Freedom's Detective Read online

  Whitley’s interrogations continued in this vein for a day, then two. Even in the isolation of the island fort, he could not make Barber talk.34 A twenty-six-year-old Confederate infantry veteran, Barber had been severely wounded at Chickamauga in 1863; he saw action at the siege of Petersburg in 1864. These experiences defined his loyalties. The Ku Klux Klan oath of silence cemented them.35

  Whitley turned to the second of the four men in his custody, a twenty-one-year-old by the name of Wade Stevens. A poor, sporadically employed leather shoe and harness maker, he was not made of the same stern stuff as Barber, and far less clearly implicated in the Ashburn crime. The detective ordered guards to put Stevens into Barber’s cell. Then Whitley slipped into the empty one next door, and pressed his ear to the wall.

  The pair’s barely audible words implied that Barber did indeed possess guilty knowledge of the murder of “that son of a bitch Ashburn,” as he referred to the Republican politician. Ashburn wouldn’t be the last Republican to meet a bloody end, he swore. Otherwise, Barber astutely avoided incriminating details, and named no higher-ups in the conspiracy. Perhaps suspecting that Whitley was listening, he audibly scoffed at the detective’s claim coconspirators had betrayed him. That was a “damned lie,” Barber muttered. “All hell couldn’t make me confess.”36

  Frustrated, Whitley approached the next two prisoners, who, unlike Barber and Stevens, were African American. Though obviously not complicit in Ashburn’s murder, these freedmen were believed to know more about it than they were saying, based on their frequent contacts with the suspected white conspirators. Or so Captain Mills and William H. Reed had informed Whitley in Columbus. One of their sources, however, appears to have been Wade Stevens. And he had a grudge against one of the freedmen, fifty-one-year-old John Wells, for moving in with Stevens’s widowed mother and siding with her in a dispute with her son over family property.37

  Whitley did not know that. Based on what he had been told, Whitley believed Wells might be withholding valuable intelligence. He ordered soldiers to blindfold Wells and take him to a casemate—one of the alcoves in Fort Pulaski’s defensive walls through which artillery pieces pointed outward. Wells could hear Whitley and the guards talking in stage whispers about shaving his head, a form of Civil War–era military punishment that was sometimes a prelude to worse. When his blindfold came off, Wells found himself seated in a chair, restrained by two burly soldiers, his hair full of barber’s shaving lather—and a cannon pointing at him from across the casemate.

  Whitley ordered Wells to talk, threatening to instruct a soldier manning the big gun to fire if Wells refused. Terrified, the freedman implored Whitley to spare his life. He poured out all the details he could remember about where he had been, and what he had done, on the night of the crime. He swore not only that he had no direct knowledge of it, but also that he had no idea who in Columbus might know about it. He begged Whitley to believe him, protesting that he was a churchgoer and would rather die than bear false witness.38

  After about fifteen minutes, Whitley concluded John Wells was, indeed, telling the truth, and let him go back to his cell. But the detective was not quite finished. Whitley ordered guards to bring him the other black detainee, twenty-two-year-old John Stapler, who had been arrested as he drove his wagon through town. The sudden detention had forced him to abandon both the vehicle and his horse.

  Whitley subjected Stapler to a mock execution much like the one he inflicted on Wells. “I have an order from General Meade to put you through,” the detective growled, as Stapler stared at the barrel of a cannon. An Army officer, playing along with Whitley, pretended to refuse him permission to kill the prisoner; then “consented” to let him do it if Stapler still didn’t cooperate after fifteen minutes. Whitley demanded that Stapler tell him everything he knew about the Ashburn murder. Stapler responded with protestations of ignorance. Whitley accused him of lying to protect “the rebels,” but said he would not carry out the execution after all, and instead gave the freedman a day to go back to his cell and think it over.

  Four days, not one, went by, with Stapler waiting anxiously in solitary confinement. Then soldiers returned for Stapler—not to deliver him to Whitley for more interrogation, but to place him in a cell with James W. Barber. As Whitley listened in, Barber urged Stapler, “Don’t let them scare you. They can’t prove anything. They’ll let us go in a day or two.”

  When Stapler emerged from Barber’s cell, the young African American insisted that Barber had told him only a few pleasantries, which Whitley knew from his eavesdropping to be untrue. In response, the detective took Stapler to a different part of Fort Pulaski, where the Army maintained punishment cells for soldiers who had committed disciplinary infractions. The sweatboxes, as they were known, consisted of closets built into the walls of the fort, not much wider than a man, and only two feet deep. Whitley forced Stapler into the tiny cell and slammed the iron door, which had a few small holes in it for ventilation. A half hour later, Stapler cried out that he had something to say. He admitted having seen Barber after the Ashburn murder, getting his beard shaved at a downtown barbershop, as if changing his appearance to avoid identification. Whitley, unsatisfied with that revelation, locked Stapler back in.

  Thirty-three hours later, on the morning of May 17, Whitley’s partner, William H. Reed, found to his amazement that Stapler was still locked in the sweatbox. Reed opened the door, and Stapler stumbled out, exhausted and perspiring, his legs visibly swollen from the heat, but still with nothing more to tell the detectives. Whitley admonished Reed that he should have left Stapler in longer, but Reed and the prison’s military commander prevailed on him finally to let the freedman go.

  Upon returning to Columbus June 7, John Wells told the story of Whitley’s tactics around town, and the Klan’s local defenders quickly got wind of it. They obviously had even less regard for the rights and dignity of African Americans than Whitley had demonstrated at Fort Pulaski; but they knew a propaganda bonanza when they saw one. White Democrats took Wells to a lawyer’s office downtown and had him swear out an affidavit on June 11 describing the mock execution. The Daily Sun published it on June 14.

  It did not take long for the rest of the Democratic press, in Georgia and elsewhere in the country, to embroider the story of torture by “infamous ‘detectives,’” as one paper described Whitley and Reed.39 Another Democratic organ claimed that “the dungeons of Fort Pulaski have reverberated with the half-stifled groans and screams of victims of a contrivance brought there for the purpose” of forcing them to confess. This purported torture machine consisted of “a box sufficiently capacious to admit the victim, and then arranged for compression by screws, by which a force could be brought upon the prisoner sufficient ‘to squeeze the breath out of him.’ It was also provided with a steam apparatus connected with the throttling box by pipes, and upon turning a faucet jets of steam were thrown in, which added materially to the anguish of suffocation.”40

  This was obviously a wild exaggeration, but there was a kernel of truth to it, as Whitley himself recognized by admitting his use of mock executions against Wells and Stapler in his letter to General Meade. Whitley’s letter offered the general a twofold explanation. First, he had been led to believe by Captain Mills that the two black men “knew the whole affair,” making it seem imperative to get them to talk. Second, Whitley believed, as he put it, that “they could be frightened out of it” and “took this method to scare them.”

  The detective claimed that he understood what he called “the negro character.” Given the intimidation to which they had been subjected under slavery, he continued, they were “naturally more easily frightened into measures than white men.”41

  This was at least a backhanded acknowledgment of slavery’s cruelty, which Whitley had witnessed and, in the case of overseer James Walkinshow, helped to punish, during his time in New Orleans. Still, Whitley partook of, and acted on, the racial prejudice and stereotyping of
his time, even while trying to penetrate a conspiracy of white racists bent on restoring as much of the old slave system as possible. Even Captain Mills had pressured and threatened some African American witnesses he thought were not being candid with him, in the apparent belief that the only cure for Klan intimidation was to instill countervailing fear. Mills did not go so far as to point a cannon at anyone, however; this was Whitley’s own tactic, which he had first used against the gens de couleur libre troops in New Orleans. Ever since he sarcastically tapped a revolver against John Doy’s forehead in Kansas, Whitley seemed to get a certain thrill from holding people at gunpoint.

  Hypocritical and opportunistic as the Georgia Klan’s apologists’ campaign to discredit the investigation campaign might be, Whitley had played right into their hands.

  General Meade stood by the detective, and defended him publicly, pointing out that Whitley had mistreated the two black detainees but they were “in nowise injured.”42 As he declared in a cable to Washington, he was astonished and disgusted by the Ashburn murder, and by the efforts of professedly civilized Southern gentlemen to cover it up, which made it “most urgent that this trial should be carried on to the end by the military authorities.”43 Whatever Whitley’s methods, the general could hardly disavow him without jeopardizing that objective.

  * * *

  The trial began in an airy, newly constructed meeting area in the McPherson Barracks military hospital at 10:00 a.m. on June 29, in front of an audience swollen by a large delegation from Columbus.44 It was as if the whole violent, racially tinged saga of secession, war, and Reconstruction were being restaged as a morality play in that improvised court.

  General Caleb C. Sibley presided over a seven-member panel of blue-uniformed judges. General Sibley served as assistant commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Georgia, the highest-ranking bureau official in the state. The remaining six members included one of his subordinates at the agency, which white supremacists hated for its work ensuring that former slaves received wages and fair treatment from former masters. Indeed, there were initially three Freedmen’s Bureau officials on the commission, but Meade replaced one of them, General Rufus Saxton—a well-known abolitionist from Massachusetts who had also commanded black troops during the Civil War—on the day before the trial, possibly because the defense would have objected to his inclusion.45

  Leading the prosecution team was Judge Advocate General William M. Dunn of Indiana. A Republican member of the House of Representatives from 1859 through 1863, he had signed on as a military lawyer after leaving Congress. General Dunn recruited fellow Yale alumnus Joseph E. Brown, the Confederate-era governor of Georgia, as a civilian counsel to the prosecution. At the time of the Ashburn trial, Brown was a state supreme court justice, having joined the Republican Party believing that the white South’s best hope was to cooperate in Reconstruction. Brown agreed to join the prosecution in return for a $5,000 fee and a promise that the commission would not impose the death penalty if the men were convicted.46 Generals Meade and Sibley agreed, hoping that the employment of this distinguished Georgian as a prosecutor would help convince Georgia whites that the military commission was not an exercise in Yankee revenge.

  The composition of the nine-lawyer defense team seemed intended to make the opposite point. The leader, Alexander H. Stephens, served in the U.S. House before joining the secessionist movement in Georgia and rising to the vice presidency of the Confederate States. Stephens’s March 1861 “Cornerstone Speech” at Savannah declared that the Confederacy was “founded upon...the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.”47 For him, defending the “Columbus Prisoners” was a matter of principle, and an opportunity to promote his campaign for the United States Senate. Former Confederate General Henry L. Benning of Columbus, who had served on the prewar Georgia supreme court, joined Stephens, along with seven other prominent members of the Georgia bar.48

  The prosecution case took up the first week of this clash of legal giants. The core of it was the testimony of Marshall, Betts, Patterson, and Bennett. As General Dunn and Joseph E. Brown led them through their narratives, Hiram C. Whitley looked on intently from the spectators’ gallery, watching for any sign that the witnesses might falter, or change the stories they had told him, and that he had subsequently rehearsed with them in preparatory sessions at the McPherson Barracks.

  Cross-examining the prosecution witnesses, Alexander H. Stephens tried to turn the proceeding into a trial of the detective who had elicited their testimony. He repeatedly demanded to know from Marshall and Betts how Whitley had gotten them to confess, suggesting that Whitley had either tortured them, or scripted their testimony, or that they were lying in return for favorable treatment from the government.

  For the most part, though, the former Confederate vice president failed to shake their stories. All prosecution witnesses swore Whitley had not told them whom to implicate, but simply to tell what they knew of “the affair,” as they referred to the Ashburn murder. Rather than punch holes in the prosecution narrative, Stephens’s questions seemed unintentionally to elicit even more damning details about who and what the witnesses had seen in the Flournoy house, along with plausible protestations that they had hesitated to tell the truth previously, to local authorities in Columbus, because of their fear of “the Ku Kluxes.”

  The star prosecution witness was Charles Marshall, the United States Army sergeant who sided with the Klan and joined its invasion of Ashburn’s home. He spent two grueling days on the witness stand. Despite his evidently despicable recent behavior, he proved formidable on the stand, seeming almost to atone by telling the truth. “A visible sensation overspread the court, counsel and spectators,” a newspaper reporter noted, as the trim, black-mustached soldier confessed the details of the plot, and his own participation in it, “in the clearest and most direct manner.”49 On cross-examination, Stephens tried to get him to say that Whitley had demanded he implicate particular defendants, but Marshall steadfastly, and truthfully, denied it. Whitley had been far too careful to make that elementary mistake.

  “He told me that if I knew anything about it I better make a full confession of the affair,” Marshall testified. “He gave me the reason that it was my duty, sir, and proved to me that the evidence against me was sufficient.”50

  Stephens’s cross-examination of Marshall “failed to shake his testimony in a single particular,” the Cincinnati Daily Gazette’s correspondent reported. “The confession of two of the conspirators has swept the ground from under their feet and Stephens has been floundering about to recover himself ever since.”51

  On July 3, a Friday, the prosecution rested. On July 6, after the Independence Day weekend, the defense proceeded to put on its case. It consisted of a parade of alibi witnesses, friends and family members of the accused, who claimed the defendants were at home in bed, or miles away from Columbus, at the time of the murder.

  Under cross-examination, the defense witnesses vented their contempt for lawyers who deigned to challenge their stories. Joseph E. Brown especially seemed to arouse the defense witnesses’ ire, not diminish it as General Meade’s officers had anticipated: one, a seventeen-year-old female, “manifested an antagonism for the prosecution more remarkable for its energy and its fire than for its politeness,” a Northern journalist reported. As she left the stand, she shot Brown a look that was “painful to behold on the countenance of any living creature, much less in one of her age and sex.”52

  The defense testimony was transparently false, as prosecutors had no trouble showing on cross-examination. Each morning, as the defense prepared to resume this routine, one of its witnesses would return to court and request permission to amend a contradiction in which he or she had been trapped on the previous day.

  In an especially damaging moment for the defense, a female member of defendant Elisha Kirkscey’s household admitt
ed she had rejoiced at the news of Ashburn’s death. When Joseph E. Brown asked her if the women living under the accused’s roof wished for the death of all the Republicans, a defense lawyer tried to object. Before he could get the words out, the woman said: “We do.” The following day, she asked permission to rephrase her answer; she meant to say that the women desired only the death of Republicans such as Ashburn, “who were trying to excite the negroes against their former masters.”53

  Even some in the Georgia Democratic press conceded, albeit backhandedly, the strength of the prosecution’s case. On July 10, after Whitley’s witnesses had fared well under cross-examination, but the defense’s had not, the Macon Weekly Telegraph tried to adapt previous categorical denials of Klan guilt to the facts emerging at the trial. Possibly, the paper reported, some of the defendants had paid a nighttime call on Ashburn, intending only to tar and feather him. Ashburn, in a panic, fired his pistol at the intruders, at which point they shot back in “quasi self-defense,” the Telegraph explained.54

  The defense team, too, must have realized that Hiram C. Whitley had assembled proof of their clients’ guilt. Alexander H. Stephens’s redundant cross-examination of prosecution witnesses, followed by his tedious barrage of implausible alibi testimony for the accused, hardly seemed calculated to impress the panel of military judges, and it didn’t. As time went by, they were “evidently growing somewhat weary of the great mass of trifling and irrelevant matter introduced by the defense,” the Chicago Tribune reported.55

  The defense’s dilatory presentation did, however, buy time for a political solution to the “Columbus Prisoners’” predicament.

  The military commission proceedings coincided with the first session of the new Georgia state legislature, which had been elected in April, and met in the new state capital, Atlanta, on July 4. This body’s key task was to be ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment—a precondition for Georgia’s readmission to the Union under the Reconstruction Acts. Georgia white supremacists regarded the measure as an abomination, because it guaranteed African Americans citizenship and equal rights. Yet ratification did offer a certain potential consolation: once Georgia was back in the Union, and its civilian government restored, Democratic politicians could run for federal offices; civilian courts, subject to Democratic influence, and to Ku Klux Klan intimidation, would once again have jurisdiction over the Ashburn case and all other crimes.