Freedom's Detective Page 17
For the next month, as winter deepened, the Fergusons hid in nearby woods. “We suffered a great deal with cold and hunger,” Sarah later said. When the family recovered enough to travel, they left behind belongings they had not already sold for food, and moved to the Chatham County Quaker community known as Snow Camp. By some miracle, they were all still alive.
Joseph G. Hester interviewed Sarah Ferguson at Snow Camp, then persuaded her to come with him to Raleigh on September 8, 1871, and make a complaint to the United States commissioner. “I have given a plain statement of the facts as they occurred,” she testified, “more terrible, however, in reality than can possibly be depicted.” Hester and his assistant took arrest warrants to Chatham County and rounded up the five men Sarah Ferguson identified as her attackers.
The Raleigh Sentinel dismissed the violence against the Fergusons as punishment for a woman who “like Sally [Gilmore], keeps an evil house.” With the aid of some of Raleigh’s wealthiest white citizens, the Klansmen made bail.51
On September 20, 1871, three members of the Chatham County Klan tracked Catherine and Sarah Ferguson down at the remote mountain hut where they had been hiding since giving testimony in Raleigh. The Klansmen declared that, this time, they would administer a beating the women would not survive, but, in the middle of the attack, Ferguson recognized one masked man by his voice, and shouted his name. A neighbor had also seen and recognized two of the men earlier that night; apparently worried that they might be discovered, the attackers fled.
The next day, Sarah and Catherine Ferguson returned to Raleigh and made yet another affidavit. Astonished at the Klan’s savagery, but awed by the women’s stamina, Hester managed to bring two of the suspects in; the commissioner ordered them jailed without bond.
The Secret Service provided the Fergusons a secure place to stay in the city, protected and paid for by the federal government. Their nightmare, at last, was over.
By the fall of 1871, “the fright among the Ku Klux and their friends in the state is becoming terrible, and...as an organization the Ku Klux is rapidly collapsing,” as federal officials arriving in Washington from North Carolina told the New York Times.52 That was a slight overstatement, but in a letter to President Grant, Attorney General Akerman confirmed privately that “there is now some abatement in their activity.”53
Approximately sixteen hundred Klansmen, of an estimated forty thousand in the state, had been arrested during 1871, and roughly eleven hundred indicted. Some three hundred of the defendants were indicted based on facts Joseph G. Hester of the Secret Service had gathered.54
Hester reveled in his success. Toward the end of 1871, he again marched Klan captives through Raleigh, and mockingly displayed a human skull on which they had laid their hands to swear the Klan’s oath of silence. His prisoners then broke that oath by confessing to a federal commissioner.55 Hester bought advertising space in the Carolina Era to taunt the Klan. “Hunters for wolves set their traps near the dens and put such bait there as they usually bite at,” the Secret Service man wrote, “and when one or more of them are entrapped, the others usually begin to howl.”56
* * *
Calhoun County, Alabama, in the northeastern corner of that state, had been the scene of a spectacular Klan mass murder on the night of June 11, 1870. A mob of robed and hooded Klansmen hanged William Luke, a Canadian who taught school for black children, and who had supplied firearms for self-defense to black men. The same night, after a brawl broke out in town between blacks and whites, the Klan shot or hanged five African American men.57
No one had been punished for those heinous offenses as of July 1871, when two itinerant bootleg liquor salesmen arrived in the Calhoun County hamlet of Cross Plains and set up shop. They spoke convincingly of their support for the Ku Klux Klan, into whose ranks both were quickly inducted. No one suspected they were Louis Del’Omo and George W. Carter of the Secret Service, much less that the capital for their enterprise came from the man who had instructed them to set it up as a “stall,” Hiram C. Whitley.58
At first, Del’Omo and Carter witnessed little new Klan activity. As their initial report to Whitley noted, the Alabama Klan was keeping a low profile lest it provoke the president to send troops as he had done in South Carolina in March. Also, a subcommittee of the congressional Ku Klux panel traveled to Huntsville, Alabama, for an on-scene hearing and the Klan was “anxious to convince the committee that there are no Ku Klux in the state,” the detectives reported.59
After the committee left, the detectives informed Whitley, dens once again “originated raids and issued warnings to such of the citizens—white and colored—as they pleased.” In due course, the Calhoun County Klan’s leaders informed Del’Omo and Carter that they were planning to punish William F. Fletcher, another white Canadian in their area whom they deemed guilty of agitating the black population. Del’Omo and Carter would be expected to take part in the “amusement,” as the Klan’s leaders called it.
The Secret Service men drafted an anonymous note warning Fletcher of what was about to happen, but could not find a moment in which to deliver it without blowing their cover. With no federal soldiers close at hand, they had no chance to summon military aid as Joseph G. Hester had done when faced with a similar dilemma in North Carolina.
Del’Omo, the senior of the two Secret Service men, was under subpoena to testify in a Florida Klan case. He had therefore been concocting a plausible excuse to leave town even before the Klan ordered him to participate in the planned crime. He could still get away without taking part in the assault on Fletcher.
For Carter suddenly to beg off, however, would arouse too much suspicion. There was no choice, Del’Omo instructed Carter: he had to stay in Cross Plains, go along on the attack against the Canadian, and take notes of everything he saw and heard.
On the night of November 23, 1871, a Klansman came to Carter at his hotel and showed him how to trim his bedsheet into a robe. Two others appeared later and provided Carter a high conical hat, white gloves, white stockings to wear over his boots, and black face paint. The four men—three Klan members and an undercover Secret Service detective—then found Fletcher at a grocery store, put guns to his head, blindfolded him, and led him to a patch of woods on the northern edge of Cross Plains. There, they removed his coat and tied him face-first to a tree.
“Say your prayers, you don’t have but a short time to live,” a Klansman told Fletcher.
The Canadian begged for mercy, but his captors responded with ridicule; then two of the men began beating him with rods on his bare back and legs until he lost consciousness.
Prior to joining the Secret Service in 1871, George W. Carter skippered a barge in New York harbor, and worked as a federal revenue officer in Brooklyn.60 Little in his experience prepared the thirty-one-year-old for this moment, but it was obvious that the slightest hesitation could cost him his life. He held Fletcher’s coat and counted, out loud, the blows on the Canadian’s body, which continued long after his flesh was a bloody pulp, and his attackers’ robes were thoroughly splashed with blood.
The flogging over, Fletcher slumped against the tree. Minutes ticked by. Then, surprisingly, he stirred. A Klansman asked if he had a last request.
“Write to my mother, Mrs. William Fletcher, Hamilton, Ontario, and say how I died,” the Canadian murmured. He added, “Is there no chance to live?”
The Klansmen considered the matter. If Fletcher agreed to leave Alabama within the next three hours, and never return, they told him, they would not kill him. Fletcher accepted; his captors took him at gunpoint to the railroad leading out of Cross Plains. Carter last saw him staggering down the tracks, with Klansmen threatening to shoot if he so much as turned to look back.
Now the Calhoun County Klan drew Carter deeper into their confidence, and their plots. Immediately after the flogging of William Fletcher, one of the men who had wielded the rods came to see the undercover Secret Service
man in his hotel, and reminisced, in detail, about the murder of William Luke and the five African American companions at Cross Plains. Another member of the den revealed that Nathan Bedford Forrest, the former Confederate cavalry general, had personally organized the Klan in a nearby town, and had come to Cross Plains after Luke’s murder to help the Klansmen who committed it avoid prosecution.
A third Klansman told Carter he had just returned from Montgomery, Alabama, the state capital, where he had denied to a federal grand jury that he had any information about the Klan. He had committed perjury, he told Carter, “although I know every one of them and have rode with them many a time.”
Carter also found out what happened to those who did not put their oaths to the Klan above any oath to tell the truth in court: the Calhoun County Klan had recently murdered a former member who had dared to testify against them in the William Luke murder case.
Still, by the third week of December 1871, the Calhoun County Klan was beginning to feel pressure from federal law enforcement once again. Members confided to Carter they were considering fleeing to Texas, lest they be arrested on one of the indictments a federal grand jury in Montgomery had just managed to issue. One Klansman became so anxious that he decided to sell his 50 percent stake in an illegal whiskey distillery, in case he had to leave the state. He stunned Carter by asking him to buy it.
Carter “hardly knew what to do for a moment,” as he later reported to Whitley. It was one thing to spend government funds on an illegal still as a front for his detective work but quite another to sink taxpayer money into an illegal enterprise so as to facilitate the escape of someone the government was likely to indict. Until now, the more Carter became enmeshed in the Klan’s criminal network, the better for his mission. Buying into the distillery might make it too hard to extricate himself from Calhoun County when the time to do so inevitably came.
Carter felt he could not say no, any more than he could have refused to go along with the beating of William F. Fletcher. He paid the man twenty dollars of the agreed-upon $275 price in cash, and promised the rest in whiskey. As soon as he got a moment to himself, the detective realized the time had come to wind up his covert operation and began planning his escape to Montgomery.
There, he met with federal authorities, and, over the course of two days, told them everything he had found out in Calhoun County: new details of the Luke murder; the identities, and admitted crimes, of dozens of Klansmen; the names of people willing to testify against them; and the ugly details of the William Fletcher beating.
Based on Carter’s information, the federal grand jury indicted sixty-seven Alabama Klansmen for their parts in whippings and murders, and seventy for illicit distilling.61 The United States Attorney in Montgomery, John A. Minnis, considered the Secret Service infiltration of Calhoun County the government’s biggest success against the Klan in Alabama. Carter’s work contributed to the fact that, after the Carolinas, Alabama became the Southern state in which the most Klansmen eventually faced arrest, trial, and incarceration. Ten Alabamians ended up imprisoned, including two who received the maximum penalty for conspiracy under the Ku Klux Klan Act, ten years.
George W. Carter “deserves the commendations of his superiors, and of the government,” Minnis wrote Whitley, “and I am truly thankful for the aid you have afforded.”62
* * *
The Secret Service’s Klan hunt forced Hiram C. Whitley to split his time between the long-distance supervision of that mission and direct management of his undercover operations in New York against counterfeiting kingpin Joshua D. Miner. His meetings with Attorney General Akerman and Joseph G. Hester in June and July, followed by the recruitment of detectives for the anti-Klan mission, and Whitley’s perusal of their reports in August and September, probably accounted at least partly for the fact that the Secret Service’s sting operation on Miner could not take place until late October 1871.
As he studied the messages flowing in from Hester, Del’Omo, Carter, and others across the South, what most impressed the Secret Service chief was how greatly the federal government had underestimated the Ku Klux Klan, and might still be doing so. Whitley, who had dealt with the Klan in its early days, was amazed at its metastasis since then.
On September 29, 1871, the Secret Service chief distilled his analysis into his first update—seventy-three handwritten legal pages—for the attorney general.63 There was no question, he wrote, that the federal government faced a widespread conspiracy “inimical to the laws of the United States, formidable in numbers, in many instances well armed, and determined to accomplish its illegal purposes even to the sacrifice of life.” The conspiracy enjoyed overwhelming support from the white population, of all social classes, in every state where the Secret Service had operated. It was sophisticated, using hand signals and whistles to “guide and direct the movements of the members without the aid of the human voice.”
All of these factors made Whitley’s detectives’ work “of the most arduous and hazardous nature,” but, for all that, doubly necessary. Where the general public supports law and order, the Secret Service chief wrote, investigating crime “is a comparatively easy task...but in localities where the masses are defective, where the local police are governed by the popular prejudice, and where every stranger is looked upon with suspicion, all routine methods of detection become useless and must be superseded by entirely new and original modes of procedure.”
Whitley’s account of his German-born detective Michael G. Bauer’s ingenious operations in York County, South Carolina, illustrated his point.64 The Klan’s strength in the South Carolina Piedmont had prompted President Grant to deploy the United States Army’s 7th Cavalry in March 1871, and with that unit still camped in white tents on the edge of Yorkville, the York County seat, the Congressional Ku Klux Klan Committee dispatched a subcommittee to the area in mid-July, to take testimony from witnesses unable or unwilling to come to Washington.
Unbeknownst either to the committee or to the commander of the cavalry unit, Major Lewis Merrill, Bauer had also come to York County, posing as the representative of a German emigration agency in the market for homesteads. Bauer found that Klan violence had indeed decreased since federal troops arrived—but that this was a tactical retreat. The Klan planned to exploit the lull by sending witnesses to tell the Ku Klux subcommittee that the peace proved the Klan had been a myth all along. As soon as the cavalry left, Bauer reported, the Klan would go back on the attack, with black members of the community who testified to the subcommittee as their first targets.
The informant who unwittingly supplied this intelligence to Bauer ran a livery stable in Spartanburg, South Carolina, near the hotel where the subcommittee stayed while visiting. His words confirmed what Bauer had heard on the moonless night of July 19, 1871, as he listened in from the bushes on the edge of an outdoor Ku Klux Klan meeting. The assembly, and its location, were secret, but some local Klansmen had told Bauer about it after he got them drunk. Bauer also heard the Klan consider—and reject—the idea of ambushing the Ku Klux committee on its way out of town and stealing its records.
Many had speculated that the reduction in violence by the South Carolina Klan was a ruse, but Bauer’s report constituted the first hard intelligence from human sources. As Whitley recounted this and other findings, his tone was businesslike—but tinged by an unmistakable note of outrage. It was as if the Klan’s deception and barbarism, documented in chilling firsthand detail by his own trusted operatives, triggered an attack of conscience like the one Whitley experienced listening to a Louisiana slave describe an overseer’s barbarous abuse in 1863. As in that case, Whitley believed the only remedy lay in asserting federal authority, backed by the United States Army.
“The time for vigorous and prompt action has arrived,” he wrote Akerman, insisting that “many arrests can be made, provided sufficient [military] force is at hand to support the U.S. marshals.” He proposed secret interrogation centers in th
e South—similar in concept to the one he had previously improvised at Fort Pulaski—where detectives could question suspects and witnesses. Secret Service men “could even be arrested themselves with other suspected parties, a fact that would the more establish their status” with the Ku Klux Klan, thus facilitating their spying. The government should try just about anything that would further the goal of “crushing out the Ku Klux organization and bringing the violators of the laws to speedy justice.”
Whitley’s report reached Washington in early October 1871, just as President Grant and his advisers weighed their next steps against the Klan. The pivotal question was whether to follow up the deployment of troops in South Carolina by suspending habeas corpus in all or part of that state, as provided for in the April 20, 1871, Ku Klux Klan Act. This would not be martial law, though the press often used that term; it entailed no military commissions such as the one General George Meade empaneled in Atlanta in 1868. Still, the measure would facilitate mass arrests of Klansmen against whom the government already had evidence of criminal wrongdoing, and whom it could then detain pending trial in civilian federal court.
Habeas corpus—the “Great Writ”—represented a fundamental protection of civil liberty in the Anglo-American legal tradition. Any curtailment was bound to be controversial. Certain of President Grant’s advisers, notably Secretary of State Hamilton Fish, fretted the crackdown on the Klan might be both constitutionally dubious and politically counterproductive. This was in character for Secretary Fish, the scion of a wealthy New York Dutch family, and a former United States senator. Since his days as a moderate antislavery leader of the pre–Civil War Whig Party, Fish’s instinct had been to try to conciliate the South rather than risk national disunity. That had proved impossible in the 1850s, but might still be feasible in the very different climate after the Confederacy’s defeat.