by Bill James
Nease was abusive to Fannie and Henry, and although Nease had lived with Fannie for many years and had married her about 1902, he had fathered a son, John Gillespie, with Fannie’s daughter. Nease was a hardworking man, a nervous, intense, excitable man, and probably an intelligent man, but he lived an extremely hard life and drank a lot of hard liquor and had a temper, and he was hell on those who lived with him. Fannie would say in court that she and Nease hardly ever spoke, and that she would stay away from him as much as she could.
The telegram sent from the depot at Barber Junction to the governor’s office early that morning began with the words: “An unknown man entered the house . . .”—a supposition, but a reasonable supposition. But later that afternoon, a coroner’s jury would conclude that “the Lyerlys were murdered with axes in the hands of Nease Gillespie, his son, John, Jack Dillingham and wife and George Ervin and Henry Lee.”
They forgot to indict Booker T. Washington. Later that afternoon, Henry Mayhew, an eleven-year-old boy, was “subjected to a severe examination” (Salisbury Post). He said he had heard Nease confess to committing the murders. It was worse than that; in Henry’s stories, not only had Nease confessed to the murders, but he had also implicated Jack Dillingham and the other four accused. As is pointed out by Susan Barringer Wells in A Game Called Salisbury, this story can’t reasonably be true; there couldn’t plausibly have been four to six people in that bedroom swinging axes, or they would have killed one another. Mayhew’s story is irrational, changed numerous times in the following weeks, and was completely contradicted by every adult involved, but . . . this is the South, and it is 1906. When a terrible crime occurred, people immediately assumed that black people had done it, and some members of the press literally said and absolutely believed that Mayhew was telling the truth because he had white blood in his veins. He may have been black that morning, but when he accused his relatives of the murders, his white blood came through.
So began the struggle to avoid a lynch mob. Some of the newspapers began immediately, in the first twenty-four hours after the crime, to refer to the accused sharecroppers as murderers—not alleged murderers, not accused murderers, but murderers. The accused were moved immediately in secret to a prison in Charlotte, beyond the reach of the outraged people of Rowan County. A mob formed in front of the Rowan County jail anyway, and refused to believe that the prisoners were not there. A delegation of the would-be lynchers searched the prison, and then a second delegation, and then a third. At length the mob came to accept that they had been denied blood, and broke up.
A grand jury was scheduled for early August. Assuring state officials that local passions had cooled and that the accused could be protected, Rowan County moved the prisoners back to Salisbury on August 6. It was an insufferably hot day, still and stifling inside the courthouse, and extraordinarily tense. At 3:40 that afternoon, the grand jury returned a true bill, indicting all six of the accused. The trial was scheduled for the following day.
The accused had an attorney; according to A Game Called Salisbury, they had an extremely good attorney. Within an hour, the attorney filed for a continuance, claiming that (a) it would be impossible to get a fair hearing in the emotional cauldron of the time and place, and (b) he had been denied any opportunity to interview possible defense witnesses, who were being held by the state. Within moments, the motion for continuance was denied, and the trial was set to begin the next morning.
The attorney demanded a special venire of two hundred. The judge expressed the opinion that this was unnecessary, but, being the fair-minded jurist that he was, granted the special venire and ordered the sheriff to have two hundred potential jurors in the courthouse at ten o’clock the next morning. The court adjourned about 5:30 that afternoon.
Ms. Wells, in her book, debates whether the responsible parties were genuinely trying to prevent a lynching, or whether they were complicit in the tragedy that occurred that night. Myself, I don’t question their sincerity, merely their competence. By “responsible parties” I mean the sheriff, the jailers, the judge, the mayor, and other local officials.
In the 1880s lynching was quite common, and was widely equated with justice in the minds of many Americans. By 1906 it had acquired a bad odor and was much less common. It is my experience that people have an immense capacity for self-delusion. I think that the responsible parties, for the most part, had merely deluded themselves about their ability to manage the situation. They wanted to believe that the people of Salisbury were progressive, forward-looking citizens in step with the rest of the nation, rather than that they were backward, ignorant louts who would do the wrong thing. I don’t doubt that most of the people of Salisbury were forward-looking citizens in step with the nation; it’s the other 25 percent you need to worry about.
Anyone could have foreseen the second tragedy approaching. The newspapers wrote editorials, urging the public to stay calm and allow the system of justice to work. The sheriff issued statements to the same effect and sent telegrams reassuring the governor’s office that he would and could protect the lives of the accused. The judge spent much of the day, August 6, repeatedly lecturing the courtroom about the need to remain calm and respect the law. They all saw it coming, and they all insisted that they had things under control.
Jake Newell was the very good attorney assigned to the accused. “I reached Salisbury and saw the crowd at the courthouse and heard it talk,” Newell told a newspaper two weeks later. “I knew that trouble was brewing.” The sheriff warned him to stay in his hotel room, that it might not be safe on the streets. About eight o’clock that night, Newell went to the Rowan County jail to confer with his clients. “Already a crowd had gathered,” he said. “But there was practically no demonstration . . . The guards at this time were thoroughly rattled and totally inadequate and incompetent.” Newell informed the judge of the conditions, but the judge refused to wire the governor’s office for help. He conferred with local officials. They decided that the sheriff, the mayor, and the prosecuting attorney would address the crowd. Anticipating a lynching, nearby towns had sent reporters to the scene who were filing regular dispatches. People were gathering at newspaper offices in nearby cities, following the situation from the wires. The Charlotte Observer, reporting in a dispatch sent out at nine o’clock that night: “At this time things look blue for the negroes. Swarms of people are congregating in the streets, and all they lack is a real plucky leader. At this very minute 500 men have congregated in front of the jail, where a dozen or more deputies sit with their guns across their knees. A few keen yells would set the crowd on fire and it would storm the jail. If the deputies do their duty they may have to kill some of their fellow men.”
Salisbury had installed a railroad car system in 1905. With every railroad car that passed the jail, a few more men would join the mob. Others tied up their horses and walked in, people filtering down from the mountains and arriving on trains from nearby towns. A lone man jumped the fence surrounding the jail yard and was arrested. A man stood up, a man about forty with a strong voice. “C’mon boys,” he said. “Are we going to let our white women die and not fix the niggers that killed ’em?”
There was an exchange of gunfire, shots fired from the crowd, but the guards stood their ground. A local militia, known as the Rowan Rifles, were ordered to report for duty. The judge, the mayor, the sheriff, the solicitor (county attorney), and others repeatedly addressed the mob, imploring them to disperse.
While the main action was at the front of the jail, three rioters with a sledgehammer broke down the back door. They were taken into custody. The judge had ordered that floodlights around the jail be kept on through the night. The mob now began to break out the lights one at a time.
The man who had emerged as the leader now rose again. “Let our men out and we will leave!” he shouted. The sheriff and the crowd negotiated a deal: the sheriff would release the three men who had broken into the jail, and the leader—identified by newspapers as “the man with the Panama hat�
��—would urge the crowd to go home. (The newspapermen certainly knew who the man with the Panama hat was, but never said. Probably the Panama hat was a code that let the readers in on the secret, without forcing authorities to file charges.) He was good to his word; he urged the crowd to disperse, and they began to comply. It was about ten o’clock at night.
But, in the words of John Charles McNeill, “The dangerous men had not yet arrived.” The crowd wandered off down side streets, where they gathered and regrouped.
At this moment the Rowan Rifles, ordered onto the scene an hour earlier, reported to the jail. The Rowan Rifles either had not been issued bullets or had been ordered not to fire them, but to fire blank cartridges. They fired their blank cartridges into the air. This made the crowd even angrier. Two men in the crowd were injured by shots fired from other rioters. The mob settled down again. After ten o’clock the Charlotte Observer reported the situation under control, and the mob dispersing.
And then they weren’t. About 10:30, the leader of the Rowan Rifles ordered the militia to abandon their posts. They were being overwhelmed. At 11:00, the governor’s office ordered the state militia in Greensville, Charlotte, and Statesboro to load special trains and get to the scene. Moments later, the order was rescinded. It was too late. The mob was in control of the jail, and in control of the prisoners.
Surprisingly—and here again we get to the issue of good faith—surprisingly, the mob did not murder all of the accused. Nine black persons were being held—six accused, two juvenile dependents, and a material witness. The women held in connection with the crime, Fannie Gillespie and Della (Young) Dillingham, were roughed up a little bit and left in their cells, as were the juveniles, Henry Mayhew and Della’s baby, whom she had with her. The lynch mob arranged an impromptu “trial” for the five men still at their mercy, a trial which—more surprisingly—acquitted two of the accused. At first the leaders of the mob set these two free, and then, fearing that they would be murdered on the streets, returned them to the sheriff. Left in the control of the mob were Nease Gillespie, his fifteen-year-old son, John, and Jack Dillingham. These three were marched about a mile through the streets of Salisbury to a city park, to an old oak tree where, it is said, a good many men had been hung before.
The mob tried to force the three men to confess. They were battered with fists and wood, whipped with small tree branches, and cut with small knives. Forced to kneel at the foot of the oak and ordered to confess, all three men loudly insisted that they had nothing to do with the murders of the Lyerly family, and knew nothing about the crime. Between 11:00 and 11:30 on the sixth day of August 1906, twenty-four days after the murders of the Lyerly family, the three men were hung from the oak tree in Worth Park. Bullets from the crowd were fired into the dead and dying bodies. No one was prosecuted in connection with the lynchings.
The remaining defendants were held in custody until the following January, as were the material witnesses Fannie Gillespie and Henry Mayhew. Their trial was moved to Statesville, which was twenty-six miles to the west of Salisbury and fifteen miles west of Barber Junction. The prosecution tried to present a case against them, but Henry Mayhew, the eleven-year-old boy who had been bullied into betraying his family, was not allowed to testify, since what he had to say would have been hearsay. The prosecution quietly dropped the case in the middle of the trial. The accused were each given a small amount of money and allowed to leave the area.
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As I have stated repeatedly, most of the information in this chapter comes from A Game Called Salisbury, by Susan Barringer Wells. It is Wells’s conclusion, and mine, that there is no real evidence against the men who were murdered on August 6. In my view, there is every reason to believe that these murders were committed by The Man from the Train.
There are two anomalies in this case, if it is considered as a part of our series. The first is that three girls who were in the house at the time of the murders survived the incident. This is the only time in The Man from the Train’s career that he missed people who were in the house at the time of the murders, although there are one or two other crimes in which he fled the house with his work half-done.
The other anomaly is that the front door of the house was wide open after the murders, whereas our murderer normally locked the house up as tightly as he could, and jammed something into the doorframe. These two anomalies have a common explanation. Think about it for a minute; you can figure it out.
You got it?
He heard a train coming. There weren’t a lot of trains on the east-west line, probably two or three trains a night, maybe fewer. If he missed a train, it might be hours before there was another one.
Out in the country you can hear a train coming from miles away. As he was nearing the completion of his business in Isaac Lyerly’s bedroom, he heard the distant bleating of a train whistle. He had maybe eight minutes to catch the train, maybe ten; the train would stop briefly at the crossroads with the north-south line. Hurriedly, he dumped the bureau drawer on the victims’ bed and set fire to it, without taking the time to search the rest of the house, as he normally would have done, for more victims. He left the door open as he ran for the train.
Despite those anomalies, there is more than enough reason to conclude that this is our guy. The extreme proximity to the railroad tracks, the motiveless murder, without any warning, of a peaceful family asleep in their beds at the time they were attacked, the use of the family’s own axe, taken from their yard and dropped at the scene, the money left in the house and money left in plain view, the use of the blunt side of the axe, the moving of a lamp or lamps, the placing of a pillow over the body of one of the victims, setting the house on fire at the end of the crime or attempting to do so, breaking into the house through a window . . . it’s him. The case merges geographically with his previous crimes, with the exception of the Nova Scotia murders.
Many of the murders, like the murders of the Lyerly family, occurred not merely right next to a railroad line, but also at places where a train would have to stop or slow down, which would facilitate a nonpaying customer—a freighter tramp—jumping on or getting off. These multiple rail lines, of course, also multiplied the opportunities for The Man from the Train to hop a ride and escape before being seen in the area after the murders.
* * *
This description of Fannie, from the Charlotte Observer of July 21, 1906, is worth reprinting for its own merit, despite the racism embedded in it; this is edited for size and scope, but essentially the same as it originally appeared, and this is describing a courtroom appearance:
If the blackest old hag in darkest Africa were brought here and put side by side with Fannie Gillespie, the wife of Nease, it would require an expert student of negro faces to tell which was the native of America. I have never, in all my experience with negroes, seen Fannie Gillespie’s equal. She is black, dirty, mean and stubborn. For two inches back the hair has been clipped from her forehead, and the remaining kinks are done in thread. For several inches around her eyes the skin of her face is dark colored, as if she had applied tar to her face until it had come to be a part of her. She wore a filthy, short dress and nothing more. Her feet were naked, wrinkled and scaly.
“Fannie Gillespie,” she said, “is my name.” This is an instance where the man took the name of his wife. Nease, who had been known as Mich Graham, became a Gillespie when he married Fannie. The children in neighborhoods where Fannie has lived, fear her. They say that she is crazy and likes to run people.
She is not formidable looking, but when her foot falls it does so without making a sound or making a track. She glides swiftly, but silently. One thinks of the missing link as she approaches him.
“What is the matter with your face and head old woman?” asked a lawyer.
“Nease put pitch on me and cut my hair while I was asleep. He has been doing that for a long time. I guess he does it for it happens while I am asleep. He has whipped me many a time.” . . .
Fannie Gillespie is
a wonderful woman. She looks like a savage, but she thinks well. It was plain to one and all that she lied yesterday, but there was no way to correct her. . . . Old Fannie is cunning. She knows what to say and what not to say. She has a certain sort of nerve. Although she was coaxed here, the effect would have been the same had she been threatened. Half a savage and half a wizard, she is an interesting character. One moment, those who watched her as she fenced with Mr. Hammer, Mr. Kluttz or Mr. Linn were almost sorry for her, but the next they felt for the lawyers.
Although the author of this passage is not identified, there is no doubt that it was John Charles McNeill. Two months after the lynchings, McNeill was presented the Paterson Cup, a North Carolina literary prize; the cup was presented to him by Teddy Roosevelt, the sitting president of the United States, and was given to him for a book of poetry entitled Songs Merry and Sad. He died the following year of what was described as pernicious anemia; he was thirty-three. McNeill was known as the poet laureate of North Carolina, and the home in which he was born and died was restored and is maintained as a memorial to him. A historical marker in his hometown directs people to his burial site, and a bronze bust of him created in 1913 is in the Charlotte public library.
After being released from prison on or about January 31, 1907, Fannie moved to Statesville, where she continued to raise and care for her grandson, Henry Mayhew.
* * *
William Sydney Porter, better known as O. Henry, was a native of Greensboro, fifty miles from Salisbury. In 1906 he published his most famous story, “The Gift of the Magi.” The falsely accused woman in this story was named Della (Young) Dillingham. The name of the young woman in “The Gift of the Magi,” the young woman who sells her hair to buy a gift for her husband, is Della Dillingham Young.
