Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (21 page)

In case after case, Bryan found in favor of black plaintiffs. Most of his judgments ordered white employers to honor prior agreements, usually after black laborers produced documents detailing what they were owed “according to contract.” It is also clear that, absent court orders, many whites would do everything possible to avoid paying. When one man, Newton Harrell, was sued by a black employee listed only as John, Harrell presented a document in which the man seemed to agree to work for nothing but room, board, and clothing. Upon closer inspection, it became clear that Harrell had forged the agreement, and Bryan ruled that “the contract was a fraud.”

On days when black workers did prevail in court, they frequently suffered for the victory after dark. When one group of white planters
was forced to pay black workers, the Bureau’s judgment was followed by a night of terrorism. The whites who lost the case, Bryan said, retaliated by “breaking into the house [of one man] and shooting at the complainant in the night. . . . Another [black family was] burnt out. . . . All this in Forsyth County.”

Bryan also had the power to review and reverse civil court judgments involving freed people, and many of these cases involved the practice of legally “binding” minor children to white masters. In theory these agreements were a kind of social welfare, meant to provide shelter, food, and clothing to black children orphaned and left destitute by the war. Many former slave owners in Forsyth offered to take in such children as “apprentices” and teach them a trade, in exchange for years of labor. But in reality the apprentice system was highly corrupt, and Bryan found in case after case that such contracts were a thinly veiled form of reenslavement, with black children “bound out” to the white masters who had owned their families before emancipation, and for whom they now worked for little or no pay. The youngest “apprentice” in Forsyth was John A. Armstrong, who was not yet five years old when he was bound to M. C. Chastain until the age of twenty-one.

Historian Eric Foner has written that all over the South “ideas inherited from slavery displayed remarkable resilience” during Reconstruction, noting that “for those accustomed to the power of command, the normal give-and-take of employer and employee was difficult to accept.” Such was undoubtedly the case among the former slave owners of Forsyth, as they fought to preserve the pre-emancipation social order even long after the war. In March of 1866, for example, Hardy Strickland went to the Freedmen’s Bureau office in order to “bind” a sixteen-year-old named Thomas Strickland. After laying out the terms under which Thomas would continue to live in a slave cabin on the Strickland plantation, the document stipulated that Thomas had
to faithfully obey Hardy Strickland’s command and keep his master’s counsel:

Thomas . . . binds himself to live with [and] continue to serve . . . until he arrives at the age of twenty-one years . . . obeying the commands of the said H. W. Strickland . . . behaving himself faithfully, neither revealing his secrets nor at any time leaving or neglecting the business of the said Strickland.

Most of the children “bound out” in this way were not orphans at all but prisoners to their former owners, still enslaved long after emancipation. A black mother named Jenny complained to the Freedmen’s Bureau about John Hockenhull Sr. (the father of Dr. John Hockenhull Jr., who would dress Mae Crow’s wounds and testify against Ernest Knox and Oscar Daniel). After speaking with Jenny, Agent Bryan wrote that Hockenhull “now holds without consent her two sons . . . and refuses to let her have or see them.” Charity Ramsey reported that her three children were being held by their former owner “without consent and without compensation.” Thomas Riley put it even more bluntly when he begged the Bureau for help retrieving his “stolen child.”

After hearing and ruling on such cases for nearly a year, an exhausted and frustrated William Bryan appended a personal note to his monthly report for October 1867. At the bottom of a page filled with cases of white masters holding black children prisoner, of employers mistreating and defrauding black workers, and of vigilantes threatening to burn down “a school for colored children,” Bryan acknowledged the desperate situation of the freed people of Forsyth. It was a place where powerful whites rejected black citizenship on principle and resented the very idea of paying for black labor. “I am fully satisfied from observation,” he wrote, “that if the Freedmen’s Bureau did not exist [then] in my district colored people
would stand no chance of getting any more for their labor than when they were slaves.”

Bryan was alarmed not just at the hostile environment African Americans faced in Forsyth but by what he saw as a downward spiral of violence, made all the worse by the Bureau’s contraction in the face of opposition from southern Democrats in Congress. A year later, he wrote another letter to Bureau officials, this time warning that

affairs are in a worse condition than at any time in the last 20 mos. There appear to be . . . robbers, murderers, and house thieves at large in Cherokee and Forsyth Counties, who are a terror to good citizens both white and black. . . . Complaints are frequent of persons refusing to divide crops with freedmen who have been working on joint account. I fear things are growing worse very fast.

If Bryan sounds anxious about what would happen in Forsyth if his office closed, he seems, in hindsight, to have been sadly prophetic. For these are among the last written records of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Cumming. After that burst of activity between 1867 and 1868, when black laborers could use the power of the federal government to receive what was owed to them—and when distraught mothers could come to Major Bryan for help rescuing their “stolen children”—in January of 1868, the Cumming Freedmen’s Bureau office closed for good.

That month Cumming saw the last of Major Bryan, who was a despised figure to many whites for having used his position exactly as Lincoln had intended. “Until the freedmen are protected by Government officials,” Bryan said in one of his last letters to superiors in Atlanta, “their freedom is only a name, without its benefits.” Bryan was reassigned to Marietta as the Bureau, underfunded and
losing support in Washington, struggled to continue its work with fewer agents and fewer offices. In late 1869, the Marietta office closed as well, and by 1872 the entire federal Freedmen’s Bureau had ceased all operations, as legal authority fell back into the hands of local sheriffs all over the South.

IN 1906, THE
Gainesville News
interviewed an old white man named George Harris Bell, who reminisced about his childhood in Forsyth in the 1870s and ’80s. Bell’s recollections leave little doubt that Major Bryan was right to have worried about what would happen to black residents once he was gone. As Bell strolled around Oscarville, he told a reporter about the “Taylor boys” and how they had

terrorized [Forsyth] just after the War and in the 1870s. Woe be unto the man who gained their enmity, for he was certain to be paid a visit. It was their favorite pastime to go at night to the home of someone they disliked and shoot into the house, throw rails and rocks into the well, tear down fences and outbuildings, cut open feather beds, and sometimes carry away guns, pistols and other things they took a fancy to. Living, as we did, only a short distance from their home, often have we seen them returning on Sunday morning, tired and worn out after making a raid on Saturday night.

Bell remembered groups of white night riders expelling black people from the county long before 1912, such as the time “a number of citizens . . . whipped a Negro and treated him to a free ride upon a rail to the Chattahoochee River at Williams’ Ferry, set him across the river, and told him never to return.”

Against the odds, and without legal protection once the Bureau was disbanded, Joseph and Hannah Kellogg slowly built a prosperous
life for themselves during those first decades of freedom. By the 1890s, nearly all the advances of congressional Reconstruction had been reversed by the oppressive codes of Jim Crow, and yet the Kelloggs were busy heeding the advice Booker T. Washington and his Tuskegee Institute gave to southern blacks at the end of the nineteenth century. Intellectuals like W. E. B. Du Bois viewed the South as a wasteland for black people and saw the industrial North as the only hope of safety and equal treatment under the law. But in his famous “Atlanta Compromise” speech of 1895, Washington declared that the corn rows and tobacco fields of the South would always be home to African Americans. “One-third of the population of the South is of the Negro race,” Washington said, and

to those who underestimate the importance of preservating friendly relations with the Southern white man who is their next door neighbor, I would say: “Cast down your bucket where you are.” Cast it down, making friends in every manly way of the people of all races, by whom you are surrounded.

The road to betterment, Washington argued, was paved with hard work, savings, and thrift, and African American farmers, laborers, and tradesmen would be truly safe only when they became highly productive members of the community, deeply interconnected with white prosperity. Washington might as well have been describing Forsyth’s black Kellogg family when he wrote that

the Negro . . . should make himself, through skill, intelligence, and character, of such undeniable value to the community in which he live[s] that the community could not dispense with his presence. . . . In proportion as the Negro learn[s] to produce what other people want and must have, in the same proportion [will] he be respected.

Joseph Kellogg had inherited the family land when his father, Edmund, died in 1874, and he was exactly the kind of tireless and productive black farmer Booker T. Washington idealized. Joseph improved the family property such that, including machinery, buildings, and livestock, it had a total value of close to $600 in 1880. Records show that by 1890 Joseph had purchased an additional fifty acres, and by the 1900 census, the Kelloggs were themselves landlords—renting to other black families and using the proceeds to accumulate more and more land each year.

So when, in April of 1910, census taker Ed Johnson walked north out of Cumming, he found the white-bearded sixty-eight-year-old Joseph Kellogg, who had been born into slavery in 1842, presiding over a two-hundred-acre farm. Such a spread, stretching out over rolling hills in the shadow of Sawnee Mountain, was the envy of people all over the county, and especially the poor and propertyless white men who sometimes stopped and admired it from the road—shaking their heads and narrowing their eyes at the luck of old Joe Kellogg.

13

DRIVEN TO THE COOK STOVES

M
any whites in Forsyth spent the days after the hangings defending Bill Reid against criticism in the Atlanta papers and congratulating him on a job well done. He had presided over an execution with all the excitement of a country fair and had gone out of his way to ensure that Ernest Knox and Oscar Daniel died not behind a fifteen-foot blind but in full view of the people. Having filled the arena and sprung the trap with one swift blow of his hatchet, Reid was now one of the county’s most celebrated heroes.

Some Atlanta editors, however, railed against the sheriff for having arranged the spectacle in the first place, and against Major Catron for having allowed it to continue. “After going all the way to Cumming,” the
Constitution
said, “at an expense to the state . . . to guarantee [against] just this thing . . . the execution took place before the gaze of a multitude of about 5,000 people specially gathered for the event.” General William Obear, head of the Georgia National Guard, criticized Catron for not delaying the execution until the fence could be rebuilt. When Governor Brown got wind of what had taken place, he blasted both the military commanders and Reid himself—calling the Forsyth lawman one of Georgia’s
“jellyfish sheriffs,” too busy pandering for votes to ever stand up to a mob.

Such indignation is ironic coming from Brown, given that in only three years he would join Newt Morris’s gang of kidnappers and help to lynch Leo Frank in the woods outside Marietta. Clearly when Brown called on sheriffs like Reid to stop lynch mobs, he did not mean they should stand up to men like himself and Morris. Instead, what seems to have really offended Brown was Reid’s lack of subtlety. After all, Knox and Daniel would have died that day whether or not their hangings were witnessed by thousands of cheering whites, and whether or not Reid turned the event into a three-ring circus. At the heart of the controversy was not justice so much as decorum. The
Constitution
agreed that Reid’s primary sin was his overt “coquetting with the mob.” Such buffoonery, the editors implied, was bad for Georgia’s reputation, and bad for its national aspirations. “An official may compromise with his own conscience when he stultifies himself,” one critic concluded, but “he has no right to indict the whole state.”

EVEN MORE PROBLEMATIC
for Reid was a news story that appeared just a few days after the hangings. Forsyth was supposed to be returning to law and order after a solid month of “excitement” and getting on with the long-delayed work of the harvest. But on October 29th the
Atlanta Constitution
reported that a white man named Dabner Elliot, “a wealthy farmer of Forsyth county,” had been attacked the previous night and “today lies at the point of death with his skull crushed.”

People all over the county were disturbed by this news, not only because Elliot was a rich and well-liked planter but also because of where his unconscious body had been found, and the modus operandi of his attacker. According to the
Constitution
,

Deputy Sheriff Lummus went to the scene, 7 miles north of Cumming, this morning and is making an investigation. The assault occurred about 10 o’clock last night as Mr. Elliot was driving along a lonely section of the road in his buggy. He had been to Gainesville . . . [but] has been unable to throw any light on the affair, as he has been unconscious . . . apparently [having] been struck by a blunt instrument, the back of the skull being crushed.