Freedom's Detective Read online

  Between the deterrent effect of Army troops, and the calming words of politicians, a measure of order prevailed. Republicans and soldiers agreed, however, that discovery and punishment of the guilty parties would have to be swift, lest the uproar triggered by Ashburn’s murder persist—and the violence spread.

  On the morning after the crime, the mayor and town council of Columbus passed a resolution condemning the murder and pledging a thorough investigation. They offered a $500 reward for information and promised to expand the police force. Authorities convened a coroner’s jury made up of seven local dignitaries. The jury, accompanied by the Muscogee County prosecutor and the county physician, proceeded to the Flournoy place for an inquest.

  Ashburn still lay in a pool of blood in his bedroom, his shattered head wedged against the back wall. The doctor poked and prodded the politician’s body, confirming that three shots had struck him, though there were eight bullet holes in his coat, various indentations in the walls and furniture, and four spent projectiles on the floor. He ruled that the fatal wound was the one in Ashburn’s forehead, from which a piece of his brain still protruded.

  With the dead man sprawled next to them, the coroner’s jury called witnesses. After four hours of testimony, however, the inquest issued only a vague verdict: “George W. Ashburn came to his death by pistol balls through the body, fired by persons unknown to this jury.”14

  The Daily Sun admitted to regarding Ashburn’s departure from politics “pleasurably,” though the paper duly expressed “profound regret” at the manner of it. According to the Daily Sun, the real scandal was that “strenuous and active exertions have been made by some negroes and some of his white followers to lay this bloody deed at the door of some of the best and most exemplary young men of our city.” Ashburn’s own supporters had probably killed him, the Daily Sun implied, perhaps due to an argument between him and Henry McNeal Turner at the Temperance Hall.

  The “negroes of this section,” the Daily Sun warned, should reflect on Ashburn’s violent death, and “take heed from the terrible fate of one who hoped to riot in the ruin of his kind.”15

  * * *

  Captain William Mills, commanding Company G of the Army’s 16th Infantry Regiment in Columbus, observed these events with a mixture of incredulity and alarm.

  The federal legal authority for his unit’s presence in Columbus, the Reconstruction Acts, empowered him “to punish, or cause to be punished, all disturbers of the peace and criminals.” On April 2, the Army’s supreme commander in Washington, General Ulysses S. Grant, sent a telegram from the War Department in Washington to General George Meade, the hero of Gettysburg now in charge of the military district encompassing Georgia, Alabama, and Florida, at his Atlanta headquarters: Grant recommended trying Ashburn’s killers before a military commission, if civilian authorities in Georgia proved unable or unwilling to dispense justice. On April 3, Meade endorsed Grant’s telegram and forwarded it to Mills.

  Though they were all white Democrats—holdovers from the whites-only elections under President Andrew Johnson’s version of Reconstruction in 1865—the local officials of Columbus assured Mills they would investigate and prosecute the Ashburn murder. Given the obvious hatred Columbus’s Democrats harbored for Ashburn, and the fact that he had been the target of repeated death threats from the Klan, Mills assumed the killer or killers came from among the town’s white population and could be identified swiftly. Certainly the confidential reports that he and his fellow officers received after the crime from the town’s African Americans supported that impression.

  Mills decided to give local officials a chance. At first, it seemed that they might keep their promises. When the mayor and town council offered their $500 reward, Mills persuaded the Army to put up an additional $2,000 as a gesture of cooperation.

  Yet after he sat in on the farcical coroner’s jury inquest, and read the Daily Sun’s intimidating message for the black population, Mills concluded that he was being dealt with in bad faith. The entire situation, he wrote to a superior officer, reeked of cover-up, or at least “apathy and indifference.”16

  Indeed, most whites’ attitudes were uglier than that, as Mills learned during Ashburn’s funeral procession. Company G supplied a squad of soldiers, plus a fife and drum team, to escort the parade—hundreds of African Americans marching beside Ashburn’s coffin under a large American flag—to the Muscogee Depot on the eastern edge of town, whence it would be sent to his wife for burial in Macon, Georgia.17 As the solemn throng moved through the streets, white women standing along the route applauded. “Thank God that he is dead!” one of them cried.18

  Mills decided the time had come to use his full powers under the Reconstruction Acts, as Grant and Meade had strongly hinted he should do. On April 6, he ordered his troops to detain ten men whom he had reason to believe were involved in Ashburn’s murder.

  Angry white citizens flocked in protest to Mills’s temporary headquarters, the Muscogee County courthouse, where he confined the detainees. Women in their Sunday best wept and wailed for their release. Lawyers appeared, demanding to know the Army’s legal authority for the arrests.

  On the advice of Meade’s top military lawyer, Mills offered the men and their supporters a compromise: each would be released in return for a $2,500 bond, and a promise to report for trial before a military commission composed of Army officers. It was a substantial sum, but four hundred white residents of Columbus pooled their funds and supplied the bonds. On April 10, 1868, four days after they had entered jail, the suspects exited.

  Mills’s brief crackdown accomplished one important objective: to deter the Klan and keep Columbus peaceful through the April 20–21 election. Some sixteen hundred men, mostly black, cast ballots in the town. The overwhelmingly Republican African American voters had been subjected to bribes and intimidation by white Democrats, but did not succumb. Black students from a local school operated by Northern missionaries helped voters read their tickets marked with the names of Republican candidates, thwarting a Democratic plan to trick them into voting for the party of white supremacy.19 The constitution that George W. Ashburn had helped to write won statewide ratification; some one hundred eighty-eight thousand registered voters, evenly divided between the two races, also elected a new Republican-heavy legislature and a Republican governor.20

  * * *

  This hardly guaranteed that the peace in Georgia, or elsewhere in the South, would hold through the November presidential election, when Grant was likely to be the Republican candidate. If the Ku Klux Klan got away with murdering an author of the charter under which Georgia was to govern itself, no ordinary Republican, black or white, could feel safe.

  For all these reasons, Meade was almost desperate to crack the case. It was also a matter of personal pride: Ashburn’s murder had caught him embarrassingly unawares. General Meade was new to Atlanta, having arrived on New Year’s Day, 1868. He knew that Republicans in Georgia and Alabama had received menacing notes; unconfirmed news of lynchings had also come his way. He had no inkling a terrorist organization was incubating in his jurisdiction. He proceeded with a planned visit to his troops in Florida, and therefore was not even in Georgia when the Klan struck in Columbus. He had had to compose a telegram to Grant explaining that; and he was acutely aware of the Northern press coverage.21

  He decided that the Army must gather enough evidence to identify all the members of the conspiracy to kill Ashburn, and to prove their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, before a military commission. This required expertise that Mills, for all his determination, did not possess.

  “I desire to have sent to me, without delay, an experienced detective to aid in detecting the Ashburn murderers,” Meade telegraphed Grant on April 13, 1868. “Can such a person be sent?”22

  Five days later, a War Department investigator, William H. Reed, reached Columbus—only to find himself stymied. Klan terror silenced black witnesses who had initially
been willing to talk to the Army. As for whites, their leaders favored the conspiracy “heart and hand,” Reed wrote Meade on April 22, 1868. His discreet inquiries showed that “the aim of the citizens is to put the blame on” Ashburn’s Republican friends, “which I am satisfied they will perjure themselves to do.”23

  Reed telegraphed Meade seeking help: he knew a detective who might be able to succeed where he had so far failed. The man had experience in the South, having been an undercover agent for the occupying Union Army in New Orleans during the Civil War, penetrating the city’s rebel spy rings and criminal gangs. After the war, he had helped Republican leaders of the House of Representatives dig up evidence of possible impeachable offenses by President Andrew Johnson. He had a reputation as a master infiltrator and interrogator.

  At the moment, this detective was in Kansas, pursuing bootleg whiskey distillers for the commissioner of Internal Revenue. Meade wired the commissioner, asking to borrow his man. “He cannot come too soon,” the general implored. When the commissioner hesitated, Grant intervened, insisting the Ashburn case took precedence.

  On April 23, 1868, the commissioner’s order clicked westward from Washington to Kansas over the telegraph wire: Stop what you are doing and get to Georgia. Five days later, when an eastbound train pulled out of Atchison, Kansas, the detective, Hiram C. Whitley, was on board.24

  2

  “You will all be blown to hell in short order.”

  The United States Army and the Treasury Department had to haggle over Hiram C. Whitley’s investigative services because he was one of the relatively few professional undercover operators available to the federal government or, indeed, to any level of law enforcement, at that time. Prior to the Civil War, the only federal law enforcement agencies were small outfits dedicated to protecting the mails and collecting custom duties. United States Marshals arrested criminals suspected of violating a handful of federal criminal statutes, and helped execute federal court orders. The commissioner of Internal Revenue, and his agents, came on the scene in 1862.1

  These federal forces derived their limited authority from enumerated powers granted in the Constitution: to provide postal service, impose tariffs, and levy taxes. They depended on appropriations from Congress and cooperation from local authorities—county sheriffs, usually—who retained the primary responsibility for crime fighting. The sheriffs, in turn, relied on posses drawn from the armed citizenry. Full-time police departments first appeared around 1830, in large cities, crime being mostly an urban problem. These forces fielded no full-time detective bureaus until Boston established one in 1846, followed by New York in 1857, Philadelphia in 1859, and Chicago in 1861.2

  In all of this, the United States differed from the more developed and centralized states of Europe. In London, the first full-time anti-theft patrol, the Bow Street Runners, began in 1749; followed by the Metropolitan Police under Robert Peel in 1829. Napoleon of France had his political spies under Joseph Fouché. In 1812, Eugène François Vidocq founded the French La Sûreté Nationale, a semiclandestine detective force targeting common crime in Paris. A brilliant and ruthless innovator, Vidocq had a long career as a forger, con man, prison inmate, and failed merchant before he put his talents at the service of the state. Most of his detectives were also ex-criminals, consistent with Vidocq’s dictum that police must “set a thief to catch a thief.”

  Vidocq led the Sûreté until 1827, after which he wrote a memoir. It was an international bestseller; the first English translation reached American shores in 1836. Vidocq was the inspiration for detective characters in the popular works of Edgar Allan Poe and Honoré de Balzac. By midcentury, detective fiction was in vogue in the United States, while the National Police Gazette, founded in 1845, provided lurid tales of crime, and dramatic accounts of the lawmen who tried to bring the perpetrators to justice.3

  As much as they enjoyed reading about Vidocq’s exploits, or even admired him and his American imitators, Americans also harbored misgivings about applying Continental detective methods to their society. Europeans viewed law enforcement through the lens of their absolutist political tradition, which assumed the existence of a central state with authority over the entire national territory and a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Americans took pride in their more libertarian republican traditions, which arose in opposition to European monarchy, and expressed itself both in the Constitution’s limitations on federal power, and in the Bill of Rights—with its prohibitions against self-incrimination and unreasonable searches and seizures. The big exception, of course, was the elaborate system of surveillance and armed patrols, drawn from local white populations, that kept African Americans, both enslaved and free, under constant pressure, especially in the South.

  Attitudes changed somewhat after the Civil War broke out, when, of necessity, the federal government employed undercover agents for purposes that ranged from spying on the Confederacy, and its Northern sympathizers, to combating fraudulent military contractors. The Scottish-born postal-agent-turned-private-detective Allan Pinkerton lent his skills and those of his agents to the Union cause: he protected President-elect Abraham Lincoln and broke up an assassination plot against him as he traveled by rail from Illinois to Washington for his inauguration in early 1861. Later Pinkerton gathered military intelligence for the Army of the Potomac under General George McClellan. The flamboyant Union detective Lafayette Baker—sporting a lapel badge declaring “death to traitors”—broke up a ring of pro-Confederate postmasters in southern Maryland, ran spies for Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, and hunted the Lincoln assassination conspirators in April 1865.4

  In this respect, as in many others, the Civil War fostered the expansion of federal power and the formation of an American nation-state. Yet as the war ended, many Americans still felt that federal covert surveillance, even in the name of revenue collection or public safety, ran contrary to the small-government ideology upon which the country had, in part, been founded. They often recoiled at the methods to which detectives inevitably resorted: paying underworld contacts for information; wearing disguises and snooping on citizens; sting operations, or “put-up jobs,” as they were called; and, notoriously in the case of Lafayette Baker, torture. “It is easy to see that such a force, necessarily recruited from a class in society whose moral tone is somewhat below par, while on the one hand it may now and then contribute to the detection of crime, is a constant menace to everything most valuable in a republican government,” the New York World editorialized in 1867.5

  The newspaper had a point: in America, as in France, many a detective had come to his profession after a previous career on the margins of the law. How else, indeed, was he to acquire his expertise? Lafayette Baker, whose unsavory past included helping San Francisco’s bare-knuckled “committee of vigilance” rid the city of alleged criminals in the 1850s, was one example.

  Hiram C. Whitley was another.

  * * *

  Shortly after dawn on January 25, 1859, a two-wagon convoy rounded a curve in the muddy road cutting through a grove of trees just north of Lawrence, in the Kansas Territory.6

  John Doy, a local doctor, and his son Charles drove the first of the horse-drawn vehicles; one of Doy’s neighbors held the reins of the second. Distributed between the wagons were thirteen passengers—eight men, three women, and two children—all of African descent. All had been living freely in Lawrence, an antislavery stronghold in the territory so bitterly and violently contested by pro-and antislavery forces that people called it “bleeding Kansas.”

  Two of the black men had never been enslaved, but had been born and raised free in Northern states. They worked as cooks in a Lawrence hotel. In recent weeks, however, raids by slave catchers from nearby Missouri had plagued Lawrence. Attackers forcibly carried African American captives east across the Missouri River, to the Show-Me State, where slavery was the law of the land, and they could be “returned” to “masters,” or sold like so much lives
tock to the highest bidder. If the black captives presented documentation proving that they were free, their captors often shredded or burned it on the spot.

  John Doy organized an effort to help black residents escape to safer places farther north, with the help of Lawrence “Free State men” including John Brown—the fierce abolitionist already contemplating the attack he would later make on Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Just a few days prior to the Doy party’s expedition, in fact, Brown had departed for Canada with a group of escaped slaves. The Doy party’s destination was closer: Holton, Kansas, where their charges would be transferred to another abolitionist guide and taken to the free soil of Iowa.

  The predicament arose in part from the Fugitive Slave Act, which Congress enacted and President Millard Fillmore signed in 1850, as part of a last-ditch legislative compromise to keep North and South together. Meant to appease Southern fury at the increasing numbers of enslaved African Americans escaping North with the aid of abolitionists, the statute represented a vast expansion of federal law enforcement. Not only did it require United States Marshals to capture and return fugitive slaves; it required citizens of all states, North or South, to assist marshals when summoned to do so. And it authorized slaveholders to appoint “agents” to track down their “property” for them, again with the assistance of federal commissioners specially appointed to approve the necessary documents.