asked him to recruit capable and trustworthy people to head south, “and as soon as you have made any important discoveries you will report to the attorney general the ascertained facts of each case together with the names of witnesses.”
Once again, the federal government was relying on a pre–Civil War slave-hunter to fight its undercover battles with the Ku Klux Klan, though it was unclear whether Akerman knew what Whitley had done in Kansas. (The attorney general surely knew about the Secret Service chief’s treatment of the black detainees in Fort Pulaski.)
This was ironic, but not necessarily inconsistent. Before the Civil War, Congress enacted the Fugitive Slave Act, pursuant to Article IV, Section 2 of the Constitution: the act provided that slaves fleeing to Free States be returned to slaveholders in slave states. When he ambushed the Doy party, Whitley purported to be following that body of law. After the Civil War, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, in conjunction with new civil rights statutes, tilted federal law in the opposite direction: enforcement power that had previously been brought to bear against those who helped smuggle African Americans to freedom in the North would now be used against those who terrorized black people and their white allies in the South. As Republican Representative James F. Wilson of Iowa said on the floor of the House while speaking in favor of the 1866 Civil Rights Act, pre–Civil War legal reasoning “uttered in behalf of slavery...is perfectly applicable to this case.”27
The federal authorities had switched sides; and, thanks to fate, political connections, and his own knack for clandestine operations, so, too, had Hiram C. Whitley. Surprised as he was to receive the Klan assignment even in the midst of his complex pursuit of the counterfeiter Joshua D. Miner, Whitley unhesitatingly assured Akerman that he would get the job done. He wrote back to the attorney general, promising to carry out his instructions “to the best of my ability,” and to spend government funds wisely. “You will receive my reports in due course of time, showing the progress of any operations,” he added.28
For Whitley, it was a chance to expand the Secret Service’s jurisdiction beyond what he could have anticipated when he took the job in 1869. Whitley would not be on the front lines, conducting interrogations or staking out suspects in disguise. His role would be that of spymaster, organizer, and supervisor of what amounted to a domestic anti-terrorism unit within the Secret Service. Still, he must have relished a rematch with the Klan conspiracy that had so viciously attacked his reputation in 1868, not to mention gotten away with Ashburn’s murder.
Within two weeks of receiving Akerman’s orders, Whitley had already sent three men to the South. Whitley imposed strict compartmentalization on them, telling each that he was going on a special mission to “ascertain if a certain condition of affairs said to exist in a certain locality, did so exist,” but not revealing that others had been sent to different regions with the same task.29 This would ensure the credibility of the information they gathered and protect the security of the overall operation if anyone were captured or discovered. Whitley was so effective in this regard that two Secret Service members would eventually infiltrate the same Klan den, each believing the other to be an actual member.30
Whitley devoted special attention to each detective’s “stall,” Secret Service slang for an assumed identity. His men could travel as laborers searching for seasonal work, tradesmen casting about for good business locations, even newspaper reporters—whatever it took to make local populations believe that the detectives were actually sympathetic to the Klan.
The ideal “stall,” in Whitley’s view, was itinerant black marketeer. As Whitley well knew from his time smashing stills in Virginia, Southerners despised federal excise taxes on alcohol and tobacco, almost as much as the abolition of slavery. This created a natural overlap between illicit trafficking in these substances and support for the Ku Klux Klan. When first spreading their conspiracy from Tennessee to the surrounding states, in fact, Klan recruiters had sometimes posed as bootleg alcohol and tobacco peddlers.
Joseph G. Hester would infiltrate the crucial state of North Carolina. As the first Southerner to work with the Secret Service during Whitley’s tenure, he knew the customs, speech, and dress; the Secret Service chief would not have to teach him, as he did some others.
For Whitley, there was just one problem: Hester had not been recruited by the Secret Service chief but by the attorney general, at the behest of the North Carolina politicians whom Whitley barely knew and to whom Hester enjoyed independent access. Akerman had issued Hester $1,000 for expenses, on June 10, 1871, along with a Department of Justice commission “to operate in North Carolina and country contiguous thereto.”31 This was the day after Hester met President Grant, and nine days before Akerman conferred with Whitley for the first time. Hester knew more about the government’s plans because he had been in on them long before Whitley.
Whitley was agreeable to absorbing Hester into the Secret Service, but not unless he had clear authority and control over him, with the North Carolinian to receive his pay and expense money through Whitley and reporting to Bleecker Street, not the Department of Justice. Akerman agreed. As soon as his June 19, 1871, meeting with the attorney general ended, Whitley went to the telegraph office and wired his first order to Hester, who had meanwhile returned to North Carolina: “I have just arrived here [in Washington] from New York and consulted with the attorney general in regard to matters in the South,” Whitley wrote. “Highly important business requires your presence here.”32 Hester had to come meet the Secret Service chief in Washington immediately.
Hester did not actually receive Whitley’s message until June 29, by which time he was already traveling through the Tar Heel state, conducting new investigations.33 In response, he telegraphed not Whitley but the Department of Justice, telling a senior official that Whitley was demanding that he interrupt his work to return north. “Must I come?” Hester pleaded. The department’s answer was yes; Hester dutifully trekked back to Washington.
Whitley then put off seeing him for a week, claiming the press of other business, before telling Hester to travel to New York. He finally received Hester at the Secret Service’s Bleecker Street headquarters on July 7, 1871, having forced him to expend much valuable time in what Hester surely understood was at least partly an effort to show who was boss.
There was nevertheless a certain logic to Whitley’s request that he and Hester meet face-to-face, and take each other’s measure, before the Secret Service started paying the North Carolinian’s expenses—and accepting responsibility for his actions. Over the course of hours, the two discussed the violent events Hester had witnessed in the South, and Hester listened to Whitley’s “ideas and plans of operation against the Ku Klux,” as Hester later wrote.
The similarity of the paths these two former teenage runaways had followed through life must have occurred to both federal lawmen, and perhaps helped them establish mutual understanding. Like Whitley, Hester had changed sides once or twice during America’s great sectional conflict of the previous two decades; now, they had definitively thrown in their lots with the federal government, and their commitment to this new mission, for the United States against the Ku Klux Klan, would have to be unconditional.
Satisfied that his new detective was a man he could rely on, and having devised a good “stall” for him, Whitley ordered Hester back to North Carolina. A few weeks later, Akerman could reassure a prominent member of Congress impatient with the government’s efforts against the Klan that there was “more quiet work going on in the way of unearthing them than the public has any suspicion of.”34
* * *
No one in the Moore County, North Carolina, hamlet of Swann’s Station considered it unusual to see a pair of denim-clad strangers driving a wagon into town at noon on a hot day in early August 1871.35 The travelers introduced themselves as merchants, with tobacco for sale—cheap, because they had not paid federal excise tax on it.