The Family Tree

by Karen Branan

  Convict lease system: Best described in Douglas A. Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (Anchor Books, 2009); Proceedings: Joint Committee of the Senate and House to Investigate the Convict Lease System of Georgia, 2 vols., Georgia Department of Archives and History, Morrow.

  “grievously wounded”: Frederick Douglass, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Dover Publications, 2003), 396.

  “rich man’s war and poor man’s fight”: David Williams, Bitterly Divided: The South’s Inner Civil War (New Press, 2010).

  “Many wealthy planters opposed Secession”: Harris County was one of the few Georgia counties to vote no at the secession convention, and the Chattahoochee Valley as a whole was a strong force against secession. But Robert Toombs, a powerful Georgia politician and a hard-drinking firebrand if ever there was one, held sway and, with his mesmerizing rhetoric and political skullduggery, pulled Georgia into the secession camp. Many modern historians claim the final vote was rigged.

  biracial political rallies in Harris County: Columbus Enquirer Sun, September 17, 1892.

  Chapter Three: The Unveiling

  Background on “Lost Cause” movement: David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Belknap Press, 2001).

  Waddell referred to as “cousin”: Letters in University of North Carolina, Wilson Library, Southern Historical Collection Number 01290, Ernest Haywood Collection of Haywood Family Papers, 1752–1967. The Haywoods were cousins of the Williams family. Waddell called on white men to rise up against black political incursions even if it meant choking “Cape Fear with carcasses” just before the Wilmington “riot” (designated a “coup” in 2006 by the 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission). He was declared mayor of the city in the wake of the riots. Chief fund-raiser for the coup was Preston Bridgers, husband of Eliza Haywood, granddaughter of author’s great-uncle Alfred Williams. See Catherine W. Bishir, “Landmarks of Power: Building a Southern Past in Raleigh and Wilmington, North Carolina, 1885–1915,” in W. Fitzhugh Brundage, ed., Where These Memories Grow (University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 161.

  “above politics”: Hamilton Journal, December 2, 1910.

  “Alfred Williams, who accompanied Charles to battle”: Harris County Journal, June 6, 1913.

  Chapter Four: New Sheriff in Town

  Information about Friendship Baptist: Louise Calhoun Barfield, History of Harris County, Georgia, 1827–1961 (Columbus Office Supply, 1961); Harris County Journal, April 17 and July 27, 1911; Friendship Baptist’s Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/pages/Friendship-Baptist-Church-of-Hamilton-GA/231198386930141, accessed August 1, 2015.

  “Dearly beloved”: Romans 12:19 (King James Version).

  “Convenient to church, near school, 2 wells, splendid water—all conveniences,” Harris County Journal advertisement, January 1911.

  Edgar Stripling: Harris County Journal, March 3, 1911; Macon Telegraph, April 5, 1911.

  Chapter Five: Norman’s Murder

  “pleasant as May”: Harris County Journal, December 8, 1911.

  “There is no excuse”: Harris County Journal, January 11, 1912.

  “no business on this wagon”: Georgene Holman, interview, Monmouth, IL, November 1999.

  Norman’s job as jail guard: Harris County Journal, March 8, 1907.

  “Quit your meanness”: Harris County Journal, July 27, 1911.

  “the routing of gamblers and rowdies”: Harris County Journal, June 9, 1911.

  “fear of the hangman’s rope”: Harris County Journal, May 10, 1907.

  “a negro named John Moore”: Columbus Ledger, January 15, 1912.

  “Sunday”: Columbus Daily Enquirer, January 16, 1912.

  “Saturday”: Columbus Daily Enquirer, January 15, 1912.

  “an existing feud”: Columbus Daily Enquirer, January 16, 1912.

  Chapter Six: Though Silent He Speaks

  “the connections”: Apr. 1880 letter from Lizzie Hadley, Lamar, AL, to Buck Hadley, Hamilton, GA.

  “orderly” and “upright” people: Columbus Daily Enquirer, March 25, 1886.

  “the whites forgot they were whites”: Interview with Horace Gordon, Columbus, GA, October 7, 1997.

  “prove it on me”: Atlanta Constitution, March 7, 1911.

  “I do not say he had no faults”: Atlanta Constitution, September 1, 1911.

  “If ever again we are threatened”: Atlanta Constitution, April 28, 1911.

  “the slave called Boy George”: Columbus Daily Enquirer, February 2, March 3, and March 14, 1861.

  “apple of discord”: Augusta Chronicle, October 23, 1879.

  Chapter Seven: Negro Desperadoes

  “there was an Indenture of Servitude”: Minutes of Harris Court of Ordinary October Term 1868, Harris County Courthouse.

  “she signed herself over”: For excellent information on this era and how women like Jane Moore were affected, see Catherine Clinton’s Half Sisters of History: Southern Women and the American Past (Duke University Press, 1994).

  Sambo Gordon assaults officer: Columbus Daily Enquirer, October 5, 1896.

  “Shaffer . . . one-man lynch mob”: Interview with Frank Moye, Columbus, Georgia, April 2, 1998.

  Information about Sog, Louis, and Milford Moore and Laney and Flynn Hargett: Inventory and Appraisement Sales, Returns of Vouchers, Estate of Edward (Sog) Moore, 1900, Harris County Courthouse; State of Georgia vs. Louis Moore, April Term of Superior Court, Harris, 1901; State of Georgia vs. Milford Moore, February Term of Superior Court, Muscogee, 1901; Governor—Convict and Fugitive Records—Applications for Clemency, 1858–1942, Moore, Milford, Muscogee, Georgia Department of Archives and History, Morrow; Macon Telegraph, December 27, 1900; Columbus Daily Enquirer, January 15 and February 20, 1901.

  Chapter Eight: Nobody’s Negroes

  “worst in the state”: Atlanta Constitution, December 8, 1889.

  “turn wind or rain”: “Grand Jury Presentments,” Harris County Journal, October 12, 1912.

  Chapter Nine: Vendettas

  “Mary David”: Macon Telegraph, December 10, 1885.

  John Cash: “White Man Shot in Negro Church,” Columbus Daily Enquirer, June 30, 1903, 2.

  “sensational shooting affray”: Macon Telegraph, June 11, 1908, 2.

  Ransom Gordon assassination: Macon Telegraph, January 16, 1890.

  Information on Edgar Stripling’s role as mob leader: H. C. Cameron letter to Governor Joseph M. Brown, J. E. Chapman affidavit, Georgia Governor’s Office, Convict and Fugitive Records, Applications for Clemency, Thomas Edgar Stripling, Harris County, Georgia Department of Archives and History, Morrow; W. Y. Atkinson, “Effects of Lynching,” American Lawyer, February 1898, discussed Stripling without naming him: “Recently a man tried on the charge of murder and convicted of shooting a citizen through the window, as he sat by his own hearthstone at night, confessed also that it was he who tied the rope around the necks of the two men who were lynched in Columbus in 1896. I condemn it and will not apologize for such lawlessness. To exterminate the practice it must be made odious and dangerous. The penalty should be the scorn of the people and the punishment of the law.”

  “substitute policeman”: City Directory, Columbus, GA, 1896.

  “I’d do it again”: Columbus Daily Enquirer, March 5, 1911.

  Sambo Gordon–Josh Caldwell shootings: Columbus Ledger, August 20, 1911.

  “I got you. I got you, Mr. Sambo.” And Sambo said back, “I got you, too, Josh”: Ibid.

  In the matter of Jule Howard: Columbus Daily Enquirer, June 11 and 13, February 24, November 28, June 14, and March 12, 1907; Bryant’s affidavit, Savannah Tribune, August 22, 1908; Harris County Journal, March 8, 1907. News accounts quoted Bryant as saying that Howard was upset that Huckaby was playing with a little “ginger colored baby” and ignored Howard’s orders to leave it alone, saying these were “his” Negroes.

  Chapter Ten: Brazen Iniquity

  “Braze
n Iniquity”: Governor W. J. Northen, in a 1907 speech to the Evangelical Ministers Association in Atlanta on miscegeny between white men and black women, asked, “When did the ministers of our city ever denounce this brazen iniquity?”

  Hutchinson obelisk: Georgene Holman, interview, Monmouth, IL, November 1999.

  Joseph Edgar Biggs: Interview with Alfonso Biggs, Columbus, Georgia, December 1995.

  “children of color”: Bureau of the Census, Fifth Census of the United States, 1830, Greene County, Georgia.

  “let our ladies alone”: Crystal N. Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Harvard University Press, 2011), 53.

  “Louisiana anti-miscegenation movement”: Columbus Daily Enquirer, September 24, 1886.

  “all on the other foot”: Tera W. Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Harvard University Press, 1998), 34.

  Chapter Eleven: Heroines

  Ida B. Wells speech: Columbus Sunday Herald, February 17, 1900.

  “nasty-minded mulatress”: W. Fitzhugh Brundage, ed., Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South (University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 305.

  Wells’s investigation of Hose lynching: David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (Henry Holt, 1993).

  “colored girls of the South”: Anna Julia Cooper, The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper: Including a Voice from the South and Other Important Essays, Papers, and Letters (Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 61.

  “I knew he was a cousin”: Brit Williams’s brother Alfred, a successful Raleigh businessman, lived close to his Haywood cousins. It was to Alfred that the six Williams brothers turned for advice as young men.

  “Without wealth”: Cooper, Voice, 97. Copies of Cooper’s book were sent to various white Haywood relatives, some of whom burned them. Interview with Betsy Haywood Foard, Raleigh, NC.

  “the painful, patient”: Cooper, Voice, 202.

  “a Haywood cousin”: Governor Charles Manly refers to Haywoods as “cousin” in letters in the Haywood Collection, University of North Carolina.

  “Alex Manly . . . a descendant”: Ray Stannard Baker, Following the Color Line: American Negro Citizenship in the Progressive Era (Harper, 1964), 160–61.

  “a Big Burly Black Brute”: Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (Random House, 2003), 125.

  “a lot of carping hypocrites”: Ibid.

  “hyenas,” “no federal aspects”: Anna J. Cooper, “The Ethics of the Negro Question,” delivered at the Friends’ General Conference, Asbury Park, NJ, September 5, 1902.

  “young colored girls” . . . their “rightful prey”: “Lynching from a Negro’s Point of View,” North American Review 178 (June 1904): 865.

  Chapter Twelve: Race Wars

  Atlanta riot: Mark Bauerlein, Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta, 1906 (Encounter Books, 2002).

  “seeking European settlers”: Efforts to replace black labor with Europeans were led by Columbusite Gunby Jordan. Columbus Daily Enquirer, August 21, 1910.

  “Mob of 2,000 gathered”: Bauerlein, Negrophobia; Crystal N. Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Harvard University Press, 2011), 99.

  “calls for . . . castration”: Bauerlein, Negrophobia, 100.

  “Scripture Justifies Lynching”: Harris County Journal, September 28, 1906, 1.

  “touched on political matters”: David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (Henry Holt, 1993). 355. An article on the same subject by Du Bois on assignment for McClure’s Magazine was, in the words of the publisher to the author, “destroyed.” Ibid. 356.

  Du Bois and George Foster Peabody: John Dittmer, Black Georgia in the Progressive Era: 1900–1920 (University of Illinois Press, 1977), 157.

  Information on Northen’s crusade: David Fort Godschalk, Veiled Visions: The 1906 Atlanta Race Riot and the Reshaping of American Race Relations (University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

  “the keeping of negro concubines by white men”: Macon Telegraph, January 28, 1908.

  “100 armed negroes”: Atlanta Constitution, June 3, 1899.

  “neat cottage”: Ray Stannard Baker, Following the Color Line: American Negro Citizenship in the Progressive Era (Harper, 1964), 165.

  “The hatred and fear of such relations”: Ibid. 168.

  Chapter Thirteen: Clutch of Circumstance

  “fluffy little baby”: Harris County Journal, August 6, 1909.

  “to my wife”: Dedication in Arthur L. Hardy, The Clutch of Circumstance (Mayhew Publishing, 1909).

  “[T]he book of the decade”: Harris County Journal, December 31, 1909.

  Chapter Fourteen: Special Court

  Judge Marcus Beck information: Obituary in Columbus Enquirer, January 22, 1943; Louise Calhoun Barfield, History of Harris County, Georgia, 1827–1961 (Columbus Office Supply, 1961), 466.

  “scalawags”: Macon Telegraph, February 6, 1909, 3.

  Rev. Ashby Jones: Columbus Daily Enquirer, October 2, 1906.

  YMCA: Columbus Daily Enquirer, July 31, 1906.

  “denounce a class of young men”: Columbus Daily Enquirer, January 13, 1907.

  “Georgia the number one lynching state”: Between 1877 and 1950, 586 people were lynched in Georgia, more than any other state. Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror. (Equal Justice Institute, 2015).

  Judge Gilbert’s belief that blacks were incapable of full citizenship: Gilbert’s unpublished manuscript: Columbus State University Archives: S. Price Gilbert Collection.

  “meet it with cold lead”: Columbus Daily Enquirer, February 6, 1909, 3.

  Shooting of Jailer Phelts: Columbus Daily Enquirer, December 13, 17, and 18, 1910; February 7 and 27, 1911.

  “a man and not a pea-hen politician for a judge”: Columbus Ledger, February 15, 1911, 5.

  “I don’t propose to be the engine”: John Dittmer, Black Georgia in the Progressive Era: 1900–1920 (University of Illinois Press, 1977), 139.

  Columbus lynching: Columbus Daily Enquirer, May 30, 1896 (Howard appeals to mob) and June 2 and 7, 1896; Atlanta Constitution, June 2, 1896, 1; Savannah Tribune, June 6, 1896; Columbus Daily Enquirer, November 13 and December 5, 1890 (Bickerstaff trial).

  Dynamite: Atlanta Constitution, June 3, 1896.

  Chapter Fifteen: The Die Is Cast

  “Negro conspiracy”: In an August 20, 2004, e-mail, Jimmy Kidd, Sambo Gordon’s great-grandson, wrote the author: “The community thought it was a planned killing so they retaliated with the hanging of many blacks in Harris county, at what was to become known as the hanging tree. Thank goodness that era is over with.”

  “Before Day Clubs”: Atlanta Constitution, September 13, 1904.

  “race war”: “Harris County Scare,” Columbus Daily Enquirer, February 20, 21, 1895.

  lynching of blind preacher: Columbus Daily Enquirer, June 22 and 25, 1909; Augusta Chronicle, June 24, 1909; Will Campbell, Forty Acres and a Goat (Peachtree, 1986).

  Jim Crutchfield’s prison letters sent to Cataula: RG21, Prison Records, National Archives and Records Administration, East Point, GA.

  “Deeper than physical fear must the blow be struck”: The Crisis, January 1912.

  Edgefield, South Carolina: Orville Vernon Burton, In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, S.C. (University of North Carolina Press, 1987); Joel Williamson, New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the New South (Free Press, 1980).

  “Georgia’s own Rebecca Felton”: Felton’s Atlanta Journal columns made inroads in white women’s consciousness about white men’s predations and use of political power to protect themselves.

  Chapter Sixteen: The Lynching

  “best catch the afternoon train”: told to the author by her father in 1953.

  Taft and state dinner: Library of Congress, Manuscripts Division, William Howard Taft Papers, Reel 125, January 1, 1910–
March 21, 1912.

  Miss Lula and Yankee torches: Lula Mobley’s memories are in Louise Calhoun Barfield, History of Harris County, Georgia, 1827–1961 (Columbus Office Supply, 1961), 468.

  “Fannie Graddick”: interview with Lester Gore, Hamilton, GA, May 30, 1996.

  “never be discouraged”: “W. D. Upshaw Speaks,” Harris County Journal, April 13, 1911. The paper added, “The problem will be solved when we come in closer touch with each other.”

  John Moore blamed Gene Harrington: “each of them putting the killing of Hadley off on the other,” Columbus Ledger, January 23, 1912, 1.

  “Pull the rope”: Author’s conversations with cousins Emily Williams, Hamilton, GA, May 30, 1996, and Mary Williams, Columbus, GA, May 18, 1996.

  Alex Copeland’s recital: Harris County Journal, March 18, 1910.

  Major W. W. Thomas: Rebecca Burns and June Dobbs Butts, Rage in the Gate City: The Story of the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot (University of Georgia Press, 2009).

  “rob the post office”: Harris County Journal, February 1, 1912.

  “like a banshee”: Interview with Horace Gordon, Columbus, GA, October 7, 1997.

  Chapter Seventeen: “So Quietly Was the Work Done”

  “A perfect quietude prevailed”: Columbus Daily Enquirer, January 24, 1912, 4.

  “not been able to get any negroes to touch them”: Columbus Ledger, January 23, 1912, 1.

  “at the hands of unknown parties”: Coroner’s report, January 23, 1912, Harris County Courthouse.

  Zeke Robinson press conference: Columbus Ledger, January 24, 1912.

  “Cut down this tree”: Interviews with Horace Gordon and Louise Teel, Columbus, GA, October 7, 1997.