by Charles Lane
By the end of June 1872, however, Whitley still had received no clear guidance from the attorney general as to how he expected the Secret Service to deal with this situation, or even how long he wanted the detectives to continue in the field. All Whitley had to go on was a brief recent conversation with a subordinate of the attorney general, who told him to leave his men in place.91
Finally, Whitley dropped Williams a stronger hint. In early July he wrote to the attorney general, reminding him of the “almost entire cessation” of violence in the South that the Secret Service helped achieve, predicting that it might continue for another two months. During that lull, his men could continue working in the South for “only a small expenditure of money,” just as Williams wanted. Consequently, Whitley wrote, he had “not in absence of further orders withdrawn the men and await[ed] your instructions.”
The problem, he noted ominously, was that the peace could not last. An election was coming up in November, and “judging from information received at this office, they”—the Klan—“may become very active during the months of September and October...requiring more extended operations to prevent election frauds and afford full protection to all classes of citizens in the exercise of the elective franchise.”
Elliptically but unmistakably, Whitley was confronting Williams with a choice: he could provide Whitley clear orders, and sufficient funding, to support detectives in the South through the election, or else Whitley would “withdraw the men”—right in the middle of the Republican campaign.
That campaign had kicked off just three weeks earlier, on June 6, 1872, with the Republican National Convention’s nomination of President Grant to run for a second term. His opponent would be the newspaper publisher Horace Greeley, a former abolitionist grown weary of Reconstruction, who was running as the standard-bearer for an odd alliance of Liberal Republicans and Democrats. The experts forecast a close race.
If Whitley’s detectives had to pull out, Klan attacks on Republicans in the South resumed, and the party’s electoral fortunes suffered, the attorney general might have to explain why he had risked letting the Secret Service mission lapse even after Whitley had advised him, in a letter (of which the wily detective undoubtedly preserved a copy), that he could maintain it at relatively modest cost.
Williams got the message. He consented to Whitley’s terms. He, too, had a price, though. For the highly partisan attorney general, it was only common sense that, as long as Whitley’s men were going to be down South, they should operate not only as law enforcement investigators but also as the eyes and ears of the Republican campaign.
The Secret Service chief agreed, telling the attorney general that he would concentrate detectives “at various points where elections are on the eve of taking place.” He sent a new directive to detectives in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi, requesting “special reports,” not on crime, but on the general political situation in these states, including the “feeling amongst, and the plans of, the opponents of the government, etc., etc., so far as you can judge from what you see and hear.”92 This contradicted his testimony to the Custom House investigation committee hearing just a few months earlier, in which he swore that he had “never received any instructions to look after any particular political clique, or anything of the kind, and I would not do it.”93
To Whitley, though, inconsistency was a small price to pay for the larger goal of keeping the Klan under Secret Service surveillance. Nor did he genuinely object to using his position for partisan Republican interests. During his dickering with Williams, Whitley was already preparing to publish excerpts from his Ku Klux Klan files as a Republican Party campaign document.
The resulting 144-page anti-Klan tract, titled The Nation’s Peril, was the sequel to Memoirs of the United States Secret Service advertised in a publisher’s note in that volume. Like Memoirs, The Nation’s Peril showed that Whitley knew how to exploit confidential information for propaganda purposes, without exposing operational secrets. The text alluded to the book’s reliance on information from “officers of the United States Secret Service,” but identified none of them. Whitley had personally redacted their names, with a pencil, when he selected atrocity reports for inclusion in the publication. The Nation’s Peril identified no author on its cover, though the first chapter was credited to “Justin Knight,” supposedly a Northerner who had witnessed Klan violence while living in South Carolina. Only those who read the legal boilerplate inside the front cover noticed that E. A. Ireland owned the copyright; and even they could not guess that this was the name of a Secret Service detective then working in Mississippi.
Though Whitley’s hand in the book’s production remained hidden, its political message could not have been clearer.94 It began by detailing the Klan’s internal rituals, oaths, and codes, simultaneously holding the organization up to ridicule, and demonstrating to its members the demoralizing fact that the Secret Service had infiltrated their ranks. Then came case studies of Klan atrocities—“thrilling stories of outrage and crime,” the text called them—calculated to arouse indignation among the voting public: Henry Lowther’s castration in Georgia; William Fletcher’s whipping in Alabama; Murchison McLean’s murder, and Sarah Ferguson’s ordeal, in North Carolina.
As a political manifesto, The Nation’s Peril had the advantage of being grounded in the truth. Indeed, its facts, about both the Klan’s internal workings and its atrocities, were not new. Some had appeared in the press, others in the Ku Klux committee’s twelve volumes of published testimony. Whitley’s book, though, offered a portable, novelistic digest, cloaked in the authority of secret government intelligence. It concluded with a paean to the Republican Party and President Grant, to whom “the people turn instinctively as the standard-bearer in the coming political contest.”95
The Nation’s Peril exemplified the Republican campaign theme of “waving the bloody shirt,” a reference to Representative Benjamin Butler’s famous 1871 speech describing the Mississippi Klan attack that left the superintendent of an African American school drenched in his own blood. Atrocity stories energized the party’s pro-Reconstruction base.
Yet the Republicans simultaneously pushed a more conciliatory theme, to counter opponents’ charges that the Klan crackdown had gone too far. Liberal Republican and Democratic papers in New York, Greeley’s home state, with thirty-five electoral votes of the one hundred eighty-four then needed to win, harped on the supposed unfairness and cruelty of incarcerating Klan “political prisoners.” The New York World depicted the convicts as victims of “hordes of detectives” sent to the South to fabricate charges against them.96 Parallels were drawn between the Bastille, or Siberia, and the Albany Penitentiary in New York’s capital, where the federal government housed Klan convicts from the South. The New York Sun said Klansmen had been “sentenced to rot to death,” and implicitly likened their journey north from South Carolina, “stowed away between decks” of a federally chartered ship, to slave ship voyages from Africa to the United States.97
These insinuations were preposterous, and the Klansmen richly deserved their prison sentences, but the Republicans felt defensive. The party’s 1872 platform boasted equally of quelling the Klan and of passing an amnesty law for former Confederates. “Congress and the President have only fulfilled an imperative duty in their measures for the suppression of violent and treasonable organizations,” the platform said. “We heartily approve the action of Congress in extending amnesty to those lately in rebellion, and rejoice in the growth of peace and fraternal feeling throughout the land.”98
“Influential Republicans” thought that additional leniency might further defuse agitation against the president’s anti-Klan policy, the Washington Daily Critic reported.99 A general pardon for Klansmen, Republican Jacob R. Davis of Washington wrote the president, would be a political “ten strike,” because it would “give the lie to assertions...that the President is opposed to the South.” Another member of the party suggest
ed pardons would drive the “final nail in the liberal coffin.”100
Such sentiments not only reflected contemporary political calculations. They also tapped a long-standing American belief that pardons could help to pacify political uprisings. In fact, the pardon had been included among the president’s constitutional powers with that very purpose in mind. Alexander Hamilton argued in The Federalist Papers that “in seasons of insurrection or rebellion, there are often critical moments, when a well-timed offer of pardon to the insurgents or rebels may restore the tranquillity of the commonwealth.”101 If you thought of the Ku Klux Klan both as a political insurrection and as a criminal conspiracy—and it was not far-fetched to do so—Hamilton’s logic could apply.
No less a “radical” Republican than Gerrit Smith came to believe certain Klan prisoners deserved clemency from the president. A wealthy abolitionist, Smith had served in Congress before the Civil War, and secretly funded John Brown’s attack on Harpers Ferry in 1859. After the war, Smith bankrolled Republican campaigns; he gave a nominating speech for Grant at the party’s June 1872 National Convention. A couple of weeks later, Smith condemned the Klan, and supported the federal campaign to stamp it out, in a speech to a Republican rally at Peterboro, New York. “Let President Grant withdraw his repressing hand for even a week,” Smith said, “and the flames of hell would again burst.”102
Shortly after the speech, however, Smith got a letter from his old friend Horace Greeley, who was now the president’s opponent in his reelection campaign. Greeley reminded him that, in 1867, the two had helped bail former Confederate President Jefferson Davis out of a Union military prison, to promote reconciliation with the South. Greeley asked Smith to investigate the plight of the Klan prisoners at Albany, in the same spirit.
After visiting the penitentiary on July 8, 1872, Smith concluded that three Klan convicts did indeed deserve clemency, due to age or illness, and wrote President Grant a letter the next day telling him so.103
Grant was not eager to comply. It was awfully soon to be pardoning Southern recalcitrants duly convicted and punished for political violence against defenseless civilians, the overwhelming majority of whom were targeted for supporting the president’s party. The latest group of Klan felons, twenty-three South Carolinians facing sentences of up to ten years, had just arrived at the Albany Penitentiary.104
Pardons might help Republicans politically in New York but hurt them in the South, as Greeley undoubtedly understood, even if Smith did not. North Carolina would hold its 1872 election for seven Congressional seats, the state legislature, and the governorship on August 1, several months earlier than the rest of the country. (North Carolina’s presidential election would take place along with the other states’ in November.) This would be the first voting in the South since the crackdown on the Klan had restored at least apparent calm and security. Leniency toward white supremacist terrorists at such a moment, Grant feared, might embolden the Klan and demoralize his Southern Republican supporters.
The president let almost two weeks elapse before answering Smith. When he finally responded on July 22, 1872, he gently explained political reality: “Any pardon now, before the North Carolina election, would be misinterpreted,” he wrote.105 He would take up the pardons later.
As soon as the voting ended in North Carolina, and it became clear that the Republicans had held their own—winning the governorship and retaking a seat in the United States House of Representatives they had lost in the violence-marred 1870 election—President Grant kept his word to Smith. He asked Attorney General Williams to dispatch a “discreet officer” to assess Klansmen at the Albany Penitentiary, and recommend which, if any, might deserve some executive clemency.106
Williams thought he knew just the man for the job.
* * *
Perched atop a green hill overlooking New York’s capital city, with fourteen-foot whitewashed brick walls and crenellated guard towers, the Albany Penitentiary resembled nothing so much as a medieval fortress. Actually, it was a modern facility, well lit and salubrious. The five hundred or so male inmates, black and white, manufactured shoes for sale in the surrounding community, to rehabilitate themselves through labor while helping finance the prison. For years, the federal government had been sending the District of Columbia’s offenders to this model institution, along with violators of federal criminal law from the various states, most recently Klansmen from the Carolinas and Alabama.
On the morning of August 7, 1872, the penitentiary’s heavy iron doors swung open, and a wiry figure with intense blue eyes and a trim brown goatee stepped briskly inside. After he and the warden exchanged pleasantries, the visitor, accompanied by an assistant, took a seat at a table in the prison’s spacious reception room.
Then Hiram C. Whitley instructed a guard to send in the first of the Ku Klux Klan conspirators scheduled to meet him.107
Penitentiary rules forbade conversation among inmates. Still, the authorities could not cut off the prison grapevine. The Klansmen had found out that Whitley was coming to see them on a mission from the attorney general. What’s more, they had learned that the Secret Service chief, the very man who had helped put them in prison, was there to help decide who among them, if anyone, could get out.
Attorney General Williams picked Whitley because of his familiarity with the Klan and the government’s operations against it in the South. A master interrogator, he could be relied on to probe the prisoners thoroughly, and to recommend leniency only for those who clearly deserved it. Whitley’s assessment “would be more impartial and just, than that of a person unaccustomed to dealing with hard cases,” the National Republican reported.108 Whitley’s “line of duty, it was thought, required him to deal justly with all classes, while he could not be easily deceived,” the New York Herald’s Washington correspondent echoed.109
Whitley was far from inclined to empty all of the penitentiary cells his men had worked so hard, and so recently, to populate. He knew too many of the details of the Klansmen’s crimes, and after meeting them face-to-face he still felt that, “on the whole they have got off pretty lightly,” as he told a reporter. A ten-year sentence for complicity in murder, he said, was “certainly not too heavy.”110 Whitley quickly ruled out pardoning one man for whom Gerrit Smith had recommended clemency due to advanced age: sixty-three-year-old Samuel G. Brown, a boss of the York County, South Carolina, Klan. Serving a five-year sentence, Brown showed no remorse to Whitley but protested his innocence and complained he did not get a fair trial. Whitley glared at him and called him a liar. “Brown himself was with the Ku Klux on several of its raids and had been justice of the peace for some years in his district,” Whitley later explained. “I could find no palliation in his case...he certainly should have known better.”
Whitley also met twenty-seven-year-old Confederate Army veteran and newspaper editor Randolph A. Shotwell from Rutherfordton, North Carolina. He was serving six years for masterminding a June 11, 1870, Klan assault on Republican state legislator James M. Justice. The federal trial of Shotwell and ten other Klansmen at Raleigh in September 1871 was the first of its kind that the Grant administration mounted under the new anti-Klan laws. Spectators, white and black, packed the state Senate chamber to see it. Shotwell scorned the racially mixed federal jury that eventually convicted him, and defiantly denounced the charges as “ridiculously false,” when given the chance to address the judge before sentencing.111
Still unrepentant in Albany, where he chafed at having to cobble shoes beside an African American inmate, Shotwell assumed the Secret Service chief’s mission of mercy was a trap, a ruse to wring intelligence from unsuspecting lower-ranking Klansmen. He scowled at Whitley and minced words with him. When Whitley asked him why he was in prison, Shotwell claimed that he and his fellow Klansmen had acted to defend themselves and their families against the horrors of “Negro rule,” in accordance with “Nature’s law of self-preservation.” The prisoner’s sarcasm, and his
lack of contrition, quickly exhausted Whitley’s patience.
“Oh, very well,” Whitley snapped, “I haven’t got time to argue. Send the next man!”
“Good morning, Mr. Whitley,” Shotwell said as he headed for the door, demonstrating his defiance—and that Whitley had failed to keep his identity a secret.
Whitley seems nevertheless to have believed the remaining three dozen prisoners he met that day did not know his identity or his mission, and that they were “frank and communicative” with him, as he later put it, despite a similarity in their stories that Whitley himself found “singular.” To a man, they professed to have joined the organization out of fear, or because they were told its purpose was benign: “to put down meanness in the country.” And now they expressed remorse, as well as anger at Klan leaders who had absconded when federal troops and marshals arrived, leaving their underlings to face arrest.
This aroused the Secret Service chief’s instinctive sympathy for humbler offenders who had become entangled in the conspiracies concocted by the socially higher-ranking. In interviews with the press after his visit, he described these prisoners as “white trash,” who had often joined the Klan out of blind deference to their local leaders. For them, in contrast to Brown or Shotwell, Whitley found “greater latitude for doubt of moral responsibility.”
