Freedom's Detective Page 7
Bennett did not have to be told a third time. On the night of May 20, he showed up at the Flournoy house, drunk and frightened. Amanda Patterson was still living there, and she was suffering, not from any physical ailment, but from paralyzing fear. Bennett pleaded with her to leave town with him. If they stayed, he told her, “the Ku Kluxes” would kill them. On the other hand, he said, if the “Yankees” took them to Fort Pulaski, they would surely die there. Their best option was to get out altogether. Rich men in Columbus had promised to bankroll a getaway, he said, if she would just agree to leave town, make a new start elsewhere—and never testify.
Amanda Patterson was still contemplating Bennett’s offer two days later—May 22—when General Meade issued an order to Captain Mills. Whitley was right, he had concluded, the young woman should be sent to Fort Pulaski without further delay. The next day, soldiers took her into custody in Columbus, along with Robert Daniel and another suspected conspirator, and placed all three aboard a Savannah-bound train.
The Army had not acted a moment too soon.
* * *
Whitley had not only anticipated Amanda Patterson’s vulnerability in Columbus, he had also formed the right intuition as to how the young woman would respond when removed from the threatening surroundings of her hometown. Lonely and austere as it was, Fort Pulaski was the first place in Georgia where men with power—Whitley and his military backers—possessed the ability and the willingness to protect her. The detective ordered this most despised and exploited member of Columbus’s white community lodged in one of the few decent rooms at the fort, an officer’s spacious quarters, with a view of the sea and a cozy hearth, and assured her that her safety would be guaranteed.
He informed her, less gently, that she would never get out of the fort unless she told him everything she knew about the Ashburn case, and agreed to repeat it under oath before an eventual military commission.17
Patterson did tell her story, just as Whitley had predicted. She seemed to be unburdening herself of all the tension that had accumulated during the weeks since Ashburn’s murder. She recounted the bloody events at the Flournoy house. And she told Whitley of the lengths to which Alexander Bennett, clearly at the behest of the conspirators, had gone in recent days to persuade her to leave town and not testify.
Patterson let slip the fact that she had been given advance knowledge of the murder plot. A week before the assassination, conspirators had approached her at a doctor’s office downtown, telling her they planned to kill the man they called “old Ashburn,” and asking her to help them gain access to Hannah Flournoy’s house. She told Whitley she had begged them to leave her out of it—but she certainly had not taken any steps to warn Ashburn about the plot, mainly because the Klan threatened to kill her if she did. Patterson probably didn’t realize it at the time, but this admission gave Whitley additional leverage. If she tried to back out of her deal to testify, he could have the Army charge her as an accomplice.
Most important, Amanda Patterson named names. The men who tried to persuade her to join the plot included two of those who later tried to pressure Alexander Bennett into taking her out of town: twenty-eight-year-old William Dudley Chipley, the chairman of the local Democratic Party and twenty-nine-year-old Elisha Kirkscey, the Muscogee County physician. Both men were Confederate veterans; Chipley’s military résumé was especially dramatic. He was a former lieutenant colonel in a Confederate unit from Kentucky, wounded at the battles of Shiloh and Chickamauga and taken prisoner near Atlanta in the waning days of the war. Upon his release from the Union prison at Johnson’s Island, Ohio, in mid-1865, he settled in Columbus, and married the daughter of a planter from Phenix City, Alabama, just across the Chattahoochee River.18 “We are going to kill old Ashburn the night of the day he speaks” at the Temperance Hall meeting, Chipley had told Patterson.
She had also seen Chipley and Kirkscey at the Flournoy house on the night of the murder. Both were masked, but Patterson knew the prominent men of the town well enough to recognize them even in disguise. In addition, there was the one intruder who had accidentally dropped his mask: Christopher Columbus “Lum” Bedell, another Democratic businessman. He hissed a death threat to Patterson as the two made eye contact at the dimly lit murder scene. Bedell had repeated that threat to her in the weeks since. And Alexander Bennett had told Patterson “Lum” Bedell was one of the wealthy men who would pay for them to get out of town.
* * *
Patterson confirmed that three men the United States Army had arrested and locked up at Fort Pulaski were, as Whitley suspected, among those who had actually fired their weapons at George W. Ashburn on the night of the crime. One, James W. Barber, also a Confederate veteran and the Democratic clerk of the Muscogee County court, was detained with the first batch of four men to reach Fort Pulaski on May 15. The other two, George Betts, a twenty-three-year-old former policeman who worked as a fireman on the train that ran from Columbus to Montgomery, Alabama, and Robert Daniel, had been rounded up and transported to Fort Pulaski with Patterson.
After they had been at the fort about a month, during which time they had proven resistant to Whitley’s interrogation methods, the Army ordered Betts and Daniel transferred to the McPherson Barracks, General Meade’s headquarters in Atlanta, where several rooms had been converted to holding cells. Indeed, as of early June, the upper-class suspects Patterson had named—Chipley, Kirkscey, and Bedell—had been arrested and shipped to the McPherson Barracks, as well.
Chipley requested that Daniel, who not only worked for him at his cotton brokerage but also rented a room in his house, be allowed to stay with him, Kirkscey, and Bedell. They occupied a relatively commodious cell, which the Army granted these wealthy detainees in return for a cash bond.19 This special favor undoubtedly also reflected the fact that Chipley had friends in high places. He had been raised in Lexington, Kentucky, the son of the city’s leading physician. Since childhood, he had been close to a Democratic member of the House of Representatives from Kentucky, James B. Beck. Chipley had sent Representative Beck a letter claiming he had been “arrested and imprisoned without cause, by order of General Meade.” Beck was a staunch white supremacist who called Reconstruction a scheme “to place the white men of the south under the domination of the negro.”20 Beck had Chipley’s letter read aloud by the clerk of the House, and demanded to know under what authority the United States Army had arrested Chipley and his fellow Klan suspects.21
Chipley’s gesture of favoritism toward Daniel was an obvious attempt to assure that he would not testify against him and the other ringleaders. Whitley, though, saw it as an opportunity to influence the man Chipley and his friends did not invite into their nice quarters: George Betts. “They’re leaving you to be hung [sic] because you’re poor,” he told Betts. The big shots wanted it that way, Whitley added, because, once Betts hanged, he could never testify against them, and they would go free.22
Betts wavered. Whitley allowed Betts a visit from his father, reminding him, as he spoke with the older man, “the halter is still around your neck.” The detective insisted that the well-to-do conspirators were planning to buy their way to freedom, while he took the fall.
Betts finally cracked—the first of the actual shooters to do so. He felt that Whitley, for the most part, was treating him as a friend. He agreed to testify for the prosecution in return for a guarantee of protection.
Betts told Whitley that Kirkscey had circulated through Columbus for weeks prior to the murder, offering not only him but several other men between fifty and a hundred dollars each if they would help kill Ashburn, not a dime of which, he noted bitterly, had yet been paid to him. Betts provided details of how the squad of masked men assembled in a vacant lot across the street from Hannah Flournoy’s house before midnight, just as their leaders—Chipley, Kirkscey, and Bedell—had instructed. He recalled that a particularly motivated member of the mob, former Confederate soldier Robert Hudson, had cried out, “we�
�ll give him hell,” as they set out for the Flournoy place. Hudson was also the one who shouted, “there’s the damn shit,” when Ashburn opened the door to his candlelit bedroom.
And it was Robert Hudson who had kneeled on the floor to fire the mortal shot between the prostrate Ashburn’s eyes.
* * *
Perhaps the most stunning information Betts provided was his revelation that the assassination conspiracy extended into Captain Mills’s very own United States Army company.
Sergeant Charles Marshall, a twenty-seven-year-old Union Civil War veteran from New Jersey, had fraternized with Columbus’s white Democrats almost from the moment the unit arrived in town. He shared their disdain for Reconstruction and the rights of African Americans, and was “highly thought of by our citizens,” as a white supremacist newspaper put it.23 In March 1868, at about the time of Nathan Bedford Forrest’s visit, Kirkscey had confided to Marshall that he was planning to assassinate Ashburn. Marshall eagerly agreed to take part, in return for a promise of money, and a home in Columbus after his service commitment expired at the end of the year.
On the afternoon of March 30, the sergeant received a package at his quarters, containing a pasteboard mask and written directions to the assassination party’s rendezvous point. Marshall sneaked away from the base to a downtown bar, where he fortified himself with drink—and got into a fight with a group of black men. George W. Ashburn arrived at the scene and broke up the altercation, upbraiding Marshall for mistreating the African Americans. Ashburn threatened to report him to Captain Mills, whereupon the sergeant slapped Ashburn and spat in his face.24
By the time he reached the vacant lot near Hannah Flournoy’s house just before midnight, Marshall was furious at the Republican politician. Other conspirators handed him a gray English walking coat and a pair of trousers to wear over his blue Army uniform. Moments later, Marshall barged to the front of the mob, where he stood shoulder to shoulder with four of Columbus’s white supremacists and fired his pistol at Ashburn.
The men on whose behalf he acted later rewarded the Army sergeant with gifts including a solid gold pocket watch and one hundred dollars in cash, the latter presented to him by the mayor of Columbus. In the weeks following Ashburn’s death, Marshall made little effort to conceal his political sympathies, going so far as to assist the Democrats at the April election by trying to deceive illiterate freedmen into casting ballots marked for the party of white supremacy. Captain Mills demoted him for this and, as further punishment, sent the sergeant on a month’s unpaid furlough to his home in New Jersey.
The Army arrested Sergeant Marshall upon his return from furlough in late May. Whitley confronted him with George Betts’s confession—and with the fact that Betts had agreed to name Marshall as one of the shooters, in return for immunity from prosecution. Marshall could have the same deal, Whitley told him, but only if he, too, told the truth. Otherwise, he would have to take his chances as a defendant. The sergeant resisted for three days, until—worn down by the detective and, he later asserted, plagued by his own conscience—Marshall confirmed everything that George Betts and Amanda Patterson had said.25
He supplied a chilling new detail: Elisha Kirkscey and “Lum” Bedell were the two men who looked into Ashburn’s room after the shooting to verify that the bullets had struck their intended target.
By the final week of June, Whitley had assembled a powerful case for the military prosecutors, the heart of which would be the testimony of two shooters, George H. Betts and Sergeant Charles Marshall, and two eyewitnesses from within Hannah Flournoy’s house, Amanda Patterson and Alexander Bennett. Whitley had arrested the latter in Columbus on June 1 and sent him to Fort Pulaski. Bennett had been a troublesome witness from the beginning of the case; immediately after Ashburn’s murder he had told Captain Mills what had happened, then, fearing the Klan, he had prevaricated under oath before the coroner’s jury inquest. Most recently, of course, he had agreed under Klan pressure to try to induce Amanda Patterson to flee. Intent on ending Bennett’s evasions once and for all, Whitley and Reed told him that he had to cooperate or else he would be charged for trying to spirit Patterson away, and, as Whitley told him, “rot” in military confinement. Bennett capitulated.26
On June 27 General Meade approved formal murder charges against twelve men, nine of whom the United States Army had managed to locate and arrest: William D. Chipley, Elisha J. Kirkscey, and Christopher Columbus Bedell, who organized the plot; James W. Barber, William A. Duke, and Robert Hudson, who had actually fired at Ashburn; and Alva C. Roper, James L. Wiggins, and Robert A. Wood. Roper was in the mob that surrounded the house and prevented Ashburn’s escape. Wiggins and Wood had staked out the Temperance Hall rally on the evening of March 30, to alert the others when Ashburn left. They had also supplied the group with masks and overcoats.
All of these men, the indictment said, had combined “feloniously, unlawfully, willfully and of their malice aforethought...to kill and murder” the leading Republican politician in Columbus.27
Hiram C. Whitley had proved that the Ku Klux Klan was not impenetrable after all.
* * *
General George G. Meade was a professional soldier not known as particularly sympathetic to the Republicans. Indeed, President Andrew Johnson had installed him as commander of the military district encompassing Alabama, Florida, and Georgia on New Year’s Day, 1868, because he considered Meade less “radical” than his predecessor, General John Pope. The fact that an officer of Meade’s reputation considered the evidence strong enough to warrant indictments caused no reflection or reconsideration among Georgia’s white supremacists, however. To the contrary, they rallied even more fervently behind the defendants the state’s Democratic newspapers now called “the Columbus Prisoners.”
Their campaign to discredit Meade’s military commission had two main themes. The first was the immorality of George W. Ashburn, a racial agitator who met his end in a place Democratic journalists insistently described as “a low negro brothel.” Though he richly deserved death, the narrative went, the claim it had come at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan, or any group of honorable white men, was sheer Republican propaganda. Far more likely, the politician had been done in by his own party, which found him not much less obnoxious than Democrats did.
The second theme was the illegitimacy of the military-led investigation itself. The Democratic press portrayed the entire process as a “reign of terror,” or military “tyranny,” devoid of warrants, formal charges, and all the other usual constitutional protections.28 Hiram C. Whitley had procured testimony against the Columbus Prisoners through force and bribery, under infernal conditions at Fort Pulaski and the McPherson Barracks. As the Atlanta Constitution put it in an editorial shortly before the trial began: “The prisoners are under the control of detectives and...they, acting under orders from the head of the army, are responsible for the fiendish malignity and racking tortures visited upon the victims who have fallen into their hands.”29
Meade could scarcely believe that Georgia’s white Democrats would vent their contempt on him, and his investigators, rather than on the people responsible for murdering Ashburn in cold blood. The general took the accusations personally; he was especially incensed because he had already had second thoughts about the grim conditions at Fort Pulaski, and began moving prisoners to well-ventilated wooden buildings at the McPherson Barracks at the end of May. Though the Army initially had to house them in makeshift cells only a few feet wide, they were provided more space as it became available. They ate what Meade’s own soldiers did. William D. Chipley had used money and political connections to get especially favorable conditions, including, by the end of the trial, the right to leave the barracks and visit his wife, who complained of illness. “I cannot find from the testimony of the prisoners themselves that any of them have been treated with the slightest degree of cruelty,” a Chicago Tribune reporter wrote after Meade allowed him to make an extensive tour of
the base.30
Yet the cries of torture reached all the way to the White House, where President Johnson, newly acquitted of impeachment charges, received a delegation from Columbus, led by the editor of the Daily Sun. Ever solicitous of white Southern Democrats, President Johnson ordered General Grant to send an Army colonel, the brother of Secretary of War John Schofield, to investigate the accusations.31 In response, General Meade asked his subordinates, Whitley included, for written reports on the detainees’ treatment.
On June 27 Whitley replied to Meade, in his usual combative tone. The claims of prisoner abuse were “false in every particular, without even a shadow of foundation,” he wrote, declaring himself eager “for an opportunity to contradict them; and when this case is tried let the sword of justice fall where it will, I am willing to stand all the bitter curses that have been heaped upon me, and the Government that I serve.” The detective appended a letter, signed by the detainees at the McPherson Barracks, and purportedly written by Elisha Kirkscey, which praised Whitley for treating them all “very kindly indeed.”32
Yet Whitley had to acknowledge that the word kindly did not apply to his treatment of all prisoners at all times. There had been, he admitted to General Meade, certain “exceptions.”
* * *
Among the first four detainees to reach Fort Pulaski on May 15, James W. Barber was the biggest fish by far. Captain Mills had information pointing to Barber as one of the men who fired on Ashburn: a black carriage driver in Columbus had heard a half-drunk Barber boast on the day of the assassination that “we Ku Kluxes” would carry out their threats “in spite of men and hell,” and that “Ashburn will be a dead man shorter than any of you have knowledge of.”33
Whitley coveted Barber’s confession. He entered his cell and told him the situation was hopeless. Not only did the Army have proof he was guilty, but, Whitley lied, others in the conspiracy had informed on him. He would be their fall guy—unless he cooperated.