by Charles Lane
A local approached the visitors. “What’s the news?” he asked.
“What kind of news do you want to hear?” the wagon driver replied.
The local immediately recognized these passwords of the Ku Klux Klan.
“Convention news,” the local man replied.
With that, he approached one of the peddlers and extended his hand. The visitor took it, and gave a firm shake, having first folded his right index finger into his right palm to form the Klan grip.
The rituals complete, the newcomers could be taken into their fellow Klansman’s confidence. He introduced them to the Moore County den, and they spent hours together over the next two days, regaling one another with stories of recent raids. The Moore County Klansmen spoke freely of murders and beatings they had administered against local Republicans, white and black; they told these tales partly because they knew they were among friends, and partly to compete with the apparent boss of the peddlers, who called himself Goodwin. He boasted of astonishingly violent deeds; he even claimed complicity in the May 21, 1870, murder of a state detective that had triggered then-Governor Holden’s ill-fated crackdown on Klan counties.
Perhaps it was also a desire to impress Goodwin that caused the Moore County den to let him in on their plan for the night of August 10: they were going to don Klan disguises, mount their horses, and take John A. Campbell from his home to a carefully chosen spot in the poplar forest. Then they would hang Campbell from a tree limb.
Campbell was thirty-five years old, married, with four children. He sold liquor by the glass to help support his family, since a disability that caused him to walk with a limp limited his capacity for other work. He also traded in cotton purchased from black farmers who grew it on land rented from whites, even though white planters, falsely, complained the African Americans stole it from them. The Klan had condemned him for other reasons, however: Campbell had been a Union man who helped the United States Army during the Civil War and had joined the Moore County Republican Party afterward. He hosted meetings for its members, black and white, at his little dram shop. On two previous nights in 1871, the Klan had punished Campbell by whipping him with tree branches. They admonished him to cease his Republican activities each time. In spite of those warnings, he had persisted.
In late July the den decided enough was enough. They intended to kill Campbell on the night of August 3, just after that day’s state referendum, but a United States Army patrol unexpectedly passed through Moore County, so they postponed the murder a week. Meanwhile, the Klan had acquired a fresh reason to hate Campbell and the Republicans: the referendum failed, with Moore County voting “no” by a 41-vote margin out of 1,719 cast.36
Goodwin and his tobacco-peddling companion not only approved the murder, they asked to join in. The Moore County den promptly assented.
A day before the raid, Goodwin helped the gang fetch their costumes from a hiding place under a neighbor’s porch. The next evening, August 10, just before the group headed out in their black cambric robes and high, conical black hoods, Goodwin urged everyone to test-fire his gun, then gave each man fresh gunpowder to reload.
Then the nine Klansmen dragged Campbell out of bed, commandeered his wagon, and drove him to the poplar forest. They encircled him, their faces obscured by the hoods, which were ghoulishly adorned with bull’s horns and emblazoned with white crosses and three white letters—“K.K.K.” They looped a noose around his neck and ordered him to his knees. Goodwin began to read a list of the offenses for which the Ku Klux Klan had condemned Campbell.
Yet when the reading of Campbell’s death sentence ended, and the moment to execute it arrived, Goodwin did not pull the noose tighter around the Republican’s neck. Instead, he cried out—and the Klansmen heard the sound of booted feet crashing toward them through the underbrush. A squad of federal soldiers, answering Goodwin’s signal, emerged into the clearing.
The stunned Klansmen reached for their firearms. Perhaps they could still shoot their way out of the trap Goodwin had laid for them. When they pulled the triggers, though, nothing happened. Goodwin had reloaded their guns with black sand.
Goodwin removed his hood and helped the soldiers handcuff his prisoners and bind them together with the rope the Klan had been using on John A. Campbell. Then Goodwin turned to the group and revealed his true identity: United States detective Joseph G. Hester.
* * *
Hester had not come to Moore County expecting to break up a plot against John A. Campbell. The timing of his first operation as a Secret Service detective rather suggests that he was there to engage in clandestine monitoring of the August 3 referendum, alongside the United States Army troops whose surprise visit temporarily aborted the Klan’s attack on Campbell. Prior to setting out, Hester had spent a few days at a safe house in Fayetteville, North Carolina, refreshing his knowledge of Klan passwords and secret grips in discreet conversations with defectors from the organization.
When he learned the Klan’s plan, Hester and his fellow “tobacco peddler”—actually an assistant he had hired with Secret Service funds—faced a choice between warning Campbell, which would blow their cover, and letting the Klan kill him. Hester’s solution was to get a secret message to the Army, which was still nearby, then rely on the troops to appear at his signal, all while keeping up the pretense that he and his assistant were looking forward to hanging Campbell. It was a tremendous gamble. Under the circumstances, however, Hester considered it the only chance for all of them—Hester, his assistant, and Campbell—to survive.
Hester had heard members of the Moore County den say something that raised the stakes even higher: this group was responsible for a notorious spate of violence earlier in 1871, near the boundary between Moore and Chatham counties.37 The rampage began in April, when the Klan attacked Frances Gilmore, a twenty-year-old African American mother of two: they stripped her, beat her with a board, slashed her with a knife, and burned her pubic hair with a match. A few nights later, thirty disguised men burst into the house of a sixty-year-old white woman, Sally Gilmore—no relation—who was known for letting African American men hold political meetings at her home. A black man who was there at the time, Murchison McLean, tried to flee, but two Klansmen caught him and shot him at point-blank range; he died the next day.
The rest of the mob beat the two remaining African American men at the Gilmore house unconscious with clubs and switches, then dumped the victims in the mud outside. Next, they stripped Gilmore’s teenage son and daughter and forced them to dance, as Klansmen lashed them with a cowhide whip. The attackers administered similar cruelties to the naked bodies of Sally Gilmore and a female houseguest.
“Let’s make the old she-radical dance now!” a Klansman cried.
“We can do better than that,” another said. “We can lick the damned nigger-loving blood out of her.”
When Hester, his assistant, and the squad of federal troops sprang their trap on the night of August 10, therefore, they were not only taking John A. Campbell’s tormentors into custody, but also arresting a half dozen of those who had thus far escaped accountability for the atrocities against the two Gilmore families and Murchison McLean.
The Secret Service men loaded the captive Klansmen onto wagons and drove them eight miles north to the railroad depot at Sanford, North Carolina, where they all boarded the next train to Raleigh. Arriving at the state capital on August 11, Hester asked five of the soldiers to put on captured Klan regalia, then paraded them up Fayetteville Street, the city’s main commercial thoroughfare, with the actual Klansmen walking ahead, in handcuffs. Hester led the procession, a pistol hanging from his belt, along with the cowhide whip the Klan had used on the Gilmores.
Raleigh “was thrown into the wildest state of excitement,” a Republican newspaper reported.38 Hundreds flocked to Fayetteville Street. Klansmen on parade was an all-too-familiar phenomenon, after dark; but to see the white terrorists being herded throu
gh town in the middle of the day, by federal officers, was astonishing and—especially for African Americans in the throng—a rare moment of triumph. Black spectators jeered at Hester’s prisoners as he led them to the United States commissioner’s office, in a rented house a block from the North Carolina state capitol. The detective presented them to be arraigned, then committed to jail. He submitted the cowhide whip and Klan disguises as evidence.
Most in the crowd did not realize that the figures in robes were not actual Klansmen, but that hardly diminished the spectacle’s impact.
Just as the Democratic papers in Georgia had blamed “Negroes” or his fellow “radicals” for killing George W. Ashburn, North Carolina’s white supremacist press insisted that there was no Klan, and no Klan terrorism, only personal quarrels that might be violent, but had nothing to do with politics or race. “I do not believe there is any such organization,” lawyer and Democratic politician Plato Durham, a North Carolina Klan chieftain, lied, under oath, to the Ku Klux Committee in Washington a week before Hester made his arrests.39
Hester’s parade debunked the myths. A pro-Republican newspaper reported it under the headline ARRIVAL OF KU KLUX IN OUR MIDST, WITH THEIR DISGUISES! THEY ARE OF THE GENUINE BRAND! THE TRUTH ESTABLISHED. “Who now will have the effrontery to stand up and deny the existence of an organized band of Ku Klux in North Carolina?” the accompanying article asked.40
Hester cleverly spread the message using the latest technology. At Watson’s Photograph Studio in Raleigh, he and eight other men posed in the Klan costumes, reenacting the attempted hanging of John A. Campbell, who had accompanied Hester to Raleigh.41 Hester delivered the black-and-white photograph to the acting governor, Tod R. Caldwell, who forwarded it to the War Department in Washington. The September 9, 1871, front page of the National Republican carried a woodcut reproduction of the image, accompanied by a detailed account of Hester’s operation, supplied by Senator John Pool. Eventually, the image would be reprinted and distributed on thousands of handbills across the country.42
Whitley’s top detective in North Carolina, Joseph G. Hester, used photography to prove that the Ku Klux Klan was no mere Republican myth and that he had captured Klansmen in the act of attempting to murder John A. Campbell. (Courtesy of The Abraham Lincoln Foundation of The Union League of Philadelphia)
The pro-Klan North Carolina press mounted a furious counterattack. The Raleigh Sentinel published a letter purportedly from the father of one of Hester’s detainees. It claimed, accurately, that Hester had dressed impostors in the Klan costumes, but added, falsely, that the detective had brought the robes with him to Moore County, then tricked the man’s son and others into wearing them so he could stage an unwarranted arrest. Klan apologists smeared Sally Gilmore as the “keeper of a bawdy house for negroes,” and John A. Campbell as a man of “low, base character,” whipped not for his politics but for being cruel to his wife and selling bootleg liquor.43
What a Sentinel editorialist most reviled was the “Horried Sight” [sic] of “six white men brought forty miles for whipping Sally Gilmore and her negro paramours,” then paraded by “a United States marshal with pistol and cowhide at his side, marching front of the prisoners, with negroes in kuklux [sic] dress following in the rear, yelling and roaring like savages.”44
The pistol and cowhide were the accoutrements of antebellum slave patrollers and plantation overseers, to be wielded exclusively by whites against blacks; this made Hester’s display of them especially intolerable to the Sentinel. It warned the state’s Republican officials: “You must not suppose that the white blood of the State will submit to such indignities from unprincipled officer-holders and ignorant negroes.”
If there was any ambiguity as to what this implied, the Sentinel’s sister publication, the Fayetteville Eagle, cleared it up in an editorial:45
Hester and other suspicious characters are prowling around in the country as secret detectives, really secret agents of Radical officers to keep up political hate and strife for profit to that party and its leaders. We hope our citizens will shoot down, on sight, any strangers caught in mischief while prowling stealthily around our homes. A legitimate and well-meaning government employee should be respected and assisted; but an assassin and incendiary, and a bare-faced tool for low-lived treachery and oppression, should not be allowed to carry out his nefarious purposes.
Yet there was a note of desperation in these threats. Hester’s face and physical description remained unknown to most people in North Carolina; he had not been foolish enough to allow a photograph. This helped him dupe the Moore County Klan, and on at least one subsequent occasion, Klan sympathizers bent on murder seized someone they believed to be Hester, only to discover that they had captured the wrong man.46
Fearful of federal prosecution, sincerely repentant, or both, Klansmen began to confess their crimes and name their coconspirators. One “puker”—as the Klan called those who violated their oaths of secrecy—was nineteen-year-old William Washington Wicker. Hester had detained Wicker in Moore County and charged him with murdering Murchison McLean.47 After eleven days in a Raleigh jail, he decided to risk Klan retribution rather than take the fall for that crime. Wicker went before the United States commissioner and swore out the first of what would eventually be two affidavits in which he recounted his career in the Moore County Klan, identified the murderers of Murchison McLean, and described not only the invasion of Sally Gilmore’s home, but also a separate April attack, as well as the plot to assassinate John A. Campbell. He named every member of the Moore County den.
Wicker confirmed the Klan regalia Hester displayed in Raleigh was genuine—the same costumes, made by the Klansmen’s wives, that Wicker and others had worn during all their attacks. The cowhide was the one they had used to whip Sally Gilmore and many others.
Two weeks after Wicker confessed, Jesse Bryan of Moore County told Hester he wanted to make a statement, too.48 He recounted Wicker’s initiation ceremony, during which Klansmen held a knife to Wicker’s throat and a gun to his chest, as he swore to keep the Klan’s secrets. Bryan also vividly described the attack on Sally Gilmore’s house, confirming that the cowhide Hester wore in Raleigh was the one with which Klansmen had slashed Gilmore’s naked flesh. He corroborated Wicker’s account of Murchison McLean’s murder. Bryan admitted he had taken his oath to the Klan freely. However, he now said, “when I saw the full meaning of the obligation revealed at Sally Gilmore’s, I was convinced it was wrong, was willing to abandon it, and did abandon the organization.”
With these affidavits in hand, a biracial federal grand jury in Raleigh quickly indicted a dozen Moore County Klansmen for the attack on Sally Gilmore.
* * *
In a letter to Attorney General Akerman, Hiram C. Whitley had called the “reticence” of the Klan’s victims the “greatest obstacle” his detectives faced. The situation was all too reminiscent of the one Whitley had encountered in Columbus, Georgia, three years earlier: “Those who have escaped with life have had a seal put upon their lips which they dare not break upon pain of death, and the dead have nothing but their mangled corpses to tell the story of their wrongs,” Whitley wrote.49
Yet after Hester arrested Klan insiders, paraded them humiliatingly through Raleigh, and turned them into witnesses for the prosecution, Klan victims in North Carolina started to overcome their fear of testifying. In early September 1871 word reached the Secret Service man in Raleigh that twenty-year-old Sarah Jane Ferguson of Chatham County was willing to tell him about her family’s ordeal at the hands of the Klan.50
Everyone in their little community on the western edge of Chatham County knew Sarah Ferguson’s father, Dennis Ferguson, had opposed secession, but was nevertheless drafted into the Confederate Army, and died as a Union prisoner of war at Elmira, New York. His widow, Catherine, still adhered to Dennis’s Unionist principles and taught them to Sarah and her three younger brothers. Sarah freely talked Republican politic
s with her African American neighbors.
The Chatham County Ku Klux Klan warned the Fergusons to cease Republican activities or leave the county. The family paid no attention.
Shortly before midnight on November 10, 1870, Sarah Ferguson heard a sound like the shuffling of horses’ hooves on the frozen ground outside her family’s home. The next thing she knew, the front door flew open, and a man in bizarre black robes stood before her. “Have you ever seen a Ku Klux?” he asked. “I never have,” Sarah replied, “and I never wish to, without it looks better than you.”
To this defiance, the intruder’s response was to usher in a mob of similarly dressed men, who dragged Sarah Ferguson’s brothers outside. They gave each boy fifty lashes, using a switch cut from a nearby sweet gum tree. Trying to protect them, Sarah knocked off one assailant’s mask, and recognized him as a neighbor, Dick Taylor. He cocked his pistol and threatened to kill her if she ever reported him to authorities.
Taylor informed the Fergusons they had ten days to leave the area—or die. Not only did the Fergusons stay; they also told their neighbors about the beatings, which were impossible to conceal anyway, given the marks on the bodies of the three Ferguson brothers. No one supported the family; local authorities took no action.
At ten o’clock on the rainy night of December 11, 1870, the Klan stormed back to the Ferguson home, cursing Sarah and her mother for naming them publicly. They stripped forty-year-old Catherine Ferguson, threw her on the floor, and administered one hundred lashes, leaving “many ugly wounds and bruises,” as Sarah later put it. Two of the brothers, and a visitor, Eli Phillips, were also stripped and given two hundred lashes each, or so it seemed to Sarah; she lost count.
Sarah was the last to be flogged, pinned facedown and naked on muddy ground outside her house. Five men took turns giving her thirty lashes each, beating her until the branches had already snapped and frayed, and all that remained were the butt ends, tightly gripped in their fists.
