Atticus Finch

by Joseph Crespino

  PART I

  ORIGINS

  Chapter 1

  The View from the Square

  Do all the good you can. By all the means you can. In all the ways you can. In all the places you can. At all the times you can. To all the people you can. As long as ever you can.

  —John Wesley

  The best way to understand A. C. Lee is to read what he wrote. There is plenty to choose from—more, in fact, than his famous daughter ever published. In the hundreds of editorials that he produced over nearly eighteen years as editor of the Monroe Journal, all the quaint fare one would expect from a rural weekly is on display: reports on prize hogs or gargantuan turnips, pictures of beauty queens, respectful obituaries, and long columns of short paragraphs noting who came or went visiting which relative or friend at Christmas or Easter. Yet so, too, is coverage and original commentary on an extraordinary range of issues and concerns. Under Lee’s leadership, the Journal didn’t merely report local happenings; it interpreted the world for its readers, only a small minority of whom had even a high school education.

  A. C. Lee himself didn’t have that. Eighth grade was the highest he completed. His formal education, such as it was in a rural schoolhouse five miles outside the tiny panhandle town of Chipley, Florida, ended at age sixteen, when he passed an exam that qualified him to teach at another meager schoolhouse elsewhere in the county. Yet Lee was Lincolnesque in his reading habits and devotion to self-education. He was a thoroughgoing Anglophile, a trait that he would pass down to his daughters. A grandson would recall hearing the names of Addison and Steele, Macaulay, and Gladstone in family conversation long before he had any idea who they were. A. C. read mostly legal and political history and biography. Southern history was a particular favorite. He consumed every book ever written by Douglas Southall Freeman, the editor of the Richmond News Leader and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for his multivolume biographies of Robert E. Lee and George Washington. A. C.’s copy of W. C. Oates’s History of the 15th Alabama was so worn that his daughter Alice would be on constant lookout for reprints. A. C.’s father, Cader A. Lee, had fought with the regiment for four years, battling Chamberlain’s men on the fateful second day at Gettysburg, taking the bloody road south, stacking arms at Appomattox with what remained of the army of northern Virginia.

  Albert James Pickett’s History of Alabama was a cult classic in the Lee family. From it A. C. learned the history of the aboriginal tribes with their ancient burial mounds and fortifications, and of de Soto’s explorations. Pickett wrote about the colonial rule of the Spanish and the French, and the arrival of English settlers, who came to the area that would become Monroe County either by traveling north up the Alabama River from Mobile, or coming down the Federal Road, which the United States had established as a postal route through Creek territory. A. C. would have read of the brutal fighting between whites and Indians in 1813 and 1814 that culminated in the Treaty of Fort Jackson. Pickett wrote a dramatic account of the Battle of Burnt Corn, considered the first real battle of the Creek War, which took place just south of Monroe County. At the beginning of the war, in Pickett’s telling, “[e]verything foreboded the extermination of the Americans in Alabama, who were the most isolated and defenceless people imaginable.” In addition to reading about local history, A. C. enjoyed taking his grandchildren and out-of-town visitors to the historical markers in and around Monroe.

  In the official accounts written by white settlers and their descendants, the Creek War made Alabama safe from “Indian uprisings.” Over the ensuing decades ambitious white men from the eastern states flocked to the southwestern frontier with their families and their slaves to take part in the cotton boom. The farms in Monroe were never as large or as prosperous as those just to the north in the Black Belt counties, named for the rich, black soil. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, there were some four hundred small farms spread throughout the county. As rail spurs penetrated deeper into the Alabama backwoods later in the 1800s, a market for timber developed and sawmills sprang up in the area.

  A. C. Lee’s first real job was as a clerk at a sawmill. He learned how to keep books and made himself indispensable to a series of small businesses in rough-hewn hamlets across north Florida, south Alabama, and southwest Mississippi. It was easy to like A. C. Lee, or Coley as he was sometimes called. He had a pleasant, earnest face, a gentle disposition, and an even temper. It was at one of his bookkeeping jobs, in the village of Finchburg in Monroe County, Alabama, that he met the woman whom he would marry, Frances Finch, the daughter of the local postmaster and prominent farmer and landowner. They married in 1910 and their first child, Alice Finch Lee, was born the following year. They would add three more to their brood: Frances Louise Lee, born in 1916, Edwin Coleman Lee, born in 1920, and their youngest daughter, Nelle Harper Lee, six years the junior of her closest sibling.

  A. C. settled his family in Monroeville in 1913, when he took a job managing a small branch railroad line recently built by two lawyers by the name of Barnett and Bugg. After a year in their office, A. C. read for the Alabama bar under the two men’s tutelage, which, in that day, for a person of Lee’s background and means, was a common way to receive a legal education. He was admitted to the bar in 1915, and shortly thereafter Barnett and Bugg became Barnett, Bugg, and Lee. The firm did well enough that in 1922 Lee decided to remodel and enlarge the home that he had bought on Alabama Avenue.

  A. C. Lee as a young man.

  If he was not at home or at work, chances are A. C. was at the Methodist church, where for decades he served as the lay representative to the annual Methodist conference, a position that his oldest daughter Alice would eventually take over. Among A. C.’s earliest memories was his mother, Theodosia Windham Lee, gathering up the children for the weekly three-and-a-half-mile trip to the community church. For seven of her eight children Theodosia chose conventional names—Fannie, Jessie, Mary, Stephen, Henry, George, James—but her second youngest child she named Amasa, the son of Abigail, the nephew of King David, derived from the Hebrew word meaning “burden bearer.” Throughout his life Amasa bore many burdens of family, church, and community. Perhaps it was one reason that, as an adult, it became A. C.’s habit each Sunday to sit by himself during church, apart from his family at the front of the sanctuary, his attention given over fully to the service.

  He was a pillar of his community as well. A member of the board of directors for the county bank, he was elected to the Monroeville town council in the early 1920s, where he helped bring electrification to the town. A. C. Lee and Monroeville practically grew up together. When he settled his family there, the population was only around five hundred. The new courthouse, built in the Romanesque style with a Georgian influence, was less than a decade old, which was the case as well with the First National Bank. Before the construction of those two buildings, Monroeville had been little more than an outpost at the crossroads of the county’s only thoroughfares, which is why it had been made the county seat back in 1832. Monroeville was neither a river town—the Alabama River runs roughly eighteen miles to the west—nor a rail town—the main line of which would be laid eighteen miles to the southeast in Repton—which meant that while it was prominent locally, as the center of county business, the town would always be isolated from the wider world.

  To counter that isolation was one reason A. C. Lee got into the newspaper business. Lee learned the trade from years of reading local papers along with the metropolitan dailies that circulated in south Alabama out of Montgomery, Mobile, and Birmingham. His journalistic interests were a matter of public service, but also political calculation. He won a seat in the state legislature in 1926. For an enterprising politician looking to have a voice in local and state affairs, gaining a stake in a newspaper was a savvy move. It was a good way to cultivate a constituency, promote pet bills or projects, or weigh in on party and state politics.

  A. C. made a name for himself throughout Alabama, both as a politician and as an editor. In Montgomery, he was
well-known as one of the legislature’s most prominent fiscal conservatives. In 1932, he took the lead in opposing Governor B. M. Miller’s proposed constitutional amendment allowing for a state income tax. When it became clear that the governor had the votes he needed to pass the measure, Lee maneuvered to limit the size of the tax. His signature achievement came three years later with the passage of a bill that required counties to pay off existing debts and operate solely on a cash basis. The Anniston Star called it “one of the most attractive measures” of that year’s legislative session. There was some talk even of A. C. Lee running for governor, although it never came to pass.

  As a newspaper editor, Lee was a member of a tight fraternity. Editors in Alabama read each other’s columns and commonly debated public issues. A. C. wasn’t shy about handing out plaudits or calling out colleagues when he disagreed with them, and he could be prickly. A measure of his ambition and standing was the frequency with which he quarreled with prominent editors of Alabama’s major dailies, particularly Grover C. Hall, the Pulitzer Prize–winning editor of the Montgomery Advertiser. Hall and Lee kept a running argument in their respective newspapers in 1933 and 1934, debating Governor Miller’s income tax proposal and other matters. Hall thought Lee had not been sufficiently forthcoming about the size of the state debt that had prompted Governor Miller to pursue an income tax. Lee chastised Hall for addressing the debt only by increasing revenues rather than reducing expenses. Things got heated. Speculating on why Hall so frequently sided with the governor against the legislature, Lee wrote, “Oh yes, it was the Governor and not the Legislature who appointed the Advertiser editor to a lucrative position recently.” During another wrangle, Hall described Lee as “a smirking opportunist” who “regards all political journalism of a ‘low order’ which is not practiced in behalf of his side.” Lee could only shake his head at Hall’s “resort to the puerile practice of calling us names.”

  Prominent though he was, if Lee had personal ambitions for wider office or acclaim, he kept them well hidden. The overarching theme of both his politics and his editorship was of an unstinting propriety bordering at times on the sanctimonious. He took seriously his role as servant of the public good, both as a representative in the legislature and as agent and operator of a free press. On display year after year on the Journal’s editorial page, in Lee’s earnest, labored prose, are many of the attributes commonly associated with the Atticus Finch of Mockingbird: integrity, idealism, and seriousness of purpose, along with a bedrock commitment to the political and legal structures of government by the people, and a determination to ensure that the individuals who administered those structures lived up to the high ideals necessary to ensure their success.

  Lee loved a good political sermon. And he was not afraid to repeat himself, nor to test his readers’ patience with lengthy editorials on arcane matters, a significant number of which had to do with the intricacies of local and state finances. Harper Lee’s portrait of Atticus Finch as a state legislator—consider Jem’s explanation to Scout that Atticus “spends his time doin’ things that wouldn’t get done if nobody did ’em”—seems as true to life as anything in her book.

  A. C. Lee also loved the Democratic Party, and, more even than the party itself, its incomparable standard-bearer, Franklin Roosevelt. Lee was ambivalent about the New Deal, yet his admiration and respect for Roosevelt himself were unwavering. No matter how much he may have disagreed with certain policies or proposals, Lee would never believe that Franklin Roosevelt had anything less than the best interests of the nation at heart.

  That might not have been the case had Lee been concerned solely with domestic matters. Yet from his newspaper office on an unpaved street in his tiny south Alabama town, A. C. Lee looked out on all the world. It was the march of fascism in Europe, its ominous parallels in American politics—to A. C., none more ominous than Huey Long—and the portent of another world war that preoccupied him by the late 1930s, and reaffirmed his faith and hope in Roosevelt’s leadership. Lee knew Roosevelt to be the heir to the Wilsonian ideals of international justice and peace. He deplored the Republican isolationists who stood in the way of what he saw as the inevitable mobilization necessary to assist Great Britain and defend freedom and democracy around the globe. His editorials were ambitious and high-minded, and sometimes he produced four for a single issue. Showing up for work every day in a three-piece suit and a felt hat, a personal uniform that he adhered to years after most men in Monroeville abandoned jackets and ties (his entire life, Lee’s only concession to informality would be when he took off his suit jacket for golf or to play with his grandchildren), he wrote for the cotton farmers and sawmill workers, bank employees and traveling salesmen, shopkeepers and schoolteachers, widows and churchwomen who made up the rolls of Journal subscribers. Who could say how much of it any of them read? Yet these were the constitutionally empowered citizens of the state of Alabama and the United States of America. With their vote and through their elected officials they made real the promise of free government. The proper fulfillment of their duties required a free flow of information and an informed opinion on vital matters of the day. If they didn’t get it from the Monroe Journal, then where else were they going to get it? Given the tireless attention and care of Lee’s editorials over his many years at the paper, it’s not hard to imagine that this thought, or something similar to it, passed through his mind pretty much every single day of his working life.

  ATTICUS FINCH IS a hero because he vigorously defended a black man wrongly accused of raping a white woman. He did it because it was the right thing to do, pure and simple. The pages of the Monroe Journal, however, show that for A. C. Lee himself, the moral calculus of Jim Crow law and politics was considerably more complicated.

  Consider a scandalous interracial sex crime that occurred in Monroe County in the summer of 1930, roughly a year into Lee’s editorship of the Journal. Local judge F. W. Hare impaneled a special grand jury to deal with an incident that had outraged the local citizenry. A man named Archie Sheffield, a twenty-three-year-old common laborer, was indicted for “carnal knowledge” of a girl under twelve years of age. The judge immediately convened a special petit jury and placed Sheffield on trial. The Monroe County solicitor L. S. Biggs waged a “vigorous and unsparing” prosecution of Sheffield. The jury returned a guilty verdict that same day. No notice of appeal was given. Sentencing was imposed, again on that same day, and Sheffield was sent to the penitentiary.

  The episode looks like a commonplace example of precipitous, railroaded “justice” in a southern courtroom, and perhaps it was. Yet there was an unexpected wrinkle: Archie Sheffield was a white man, and his young victim was black.

  The conviction was front-page news in the Journal. Failing to respect the usual distinction between reportage and editorializing, the Journal reporter was quick to make clear the meaning of the event. It was proof “to the public” that “our courts do function promptly when an unusual situation demands it.” A letter to the editor signed by two local white ministers elaborated. “[T]he jury that faced the facts and the law without prejudice,” the men said, “wrote a new page—a bright page—in the history of human progress in our section—declaring the sacredness of human personality without distinction of racial heritage or of ‘the pigmentation of the epidermis.’ Under the administration of men of such courageous attitude and sincerity of purpose as these we bear with added pride the name Alabamians.”

  The historical record leaves little trace of who Archie Sheffield was and where he might have stood in the pecking order of Monroe County’s white community, although it’s unlikely that his position was very favorable. Yet even as a presumably poor white man with few influential friends, Sheffield’s sentence was only fifteen years. It is impossible to imagine a black man receiving such a sentence for the same crime against a white woman.

  Nonetheless, Archie Sheffield’s conviction showed that Monroe County courts functioned properly, or at least that was A. C. Lee’s understanding of i
t. Lee gave the Sheffield conviction front-page coverage in part because he himself had had personal experience with the improper functioning of county courts. In 1919, only a few years after he passed the bar, Lee was appointed by a local judge to defend two black men, Frank and Brown Ezell, a father and son accused of having robbed and murdered a white storeowner. Passions ran high throughout the county; a lynch mob gathered outside the Monroe County jail where the men were being held, leading the sheriff to move them to another county for safekeeping. The trial they received was a farce, a fact that Lee highlighted in his defense of the men. Lee objected to the fact that among the members of the jury was one of the victim’s own sons. Lee lost the objection and the case. The Ezells were hanged in the Monroe County jail. It was the first and last criminal case that A. C. Lee ever took.

  In Mockingbird, the adult Jean Louise notes that the hanging of Atticus Finch’s first two clients “was probably the beginning of my father’s profound distaste for the practice of criminal law.” If the same was true for A. C. Lee and the Ezell hangings, it was because Lee knew that the case had been, in effect, a legal lynching. A. C. Lee detested lynching, and the sentiment went to the core of his religious beliefs. As a devout Methodist layman, Lee would have taken his cue in such matters from prominent leaders of southern Methodism. He held none in higher regard than Warren A. Candler, the Methodist bishop and longtime president of Emory University in Atlanta. As an editorialist, Lee recommended to his readers various sermons and moral teachings of Candler’s, and when Candler died in 1941, Lee memorialized him in an editorial titled “A Truly Great Man Passes.” The bishop’s views on lynching provide a good proxy for Lee’s.