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  Attorney General Akerman spoke for those who believed that, to the contrary, stamping out the Klan was the only hope to salvage national cohesion, the new post–Civil War political order and, last but not least, the Republican Party’s future. Whitley’s September 29 report, along with similar information from Major Merrill, helped Akerman make this argument to the president. If it was true that the recent lull in Klan violence was merely tactical, as Michael G. Bauer had reported, President Grant could not possibly relent.

  On October 12, 1871, the president sided with his attorney general, issuing a proclamation that gave the Ku Klux Klan in nine counties of the South Carolina Piedmont until October 17 to disperse, and to surrender their arms and disguises—or face the suspension of habeas corpus. When, predictably, the Klan refused, President Grant followed through; on October 19, mass arrests, carried out by United States Marshals with the assistance of the 7th Cavalry, began.

  President Grant’s decision hit the South Carolina Klan hard. By the end of 1871, nearly five hundred of its members had been detained on federal charges. A hundred had fled the state; hundreds more turned themselves in to the 7th Cavalry, often confessing in return for leniency. Of the two hundred twenty South Carolina Klansmen ultimately indicted, fifty-four pled guilty when federal court convened at Columbia, South Carolina, in late November 1871. Another five went to trial; juries made up of both blacks and whites convicted them. The last guilty verdict came when the court’s fall–winter term ended on January 2, 1872.65

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  To Whitley, the obvious lesson of the Klan’s retreat in the Carolinas and Alabama was that the crackdown was working, and should be extended. He set his sights on Georgia. The government’s campaign could not truly be considered a success until it rid that strategic state, the largest in the Deep South, of the organization that had murdered George W. Ashburn in 1868, and many others since.

  So far, however, federal enforcement efforts had hardly touched Georgia, as Secret Service reports from the state confirmed. In the last week of September 1871 Whitley sent Ichabod C. Nettleship, his right-hand man, to Atlanta. His ostensible purpose was to check on federal anti-fraud cases; Nettleship’s probable real mission, though, was to provide Whitley an update on Klan terrorism. Klan victims and federal officials told Nettleship of a recent surge in violence, and Nettleship relayed the news to Whitley in an October 2 telegram.66 Nettleship found the situation so urgent that, acting on his own authority, he ordered Secret Service detective Judson Knight to transfer from North Carolina to Georgia immediately.

  Whitley had recruited Knight just two months earlier, specifically for the anti-Klan mission. As former chief of scouts for General George Meade’s Army of the Potomac during the Civil War, Knight was the rare politically reliable Union man with experience operating undercover in the South. Knight’s record of working closely with enslaved African Americans behind rebel lines made him especially well suited for a job that would involve obtaining testimony from the Klan’s black victims.67

  Soon Knight was in Macon, Georgia, posing as a correspondent for a pro-Klan newspaper. There, he made contact with Henry Lowther, a forty-year-old black Republican who farmed a plot of land in Wilkinson County, about one hundred ten miles southeast of Atlanta, and whose body still showed the terrible scars of a harrowing ordeal at the hands of the Klan.68

  Lowther told Knight that on August 27, 1871, Klansmen had shot and killed Wilkinson County’s white Republican sheriff, and drowned his African American common-law wife, the mother of their five children. Then, on the night of September 2, the Klan came for Lowther, accusing him of plotting an armed uprising of black men, and sleeping with a white woman. They locked him in jail until 2:00 a.m. on September 4, when one hundred eighty Klansmen appeared on horseback outside Lowther’s window. Some entered his cell, tied him up with a rope, and led him to a swamp two miles away. There, a hooded Klansman told Lowther he could either be lynched or “altered”—castrated. Lowther soon found himself writhing and screaming in pain under a knife wielded by the town’s physician, a former Confederate Army surgeon.

  Nearly naked and covered in blood, Lowther staggered out of the swamp and eventually reached the nearby settlement of Irvinton, begging for aid. No white person would help him. He collapsed, unconscious, on the ground, awakening shortly before dawn to find, at last, a black woman who was willing to take him in. Later that day, he received a visit from the doctor, who seemed mainly concerned with denying that he had been in the swamp the night before, and warning Lowther not to say otherwise.

  From Macon, Judson Knight took Henry Lowther to Atlanta, where he placed him under federal protection and had him swear out a criminal complaint before the United States commissioner. To Knight’s amazement, however, the United States Attorney in Atlanta, John D. Pope, who seemed thoroughly intimidated by the Klan, refused to convene a grand jury in Lowther’s case, ostensibly because the alleged crime had occurred in the southern portion of the state, and he was responsible only for the northern.69 Pope’s position did not change even after Secret Service detectives received a confession from a repentant member of the Klan in Wilkinson County, who identified all of the participants in the grotesque assault on Lowther, including the doctor who castrated him.

  Judson Knight poured out his frustration in a letter to Whitley. “Unless they go into this thing here in the same shape they have in South Carolina,” he wrote, “there will be no good results arrived at and it is a shame that such a state of things should be allowed to exist in the United States as does exist right here in Georgia today.” If the government did not get tough soon, Knight added, “I don’t want to stay in the business.”70

  Whitley agreed with his detective and lobbied for a more aggressive policy. On October 12, the same day President Grant issued his proclamation threatening a suspension of habeas corpus in South Carolina, Whitley wrote Attorney General Akerman, urging him to ask the president to send a company of cavalry to Georgia.71 The Klan was out of control in that state, and both Whitley and the attorney general knew this was partly because of United States Attorney John D. Pope. However, the United States Marshal for Georgia, whom Whitley had assigned to hand-carry this letter to Akerman, was committed to the anti-Klan struggle. If backed by cavalry, he would carry out mass arrests based on testimony and intelligence accumulated by Whitley’s detectives.

  On October 16 Whitley sent Akerman Judson Knight’s report on the shocking atrocity against Henry Lowther. He did so knowing that the attorney general raised Ku Klux Klan terrorism at every cabinet meeting, often supporting his arguments with facts drawn from Secret Service reports. The attorney general’s persistence had paid off in President Grant’s decision to suspend habeas corpus in South Carolina. Perhaps the explosive facts of Lowther’s case would galvanize the president into taking similar action in Georgia.

  What Whitley failed to anticipate was that the attorney general’s influence in Grant administration circles had already peaked, and was about to decline, rapidly. By the fall of 1871, Washington’s ever-changing political winds were shifting yet again. Twelve months earlier, in the wake of a violence-marred election campaign, President Grant had faced a clamor for the administration and Congress to do something—anything—about the Klan violence. Now, more voices were heard suggesting that the Klan’s retreat in the Carolinas and Alabama meant that the president had gone far enough, and could safely relax federal pressure against the conspiracy. Some even maintained that the apparent peace in South Carolina proved the threat might have been exaggerated in the first place.

  If Democrats were the only ones making these arguments, President Grant could have safely ignored them, but Republicans were saying similar things, too. In addition to Secretary of State Fish, whose misgivings were well-known, Representative James A. Garfield of Ohio fretted that the Ku Klux Klan Act threatened to “abolish the state Governments.”72 A new faction in the president’s party, the “Liberal Repub
licans,” contended more broadly that Reconstruction was distracting from other important issues, such as federal corruption; the government should reconsider its commitment to Southern blacks, they contended, and try instead to address those grievances of Southern whites, such as the exclusion of ex-rebels from office-holding, that had purportedly provoked the rise of the Ku Klux Klan.

  During a November 24, 1871, cabinet meeting, Akerman read from Judson Knight’s report, apparently hoping that it would help persuade his colleagues and President Grant to support the same kind of vigorous federal action against the Klan in Georgia that he had recently authorized in South Carolina. It did not work. Secretary of State Hamilton Fish fairly rolled his eyes at the attorney general’s dramatic appeal. In his diary, Fish sneered that Akerman was obsessed with the Klan, and had taken discussion of Lowther’s castration into “terribly minute and tedious details. It has got to be a bore to listen twice a week to this same thing.”73 At the next cabinet meeting, on December 1, 1871, the attorney general followed up by proposing Whitley’s idea of sending more troops for Georgia, albeit without naming the Secret Service chief, and presenting the deployment as a way to protect the Republican governor from potential violence. President Grant rejected the proposal, agreeing with Fish that the threat to the governor was too hypothetical.74

  Grant’s annual message to Congress on December 4, 1871, confirmed the White House’s new, more cautious, posture. The president unequivocally condemned Klan violence as he had always done and sincerely believed. However, instead of announcing that he would suspend habeas corpus in additional Southern states, or send more troops to Georgia, as Whitley and Akerman wanted, the president implied that he had intended the suspension in South Carolina as an exceptional measure, which he had carried out only with “reluctance.” Contrary to the wishes of many pro-Reconstruction Republicans, including a majority of the Ku Klux Committee, he also declined to request reauthorization of the soon-to-expire Ku Klux Klan Act provision that empowered him to suspend habeas. The president did, however, voice sympathy for an amnesty that would permit all but a few former Confederate soldiers and officials to hold federal office again.75

  Akerman lamented the changing political climate in a letter to a Georgia friend, writing that “[t]he feeling here is that the Southern republicans must cease to look for special support to congressional action.”76 On December 13, 1871, he resigned, at President Grant’s request. Why Grant ousted Akerman at that moment, neither man ever fully explained. Newspapers cited pressure from influential Republican railroad barons, hostile to Akerman because he had disallowed subsidies for them. The timing of Akerman’s departure, however—nineteen days after he had antagonized Secretary of State Fish by recounting the Klan atrocity against Henry Lowther; twelve days after the president rejected Akerman’s request for troops in Georgia; and nine days after the president presented his conciliatory annual message—suggested to anxious Southern Republicans that the attorney general’s aggressive policy on the Klan had fallen out of favor.

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  For Hiram C. Whitley, Amos T. Akerman’s ouster meant that he had suddenly lost the strongest supporter in the cabinet of Whitley’s preferred hard-line policy toward the Klan, which was, after all, the basis for the Secret Service’s mission in the South. Never one to concede even the smallest point in an argument, however, Whitley refused to surrender on this vital question for both his detectives and for the country.

  The Secret Service chief lobbied even harder in favor of the crackdown, seeking to sway Akerman’s successor as attorney general, former Senator George H. Williams of Oregon. In his January 15, 1872, report to the Department of Justice, his first of Williams’s tenure, Whitley told his new boss that the Klan was impervious to anything short of what he called “vigorous measures.” The contrast between the government’s success in the Carolinas and Alabama, and its failure in Georgia, proved the point, in his view. Whitley conceded that “proclamations of martial law and the suspension of the habeas corpus are measures that should not be resorted to until all others have failed,” but, he insisted, “the milder mode of dealing with the organization in question has not been attended with results that can be considered in any manner satisfactory or effectual.”77

  At the time, Whitley was also waging a defense of his men’s integrity against Judge Benedict’s jury instructions in the Joshua D. Miner trial. To that campaign in the press, Whitley added advocacy for its role in the battle against the Klan—which had previously been kept secret. He fed news of his men’s operations to the Washington newspapers, though not specific operational details, in return for favorable coverage. “The secret service division [sic] of the Department of Justice is entitled to much credit for its efforts during the last six or eight months in ferreting out the Kuklux and protecting the revenue,” an editorial in the Washington Chronicle, a Republican mouthpiece, declared.

  Colonel Whitley, the chief, has shown himself the very man for the place he fills. There is much work yet for this division to do. Colonel Whitley is ably sustained by his subordinates. This branch of the service, one of the most indispensable to the Government in the present condition of things in the Southern States, should be liberally sustained by the Congress.78

  There was at least a reason to hope the new attorney general would see things Whitley’s way. Though a man of the West, with less at stake, personally, in the struggle against the Klan than Southern Republicans like Akerman, George H. Williams was a partisan, pro-Reconstruction Republican. In the Senate, he sponsored the 1867 law that empowered General George Meade to hold the military trial for George W. Ashburn’s killers in Georgia. “If those who commit or countenance...atrocious crimes expect any favors from me,” Williams assured Senator John Pool of North Carolina in a Dec. 30, 1871, letter, “they are doomed to signal and bitter disappointment.”79 He urged John D. Pope, the federal prosecutor in Georgia, to show more “diligence and earnestness.” Taking the hint, Pope resigned, in favor of a close Akerman associate.80 During Williams’s first year in office, convictions in Klan cases increased, from one hundred twenty-eight in 1871 to four hundred fifty-six in 1872.81

  Williams achieved this mostly by working through the backlog of indictments left over from 1871, however. As 1872 wore on, it became clear that he sympathized with those in Washington who believed that the previous year’s use of troops, detectives and mass arrests was an emergency policy that had accomplished the Grant administration’s main goal, which was to stop the violence—not necessarily to punish every offender—and that the crackdown could safely be scaled back.82

  The attorney general imposed new spending restrictions on the Secret Service. Whitley, backed by Pool and other North Carolina Republicans, had told the attorney general in February that a pay raise for Joseph G. Hester was in order. It certainly seemed to be: in the entire detective force, the Secret Service chief wrote, no other man “has been more effective in their operations” than Hester, who had been “somewhat destructive to the organized bands of armed and disguised men committing outrages in the State of North Carolina.” A pay hike for this daring detective would serve not only to reward him, but to demonstrate, in a small but significant way, the federal government’s resolve. The attorney general, however, responded that Hester already made eight dollars per day, plus expenses—three dollars more than other Secret Service detectives got. He rejected the raise.83

  A few weeks later, Whitley asked Williams to release $5,000 of his appropriated funds. Williams approved only $1,500.84 Williams said this was necessary for government economy. Whitley had not yet spent all of the March 3, 1871, special appropriation from Congress, and his new boss seemed to think he should stretch his leftover funds. Congress did not make a fresh $50,000 available to the Secret Service until the next fiscal year began on July 1, 1872.

  Whitley had little choice but to demand that his detectives squeeze every penny. When George W. Carter proposed setting up a dry goods store as
his cover in Mississippi, Whitley rejected it as “both impracticable and too expensive.”85 He urged Carter’s assistant to “get up another stall for him, such as peddling tobacco or something else that can be purchased there and may answer your purposes just as well.” Later, Whitley reprimanded Michael G. Bauer for submitting an expense report that was “altogether exorbitant and not in proportion to the results produced.”86

  There was a certain logic to the new attorney general’s approach. Even Amos T. Akerman, by the end of his tenure, favored selective prosecution of only the most aggravated Klan crimes, because the federal courts were swamped, and the Department of Justice was spending beyond its 1871–1872 budget.87 The violence, meanwhile, had indeed abated—markedly. In the first half of 1872, the Secret Service heard from an informant in North Carolina that a Klan insider in that state considered the organization “very nearly destroyed.” In two South Carolina counties where President Grant had suspended habeas corpus, the Klan seemed to be “entirely suppressed,” according to another Secret Service source. A detective’s report from Mississippi called the K.K.K. “very bold in their expressions though quiet in their actions.”88 Whitley himself wrote that the restoration of peace had “inspired the negroes with a sense of security” across the South.89

  Whitley, though, kept arguing for a hard line. He simply did not believe terrorists would remain quiescent absent sustained government pressure, and he interpreted the information from the field to confirm this suspicion. The “spirit of Ku Kluxism still exists among the disaffected portion of the community,” he wrote to Williams. There were indications in several states that some Klan dens that had supposedly been crushed were reorganizing as “Farmer’s Clubs.” From his men in Mississippi, he learned that white supremacists in that state expected President Grant to lose his reelection bid, in part because of the rise of the anti-Grant Liberal Republicans. When that happened, “they say, they will get the Ku Klux laws suspended and have things their own way,” the report to Whitley noted.90 On April 8, 1872, a New York Times headline warned: THE KUKLUX WAITING FOR THE ASCENDANCY OF THE DEMOCRATS. The accompanying story suggested the Klan was just playing possum; the article’s only named source was Hiram C. Whitley.