Freedom's Detective

by Charles Lane

  While waiting in Washington for his initial April rendezvous with Ichabod C. Nettleship, Hayes used some downtime to visit the Baltimore, Maryland, home of George W. Carter, his old friend from Klan-fighting days in Alabama. This was the same George W. Carter whose brave infiltration of the Calhoun County Klan den had helped break up that branch of the white terrorist organization, earning both Carter and Whitley awestruck praise from a top Department of Justice official.

  More recently, though, Carter, like Hayes, had been laid off from the Secret Service. He toiled as a private detective on the railroad between Baltimore and Wheeling, West Virginia, a grim, low-paying job that involved spotting the occasional counterfeiter and breaking up three-card monte games. He resented the Secret Service’s refusal to hire him permanently, so much so that he wrote Nettleship calling him a “pot-gutted son of a bitch” for not answering his previous job-seeking letters.

  Troubled by the unethical nature of his mission in Washington, and determined to have a friendly witness available in case the safe burglary failed—and Whitley tried to make him the fall guy—Hayes laid out the basic scheme to Carter over the course of an extended drinking session in Baltimore. He had Carter shadow him when he first met Nettleship in Washington, so that there would be a witness to that, as well. Hayes made clear that the goal of the burglary was to smear an innocent party. The only key details he omitted were the name of that party and the location of the safe.

  Betraying Hayes’s confidence, Carter then tried to shop the story around Washington in April. No one in government or the press was interested in such an implausible tale, especially since it lacked crucial specifics. Not until the news of the bizarre events at Richard Harrington’s office broke did Carter put two and two together: this must be the caper that Hayes had described to him, and he was therefore in possession of information that would enable him to get revenge on the Secret Service, the “pot-gutted son of a bitch” Nettleship included.

  Carter contacted Columbus Alexander’s lawyer, who sent him to the congressional panel investigating the affair. On May 19, 1874, a week after Harrington’s appearance, and four days after Whitley and Nettleship testified, Carter went to the committee and revealed everything Hayes had told him, which contradicted the three officials’ tales in every important detail.

  Whitley still had an ace in the hole: only he knew Michael Hayes was in Toronto. He sent his loyal subordinate, Abner B. Newcomb, to tell the congressional committee that Hayes had told Newcomb the whole safe burglary was George W. Carter’s idea. This was remotely plausible, given the latter’s admitted hatred of his former employers. Meanwhile, Nettleship went to see Hayes north of the border, with a fresh supply of cash and a revised affidavit for Hayes that would adjust his previous statement to fit the new testimony the committee had heard.

  Hayes balked. He felt mistreated, and was beginning to wonder how long he would have to remain in Toronto, living off an allowance away from his wife and family.

  On the night of Saturday, June 13, 1874, Ichabod C. Nettleship heard a knock at the front door of his Newark, New Jersey, home, where he and his family were holding a wake for Nettleship’s daughter, recently dead of diphtheria.38

  When Nettleship opened the door, what he saw compounded his grief: Michael Hayes. He had decided to get out of Toronto on his own. And he was in no mood to express sympathy for his erstwhile Secret Service handler.

  “In the name of God, what brought you back?” Nettleship demanded.

  “I can’t live on air and water,” Hayes replied angrily.

  Nettleship desperately borrowed fifty dollars from the mourners and gave it to Hayes, urging him to go away and lie low in Albany, New York, at least until the congressional committee’s scheduled adjournment at the end of June.

  Indignant at Nettleship’s paltry cash offer, Hayes headed to Washington, determined to unburden himself of the truth once and for all. On June 15, 1874, a mutual friend of Hayes and George W. Carter, who was now assisting Columbus Alexander, escorted Hayes to Capitol Hill. The investigative committee’s members were as shocked to see Hayes as Nettleship had been, but they immediately put him under oath and began questioning. Hayes repudiated his previous affidavit, telling lawmakers that he signed it under duress. He confirmed George W. Carter’s damning testimony.

  Hayes added a devastating new detail: upon arriving in Washington in April, he had sent a telegram to Whitley in New York, asking for help in finding Nettleship. Whitley had responded. These messages, copies of which the committee quickly obtained from telegraph offices in Washington and New York, provided documentary proof of Whitley’s guilt.

  On June 23, 1874, the committee published all of the testimony, along with a brief report that drew attention to the incriminating discrepancy between Hayes’s account of the safe burglary and Whitley’s. The committee asked the two cabinet departments with authority over the Secret Service, Justice and Treasury, to investigate the matter further, focusing on the crucial contradiction over the telegram.

  Whitley faced potential career destruction and ouster from the detective force that he had only recently taken the liberty of renaming the “U.S. Secret Service” on expensive new official stationery. Irony of ironies, his downfall could be based on the testimony of two men—Hayes and Carter—who were instrumental in his finest moment as chief, the infiltration of the Ku Klux Klan.

  Having previously avowed that Secret Service spies could not be taken at their word, the Klan’s leading apologist in Congress, Representative James B. Beck of Kentucky, now rejoiced in their revelations. Six years after Hiram C. Whitley pinned the murder of George W. Ashburn on Beck’s friend William D. Chipley in Georgia, he thought the detective might be about to get his comeuppance.

  On the floor of the House, Beck tried to block publication of the committee’s report, on the grounds that it did not condemn the Secret Service chief and his top assistant harshly enough. Whitley and Nettleship should be in the penitentiary, he roared.39

  * * *

  At various points throughout his career Hiram C. Whitley had found himself in trouble due to exposure of his secrets. He always reacted the same way: he denied any and all charges, admitted no wrongdoing, and turned the tables on his accusers by leveling charges against them. Now, the Secret Service chief tried the same methods to brazen out the scandal newspapers dubbed “The Washington Safe Burglary Case.”

  Returning to the congressional investigative committee after Hayes’s bombshell, Whitley asserted that he had no recollection of ever reading Hayes’s telegram. He had been at a dinner party in Boston when it arrived at Bleecker Street; an aide probably signed Whitley’s name on the receipt, per Whitley’s standing instructions. It was a normal practice for a busy detective chief who could not possibly attend to all the correspondence that poured into his office each day.

  On the same day the committee published its report, June 23, 1874, Whitley wrote to one of the Republican members of the panel, Senator William B. Allison of Iowa, claiming that the telegram receipt was “part of the original plot to implicate me in the job.”40 Hayes and Carter, he wrote, were in on this purported conspiracy, whose true masterminds remained hidden. Whitley was certain, though, that its “sole purpose” was nothing less than “destroying the Secret Service force.” All he asked for now, he begged Allison, was a chance to get to the truth. “I am bound to ferret it out,” he wrote, “if permitted to do so, if it take a lifetime.”

  As his frantic tone and increasingly complex narrative implied, Whitley was caught in a very tangled web. He had himself to blame. The safe burglary was, indeed, a “funny job,” as Ichabod C. Nettleship had said. No one asked Whitley to try it. He concocted the scheme to curry favor with Orville E. Babcock, hoping to further his own bureaucratic and political interests.

  Wise spymasters take care of their former subordinates, lest they become disgruntled and vengefully peddle their skills and knowledge to s
omeone else. Proper handling of such trusted insiders was bound to be difficult for a new undercover organization like the Secret Service, with its limited resources and improvised legal status, and Whitley had not risen to that challenge. Instead, he neglected Michael Hayes and George W. Carter, who had risked their necks for him against the Ku Klux Klan. Now they were getting even. Whitley failed to learn from his experience with Abraham C. Beatty, his former protégé in New York, who had avenged his summary dismissal from the Secret Service by turning against Whitley in the Joshua D. Miner case.

  Whitley had also overestimated how much protection his friends in high places would be able to offer. The safe burglary case hit the news just as Attorney General Williams was facing accusations that his wife, Kate, had used Department of Justice funds to buy a fancy new carriage. Given that scandal, and the fact that the safe burglary implicated his subordinates—Whitley and Harrington—Williams had to recuse from the case and appointed an independent prosecutor. Meanwhile, Whitley’s allies at the Treasury Department, Secretary William A. Richardson (who replaced George S. Boutwell when Boutwell became a senator in 1873) and Solicitor Everett C. Banfield, had been forced to step down in May due to a contretemps of their own: their recruitment of a private citizen, John B. Sanborn, to collect more than $400,000 in unpaid federal taxes, of which Sanborn was allowed to keep half.

  The case of Williams’s carriage and the “Sanborn Affair” merged in the public mind with the “salary grab”—Congress’s 1873 attempt to vote itself a retroactive pay increase—the safe burglary, and other scandals, to create an impression of an out-of-control government. Certainly, that was the image newspapers affiliated with the Democrats, and with the anti-Grant faction of the Republican Party, promoted. With the 1874 elections approaching, and the economy reeling from a financial panic that began in September 1873, the Grant administration found itself on the political defensive. Voters in the Republican Party’s Northern base were losing patience with Washington politicians, and losing interest in what President Grant had done, or might still want to do, to pacify and transform the South under the banner of Reconstruction.

  A new secretary of the Treasury, Benjamin H. Bristow, took office in June 1874, vowing to expunge waste and fraud from the department. Reform was a matter of principle for Bristow, a talented Kentucky Unionist lawyer who had risen to the rank of general in the United States Army during the Civil War, supported Reconstruction and the rights of African Americans, and served as Solicitor General of the United States for two years under Attorney General Amos T. Akerman at the Department of Justice.

  It was also a matter of ambition. Bristow coveted the Republican presidential nomination in 1876; he hoped to ride the anti-corruption wave to the White House. Leading anti-Grant Republicans encouraged him to think of his new Treasury job as a stepping-stone to higher office. “If you clean out the department, thereby convincing everyone of your capacity and integrity,” Supreme Court Justice David Davis wrote Bristow, “I think you stand as good a chance...of being taken up for president as anyone I know.”41

  As solicitor general, Bristow had only minor involvement in the Department of Justice’s campaign against the Klan, and little direct knowledge of Whitley’s role. Consequently, he had no investment, personal or professional, in the Secret Service and its embattled chief. Whitley tried to ingratiate himself with Bristow, telling him how “happy” he and his detectives were at Bristow’s appointment, offering “the congratulations of your humble servant”—and pleading with the new secretary not to fire the Treasury Department official who kept the Secret Service’s books and reimbursed detectives for their expenses.42

  Bristow brushed Whitley off. Nor did Whitley’s letter asserting that he was a victim of a conspiracy faze Bristow, when Senator Allison forwarded it to him at Whitley’s request on June 24, 1874.

  Bristow was determined to carry out the institutional scrubbing of the Secret Service that neither Congress nor his predecessors at the Treasury Department ever had. He would get to the bottom of the Secret Service’s role in the safe burglary, as the congressional committee had recommended. The inquest would go beyond that, too, encompassing the division’s history, its finances, its performance—its entire rationale. Bristow said he wanted to know if the present “system” of detectives was indeed the best use of the funds Congress had given his department to fight counterfeiting and other crimes.43

  Bristow assigned the task to Bluford Wilson, whom President Grant had appointed to take Everett C. Banfield’s place as solicitor of the Treasury. Wilson was thirty-three years old, but had only been a lawyer for seven years, having begun legal study after United States Army service in the Civil War. His older brother, James H. Wilson, a well-connected Republican who had been on then-General Grant’s staff during the war, helped Bluford Wilson get appointed in 1869 as the United States Attorney for southern Illinois, then recommended him to Bristow in Washington.

  For Bristow, Wilson’s inexperience was an advantage. He could be counted on to defer to his more seasoned boss. He would be eager to establish his reputation by advancing the cause of reform; and he would be unencumbered by obligations to Washington pols. Upon accepting his new position, Wilson wrote Bristow: “I will strive to the utmost to fill it to the satisfaction of the country, the administration, and my friends.”44 He promptly set out to prove it.

  * * *

  Bluford Wilson devoted July 1874 to his probe, mindful of the need to resolve the matter well before the November midterm elections. Wilson read statute books and Department of Treasury archives, trying to understand how Whitley’s outfit had evolved. He scoured its expense reports, and froze reimbursements upon discovering that Secret Service men were billing hundreds of dollars per month in “incidentals.” Ichabod C. Nettleship alone averaged $714.90, four times his regular pay.45 Wilson wrote United States Marshals and United States Attorneys in the eight cities where the Secret Service maintained branch offices, seeking their views of its effectiveness, and asking if it could be eliminated “without detriment to the public interests.”46

  Wilson traveled to the Bleecker Street office in New York, where he installed himself at Hiram C. Whitley’s desk on July 8, 1874, and plowed through his files. Over the next four days, Whitley hovered over the solicitor of the Treasury, pledging his full cooperation, boasting about his accomplishments, and protesting his innocence in the safe burglary. The Secret Service chief escorted Wilson to Boston, to meet witnesses—Whitley’s friends—who told him that Whitley had been dining with them on the evening in April when he had supposedly signed for Michael Hayes’s telegram in New York.

  Whitley exerted all of his formidable powers of persuasion on the earnest new solicitor of the Treasury. For a moment at least, they worked.

  From New York, Wilson telegraphed his superiors in Washington, reporting his tentative view that Whitley was not guilty in the safe burglary. Wilson’s message was meant to be confidential, but Whitley promptly found out about it and leaked a version to friends in the New York press. The New York Times reported that Wilson had decided to exonerate Whitley, having been “perfectly satisfied of the chief’s freedom from all knowledge of any connection, in ever so remote a way, with the alleged burglary.”47

  Benjamin H. Bristow was annoyed, if not entirely surprised, to find out from the papers that Wilson had let himself be manipulated. “Bluford is an honest courageous man,” he wrote to his brother, James H. Wilson. However, “he has made a mistake in announcing his conclusion in the Secret Service investigation prematurely, and in conferring with some persons with whom he ought not to have conferred, but this is not a matter of surprise, since he was a comparative stranger to people whom he encountered here and in New York.”48

  Wilson’s mistake was readily corrected upon his return to Washington. Bristow put him in touch with the newly appointed special prosecutor in the safe burglary case, and with William P. Wood, Whitley’s predecessor, now working a
s a private investigator for Columbus Alexander. Still smarting over his ouster from the Secret Service in 1869, Wood hated Whitley; he had helped Joshua D. Miner dig up dirt on Whitley, and denounced him in a broadside published on January 1, 1872, as “one of the most precious scoundrels who ever went unwhipped of justice.”49

  Wood and the special prosecutor took Wilson to meet Michael Hayes on July 17, 1874; he was not hard to find, having been locked in a jail cell ever since Richard Harrington retaliated for Hayes’s testimony to the congressional committee by having him arrested for burglary.50 Hayes explained the safe burglary and showed the solicitor of the Treasury his diaries and written orders from Whitley.

  Realizing that Hayes was a solid witness, and that the Secret Service chief had duped him in New York, Wilson turned decisively against Whitley. With William P. Wood in tow, Wilson went back to New York and offered Whitley forty-eight hours to come clean. Whitley continued to deny everything, and appealed desperately over Wilson’s head to Bristow.

  “The solicitor has discovered new charges against me,” he telegraphed the secretary of the Treasury on July 20, 1874. “They are false and I can disprove them. Shall be in Washington tomorrow.”51

  Bristow paid Whitley no heed. A telegram from Bluford Wilson, warning the secretary that Whitley was “plotting” against them, had reached him first.52

  * * *

  Secretary Bristow and Solicitor Wilson believed to a moral certainty that Hiram C. Whitley had abused his power to attempt the political destruction of Columbus Alexander. The Secret Service chief had to go, they concluded.

  The question, though, was how best to effectuate his ouster. A federal grand jury was pursuing the case, guided by the special prosecutor Attorney General Williams had appointed. Whitley was almost certain to be indicted. To fire him before the grand jury acted, though, could be seen as improper interference in the criminal case, which Whitley might even exploit to escape punishment. Yet allowing him to stay in office as if all was well would be equally unacceptable.