Freedom's Detective Read online

  That detective was Hiram C. Whitley. He took down the African American’s complaint in copious detail, emphasizing the overseer’s sadism. He then presented the case to a military court, where Whitley vouched for the black man’s word against the white overseer. Walkinshow’s lawyer objected that a slave had no right to complain against a free white man, but the military judge instructed him that this principle of Louisiana law had no validity in his court. Walkinshow would have to answer for his abuse of George’s rights before the United States Army. The court sentenced him to six months in prison.32

  3

  “He has worked his way through

  the labyrinth of lies.”

  Columbus’s newspaper, the Daily Sun, had described the Ku Klux Klan as “large and powerful, and conducted upon such a system as to defy detection.”1 As of the moment Hiram C. Whitley’s train pulled into the Georgia town on May 3, 1868—more than a month after George W. Ashburn’s death—the Daily Sun’s claim appeared all too true. The Columbus Klan’s secrets remained unexposed, the Republican politician’s murder, unpunished.

  Whitley strode the five blocks from the Muscogee Depot to Captain William Mills’s headquarters at the courthouse, in the center of town. The two-story Greek Revival structure, built from red bricks set atop a massive stone half basement, certainly looked like what it was, at least for the time being: the stronghold of an occupying force. The building stood in the middle of a grassy field, which was dotted with soldiers’ white pup tents and surrounded by a low brick wall.2

  Whitley presented Mills a letter of introduction he obtained from General Meade the previous day, during a brief stopover in Atlanta. With that formality out of the way, Whitley settled in to discuss the case with the Army officer and William H. Reed, the War Department detective who had preceded Whitley to Columbus.

  The evidence so far came from two main sources. The first of these was the testimony of African Americans from Columbus, supporters of the murdered Ashburn. On the day or two after the killing, they had come to the courthouse and offered statements to Mills and to Major John Leonard, the local representative of the Freedmen’s Bureau, whom they especially trusted in part because he was supervising the construction of a school for black students.3 Domestic servants of several white men, for example, said they had seen their employers going out in masquerade dress on the night of the murders. These reports, while useful as investigative leads, consisted largely of circumstantial evidence. The black informants had not actually seen the killings.

  The second source was sworn testimony at the inquest conducted by the coroner’s jury on the morning after the murder. Mills sat through it himself. The key witnesses were the men and women who had been in or near Hannah Flournoy’s house at the time of the crime. The first was Flournoy herself. The second was Alexander Bennett, one of Ashburn’s fellow white Republicans; he was the houseguest who tried to seize Ashburn’s gun for self-defense as the attack began. Next came Amanda Patterson, a seventeen-year-old white female, who used the Flournoy house both as a residence and as a place to receive male visitors who paid her for sex. The fourth eyewitness was Thomas Johnson, an African American who lived in a cabin just a few yards behind Flournoy’s place.

  Taken together, their accounts created a sketchy, but coherent, narrative of the crime: a gang of masked men broke down Hannah Flournoy’s front door; five of them stormed into Ashburn’s room, opened fire, and left, joining an unknown number of accomplices who could be seen and heard moving around in the darkness outside the house, cutting off Ashburn’s possible escape routes.

  Crucially, two of the witnesses—Amanda Patterson and Thomas Johnson—said they had glimpsed the faces of one or more of the intruders, and recognized them. Patterson testified that one man’s mask had fallen off, at which point she made eye contact with him and heard him snap, “Damn you, if you tell on me, I’ll kill you.” Judging by the quality and style of their clothing, Hannah Flournoy added, the intruders seemed to be well-to-do “dandy young gentlemen belonging to Columbus.”4

  The tone and tenor of the inquest suddenly changed when the mayor of Columbus and the Muscogee County prosecutor, both white Democrats, came in, accompanied by two Columbus policemen. The officers stepped forward and told the coroner’s jury they had seen a large crowd gathered in a vacant lot outside Hannah Flournoy’s shortly before midnight on the night in question. They had even heard the cocking of revolvers. This much corroborated what the first four witnesses had said. In every other detail, however, the police officers’ testimony contradicted it. Both denied under oath that they could identify a single person they had seen. Indeed, one claimed he had not noticed whether anyone in the crowd was wearing a mask or other disguise, much less fine clothes, as Hannah Flournoy had insisted.

  The prosecutor, a holdover from the local government elected when President Andrew Johnson controlled Reconstruction policy, demanded the initial four witnesses return to explain these discrepancies between their testimony and that of the lawmen. Intimidated, Amanda Patterson stammered out a new, vaguer story, claiming that she had been mistaken when she named the man who had dropped his mask. Alexander Bennett simply declined to say anything one way or the other. Thomas Johnson, the African American neighbor, refused to recant despite the pressure. Hannah Flournoy, however—undoubtedly trying to protect him, and herself—claimed, falsely, that Johnson could not possibly have seen anything because he had never left his cabin the whole night.5

  Mills watched in disbelief as the coroner’s jury accepted this welter of perjury, and issued its verdict that Ashburn had been killed by “persons unknown.” He was even more astonished a few nights later when his soldiers intercepted the two police officers as they escorted a group of disguised men to Alexander Bennett’s new temporary residence. Their intent, apparently, had been to assassinate this crucial witness.6

  * * *

  Whitley quickly surmised that Mills and Reed had a rough idea of the truth, and of who the culprits might be. The question, though, was how to crystallize their facts and logical inferences into hard evidence, capable of identifying named suspects and proving them guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

  Despairing of cooperation from Columbus’s whites, Reed thought the best approach would be to build a case on testimony from blacks. African Americans worked in white-owned homes, factories, and fields; in those positions they could hear and see a great deal. For the time being, they might be too intimidated to provide more testimony to the detectives, much less in a public trial. “The great trouble is with the negro witnesses,” Reed observed in an April 22 message to General Meade. “They do know, but are afraid to tell what they know.”7 With appropriate incentives, however, especially offers of protection from the Army, that could change.

  Whitley saw the situation differently—more audaciously. African American testimony could bolster the evidence here and there, and it was in black citizens’ self-interest to provide it, assuming that their legitimate fears of reprisal could be addressed. Yet no black person, not even Hannah Flournoy, had witnessed the actual shooting; none possessed detailed inside knowledge of the plot.

  Therefore, Whitley concluded, the investigators would have to do what had so far seemed impossible: penetrate the conspiracy, and induce some of its members to turn state’s evidence. They would have to attack the Ku Klux Klan’s code of silence head-on, and break it.

  Whitley focused his blue eyes on Mills and Reed and told them that it was time to be ruthless: if it was impossible to get anyone to talk in Columbus, then they should arrest both suspects and material witnesses and take them for interrogation to a different place, of the investigators’ choosing, far away from the Klan-dominated town. In this secure location, Hiram C. Whitley would be in charge, not white supremacist terrorists, and “we could handle them in such a manner as to give sufficient evidence to convict them,” as the detective explained in a telegram to Meade on May 4. “I sincerely believe
, should these measures be carried out with severity and dispatch, that the whole affair would be brought to light.”8

  This plan obviously did not correspond to the usual norms of criminal procedure, according to which suspects could be arrested only after authorities had established some basis for doing so. Whitley took it for granted, however, that the Reconstruction Acts gave the Army authority to carry out his plan—to dispense with warrants and formal charges, and transport civilians under military guard to a military prison, where they would be held incommunicado. His plan even contemplated rearresting some of the men whom Captain Mills’s company had previously detained in Columbus, then granted bail. Whitley assumed that the Army would allocate the scarce resources necessary for guarding and provisioning his proposed interrogation center. What’s more, Whitley assumed that the Army would trust him, a civilian who came highly recommended, but whom General Meade and the rest of the Army hierarchy in Georgia barely knew.

  It was not clear what this intense, self-assured detective, fresh from a job breaking up illegal distilleries out in Kansas, meant by handling detainees with “severity,” though the word certainly had ominous connotations.9 The Reconstruction Acts, under which Meade and his subordinates did indeed exercise power to detain, charge, and try civilians, specifically provided “that all persons put under military arrest by virtue of this act shall be tried without unnecessary delay, and no cruel or unusual punishment shall be inflicted.” This language had been added to placate senators wary of the consequences of military rule for civil liberties.10

  Still, the detective’s logic was sound. The Reconstruction Acts intended to fill the chaotic postwar South’s vacuum of legitimate civilian law enforcement with a measure of military justice, much as military provost courts had done in New Orleans during the Civil War. The Freedmen’s Bureau, an agency of the War Department heavily staffed by Army officers, had empaneled military commissions to try crimes committed by whites against blacks.

  Meade consulted his military lawyer and Mills. Both supported Whitley’s plan, the lawyer because he could see nothing in the Reconstruction Acts to forbid it—Mills because he saw no realistic alternative. Though reluctant at first to sign off on the arrest of more than “two or three of the most prominent” suspects, Meade eventually agreed to take more people into custody. In a May 6 telegram to Mills, he authorized the detention of an initial group of up to seven suspects and witnesses identified by Whitley. Of those, the Army actually seized four—two suspects and two witnesses.

  On May 14, the troops bundled these detainees, accompanied by Whitley and Reed, aboard a heavily guarded eastbound train.11

  * * *

  Their destination was Fort Pulaski, the United States Army’s military prison on Cockspur Island, a flat, sandy scrap of land in the mouth of the Savannah River, fifteen miles east of the eponymous Georgia city. Meade had personally recommended the site to Whitley, and, given the detective’s purposes, it was an appropriate choice. No one could get on or off Cockspur Island without the Army’s knowledge. Fort Pulaski itself was a pentagonal structure whose walls, made from a total of twenty-five million red bricks, were eleven feet thick. The bastion was bristling with cannon and surrounded by a moat. It contained a series of four-by-seven-foot cells, in which the United States Army had held Confederate prisoners during the Civil War, after recapturing the place from the rebels.12

  Over the next two weeks, detainees flowed from Columbus to Fort Pulaski, where Whitley kept them for the most part in solitary confinement, their guards under strict orders to allow no communication among prisoners, or between them and the outside world. Only two people—Whitley, and his detective partner, William H. Reed—enjoyed total access to the prisoners in their cells. By order of General Meade, the detectives had carte blanche regarding the detainees and their treatment.

  Even his detractors acknowledged a certain relentlessness to Whitley that made him, if not exactly charming, then at least uncommonly persuasive. A colleague would later describe this quality as his “magnetic power,” the “wondrous gift of controlling the passions, the inclinations, the thoughts, the secrets of other men.”13 Drawing on this trait, Whitley cajoled and threatened the detainees. He would place previously isolated prisoners in a cell together, then eavesdrop on their furtive conversations from a nearby hiding place, or through the walls of an empty next-door cell. He confronted them with evidence of their guilt, telling them they would never again see the light of day unless they confessed. He promised that if they did confess, and agreed to testify at the military commission, he could guarantee them a chance for a new life under the government’s protection.

  At first, Whitley’s efforts produced little in the way of new information. “They are hard cases,” he wrote Meade on May 18, “and nothing can be learned from them with their consent.”14 He asked for more time, emphasizing that if “we can get the right persons here, we can get evidence sufficient to convict them.” He reminded the general that Amanda Patterson, the seventeen-year-old part-time prostitute who lived in Hannah Flournoy’s house, could be the key to the case. She had witnessed practically the entire crime. At the inquest she had identified perpetrators by name, before recanting under pressure from Columbus’s pro-Klan authorities.

  “The woman Amanda...would be the most important one to bring here,” Whitley wrote, “for we know she was there, and we believe she possesses the facts and will blow as soon as she is out of control of the rebels.”

  Patterson had avoided being taken to Fort Pulaski with the first group of detainees by claiming to be sick when Captain Mills’s men called for her. Since she was a witness, not a suspect, and vulnerable to pressure from the Klan conspirators, the soldiers did not insist. This exercise of restraint was “all very well,” Whitley informed the general, “but ought not to be allowed at this stage of the game. We want her bad.” The detective wired a similar plea to Captain Mills, urging him to send Patterson to Fort Pulaski, as well as two suspects they had tried and failed to track down during the first round of detentions. Mills must “do it at once,” Whitley asked, “as delays are dangerous at this stage of the case.”15

  * * *

  Whitley was right: even as the detective wrote these messages, the Klan and its allies in Columbus were plotting to silence Amanda Patterson.16

  With the Army having taken charge of the town and detectives prowling about, the conspirators understood that it would be risky to spill any more blood. They opted instead for a more subtle plan: manipulating forty-eight-year-old Republican Alexander Bennett, Patterson’s former fellow occupant at Hannah Flournoy’s house, into getting the seventeen-year-old female out of Georgia.

  Bennett had seen the entire crime. After George W. Ashburn refused to give him his gun, but before the Klan killers entered Ashburn’s room, Bennett had ducked behind a rack of clothing; he watched the murder from this hiding place. The next day, he told Captain Mills what he saw, and he named several of the intruders.

  Yet when it came time to testify publicly at the coroner’s inquest, Bennett quickly lost his nerve. He balked at repeating the details—thus proving that he could be easily intimidated. He demonstrated this susceptibility again six weeks later, on May 11, when two of Columbus’s leading citizens, cotton merchant William D. Chipley, the chairman of the Muscogee County Democratic Party, and Elisha Kirkscey, the county physician who had inspected George W. Ashburn’s body at the inquest, arranged to have the sheriff arrest Bennett on a trumped-up charge: failing to pay for whiskey delivered to the little shop where he sold drinks by the glass.

  Visiting him in jail, they pumped him for the names of black witnesses who had talked to the Army, and what they had said. They demanded that he give them a list of the white Republicans in town, plus Ashburn’s private letters. The documents, they assured Bennett, would be returned to him if he helped Chipley and the Democrats persuade Captain Mills to return power to elected Democrats in Columbus.

&
nbsp; If Bennett did not cooperate, they warned, he would rot in jail. If he did what they said, they could assure his release, and, Chipley added, he would have nothing to fear from “the Ku Kluxes.”

  Bennett refused to give them the list of white Republicans, but he capitulated to all their other demands. He told a jailer where to find Ashburn’s letters: in a steamer trunk back at Bennett’s permanent lodgings. After the jailer retrieved them and gave them to Chipley, the cotton merchant paid Bennett’s fine, and the latter went free.

  Just nine days later, the thoroughly frightened Bennett was approached at the barbershop by another cotton merchant, who asked if he knew that one of the men rumored to be on Captain Mills’s arrest list, Robert Daniel, had been one of Amanda Patterson’s regular visitors. That would certainly make it easy—too easy—for her to identify him, if the Army took her to Fort Pulaski. Bennett said he had seen Daniel call on Patterson, from time to time. The cotton merchant wondered aloud whether it might not be better, under the circumstances, to get Amanda out of town. Bennett said he didn’t know. Well, there would be a lot of money in it for whoever persuaded her to go, the cotton merchant remarked as they parted.

  Later that day, undoubtedly anxious about what was happening, Bennett sought solace in a downtown bar. A local banker found him there and brought up the same proposition that the cotton merchant had mentioned at the barbershop: a handsome reward for anyone who helped persuade Amanda Patterson to get out of Columbus.