Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (20 page)

While most of these vanished long ago, one remnant was put on a kind of public display in the Forsyth County Courthouse. Well into the 1980s, it could still be found tucked between the pages of a big leather-bound volume of superior court minutes from 1912. And so when, in 1987, descendants of Forsyth’s expelled African American families finally came searching for records of the Knox and Daniel trials, they found the page they were looking for quite easily. For as long as anyone could remember, it had been marked with a dusty and disintegrating—but still recognizable—piece of old hemp rope.

ANSEL STRICKLAND HAD
already hosted one bonfire in his lower pasture, and now Major Catron feared that “if the bodies of the prisoners were left at Cumming they would be burned.” After all that had transpired over the previous month, the last thing Catron
wanted was a bunch of drunken whites dancing around the burning bodies of two black men. So he ordered his soldiers to place the corpses inside two pine boxes provided by the local undertaker, and had them loaded onto a hired wagon. Dr. Lindorme then “called Dr. Selman over long distance phone and arranged to bring [them] to Atlanta . . . at the expense of the State Anatomical Board and for their use.”

When, well after dark, a detachment from Catron’s unit turned onto Luckie Street in Atlanta, William Selman was waiting in his long white coat, outside the Baptist Tabernacle Infirmary. He ordered assistants to store the bodies in a basement morgue, in case some relative or friend appeared to claim them. But as Dr. Selman made his rounds the following day, no one came to the front door or the back, asking after the two convicted rapists. So there was no one to object when, Friday morning, they were washed and prepared for “use.” At a nod from Selman, a group of young surgical students lowered their head mirrors, lifted their scalpels, and began examining the lacerations and cracked vertebrae of two anonymous black cadavers.

12

WHEN THEY WERE SLAVES

N
ot long after the hanging, somewhere in Georgia an amateur photographer lifted a negative out of its fixing bath, held it up to the light, and peered at the only known photograph taken on the day of the executions. The photographer had scrambled to high ground, unfolded the bellows of a camera, and taken a shot looking back over the jumble of buggies lined up on Tolbert Street, as thousands of people spilled out of Ansel Strickland’s pasture and headed back toward Cumming. Two men in the foreground stare directly into the lens, with an expression common to so many lynching photographs of the Jim Crow era: somber but self-assured, earnest yet openly content.

But the most startling thing about the image is that in the bottom right corner, three young black men can be seen standing among the crowd. On a day when the overwhelming majority of Forsyth’s African American residents had already fled across the county line, these men were part of the small group of holdouts in Cumming, who still hoped they might weather the season of violence and hold on to whatever it was that had kept them in Forsyth, despite the obvious risks.

One of the men sits in the driver’s seat of a buggy, having
unhitched his mule and allowed it to graze by the roadside. The other two are caught in conversation. The man on the left wears a rumpled hat, a white shirt, and a simple coat, but the other, in the center of the group, is dressed like a man of means—with his crisp bowler, long topcoat and bow tie, and a gold watch chain looping down from the buttonhole of his vest.

With his elegant attire and air of wealth, this figure belies the stereotypical image of the 1,098 banished people of Forsyth. A great many of them were indeed poor, illiterate field hands and hired men, like Rob Edwards, Ernest Knox, and Oscar Daniel. Still, there were others who had managed—through skill, patience, luck, and decades of hard work—to not only survive in post-emancipation Forsyth but thrive there. These successful black residents, like the dapper gentleman in the photograph, were among the very last
African Americans to leave the county—not because wealth and property were any protection from the mobs but because they had more than anyone else to lose.

A crowd near the gallows where Knox and Daniel were hung, with Sawnee Mountain in the distance, October 25th, 1912

Three witnesses to the Knox and Daniel hangings, October 25th, 1912

ONE SUCH MAN
was Joseph Kellogg, the largest black property owner in the county. When emancipation finally reached Georgia, in 1865, Joseph’s parents, Edmund and Hannah, had begun building a new life, as free citizens of Forsyth. They were more fortunate than most former slaves, given that they had eight adult children, including six strong young sons, and had been staked to a small parcel of land by their former owner, a white merchant named George Kellogg, who had moved to Georgia from Hartford, Connecticut. By 1870, only five years after the South’s surrender at Appomattox, the sixty-two-year-old Edmund could report to the tax collector that his “total estate” was $125—an impressive sum for a man who had been enslaved for more than sixty years. Four years later, he owned multiple lots near Sawnee Mountain, north of Cumming, totaling eighty acres, with a reported value of $345.

Edmund’s oldest son, Joseph, had also been the legal property of a white man when he was born. But he was just twenty-three when freed, and so the early years of Joseph’s adulthood were marked not by the hopelessness of slavery but by one new milestone after another. There was the day—July 2nd, 1867—when Joseph and his younger brother Lewis stood in line at the Forsyth County Courthouse, shoulder to shoulder with white men who two years earlier might have bought and sold them like livestock. When they signed oaths of allegiance to the United States government, scratching small X’s above their names, they became for the first time in their lives “Qualified Voters.” There was also the day—July 21st, 1868—when they learned that Georgia had ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, granting in theory, if seldom in practice, “equal protection of the laws,” regardless of color or “previous conditions of slavery or involuntary servitude.” And then there was the day in 1870 when they celebrated news that the right of black men to vote had been enshrined in the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

It would take more than a century of struggle to even begin to realize the promises that federal lawmakers made to the Kelloggs during these early years of Reconstruction. But as Edmund, Joseph, and the rest of the Kelloggs harvested one successful crop after another in the 1870s, and as they reinvested their earnings in acquiring more and better land in Forsyth, they had good reason to hope that going forward the protections of law and government might actually be available to them. Looking out over their farm at the base of Sawnee Mountain, they surely believed that Forsyth would always be their home.

Filled with that hope, on a crisp fall morning in September of 1871, a twenty-nine-year-old Joseph Kellogg asked eighteen-year-old Eliza Thompson to be his wife. When she said yes, rather than “jumping the broom,” as blacks had done to consecrate marriages in the days of slavery, they walked together toward Cumming,
accompanied by a local minister named Silas Smith. As it happens, Reverend Smith was the father of Grant Smith, the man who would be horsewhipped on that same town square four decades later. But the expulsions of 1912 were still far in the future on the day of Joseph and Eliza’s wedding, and when Reverend Smith signed their marriage license and dated it September 7th, 1871, they must have all had great expectations for this new America—in which black people had the right to receive fair wages for their labor, own land, vote, and even hold elected office.

It’s true that the majority of African Americans in Forsyth still worked on the same farms where they had been enslaved, and that like black people all over the South, they were widely exploited and cheated by whites under the new contract labor system. But for the first time in their lives, people like Joseph and Eliza Kellogg had the right to protest the injustices whites committed against them, and at least the possibility of legal remedy. The face of the law in Forsyth, which had always been the local sheriff, now included the county’s own representative of the United States government, who had an office located right on the Cumming square. Over its door hung a sign that read “
BRFAL
.” The acronym stood for the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands—though everyone in town, whether in bitterness or gratitude, called it simply “the Bureau.”

ABRAHAM LINCOLN HAD
established the Freedmen’s Bureau as part of the Department of War, intending it to operate for one year after the Confederate surrender, with the express mission of helping protect the rights of people like Joseph and Eliza Kellogg as they made the difficult transition from slavery to freedom. The bill Lincoln signed into law on March 3rd, 1865—just a month before his assassination—gave the Bureau power to rule on disputes between blacks and whites “in all places where . . . local courts . . . disregard the negro’s right to justice before the laws.”

Federal officials quickly recognized that Forsyth County, Georgia, was just such a place. The Freedmen’s Bureau office at Cumming opened in March of 1867, headed by a man named Alexander Burruss Nuckolls. The thirty-seven-year-old Nuckolls, a local Baptist minister, was typical of the first group of Freedmen’s Bureau agents in Georgia, who were appointed by Brigadier General Davis Tillson. Tillson is best known as the man who reversed Sherman’s Field Order 15, which had given freed slaves a share in the vast abandoned plantations along the Georgia coast. Having reneged on the promise of “forty acres and a mule,” Tillson went on to appoint a whole class of Freedmen’s Bureau agents like Reverend Nuckolls, who were ill-suited to the job of imposing federal law on resentful local whites. These were local men with strong connections to former slaveholders and a deep personal investment in the status quo.

To make matters worse, under the original arrangements of the Freedmen’s Bureau, agents were not given government pay; they were compensated by the white landowners for whom they certified labor contracts. The system was abused all across the South, and when Tillson was replaced as commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Georgia, his successor, Colonel Caleb Sibley, realized just how corrupt the Bureau had become—and just how woefully it had failed to protect vulnerable African American communities. As Sibley put it, the “power delegated to these resident white appointees [was] shamefully abused. . . . And [t]hey occasionally inflicted cruel and unusual punishment.”

Sibley fired most of the original Bureau agents in 1867 and replaced them with northern military men, in the hope of establishing impartial legal tribunals that would give freed slaves their first taste of real justice. On April 1st, 1867, Nuckolls was relieved of command of the Cumming Freedmen’s Bureau office and replaced by Major William J. Bryan, who hailed from North Carolina, and
who owed his $1,200 annual salary—and his allegiance—not to local white property owners but to the United States government.

As a small cog in the great machine of the Bureau, Agent Bryan focused his efforts in Forsyth on disputes brought by black workers whose employers refused to honor verbal and signed labor agreements. Like former slave owners all over the South, the white planters of Forsyth were frequently ordered to appear before the Freedmen’s Bureau court for withholding crop shares and payments to black field hands, who for the first time in the history of the state had to be paid a fair wage.

Records of the cases heard by Major Bryan are peppered with the names of the same white men who feature most prominently in the lists of Forsyth slave owners in the 1850s and ’60s. Tolbert Strickland, scion of the Hardy Strickland family, which had owned more than a hundred slaves in 1860, appeared before Bryan six times in a single week in October of 1867, charged by his employees with refusing to pay wages owed and refusing to give tenants a share of crops they had spent the entire year planting, tending, and harvesting.