A Hanging in Nacogdoches: Murder, Race, Politics, and Polemics in Texas's Oldest Town, 1870-1916 (Clifton and Shirley Caldwell Texas Heritage Series)

A Hanging in Nacogdoches

Number Nine

clifton and shirley caldwell texas heritage series

gary b. borders

A Hanging in Nacogdoches Murder, Race, Politics, and Polemics in Texas’s Oldest Town, 1870 –1916

universit y of texas press Austin

Publication of this work was made possible in part by support from Clifton and Shirley Caldwell and a challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Copyright © 2006 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2006 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 www.utexas.edu /utpress/about /bpermission.html
The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of 䊊 ansi /niso z39.48-1992 (r1997) (Permanence of Paper). library of congress cataloging-in-publication data Borders, Gary B. A hanging in Nacogdoches : murder, race, politics, and polemics in Texas’s oldest town, 1870 –1916 / Gary B. Borders.— 1st ed. p. cm. — (Clifton and Shirley Caldwell Texas heritage series ; no. 9) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-292-70252-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 0-292-71299-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Lynching— Texas—Nacogdoches—History—20th century. 2. Buchanan, Jim, d. 1902. 3. Nacogdoches (Tex.)—Race relations— History. 4. Vendetta— Texas—Nacogdoches—History. 5. Populism— Texas—Nacogdoches—History. 6. Populism— Texas, East—History. 7. Texas, East—Race relations—History. I. Title. II. Series. HV6465.T4B67 2006 364.134 — dc22 2005024084

To Kass

THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction xi

ix

part i a murder, a manhunt, a trial, and an execution 1 chapter one Three Killed in Black Jack 3 chapter two A City with a Long Past 6 chapter three A Texas Sheriff 26 chapter four A Suspect and a Possible Motive 31 chapter five Nacogdoches in 1902 39 chapter six A Suspect Is Caught 51 chapter seven Lynchings: A Grim Fact of Life 55 chapter eight Populism and Race: An Incendiary Mix 64 chapter nine The Spradley-Haltom Feud 77 chapter ten Buchanan Confesses in Shreveport 88 chapter eleven A Desperate Journey across East Texas 97 chapter twelve Preparations Made for Buchanan’s Trial 108 chapter thirteen Buchanan Returns for Trial 112 chapter fourteen A Hanging in Nacogdoches 118 part ii aftermath

127

chapter fifteen Quick Hanging Sparks Criticism and Praise 129 chapter sixteen Wettermark, Whitecapping, and a Whipping 141 chapter seventeen Conclusion 154

Epilogue 175 Notes 179 Bibliography 199 Index 203 Photo section follows page 126

THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

Acknowledgments

the genesis of this book came in early 1999 when the staff of the Daily Sentinel in Nacogdoches, Texas, began doing research for its centennial edition. I was editor and publisher of the newspaper at the time, and as we divided up the century among the dozen or so newsroom employees, I volunteered to chronicle the first decade of the newspaper’s existence. That was when I came across the murder of the Hicks family in October 1902 and the hanging of Jim Buchanan just a week after the crime was committed. The story—a black man hanged for killing three white people in a small town on the edge of the Deep South during the Jim Crow era—stuck in my mind, and a few years later I decided to produce a narrative series for the newspaper that recounted, day by day, what happened exactly one hundred years earlier. The series provoked considerable comment in town from folks wondering why I was stirring up such painful old memories. I pointed out that a photo of the hanging was proudly displayed in the Historic Town Center downtown, so it wasn’t all that big a secret. With the encouragement of friends, I pitched the idea of expanding the series into a book to Bill Bishel at University of Texas Press, who encouraged me to do so and actually offered a modest advance—a first for me. For a solid year, I worked on this book nearly every moment that I wasn’t actually earning a living as a newspaper editor and publisher. It was a fascinating experience. There are many people who proved invaluable in providing information and encouragement, and I apologize in advance if I have left anyone out. Among those to whom I am in debt is Larry A. Woods, an East Texas researcher who kindly provided me copies of newspaper clippings on many germane subjects, already categorized and in chronological order. His work saved me dozens of hours of poring over microfilms. The li-

x

} A Hanging in Nacogdoches

brarians at the East Texas Research Center at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches were unfailingly helpful, as were those at both the Center for American History at the University of Texas and the Texas State Library in Austin. While delving into archives for a few days in Washington, D.C., I was treated with great kindness by researchers at the National Archives and the Library of Congress, who helped me find obscure material dealing with Reconstruction in Deep East Texas. Juanita Tarpley Peters, the granddaughter of Lizzie Hicks—who was the only surviving member of the family murdered in 1902 —showed up unannounced at the newspaper office a few weeks after the series concluded. She generously let me make copies of a number of photographs related to the hanging, which had never before been published, and spent some time with me relating how the story of this family tragedy had been passed down through two generations. Mrs. Peters has since passed away, but her daughter was kind enough to grant me permission to publish these photographs. Neal Murphey and his cohorts at the San Augustine History Center provided a wealth of original material concerning the Border-Wall feud. The project that Murphey spearheads involved digitizing and indexing more than 150 years of public records dating back to when Texas was under Mexican rule. It is a treasure trove of Texas history, now available at the touch of a keyboard. John Ross’s master’s thesis, written at Stephen F. Austin State University, on legendary Sheriff A. J. Spradley proved invaluable in providing the dates of articles in the Daily Sentinel of Nacogdoches. This again saved me dozens of hours of poring through microfilm. Donna Phillips, district clerk of Nacogdoches County, and Debra Gaston, county elections administrator, were both helpful in ferreting out old court and election records. Renè Guajardo agreed to scan and retouch the photographs in this book, many of which were reproduced from hazy microfilms or tattered prints. Karen Standridge helped me locate a number of the photos in the Sentinel archives and elsewhere. Finally, my thanks go to Judy Morgan, who was kind enough to read this manuscript in advance and offer advice and suggestions. The assistance of all the people named above helped make this a better book. Any errors of omission or commission that remain are my own.

Introduction

this is the story of the hanging of a black man in the South for a grisly crime that he almost certainly committed. Whether or not Jim Buchanan was guilty, his execution for the murders of three members of the same family was described many years later by the sheriff who brought him to justice as a “legal lynching.” Buchanan died in the town square of Nacogdoches, which calls itself the “Oldest Town in Texas,” just six days after the bodies of Duncan, Nerva, and Allie Hicks were found in their rural home in the hamlet of Black Jack, twentyfive miles east of Nacogdoches. By the time Buchanan was hanged in front of hundreds of people—a goodly number of whom wanted to skip the legal niceties and burn him alive—his name was a household word across the South. Newspapers breathlessly recounted the desperate measures taken by lawmen to keep Buchanan from the lynch mobs determined to kill the young man—actions taken so that he could be brought back to Nacogdoches and legally executed. This is also an account of race relations, politics, violence, and newspapering during one of the darker periods in southern history—when the promise offered by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation soon turned into bitter fruit, as blacks exchanged one form of bondage for another. The freedmen were no longer physically and legally bound to their masters. But the economic stranglehold of tenant farming and sharecropping meant that, in effect, little had changed. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the few remaining political rights of blacks vanished as well, because Jim Crow laws ruled supreme everywhere south of the MasonDixon Line. For a brief time, however, it appeared that Nacogdoches County— which had once been home to some of the luminaries of the Texas Revolution, though its shining light as a Texas star had long dimmed—would be a leader in a progressive movement that would battle not only to include blacks in the political process but also to push for economic justice for the

xii

} A Hanging in Nacogdoches

have-nots of both races. That movement in Nacogdoches County was led by an East Texas lawman who became a larger-than-life figure during his three-plus decades in politics. His bitterest enemy was the powerful local newspaper editor, and their feud became the stuff of legend. It was a violent, fascinating time in southern history. It is this writer’s hope that this modest account sheds some light on what it was like to live in Deep East Texas in and around the turn of the last century.

A Hanging in Nacogdoches

THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

part i

A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

chapter one

Three Killed in Black Jack October 11, 1902 finally, the heat of summer was gone. In Deep East Texas, summer is the longest season. From May until early October the hot air hovers, thick with humidity and mosquitoes. This year had been no exception, though in late June a freak storm had dropped fourteen inches of rain in twenty hours, causing a flood that washed out all the bridges over the Attoyac River, which divides Nacogdoches and San Augustine counties, and wreaking widespread damage in the old Spanish town of Nacogdoches, the county seat.1 By October the leaves were just starting to turn in the thick woods that ran along the rivers and creeks, although it would be November before the crescendo of color was at its peak. Eight days earlier a thunderstorm had swept through, dropping more than four inches of rain in a twelvehour period, causing more flooding, and slowing efforts to rebuild the bridges across the Attoyac. Once again, the red-dirt streets of Nacogdoches turned into an ochre slop that clung to everything. Since then, the weather had been sunny and the mercury moderate, with highs in the upper 70s and lows dropping into the 50s at night.2 It is likely that Duncan Hicks, his wife, Nerva, and their daughter, Allie, had spent the previous evening enjoying the cool air on the front porch. Before air conditioning, families tended to gather on the porch as the sun began to set, the day’s work done. Hicks, forty-eight, was a farmer, as were most folks living in Black Jack, a small community four miles west of the Attoyac and an equal distance north of Chireno, the closest town of any size.3 The Hicks family farm was no more than a few hundred yards east of the river. Duncan likely grew cotton and vegetables, maybe some tobacco—a crop the county’s boosters hoped would help fuel a cigar-making factory recently established in Nacogdoches, twenty-four miles to the west.

4

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

Black Jack in 1902 wasn’t exactly booming. A correspondent for the Daily Sentinel in Nacogdoches earlier that year had described the community as having two mercantile stores; a doctor’s office; a blacksmith and wood shop; a single church building, which looked “more like an old barn than a house of worship” and which was shared by the Baptists and the Methodists; and an “old eye sore of a school building.” Careful not to be too critical, the anonymous correspondent praised the residents of Black Jack, saying that “all they need is a little hustling up.” 4 The same correspondent complained that the condition of the “road leading out of this place towards Nacogdoches is almost impassible in wet weather.” That road was El Camino Real, the King’s Highway, hacked out of the forest in the seventeenth century all the way from Louisiana to San Antonio and from there down to Mexico. Duncan Hicks was from Mississippi, and the red-dirt roads, rolling hills, cotton fields, and thick forests of East Texas no doubt reminded him of his birthplace. Nerva, fifty-eight, was a Texas native whose father was of German descent. They had been married nearly twenty-four years and had two children, one of whom, Lizzie, was married and lived in Hooker Bend, Louisiana, just across the Sabine River (completion of Toledo Bend Reservoir in 1969 would send Hooker Bend underwater). Allie, who had turned twenty-one in July, still lived with her parents.5 Neighbors considered the Hicks family prosperous and respected. Sheriff A. J. Spradley, for two decades the chief lawman of Nacogdoches County, described them as “peaceable, quiet, unassuming citizens who attended to their own business and bothered nobody.” 6 A modern invention, the telephone, had made its appearance in the city of Nacogdoches in the 1890s. The first daily newspaper in the county, the Daily Phone, was started in 1899. Readers were encouraged to phone in news items. The paper’s name was changed a year later to the Daily Sentinel. The news on October 10, a fine autumn day, was a bit slow for editor Bill Haltom’s tastes. He published the Sentinel six afternoons a week, taking off Sunday. Haltom wrote: It is quite dull about the courthouse today. The grand jury has adjourned, the judge and all the visiting lawyers have gone home, and even the sheriff has gone off with a copy of yesterday’s Sentinel to study the definition of a Nacogdoches county independent.7

Three Killed in Black Jack

{ 5

Haltom was referring to Spradley, who had run as a third-party candidate for the past decade. This fall the sheriff was running as an independent. Haltom, a yellow-dog Democrat, and Spradley were longtime political rivals.8 It wouldn’t be long before the crusty editor, with his drooping moustache and piercing eyes, would have plenty of material to fill the pages of his modest newspaper, which usually ran just four pages a day.

out in the boondocks of black jack, news traveled mainly by word of mouth. Neighbors were accustomed to checking on one another, stopping by to pass along the latest tidbits of news or to discuss cotton prices and politics.9 And that’s likely why J. W. Jernigan, a longtime Black Jack resident, finally decided to stop by the Hicks home, two miles east of the community, on Saturday evening, October 11. He’d passed by several times earlier and not seen anyone outside— certainly unusual for a farming family on a pleasant autumn day. As the sun was about to set, the temperature dropping nicely into the 60s, Jernigan pulled into the Hicks residence. What he discovered would horrify the community and make the front pages of newspapers across the South for the next seven days. Duncan Hicks lay on his front porch, a blanket or sheet over his body, the top of his head blown off. Nerva Hicks was nearby, also dead of a shotgun blast to the head. Their daughter Allie was dead inside the house, her head beaten to a pulp. It was believed that she had been sexually assaulted. Jernigan alerted neighbors, and someone left on horseback for Nacogdoches, traveling in the dark at a breakneck gallop along that red-clay ribbon of dirt, through the forest and the cotton fields.10 Once the rider arrived in Nacogdoches with the news of the murders, Sheriff Spradley immediately set out for Black Jack in the darkness, hoping to arrive by early daylight Sunday. It was now up to him to solve what would be called the most horrific crime in the county’s history.

chapter two

A City with a Long Past

the name “nacogdoches” comes from the nacogdoche tribe of Hasinai Indians, who made their home on the present site of the city, between two creeks that run from north to south, the Banita and the Lanana. The tribe was one of eight in the Hasinai confederation of Caddoes, four of which lived in the area that became Nacogdoches County. Archaeological evidence, including a number of burial mounds, indicates there was a large Caddoan settlement in the thirteenth century near where downtown is now located, and there is evidence that Indians had settled in the area as early as the ninth century. Explorer Alonso De León apparently came through the village while on a mission in 1690 to discover how far the French had encroached on Spanish territory.1 In 1713 the French, intent on both Christianizing the Indians and establishing trade with them, sent Louis Juchereau de St. Denis, an inveterate adventurer, from Biloxi, Mississippi, through Louisiana to East Texas, with a load of merchandise, about two dozen white men, and “as many Indians as necessary.” 2 Ostensibly, his mission was to find a Franciscan friar named Francisco Hidalgo, who had turned to France after Spain had spurned his efforts to establish missions deep in East Texas.3 St. Denis followed one narrow trail after another—trails already blazed by Indians and animals—through Nacogdoches and all the way to the Rio Grande on what later became known as the Camino Real or King’s Highway (also known as the Old San Antonio Road). The trail that St. Denis followed, created in part by Indians and animals, had been expanded by three previous expeditions: Alonso De León in 1690, Domingo Terán de los Ríos in 1691, and Gregorio de Salinas Varona in 1693 had built on earlier attempts to establish missions in East Texas, traveling from Monclova, Mexico (the first colonial capital of Texas). As one historian noted, it is more accurate to consider the Camino Real as a “network of trails.” 4 As he traveled southwest from Nacogdoches, St. Denis visited a number of the abandoned missions that had been established by Father Damian Massanet in the late seventeenth century.5

A City with a Long Past

{ 7

After crossing the Sabine River, St. Denis and his party trekked for more than three weeks before reaching the first Tejas village, where some modest trading took place. But St. Denis vowed to push on, justifying his incursion into Spanish territory by the quest for Father Hidalgo and his desire to tell authorities that the Tejas Indians wanted the Spanish missionaries to return.6 St. Denis and his party arrived at the presidio of San Juan Bautista del Río Grande, near present-day Eagle Pass, in 1714, causing some consternation among government officials that a party of Frenchmen had traveled so deeply into New Spain. The commandant, Diego Ramón, concluded that St. Denis had violated the viceroy’s prohibition against foreign traders or merchandise entering the colony. Ramón put St. Denis under “arrest” in his own home and wrote the viceroy for instructions. While in such commodious custody, St. Denis fell in love with and received a promise of marriage from Manuela Sánchez, Ramón’s beautiful granddaughter.7 Ramón finally sent St. Denis under guard to Mexico City, where he again used his considerable powers of charm, this time on the viceroy, who not only freed St. Denis, but also appointed him commissary officer and guide for a new expedition into Texas. Thus, besides finding a new love, St. Denis found a new nation. He began working for the Spanish. As one writer put it, “St. Denis played an active part in establishing Spanish presence in East Texas, and his skill in Indian relations and willing cooperation with the padres made a favorable and lasting impression on them.” 8 St. Denis returned to East Texas three years later with Domingo Ramón, a son of the commandant of San Juan Bautista, under orders to counteract attempts by the French to encroach into Texas from Louisiana. He eventually helped reestablish six missions along the Camino Real, including one at Nacogdoches, Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de los Nacogdoches.9 That mission operated more or less continuously until 1772, when the Spanish decided to abandon all the East Texas missions and evict the settlers living near them. Few Indians were being converted, and resources were needed to protect settlements in and around San Antonio from attacks by Apaches and Comanches. In addition, France had ceded Louisiana to Spain in 1763 after the French and Indian War, in hopes of keeping that vast territory out of the hands of the British. Thus, Spanish fear of French encroachment into East Texas ceased.10 In 1756 King Ferdinand VI of Spain ordered the Marqués de Rubi, a Spanish field marshal, to inspect the interior missions—a daunting task

8

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

that he procrastinated against undertaking for more than ten years. By then Ferdinand VI was dead, and his half brother, who had assumed the throne, once again pushed for the inspections. The Marqués de Rubí finally reached the Nacogdoches mission in 1767. He wasn’t impressed by what he found: a single missionary and no converted Indians, nor any immediate prospects. There were apparently a few settlers, but hardly enough to justify using any military resources to protect the territory. The Indians’ lack of enthusiasm for Catholic conversion and a chance to save 44,000 pesos a year prompted Rubí to recommend the missions be closed, and that colonization in the area between San Antonio and Louisiana end. Spain was simply stretched too thin, especially since the more substantial settlements around Bexar faced increasingly hostile Indian tribes.11 The governor for the region was sent to Natchitoches, Louisiana, the mission farthest to the east, to order the expatriation of the settlers to San Antonio and the closing of the missions—an order that was highly unpopular. Many of those being repatriated dropped out as the exodus headed west. About two dozen settlers stopped at Gil Ibarvo’s ranch in El Lobanillo, just west of the Sabine River, and still more stopped in Nacogdoches. Though most of the settlers did leave East Texas under Spanish orders, a number of them remained behind, pleading illness or pressing matters, or else simply vanishing into the woods for a time.12 Ibarvo, who likely was born near the Natchitoches mission of Los Adaes in 1729, had no intention of giving up his vast holdings in Deep East Texas and Louisiana. Besides, he apparently had established a lucrative contraband business by smuggling livestock out of Texas and illegal goods in from the French. He was once thrown in jail for several months by a previous governor for selling to the French horses stolen by the Indians from the Spanish.13 He became the spokesman for the displaced settlers in their attempt to get the Spanish government to change its mind, and he went to Mexico with fellow settler Gil Flores to speak to the viceroy. Ibarvo received permission to go to Mexico from the governor of San Antonio, who also did not agree with the king’s order to vacate East Texas. Doubtless that decision played a role in the viceroy rather surprisingly—and quickly— reversing the king’s order. Some rather complicated machinations, counterorders, and vague instructions ensued, but it’s sufficient here to say that the settlers, at least those who wanted to, returned to East Texas, nesting at first near the Trinity River in Madison County. From there, new outposts were es-

A City with a Long Past

{ 9

tablished, and old ones resurrected. But the Madison County post was subject to hostile Indian attacks, so in April 1779, Ibarvo, by now the settlers’ unquestioned leader, moved his charges eastward eighty miles or so into the old Nacogdoches mission site, picking up scattered stragglers and loners along the way.14 Ibarvo, whom the Spanish finally realized had a talent for forming alliances with the various Indian tribes in the area, was given the lofty title of Lieutenant Governor of the Pueblo of Nacogdoches and promised an annual salary of 500 pesos a year. In a short time, as one writer put it, this growing and viable community immediately supplanted the historic role of Los Adaes, even though the townspeople were forced to defend themselves until the arrival of Spanish troops in 1795. In future years when Nacogdoches would serve as a counterweight against AngloAmericans, its influence would rival even the importance of Béxar.15

The city of Nacogdoches has been occupied continuously since Ibarvo and his followers arrived in 1779.

also in 1779, ibarvo built a stone house that the spanish called La Casa Piedra, the Stone House. The two-story building was built of sun-dried adobe blocks that measured ten by fourteen inches; walnut was used for the window and door casings. It was a goodsized building, seventy feet by twenty-three feet. Though never an official government building, the Stone House was treated as such, and served a variety of quasi-official purposes: as a billet for soldiers, as the setting for negotiating various treaties and agreements, and even as the site where the first Texas newspaper, the Gaceta de Tejas, was prepared for publication in 1813 (though it was actually printed in Natchitoches, Louisiana). Eventually the Stone House became known as the Old Stone Fort, though it never served a formal military purpose. In the Republic of Texas it served as the first official courthouse in East Texas. In the late 1830s it was turned into a combination saloon and store, which it remained until 1902, when it was dismantled for being an eyesore.16 nacogdoches soon became a valuable outpost for trade, first with the French, then, after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, with the Americans. Mexico gained its independence from Spain in 1821, and settlers began to filter into Texas from the United States. As those set-

10

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

tlers became more and more restive under Mexican rule— chafing under the government’s increasing heavy-handedness—Nacogdoches evolved into a hotbed of political activity. Hayden Edwards led the ill-considered Fredonia Rebellion in 1825, which was put down by a combination of Mexican forces and settlers from Stephen F. Austin’s colony. That act of insurrection prompted the Mexican government to establish a military garrison at Nacogdoches. Seven years later, in 1832, those troops were driven out in the battle of Nacogdoches, after the highly unpopular garrison commander, Colonel José de las Piedras, ordered all citizens to relinquish their weapons. Instead, the settlers called on allies in neighboring counties to band together and resist Piedras. Several companies were formed, and the battle was engaged. Fighting continued from house to house until Piedras and his troops were forced to hole up in his own house at nightfall. By the next morning, the battle of Nacogdoches was over. Piedras sneaked out of town with what was left of his troops, leaving behind thirty-three dead and eighteen wounded, while the insurgents had only three casualties.17 As a result of Piedras’ ill-considered attempt to disarm the settlers, Mexico didn’t have a single soldier east of San Antonio. That meant East Texas would be the focal point of the move toward Texas independence because the rebels could conspire there in the Piney Woods, unimpeded by hostile military forces. The indomitable Sam Houston practiced law in Nacogdoches for a time, and unsuccessfully courted Anna Raguet, the beautiful daughter of Henry Raguet, one of the town’s leading businessmen. Thomas J. Rusk and three other signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence lived in Nacogdoches. Rusk would fight in the Battle of San Jacinto and would serve as Houston’s secretary of war in the Texas Republic. In the 1830s and 1840s, virtually all those slipping across the Sabine River into Texas— whether they were fleeing creditors, escaping from unhappy marriages, or just looking for a fresh start—passed through Nacogdoches.

nacogdoches count y was one of the three largest counties when Texas was an independent republic. But soon after Texas was annexed by the United States in 1845, the Texas Legislature voted to carve several counties out of Nacogdoches County, reducing it to its present modest size of 900 square miles. Nacogdoches University was chartered in 1845, and a fine brick structure to house it was built in 1858 on what became known as Washington

A City with a Long Past

{ 11

Square, a few blocks north of downtown. That structure is still standing, known now as the Old University Building. Almost everyone lived in the country and farmed for a living. In 1847, a state census showed the county with a population of just more than 4,000, including around 1,000 slaves, who worked mainly in the cotton fields or in raising livestock. The city of Nacogdoches, which had first been incorporated in 1835 and reincorporated by the state in 1848, had only 400 residents, around a quarter of whom were slaves.18 As the Civil War loomed, the county’s fortunes began to ebb. Rivers in Deep East Texas were shallow and difficult to navigate, so exporting agricultural products, such as cotton or timber, was extremely cumbersome. The town’s claim as one of the two leading stopping points into Texas from the United States (the other town was San Augustine, thirty-five miles east) was no longer true, because settlers migrated into Texas farther north, through Arkansas— or from the south, by ship, to Galveston and overland from there. The state capital had been moved from Houston to Austin, more than doubling the county’s distance from the seat of power. County roads were invariably pitiful, thanks largely to an average rainfall of more than forty-five inches. Not a single mile of railroad track came anywhere near Nacogdoches. In 1861, when the Civil War broke out, nearly all the measly 468 miles of track operated by eleven Texas railroad companies were in the Houston area—100 miles south—and ran from seaports or river ports into the city. And much of that modest rail service ceased operation during the war.19 Flat-bottomed steamboats began traveling in 1844 up and down the Angelina River, which borders southern Nacogdoches County, twelve miles south of town. The boats, because of their low draft, could haul goods into Deep East Texas and take cotton out, down to Sabine Pass on the Gulf Coast. The efforts of Robert S. Patton to raise money to dredge the Angelina proved successful, and the community of Pattonia was born. By 1844 the Thomas J. Rusk, a flatboat, was regularly hauling cotton to the coast and bringing back commodities, at least when the river was up.20 By 1857 Patton had a steamboat, the Angelina, that could haul up to 400 bales of cotton. But keeping the river clear of debris and silt proved difficult, and transportation was unreliable at best. During times of drought, the river was too low to navigate, and cotton piled up in Nacogdoches warehouses. Cotton was the main money crop in Nacogdoches, and if farmers couldn’t

12

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

transport it to market, they couldn’t get cash to repay their debts or to buy seed and the other items that couldn’t be produced locally. The marked decline in the fortunes of Nacogdoches on the eve of the Civil War has been summarized thus: While older than its western neighbors, it had not by 1860 experienced the same prosperity. . . . The lack of easily navigable rivers meant that the lands of East Texas were denied ready access to markets, and consequently were less profitable.21

As it was throughout the South, the war proved to be an economic disaster for the county. Several hundred men left to fight for the Confederacy, though no battles were fought in East Texas. Nacogdoches residents strongly supported the war and voted overwhelmingly for secession. The proximity of East Texas to the fighting in Louisiana and Arkansas resulted in an influx of refugees, both black and white, who strained the limited resources of Deep East Texas and made it even harder to get commodities such as cloth, coffee, and shoes.22 Paper was especially difficult to procure, and it appears that the long tradition of newspapering in Nacogdoches, begun in 1813 with the Gaceta de Tejas, went on hiatus during the war—at least, there are no extant copies or references elsewhere to Nacogdoches newspapers during the period 1860 –1865. Although Texas saw few battles, and its residents were spared the hardships of war suffered by civilians in the Deep South, the state suffered nonetheless. As one writer put it, “For most Texans . . . the war was damaging. It diminished the money available in a society that had never had much liquid capital.” 23

if life in deep east texas was tough during the war, it became worse during Reconstruction. Occupied by Union troops, the state was under military control from June 1865 until 1869. On June 2, 1865, the Confederate general Edmund Kirby Smith had signed the surrender of the trans-Mississippi department of the Confederacy, which included Texas, on a steamship in Galveston harbor. The Union general Gordon Granger then arrived in Galveston, and on June 19, 1865, delivered the news that Abraham Lincoln, the late president, had issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing all slaves in the South, two and a half years earlier. Former slaves living in East Texas were largely at a loss as to what to do. Many migrated to urban areas, primarily Houston, the closest big

A City with a Long Past

{ 13

city; there they faced an antagonistic white class who might hire them, but for subsistence wages at best. Others left the rural areas not only to seek work but also to attempt to reunite families split apart by slavery. Those who stayed often faced open hostility from former masters angry at losing their labor and from other whites determined to maintain their status as the superior class. As James Smallwood, one of the major scholars on blacks in Texans during Reconstruction, put it: Whites feared that freedom for blacks implied equality of the races, an idea that most refused to accept. Many believed the Negro race so inferior that amalgamation represented the only way to uplift it; thus arguments against black equality often focused on the question of racial mixing. Whites feared that granting the Negroes political and legal rights ultimately would lead to social equality, which in turn would lead to amalgamation; hence many Anglos opposed giving any rights to Negroes.24

Whites, in East Texas and elsewhere, didn’t simply voice their opposition. Blacks were regularly attacked in what Smallwood called a “onesided guerilla war.” 25 Many whites were hostile to the occupying forces of Reconstruction and took it out on the freedmen and freedwomen by attacking them for all manner of ostensible reasons, from not removing one’s hat quickly enough to looking at a white woman. In virtually all cases, the real reason was an attempt to continue white domination over the newly freed slaves. Thus, the freedmen of East Texas, like those elsewhere, had three choices: negotiate a wage-labor agreement with their former owners, move somewhere else and look for work, or do nothing and rely on the federal government to provide. All three choices, in large part, still meant being socially, politically, and economically under the thumbs of whites— who in turn chafed at the blue-uniformed troops stationed in their towns and cities.

james harper starr was a nacogdoches physician who became heavily involved in land dealing in Deep East Texas. He served as secretary of the treasury when Texas was a republic, was assistant postmaster general for the Confederacy, helped plan the design for the city of Austin, and, as did so many, lost his fortune during the Civil War.26 Starr, after the war, continued to speculate in land and often was forced to placate people who were unhappy because they had lost money by in-

14

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

vesting in his land purchases. In 1870 Starr relocated ninety miles north to Marshall because “communication with the outside world is less difficult.” From there he replied to the importuning of Mrs. James F. Thorn, then living in New York City but formerly of Nacogdoches. She was upset that her land purchases were proving to be at best worth a fraction of their original cost and were likely worthless. Starr replied, rather defensively, that: We were in a whirlwind of anarchy at and before the conclusion of the war in which personal property was insecure, and too often lost. Confederate money was taken by all alike, or nearly so. We were fighting for our homes and the right of self government and in such a contest the credit of the government issues could not be repudiated.27

Starr claimed he lost $20,000 —“the best part of my lifetime earnings”—because he accepted Confederate money for land he sold. He chided Mrs. Thorn, far removed from the depredations of Reconstruction, writing, “I hope you do not allow the superior wealth and affluence and fashion and display of New York to disturb your repose by inducing a craving for similar means of show and extravagant indulgence.” 28 Unsurprisingly, Starr was contemptuous of the federal occupation of Nacogdoches by troops that had been considered the enemy just a few months earlier. As his biographer recalls: During the period that Federal troops were stationed at Nacogdoches, Governor J. W. Throckmorton requested that Starr receive into his social circle Captain George A. Ebbets of the United States Army of Occupation. The officer bore a letter of introduction from the Texas governor. Starr wrote that he could scarcely muster any cordiality toward the man: “Well, my part of the ‘social’ matter will be quite limited. Respectful politeness towards the introduced and his party of distinguished visitors seems proper enough. They are here in the discharge of duties incumbent upon them as officers of the U.S. Army, and from no voluntary election of their own; and for aught we know are very worthy individuals. But they come as instruments of oppression.” Similarly, Brigadier General Hayden, commander of the Nacogdoches detachment of 150 officers and men, presented a note of introduction to Starr, this time from the latter’s son-in-law, Emory Clapp. Starr kept a watchful eye on the doings of the soldiers, who camped on the creek on the western edge of town. He could not be indifferent

A City with a Long Past

{ 15

to the sound of their morning and evening drums or to the sight of the white tents: the “buttons & gold lace, Qr. Masters’ wagons, drums & bugles (etc.) reminded that we are in the Glorious Union,” he remarked. He objected to the Union soldiers, which he nicknamed “Blue folks,” for their habit of appearing constantly on Nacogdoches streets. Occupation forces and local residents, he feared, would mix no better than oil and water.29

A branch of the Freedmen’s Bureau was established in Nacogdoches County, as elsewhere throughout the South. Its goal was to help both blacks and whites displaced by the Civil War, to establish schools for blacks, and to attempt to integrate former slaves into society, both as paid workers, primarily in agricultural occupations, and as citizens with the same rights as whites, including the right to vote. Freedmen’s Bureau agents spent a great deal of time helping freedmen find missing kin.30 The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands became a reality on March 3, 1865, by an act of Congress, though it would be September before the Freedmen’s Bureau, as it came to be known, came to Texas. The bureau was an adjunct of the military and under the auspices of the War Department. As a result, many of its agents were former Union soldiers.31 From the beginning, the bureau was the target of unceasing criticism, both from whites hostile to its stated intention to help assimilate the freedmen into society, with all the rights of white citizens, and from blacks unhappy with what they perceived as an exceedingly slow redress of grievances. As one writer points out, Texas posed a unique challenge for the bureau. Since the state had not been subjected to the ravages of a war largely fought elsewhere, “Texans carried into the post–Civil War era the idea that their state had never been subdued.” 32 Indeed, the most difficult problem facing the Texas Bureau was the rising tide of violence directed against former slaves—a situation that would confront the assistant commissioners until the Bureau was discontinued. The constant abuse of blacks, in whatever form, simply could not be controlled or stopped by the Bureau.33

james harper starr, his sympathies never in doubt, wrote that “a branch of the Freedmen’s Bureau having been established

16

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

there, suffrage requirements became so stringent that by the Fourth of July, 1867, the only voters or jurors were Negroes.” 34 Starr’s comment that only blacks could vote almost certainly was an exaggeration. The more pressing and more immediate effect of Reconstruction, at least in Nacogdoches, was a shortage of labor and cash. Starr complained that former slaves were congregating in the homes and shanties about the villages and towns doing nothing but begging & stealing, sunning themselves like alligators along the mud banks. They think freedom means freedom from labor, and are generally thus taught by the philanthropic and pious agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau.” 35

Nacogdoches County was not considered one of the “Black Belt” counties in which blacks constituted a majority. In those counties, whites feared that blacks would soon control the political and economic system if drastic—and often violent—measures weren’t taken. There does not appear to have been any widespread, organized resistance on the parts of whites in Nacogdoches County to emancipation. But as Starr’s comments indicate, whites there had no intention of doing little more than outlasting the occupation forces and the Freedmen’s Bureau. As Smallwood put it: “If a majority of whites at first appeared conciliatory, if newspapers advocated moderation, they did so only because they wanted to remove the necessity of a military occupation of the state.” 36 For a brief time, freed blacks in Texas held on to the hope that the federal government would redistribute land, perhaps by Christmas of 1865. But President Andrew Johnson dashed those hopes when his Reconstruction policy restored all their property (with the exception of slaves) to ex-Confederates. There was some acreage available to freedmen in other Southern states, both from land that had been abandoned before or during the war and was not reclaimed, and through homesteading programs. But the federal government had not confiscated any land in Texas, nor did it own any there.37 That meant, in East Texas in particular, there would be little land for sale to, or for homesteading by, the few blacks who had any means of purchasing it. Johnson’s decision helped seal the future of most blacks in postwar Deep East Texas, which wouldn’t be terribly different from what their life had been like under slavery. Blacks may have gained some control over their personal lives after emancipation but, for most, the economic hardships suffered under slavery continued unabated.

A City with a Long Past

{ 17

Instead of slavery, now it was sharecropping, an arrangement in which workers received a portion of the crops they raised—and a shanty in which to live—in exchange for their labor. In reality, the system was little different from slavery: blacks endured grinding poverty and wielded little or no political power.38 As one historian of Reconstruction pointed out: In some areas of East Texas which the army of occupation did not reach, slaveholders refused to free their chattels and continued to work them as before. Those whom masters released found that freedom represented no panacea. Turned out with little but the clothes they wore, the majority of the black population who remained in rural areas worked in agriculture as they had before the war. Most became sharecroppers who often faced exploitation by white landowners, whose bookkeeping kept many Negroes in virtual peonage.39

Once a Freedmen’s Bureau was established in Nacogdoches, probably in early 1867 ( judging from correspondence preserved in the National Archives), neither freed slaves nor former slave owners were shy about complaining about “outrages,” real or perceived, committed by the other race. The “Register of Complaints, Murders and Outrages,” compiled by the two subassistant commissioners of the Freedmen’s Bureau who served in Nacogdoches from October 1867 through December 1868, is a thirty-page ledger that lists, line by line, more than 200 complaints. The vast majority of the complaints were made by blacks against whites, for everything from nonpayment for services rendered to assault, and even murder.40 Very few cases ended with any type of judgment, fine, or other resolution. Usually the case was dismissed because the defendant—invariably a white man— didn’t show up, or on occasion because the complainant, almost always a freedman or freedwoman, didn’t appear. Here are a few samplings from the bureau’s ledger for Nacogdoches County: • A freedman named Scot complained that J. T. Garrison, who was white, sold a horse that belonged to the former slave. Garrison was fined $50. There is no record that he paid the fine. • Another freedman named Mansfield claimed a white farmer named Joe Atkins owed him money for crops, but the case was dismissed. • Louis Johnson claimed that Charles Thomas, a white man, illegally kept bales of cotton that he had sharecropped, but Thomas didn’t appear to

18

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

answer the charge, and the freedman was left out in the cold without his cotton. • Freedman Henry Washington complained that Willis Darby, who was white, stole his hog, a charge that was dismissed for lack of proof.41

At least twenty cases in Nacogdoches County from 1865 to 1869 involved acts of violence between former slave owners and freedmen, and in nearly all cases the whites were believed to be the offending party, though it was rare that anyone was convicted. For example: • A white man named J. Simpson was accused of shooting freedman Augustus (no last name) and his wife, but Simpson escaped before prosecution. • An unknown white man fired a shot at freedman Neil Kirk as the former slave attempted to enter his own house. • A freedwoman named Patsy attempted to protect one of her children from a former slaveowner named Robert Lindsey and paid dearly for her efforts: “In endeavoring to prevent Lindsey from whipping one of her children, she was struck by (Ben) Curl over the head with a pistol.” • William Walker, who was white, was accused of shooting former slave Smith Pettis. The report said, “Pettis in riding home was fired upon by the criminal from behind a tree, the ball entering his back.”42

One of the more egregious cases occurred on May 6, 1868, when three whites— Thomas York, Willie Nickols, and Joseph Rector—set upon a freedman named Albert: The freedman Albert was cropping with York and made about six bales of cotton, and it is believed that York, Nickols and Rector murdered . . . him for his share of the cotton. He was found hanging from a dead tree.43

Later that year, on December 5, an unknown white man attacked Barney Hyter, who was “taken out of his house and taken about one hundred yards and shot ten or twelve times . . .” On the same night, freedman Henry Thomas was killed in a similar fashion, and six other freedmen were “severely” whipped.44 A number of complaints were lodged by former slave owners against freedmen, nearly all of them involving work not performed as promised. It

A City with a Long Past

{ 19

appears that action was rarely taken— or if taken, was rarely recorded— against freedmen who didn’t fulfill their part of the contract. Alexander Ferguson served as subassistant commissioner for the Nacogdoches County Freedmen’s Bureau during the bulk of its existence. One can hardly imagine a less-desirable position to hold in the Deep South after the end of what was called in those parts the War of Northern Aggression. The offices were poorly funded and perpetually undermanned. Ferguson continually, and unsuccessfully, submitted bills for office supplies and other expenses, all the while juggling the claims of freedmen who alleged that they had been wronged by the former slave owners now employing them as sharecroppers, or claims from white farmers who complained about ex-slaves not upholding their part of a bargain. For example, in October 1868, T. B. Garrett and J. T. Garrett complained, using a stream-of-consciousness form of punctuation common to nineteenth-century rural writers, that two freedmen, Jake and Henry, “refuse to chop wood to make fires their contract is to chop wood if you think it right for them to do so please drop them a few lines if you think otherwise let the matter pass.” 45 John White complained the following month about freedman Edmon Sanders, from whom he claimed to have bought a bale of cotton and to have “advanced goods on the path of the trade, and I want you to tell him to turn it over to John Tinsley for me.” Sanders, who apparently was illiterate, delivered the note to Ferguson, in which White contended “some fellow has sold him a horse and is trying to get the cotton that I have bought and have traid [sic] a part in goods before he sold the horse to Edmon.” 46 S. W. McGaughey wrote to Ferguson on May 22, 1868, that his “children,” meaning his former slaves, now freedmen, had run away in the dark of the night. His (assuming that S. W. McGaughey was a man) complaint was that “if I had mistreated the children or did not has [sic] a better right to them, it would not be so grat [sic] a wrong, but nothing of the kind is alleged . . .” 47 In another case, a former slave owner, Jane B. Hart, petitioned the county to help pay for the expenses of an elderly ex-slave by the name of Betty, who was now infirm and considered a liability by Hart. She complained that the former slave “is a great burden upon her in many ways, besides being a tax upon her income.” Hart complained bitterly that the police court (a precursor to the justice of the peace) had twice refused to provide any relief—thus, her appeal to the subassistant commissioner.

20

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

There is no indication that Hart was ever “compensated” for caring for a black woman whom she once considered a piece of property. The beleaguered Ferguson even had to deal with potential election fraud. In April 1868, the Austin office of the Freedmen’s Bureau, which had supervisory authority over Nacogdoches, responded to an allegation of vote buying by advising Ferguson to look the other way. Lieutenant J. P. Richardson wrote from Austin to Ferguson: Referring to your letter of the 15th inst., regarding that portion in which you state that freedmen are coming forward to swear that James O. Muckleroy, candidate to elect to the convention, bought their votes, the asst. commissioner directs me to say that it is not deemed advisable for you to take any actions in this case.48

A few months earlier, freedman Abraham Wolfe, who was illiterate and signed his statement with an x, claimed that “a white man named Givins fired a shot at him while driving peaceably along the road with a load of rails on Saturday 22 Feb. (1868).” 49 There seems to have been no provocation for this attack. Givins chased Wolfe into the woods and fired a second shot that also missed, before giving up the chase. Former slaves weren’t the only victims, however. There is the harrowing tale of Columbus G. Hazlett, who was white.50 The incident occurred in 1864 but wasn’t reported until 1867, two years after the war was over. Hazlett, fourteen at the time, was sleeping at his grandfather’s home when four white men broke into the house, grabbed the boy, and told him they intended to hang him. Hazlett, three years later, recounted: “They then carried me about a mile to a quarter, and Johnson and Wm. Burrous tied the rope around my neck and put the rope over the gallows where they had been cleaning hogs.” 51 After hoisting Hazlett up in the air a couple of times, they turned him loose. His account, written three years later, after the war had ended and Union troops were occupying Nacogdoches, concluded, “It was well known that my father was a Union man.”

the republicans may have had political control of Texas in the early years of Reconstruction, but it wouldn’t be long before the long-dominant Democratic Party of the South would attempt to wrest power from the Republicans—usually referred to as the Radicals. Deep East Texas was no exception, particularly since whites still were the

A City with a Long Past

{ 21

majority in those counties that had been home to many of the leaders of the Texas Revolution. In September 1868 in San Augustine County, for example, what was reported as a large number of white citizens met to ratify the Democratic national convention’s platform and nominees. The San Augustine convention adopted a number of resolutions, including one decrying the continued disenfranchisement of men who had served in the Confederacy, as “unjust, illegal and tyrannical.” 52 Indeed those few small-town Texas newspaper editors willing to stand up to the white majority and espouse suffrage for blacks, as well as other planks of the Republican platform, often faced violence. The same week that the “old Democracy” was attempting to resuscitate itself in San Augustine, the editor of the Paris Vindicator in northeast Texas was “KuKluxed,” as the headline in the pro-Union Austin Republican put it. More than three dozen heavily armed “Democrats,” according to the Republican editor, rode upon the Paris editor’s home, yelling, “O, Radical, show thyself !” No physical harm was done, but the Paris editor nonetheless was sorely exercised at this attempted intimidation. He complained that we have lived here some ten years, married here, and in the graveyard sleep two of our children, and all we have in the world is here, and we can have no hope, no pulsation of the heart that is inimical to the interests of the people. We obey the law and pay our taxes. We have been a public journalist for over four years in this city and have never lagged in eulogizing this town, this county and the State.53

A. H. Longley, the editor of the Austin Republican, laid the blame for the violence against blacks and those perceived as sympathetic to them on white Democratic newspaper editors: And we maintain that the prevalent lawlessness in the State of Texas is directly traceable to the editorials of the democratic journals published in the State. Every paragraph of their leading political editorials is well calculated to incite a riot, and every article to provoke a mob.54

while the military occupation of texas only lasted five years, from 1865 to 1870, the establishment of a state police force and militia to combat lawlessness and civil unrest had long-lasting repercussions in Nacogdoches County. The militia, formed under the state’s first

22

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

Republican governor, Edmund J. Davis, was comprised of two parts, the State Guard and the Reserve Militia, as well as a state police component. All three branches were to be racially integrated. The state police force (by one account, it was 40 percent black) was charged with protecting citizens and property. The militia, which would play a major role in keeping the peace in Nacogdoches after the murders of the Hicks family in 1902, was made up of reservists commonly called out to quell civil insurrections.55 The state police force was widely perceived by white Democrats as the enforcing arm of the Republican scoundrels who were pushing for integration, and as such it was highly unpopular among whites. Governor Davis pushed the legislature to create the force because lawlessness and violence in Texas had become so pervasive that the number of reported homicides tripled from 1865 to 1868.56 The Police Act became law in 1877, and the force, hired to restore “peace and security for life and property,” was both unique and immediately controversial: Policemen were hired from all walks of life, and the ranks soon contained such strange bedfellows as former Unionists and ex-Rebel soldiers, as well as men of a variety of ethnic backgrounds including Negroes, whites, and Mexican Americans.57

In Nacogdoches County, an event that was dubbed the “Linn Flat Raid” provides an example (from the whites’ perspective) of how it felt to be occupied by what was widely considered a hostile military force. Richard W. Haltom, commonly called Bill, wrote one account. In 1877, twenty-year-old Haltom started working for his uncle, R. D. Orton, at the weekly Nacogdoches Chronicle, one of a string of weeklies that served the county after the close of the Civil War. Orton began serving as sheriff of the county during Reconstruction, and hired A. J. Spradley as his chief deputy in 1882. In 1880 Haltom published The History of Nacogdoches County, Texas. At the time, Haltom, who along with W. H. Harris would found the county’s first daily newspaper in 1899, was editor and proprietor of the weekly Nacogdoches News (a successor to the Chronicle), which printed and published the seventy-six-page book. Haltom recounted much of the early Nacogdoches County history described here, but Chapter VII sticks out because of its incongruity with the broader themes of earlier chapters. Haltom’s account describes whites’ resentment of the state police. There is little doubt where Haltom’s own sympathies lay: he claimed that

A City with a Long Past

{ 23

the state police abused their powers, enlisted blacks to commit depredations against whites, and “became a terror to the law-abiding citizens.” 58 That terror, at least according to Haltom, struck home in December 1871, when David W. Harvell was killed in Linn Flat, a small village about fourteen miles northwest of Nacogdoches, by two state police officers, William J. Grayson and Columbus Hazlett. Hazlett, then twenty-one, was the young man who briefly had been strung up seven years earlier because of his father’s pro-Union sentiments. His father, Marion Hazlett, apparently also was a state police officer and a key participant in the Linn Flat Raid. The Hazletts lived “in the brush,” eight miles west of town; Grayson lived “in the sticks,” four miles north of Linn Flat.59 According to Haltom, a justice of the peace in Linn Flat by the name of Dawson was holding court. Hazlett and Grayson became dissatisfied with the proceedings and threatened to shoot the judge. Dawson charged them with contempt of court and sent out Constable John Birdwell to arrest them. Harvell was recruited to assist Birdwell with the arrests, but the state police officers “belligerently defied all authority, even threatening to shoot anyone who opposed them.” 60 Within minutes, guns were being fired, and Harvell was dead from a gunshot to the head. Hazlett and Grayson, who were white, fled and “collected thirty or forty Negroes together, at the house of Grayson and openly defied the law of the land, asserting an immunity from arrest by the civil authorities.” 61 Nacogdoches physician Joseph Mayfield, who was a Civil War veteran in his late twenties at the time of the Linn Flat Raid, told a similar version of this story when, in his dotage, he wrote a series of columns, under the heading “Nacogdoches Traditions,” for the Daily Sentinel. However, he placed the number of men defying the law much higher, claiming: The entire community became terrorized. These outrages (were) backed up by armed bands numbering at first about fifty men, but soon increased to several hundred. What would follow, no one knew. These war-like gangs roamed over the country in a boisterous and threatening manner.62

Fearful that the state, controlled by Republican radicals, would declare martial law, Sheriff Orton headed to Linn Flat with a posse of ten to fifteen men. He trod lightly, and after hearing what happened, Orton decided his duty was to arrest the men. But as Haltom pointed out, doing so would require prudence, since “the state executive only wanted an

24

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

excuse or pretext to declare martial law in the country and quarter soldiers on us.” 63 Orton persuaded the judge to issue arrest warrants for Grayson and Hazlett. On his way to arrest the pair, Orton confronted twenty-five to thirty “well armed Negroes,” according to Haltom, but managed to stand them down. Orton forced the group of blacks to surrender and sent them under guard to Nacogdoches, some seventeen miles away. The sheriff found neither suspect, and, against his wishes, the blacks taken to town were released. Since he had come up empty-handed, Orton disbanded his posse and returned to Nacogdoches. Five days later, John Birdwell, the constable for whom deputy Harvell was working when he was killed, answered his door and was gunned down. Most everybody in the tiny community of Linn Flat assumed that Grayson and Hazlett had struck again. In the purple prose typical of a young writer, Haltom wrote: When this last murder became known, the people were almost paralyzed with fear, the secret assassins were abroad in the land, their awful acts were being done in the darkness of the night— courage was no protection against the midnight murderer; prudence would avail nothing; the hearth-stone and the fireside were not a protection— no one knew whose turn would come next —the Negroes were the friends of the murderers— an internecine war was to be feared.64

New warrants were issued and posses raised, but the suspects—a group expanded to include some relatives and friends of Grayson and Hazlett—were nowhere to be found. Orton concluded that the pair had fled to Austin to seek the protection of Davis, who was highly unpopular among white East Texans. At least some of the white residents of Linn Flat, Haltom wrote, were convinced that the fugitives were holed up, inciting blacks to insurrection. But a few days later, a state police lieutenant brought Grayson and Hazlett back to Nacogdoches from Austin. Conditions were placed on the release of the pair to Orton, such as allowing the state police force to guard them. Orton refused to go along. The ensuing stalemate was broken by the intervention of a district judge and the state adjutant general—the commander of the state militia; Grayson was eventually tried, convicted, and sent to prison for life, according to Haltom. Mayfield says Grayson was pardoned, and “expressed penitence and lived orderly.” 65 Columbus Hazlett escaped from jail before his trial, fled to Arkansas, and was killed

A City with a Long Past

{ 25

by bounty hunters.66 It is unclear what happened to his father. As Haltom concluded, “The civil law triumphed, and quiet was again restored to the county.” 67 Mayfield wrote of the state police officers that they “thought themselves masters of the land and not answerable to any civil government. They carried arms and rode over the land seeking disloyal trouble makers.” 68 Mayfield also praised Sheriff Orton’s bravery in quelling the disturbance, concluding sarcastically, “There were giants in those days, selfseen giants, who made the bad boys be good to the poor downtrodden negro—so they pretended, and disenfranchised all such ex-rebels, while the unreformed negro could vote and elect officers.” 69 The state police force was disbanded when Democrats regained power in 1873, but later historians have been somewhat kinder to the force. Ann Patton Baenziger defended the force as a “worthwhile agency created for a legitimate purpose, and its premature disbandment by the conservatives for political purposes left a void which was not soon filled.” 70 She points out that the force made an impressive number of arrests—7,000 in 1872 —and was often called in by local lawmen who were spread thin. The antipathy the force faced is reflected in Haltom’s writings about the Linn Flatt Raid. Baenziger, although not writing directly about the raid, accurately summarized the white position, concluding, “Considerable evidence indicates that most of the unpopularity of the State Police was due to its racial composition and political association. . . . The hostility toward the force was, for the most part, an expression of conservative resentment of Negro and Radical domination.” 71

chapter three

A Texas Sheriff

in 1902 andrew jackson spradley was fort y-nine, a year older than the slain Duncan Hicks. In a photo taken when Spradley was first elected sheriff, he bears a resemblance to Bat Masterson—the infamous occasional lawman, occasional gunslinger, part-time sportswriter, and full-time card shark—who was of the same era. Each had a thick moustache, wavy, dark hair, and piercing eyes. By 1902 Spradley’s hair was streaked with gray and perhaps a bit thinner, but the moustache was still full. In a photograph taken that year, posed with one of his bloodhounds, Spradley looked the picture of a Texas sheriff: tall, stern, and tough. Like Hicks, Spradley was originally from Mississippi. One of nine children, he grew up in a hamlet called Fayette Hill in Simpson County, about thirty miles southeast of the state capital of Jackson. When he was twenty, Spradley and his brothers were considered the county champs in wrestling and boxing, according to a 1931 account written by former newspaper editor Henry C. Fuller. But the Hayes family had several strapping sons interested in taking the fisticuffs title away from the Spradleys. One of the older Hayes brothers challenged John Spradley—as the future sheriff was then known—to a bare-knuckle boxing match. Spradley’s account, as told to Fuller, was that he poured blow upon blow upon Hayes’s unprotected body, “finally knocking him down and giving him such a beating as perhaps no man ever received in that part of the country.” 1 The beating—and the humiliation— didn’t sit well with the Hayes brothers, and matters came to a head a few weeks later. In a confrontation, one Spradley brother was shot by a Hayes brother, though not seriously. John Spradley whipped out an old cap-and-ball six-shooter, shot, and killed two of the Hayes boys. Though the killings were deemed self-defense, a family council determined it was time for John Spradley to move on. His uncle lived in Nacogdoches County, and, like so many before who deemed it best to seek a new life for whatever reason, Spradley was GTT: gone to Texas.2 By Spradley’s account, he caught a steamboat, probably at Vicksburg,

A Texas Sheriff

{ 27

and then traveled upstream along the Red River to Shreveport. By the time he arrived, Spradley was nearly broke, with just thirty-five cents to his name. He later claimed to have walked the remaining ninety miles to Nacogdoches. The year was 1874. Spradley landed a job at a lumber mill, where he worked until 1880. He quickly garnered a reputation as someone not to be trifled with, and caught the eye of Sheriff Dick Orton, who that year appointed him his chief, and only, deputy.3 Orton resigned a scant month later, and the commissioners’ court appointed his brother, John, to replace him. But on August 15, 1882, John Orton also resigned, and Spradley, then twentynine, was appointed to take his place as sheriff. Spradley was elected on his own that fall, surviving a rather vicious campaign in which the circumstances of his leaving Mississippi were bandied about, forcing him to gather up a petition signed by Simpson County’s finest, who averred that Spradley was of good character and was welcome back any time. Still, the killings in Mississippi would be used by political opponents—Sentinel editor Haltom would become his bitterest—for much of his political career. His career nearly ended prematurely in the summer of 1884. Spradley had gone up to Linn Flat on a midsummer Saturday morning to take care of some business. On the way back a squirrel darted in front of his horse, and he shot at it twice, killing it with the second shot. He tied the dead squirrel to his saddle, likely planning on talking his wife into making some squirrel stew for supper. The sheriff recalled he had just two cartridges left in his pistol when he got back to Nacogdoches, where downtown was full of country people, many of whom were getting liquored up in one of the town’s ten or so saloons. Spradley said he was going to get some dinner when he was summoned to P. C. Richardson’s store, where a couple of drunks were raising a ruckus. He arrived to find three drunk men being held off by the shotgun-wielding Richardson. The sheriff arrested Bill Rogers, whom Spradley later described as a friend. On the way to jail, the two met up with Bill Rogers’s brother, Whig, who asked what was going on. Spradley told him he was taking his brother to jail. Whig went to draw down on the sheriff, who got the drop on him. However, Spradley hadn’t bothered to handcuff brother Bill or take his gun away, and Bill Rogers pulled his pistol and shot Spradley squarely in the chest. Nearly fifty years later, in his memoirs, Spradley dispassionately described what at the time he thought would be his dying moments:

28

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

I was carried to the gallery of the Mitchell Hotel and laid out; the shooting created considerable excitement, but had the effect of producing absolute quiet on the streets. Loud and vociferous talking ceased and men stood around in groups and discussed what appeared to be a useless tragedy, and this is always the case in tragedies of this kind.4

The young sheriff was convinced that he was knocking on heaven’s door. Dr. Joseph Mayfield arrived, and Spradley asked if he was going to die. Mayfield said yes, it looked as if he had no more than thirty minutes to live. Spradley told the doctor that he forgave his killer because Rogers was drunk and didn’t know any better. Porter Fears, another doctor, arrived. He bent over, looked at Spradley, and told him, “Hell no, you are not going to die. John, get up from here. They couldn’t kill you with a pine knot. You and I will both be alive when this bunch is dead.” 5 The sheriff did indeed recover, though it took a number of weeks. He always said that Fears’s words of encouragement saved his life, writing that, “If Dr. Fears had told me I had only a few minutes to live I am sure I would have died.” 6 Spradley gained a reputation as an excellent investigator and a ruthless pursuer of wanted criminals. In one case, he searched off and on for the killer of a Timpson man for twenty-five years and finally found the suspect, who was convicted and imprisoned. Lawmen in distant towns in Arkansas and Oklahoma often hired Spradley to bring his bloodhounds and help track down criminals.7 Spradley, by many accounts, was skillful in interrogation and in setting traps for catching fugitives who had stated their willingness to resist to the death. This account in an 1886 Dallas Morning News article is one of many examples: NACOGDOCHES— C. W. Ringgold has been wanted for some time in Louisiana for murder, and also in this place for assault to murder. On last Thursday night Sheriff Spradley located him in a Mexican house near Martinsville. Learning that Ringgold was armed with a double-barreled shotgun, and would resist to the death, Spradley, after locating the house, took his stand in the rear, concealed by the thick undergrowth, and sent his deputy to the front with instructions to tell Ringgold that he was his friend, and that a posse of men were coming to arrest him. The plan worked all right. Pointing in the direction of the thicket in which Spradley was concealed, the deputy told Ringgold

A Texas Sheriff

{ 29

to run for his life. When within twenty paces of the thicket, Spradley stepped quickly out and said, levelling [sic] his Winchester: Surrender: you are my prisoner. Ringgold immediately threw himself in a position to shoot, but quick as thought Spradley said: “I’ll give you two seconds to choose between life or death. Drop that gun or you are a dead man.” Desperate, and panting like a wolf at bay, Ringgold looked into the eyes of Spradley, and seeing nothing but cool determination and fixed resolve, said quietly, as he dropped his gun: “I prefer to live.” Ringgold is now safely in jail here.8

A decade later, the sheriff was still catching criminals through subterfuge. Spradley nabbed a Nacogdoches man who had beaten his wife to death and then fled to Tyler, about eighty miles north. According to a Dallas Morning News account, “a decoy registered letter brought (the suspect) to the post office,” where Spradley was waiting.9

by the time of the hicks murders, spradley had been sheriff off and on for twenty years. For more than three decades, from 1882 until 1914, he ran for the position every two years, though he didn’t always win. For the first ten years, Spradley ran successfully on the ticket of the Democratic Party, which dominated Texas politics once Reconstruction ended. Beginning in 1892, Spradley, who supplemented his modest sheriff ’s salary through farming and part ownership of a saloon, ran under the banner of the People’s Party, the populist movement that had sprung out of the Farmers Alliance and for a time threatened to break the Democratic stranglehold on elective offices.10 In 1894 he even started a weekly newspaper, the Plaindealer, to push the populist platform, and he served as both editor and sheriff for a number of years. That same year his brother Mat, running as a Democrat, defeated him by thirty-six votes. (A later chapter will examine the populist movement in Deep East Texas in more detail.) Spradley came back in 1896, still running under the People’s Party banner, and defeated his brother by more than 200 votes, receiving 53 percent of the total ballots cast. But two years later another Democratic candidate, W. J. Campbell, beat Spradley by 195 votes.11 In the Plaindealer of December 1, 1898, Spradley gave what appeared to be his valedictory address: On Monday last I surrendered the sheriff ’s office to my successor and with it all the responsibilities involved. I am now a private citizen and as

30

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

such can sleep in peace. In retiring from the sheriff ’s office for life, I have the satisfaction of knowing that I have tried to do my duty. How well I have done so the people know and the records bear witness. To those who have been my friends, white or black, rich or poor and to those who have been otherwise: If you are satisfied, I am. In entering the ranks of private life, I shall be an humble but proud American citizen, willing to do my share for the peace, happiness and prosperity of the city, county, state and nation. Whatever service I can be to my friends in any way, it is always at their command.

Spradley’s retirement from politics didn’t last long. He ran again as a populist two years later and wrested the sheriff ’s office back from Campbell, winning by 176 votes out of 4,000 votes cast.12 As Spradley headed to Black Jack early on the morning of October 12, 1902, to investigate the Hicks murders, he again faced a tough reelection campaign, in just a few weeks. How quickly he could solve the murders of the Hicks family certainly could determine how Spradley fared at the polls in November.

chapter four

A Suspect and a Possible Motive October 12, 1902 spradley arrived at the hicks home in black jack at about daybreak on Sunday. The bodies still lay where J. W. Jernigan had found them the night before. Hicks and his wife were on the front porch, dead from shotgun blasts. Their daughter, Allie, was inside the house, her head bashed in. Judging from the state of decomposition of the bodies, Spradley determined that the parents were killed first and the daughter afterward, maybe as much as several hours later. A broken target rifle was found near the girl’s body in the dining room, and Spradley assumed that was the weapon used to bludgeon her.1 A crowd had gathered by the time the sheriff arrived. The coroner determined the three were “intentionally killed by persons unknown.” A funeral was held without delay, as was the custom before refrigeration and embalming were common. Several neighbors reported hearing a couple of gunshots on Friday evening, but had thought nothing of it. Three other lawmen arrived with bloodhounds: City Marshal Mat Spradley (the sheriff ’s brother), Doc Watson, and John Floyd. Robbery didn’t appear to be the motive: nothing seemed to be missing, with one exception. Sheriff Spradley was told that Hicks owned a good double-barreled shotgun, which couldn’t be located.2 there was a suspect. As Spradley asked around, he was told about a black man who had been seen in the neighborhood during the past few weeks. The man, a stranger to the area, reportedly worked for a builder named Bill Blankenship, who had the contract to build a new bridge across the Attoyac River into San Augustine County, to replace the bridges washed away by the June floods. Spradley talked to Blankenship, who told him that

32

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

the man in question, Jim Buchanan, had not been seen since about noon Friday. Spradley soon learned that Buchanan had recently bought a small rifle from someone in Black Jack, and later had bought some shotgun shells— even though he didn’t own a shotgun. In Spradley’s opinion, that was ample evidence for concluding that Buchanan was the most likely suspect in the murders of the Hicks family. There is little doubt that Spradley was familiar with Buchanan, since the latter had twice escaped from the Nacogdoches jail in the past four months. In early June 1902, editor Haltom reported in the Sentinel that: A Louisiana negro named Jim Buchanan broke into Charley Byrd’s place east of the La Nana last night and stole a Winchester. He might have secured other valuable articles but Charley interrupted his proceedings and chased him away. Charley called up Sheriff Spradley immediately and the dogs were put on his track and Buchanan was run down and arrested about daylight this morning. He still had the gun in his possession and confessed to the burglary. The burglar now languishes behind the bars and will make a safer run for the pen at next term of district court.3

Two days later, Buchanan escaped from the county jail. Haltom, who was Spradley’s bitterest enemy for reasons that subsequent chapters will make clear, wrote sarcastically, “The negro, Jim Buchanan, just got up and walked out of jail. There is some consolation in the fact that he did not take his bed with him.” 4 Buchanan was captured in nearby Lufkin the following week and returned to the Nacogdoches jail, which by all accounts was in a deplorable state. Despite strong backing from both the newspaper and the county officials, voters in May overwhelmingly defeated a $20,000 bond issue to build a new jail. Escapes were common; at least four were reported in 1902 alone. Buchanan again escaped from jail on July 6, and this time, apparently, he remained at large.5 Now he was the chief—indeed the only—suspect in the murders of the Hicks family. Spradley started looking for tracks, finding some on the west bank of the Attoyac River, near the bridge that Blankenship was building. The veteran sheriff began doing what even his enemies grudgingly admitted he did best. He began following the suspect’s tracks and crossed the river into San Augustine County.

A Suspect and a Possible Motive

{ 33

a few miles after crossing the attoyac, spradley met up with two San Augustine lawmen: Constable Lycurgus “Curg” Border and City Marshal A. Y. Matthews, who were accompanied by about fifty armed men. One can hardly imagine Spradley’s reaction at seeing Curg Border wearing a lawman’s badge pinned to his shirt. Just two and a half years earlier, Border had shot down Sheriff George Wall in cold blood in downtown San Augustine, a murder for which he was never prosecuted. Now, it was likely that Border, the Democratic nominee, would be elected sheriff. His opponent—and companion on this hunt for a murderer—running under the People’s Party banner, was Matthews, who had sold his cotton yard in Nacogdoches and moved to San Augustine the previous February.6 The Border-Wall Feud

In the final decade of the nineteenth century, the Border-Wall feud had cleaved most of tiny San Augustine County into two warring factions. Bad blood between the two families had existed for years. The patriarch of the Wall family was W. A. (Uncle Buck) Wall, who had loudly proclaimed himself pro-Union in the Civil War. That unquestionably had not been a popular position in Deep East Texas, which had, at least in the minds of its white residents, suffered mightily under Reconstruction. Wall had five sons, all named after contemporaries of George Washington and Napoleon Bonaparte, his two heroes.7 The boys, four of whom became involved in the feud, went to school with Curg Border and his brother, George, both of whom were related to the pioneer Broocks family. That family produced a congressman who was Curg’s namesake. The Wall boys and the Border brothers fought often in school, and their antipathy continued into adulthood, though George left town soon after the feuding began and became a respected doctor in Oklahoma.8 Perhaps his decision to leave the red-clay land of Deep East Texas resulted from a narrow escape, described by George L. Crocket, an Episcopalian minister in San Augustine and a seminal East Texas historian. Crocket described one violent encounter between the Wall and Border boys: “On one occasion Pez and Brune Wall met George and Curg Border on the road and they emptied their weapons at each other without, however, inflicting any damage.” 9 Curg Border, who was described as being five feet four at most and weighing 140 pounds, apparently felt compelled to overcompensate with

34

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

aggressiveness. Roughly ten years earlier, he had been involved in a gunfight in which he got the worst end of the deal, according to one historian. Border ended up with a bullet wound in the leg that gave him a lifelong limp and may have required him to wear a leg brace. His lack of mobility later proved important.10 In addition, Border was especially despised for the high-handed way he treated black sharecroppers who owed money to San Augustine merchant John Lynch, for whom he worked as a bill collector. Some of those sharecroppers worked the Wall farms, and harsh words were soon exchanged between Border and the Wall boys. By all accounts, Border had a vicious temper and was prone to violence over any minor slight, real or perceived.11 Frankly, if Curg Border had any redeeming qualities, they are lost to history.

soon, two factions were formed in san augustine County: on one side the Walls and their allies, and, on the other, Curg Border and the Broocks family. Political differences soon further exacerbated the ill feelings between the two families, especially when the People’s Party, the political arm of the populist movement, swept the local races in San Augustine County in 1894. Uncle Buck Wall—who, with his flowing white beard and full head of hair, resembled an Old Testament prophet wearing round eyeglasses— became the head of the local People’s Party in the 1890s, and was elected county commissioner in 1894. His son George was elected sheriff in the same election. Curg Border and his allies—the Burlesons and the Sharps in particular—were not good losers, and it was not long before tensions arose once again between the two families. The five Wall brothers and the two Border brothers all had reputations for being hot-tempered and violent. Brune Wall once was indicted for assault; his brother Eugene was indicted in 1898 for murder but not convicted. A year later he was again indicted for murder and convicted, but he successfully appealed on the grounds of self-defense, and was released from prison. Brune was indicted for attempted murder in September 1900. George Wall, who had been elected sheriff in 1894, was tried for murder in the killing of a man at the courthouse door in 1889. Again, self-defense was successfully claimed.12 When George Wall was elected sheriff, the split in tiny San Augustine County was complete. One was either with the old-line Democrats,

A Suspect and a Possible Motive

{ 35

whose memories of the bitter fruits of Reconstruction were still relatively fresh, or with the People’s Party, which promised economic justice for the farmers. There was no middle ground. Curg Border was firmly with the Democrats. His father, George, and his uncle, John, had both served in the Confederacy, and as one chronicler of this conflict phrased it, “they naturally had bad feelings of intolerance toward those who opposed the customs and doctrines of the Old South.” 13 Anyone, it was implied, who had supported the Union couldn’t possibly be considered a true Southerner, no matter how long he had lived in Deep East Texas. Before the Border-Wall feud ended, nearly a dozen men had been killed, ambushed in saloons, waylaid on country trails, and sometimes murdered in gunfights right in downtown San Augustine. A number of trials were held for men accused of murder on both sides of the feud, but not a single conviction was obtained. The feud reached its peak with the killing of Sheriff George Wall. In front of witnesses, Border shot the sheriff in the back with a shotgun on April 21, 1900. Sam Garrett was sitting on a bench outside G. W. Slaughter’s store when Border rode into town, a double-barreled shotgun in his lap. Garrett’s sworn testimony (strange capitalization and all) follows: [Border] got down near Mr. W. C. Church’s Saloon and walked in the Saloon. He did not stay in the Saloon but a very short time and then he came out of the Saloon and walked to G. W. Slaughter’s store house. . . . There he stopped [and] seemed to be waiting for someone. Dick Roach [and another black man] came walking along near the path, going up or down towards E. E. Smith’s. I noticed Dick Roach in particular, when he first saw Kurg Border [Border’s first name is spelled both as Kurg or Curg in newspaper accounts]. [He] laid his left hand to his right side and kept it there until he met George Wall. When Mr. G. W. Wall and these two Negroes met, Wall coming down towards W. C. Crouch’s store house, just a little west of G. W. Slaughter’s store house, G. W. Wall asked Dick Roach and the other negro [who] was with him, where was he [Border]? Dick Roach said back to G. W. Wall there he is right there and pointed his finger north. Then G. W. Wall turned half around . . . drew his pistols, and then I heard the report of what I thought was a shot-gun, and then another report of a gun [that] sounded like a pistol shot, then another shot, and I could not tell about the other shot—so, well, there were three shots fired to the best of my knowledge.14

36

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

The last straw for Border had apparently come when Wall had jailed him for disorderly conduct a few months earlier and had refused to allow Border’s friends to make bond. There were innumerable cases in Deep East Texas of folks being bonded out of jail on murder charges for as little as $500. Given the bad blood between the two families (the court files of the trials involving various family members on both sides is nearly two inches thick), surely Wall must have known that forcing a hothead like Curg Border to stew in jail for a few days over a minor disorderly conduct charge was tantamount to challenging him to a duel. Crocket, the San Augustine historian, wrote in his notes about that event: At another time Curg Border had committed some act against the law within the jurisdiction of the Justice of the Peace of Beat No. 2. George Wall arrested him and carried him out to trial in the justice court of Beat No. 2. Both sides were armed with guns and great excitement prevailed and a serious difficulty was anticipated, but the affair passed off without a clash.15

Bill Haltom, the Democratic editor of the Daily Sentinel, did not exactly mourn the killing of a populist sheriff, and all but said Wall got what he deserved because he “stubbornly refused” to grant Border’s bail.16 That prompted a rather angry letter from a couple of Nacogdoches County populists, who said the bond offered by Border’s friends was “valueless and did not comply with the law, and that ‘right’ and sworn duty compelled Sheriff Wall to reject it.” 17 Haltom even went as far as to rather tackily conjecture that Wall’s murder would improve the chances of the Democrats to retake San Augustine County because it might “appreciably strengthen the democratic influence in a Populist-ridden county, and give a safe democratic majority.” 18 Quickly granted bail on the murder charge, Border resumed swaggering around town. His bodyguard was a black man by the name of Arch Price. Border, Price, and Border’s sister, Cora, formed a formidable, trigger-happy trio. (Cora would later kill Price and successfully claim selfdefense, by at least one account.)19 Judge Tom C. Davis, who two years later would preside over the trial of Jim Buchanan in the Hicks family murders, quickly realized there was no way Border could get a fair trial in San Augustine County. People either hated him or feared him. He ordered the trial moved northeast

A Suspect and a Possible Motive

{ 37

to neighboring Shelby County, “for the reason that there exists in San Augustine County an interest for and prejudice against the defendant among the people of this county that the judge of his own motion now here orders that the venue of said cause be moved to Shelby County.” 20 The violence didn’t end there. Border was involved in at least one other vengeful gunfight with the Wall clan and their allies, after one of his cousins, Ben Broocks, was shot down in cold blood by Eugene Wall, the slain sheriff ’s brother. In June 1900, Sheriff Noel Roberts was wounded and two of his brothers were killed in a gunfight that prompted the governor to call out the Stone Fort Rifles, the Nacogdoches militia company.21 Border was jailed again after that shooting, and languished there until September. An eyewitness claimed he saw Border and two accomplices leave Crouch’s saloon, guns in hand, just after A. S. Roberts, the sheriff ’s brother, was killed. Border bitterly protested his incarceration, writing his own writ of habeas corpus, and finally was released on $3,000 bond.22 Border was indicted for killing the sheriff but was never tried, nor was he tried in the shootings of the Roberts brothers. The prosecutor filed an affidavit stating that all the witnesses were unwilling to testify against Border for fear of their lives. The district attorney’s motion said in part that to force a trial at this term would lead to disasterous [sic] results to the state, and would be the means of depriving the state to put before the jury the evidence and material essential to the prosecution, thereby resulting in only a partial hearing of the state’s case, and in such status result in irretrievable injury to the interest of the state in this case.23

The murder charge was dropped, and Border went free. To cap this reign of terror, Border managed to win the Democratic nomination for sheriff in the spring of 1902. Thus it was that a man widely known to be a violent killer was now operating under the cover of law. And he joined Spradley in hunting for the murderer of the Duncan Hicks family in October 1902.24 the search for jim buchanan, the lone suspect in the Hicks murders, continued. Spradley, now accompanied by what can only be described as a group of vigilantes, traced the tracks to a cotton field, but there they lost the trail.

38

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

Night was drawing near. Border and his men decided to head back to San Augustine, about fourteen miles to the east. Spradley asked Matthews to stay with him. Given Border’s reputation, there’s little doubt that Spradley was relieved to be rid of him and his men. The two remaining lawmen cadged some supper at a black family’s home and went to bed. The search would begin anew tomorrow.

chapter five

Nacogdoches in 1902

nacogdoches in 1902 was a sleepy little place inhabited by a goodly number of trigger-happy citizens, who were called “gun toters” by the state’s newspaper writers. Local voters proved time and again unwilling to pay for public improvements, apparently satisfied with muddy streets, a porous jail, and raw sewage running down the ditches. They scrapped constantly over politics. Most folks barely scratched out a living on red-dirt land that was nearly played out from the ravages of raising cotton and cows, or else they worked in the forests, cutting down huge pines and hardwoods for lumber. Blacks were treated barely better than chattel by most whites. The town’s boosters constantly pushed the latest far-fetched get-rich scheme—whether it was growing tens of thousands of tomatoes, establishing a cigar factory, or attracting Northerners on excursion tours with the lure of cheap land and cheaper labor. In many ways it was a typical small southern town. The 1900 census showed 24,663 people living in the county, 73 percent of whom were white. Of the 3,678 farms listed, three-fourths were owned or operated by whites, 892 by blacks. More than half the white farmers owned their farms, according to census statistics, although less than a third of black farmers did. The vast majority of the county’s residents tended small farms, averaging about ninety-four acres—about a fourth of the size of an average Texas farm.1 Relatively few people worked in the 101 manufacturing establishments listed in the county—314 in all, earning an average annual wage of $285, about a third less than the state’s average wage for that type of work. Unsurprisingly, given the second-class status of blacks in the South, the rate of illiteracy among blacks in Nacogdoches County was four and a half times that of whites.2 In a special edition of the Sentinel published in the fall of 1902 and designed to lure new investment and residents, Haltom said there were

40

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

roughly 125 “school houses” in the county, educating roughly 3,900 white children and about 1,800 black children—in separate facilities, of course. Another 1,100 students attended one of three independent school districts in the county, in roughly the same racial ratio—two-thirds white, onethird black.3

on new year’s day 1902, four prisoners escaped from the county jail by digging a tunnel through one of the cells. Sentinel editor Bill Haltom complained, “The steel floors to the cells in the jail are practically eaten up with rust, and it was little difficulty to make a hole through the brick walls. The fact of the matter is we have no jail that dangerous prisoners can be kept in.” 4 Those words would prove prophetic several months later, when escaped prisoner Jim Buchanan was arrested for the murders of the Hicks family. the hot issue in early 1902 was the fate of the old Stone Fort, the structure built by pioneer Gil Ibarvo in 1779. The stone house (which served only briefly as a fort, during a minor skirmish, and was used mainly as a mercantile establishment and home) was falling apart. In the past several decades it had been used mainly as a rather dilapidated saloon, and its new owners, the Perkins brothers, who ran a drugstore next door, wanted to tear it down and expand their store. The Daughters of the Republic of Texas and the Cum Concilio Club, two organizations composed entirely of women, were leading a crusade to move the building intact into the center of the square. Haltom vacillated over what should be done, pointing out that it would cost more to move the Old Stone Fort than it would to build “a much finer building,” but then the new structure wouldn’t be the “Old Stone Fort.” A few weeks earlier he had pointed out that the fort “has been known as a ‘den of iniquity’ for over half a century, and its associations have been such that have quenched every spark of veneration that might ever have existed.” 5 Apparently, at least one contractor guaranteed that the fort could be safely moved, saying he would rebuild it if it fell apart during the move (about seventy-five feet, judging from photographs). The city council granted the women’s groups permission to have it moved, but they had trouble raising enough money for the project, which apparently met with little enthusiasm among the few folks wealthy enough to underwrite such an endeavor.

Nacogdoches in 1902

{ 41

Finally the fort was torn down and the stones were piled up just outside of downtown. George F. Ingraham, who served in a number of elected positions, including county judge, bid a sentimental farewell to the fort, plaintively writing in the Sentinel, “The merciless spirit of commercialism is abroad in the land, destroying idols around which fond memory clings.” Ingraham concluded by writing, “I suppose I have a spell of the blues.” 6 A smaller replica of the fort was built in nearby Washington Square (site of Nacogdoches University) six years later, though it didn’t really resemble the original structure—and, poorly built, didn’t survive for long.7 After almost 125 years of use, this venerable “den of iniquity” was no more.

seven months after the deaths of the hicks family, Haltom listed, among others, the following enterprises inside the city limits. It is likely that little had been added during those seven months: Six white churches and three “nigger” churches Two banks Three dentists Four drug stores Three blacksmith shops Four good hotels Seven saloons One daily and two weekly newspapers Eighteen dry goods stores Two cigar factories One gun shop A large and comfortable opera house Four cotton yards And one music store.8

two railroads served nacogdoches in 1902. the first to come to town was the Houston, East and West Texas Railway, popularly known from its initials as “Hell Either Way Taken,” given its bumpy ride and frequent derailments. The HE&WT had arrived in Nacogdoches in 1883 from Houston, after a laborious process of laying rails through forests and building trestles across rivers. The railroad christened many of the small towns in Deep East Texas—Lufkin, Corrigan, Burke, Appleby, Blair, and Timpson—naming them after HE&WT personalities who were instrumental in the railroad’s expansion.9

42

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

The HE&WT was purchased by the Southern Pacific in 1899, which added additional routes in its name while keeping HE&WT’s original moniker.10 The railroad gave Nacogdoches residents—and, more importantly, its farmers—a way to ship themselves and their produce out of town. And it provided outsiders with a way to get to Nacogdoches. By the beginning of the twentieth century, groups of “excursionists” were making their way regularly to Deep East Texas: they had been courted in hopes that they would invest, buy land, establish factories, and turn this patch of woods into the paradise its boosters were convinced it soon would be.

when black residents of nacogdoches received mention in the Daily Sentinel, it was rarely positive. (There are few extant copies for 1902 of the other Nacogdoches newspaper, the Plaindealer, founded in 1894 by Spradley.) In Haltom’s Sentinel, blacks certainly could expect to see their names in print if accused of a crime, or if they were victims. As did most southern newspapers, Haltom always identified blacks when mentioning them in his newspaper, usually using the designation “col.” (for colored) after the person’s name, as in this brief from January 8, 1902: “Anthony Devereaux, col., was jailed yesterday in default of $300 appearance bond. He is charged with theft of hogs in the Douglass beat [precinct] and also with maliciously shooting a horse belonging to Dr. Campbell.” Blacks, such as Jim Buchanan, who were accused of serious crimes could expect to find themselves referred to as “niggers” in the Sentinel, a not uncommon practice in southern newspapers, particularly those published in small towns where few whites were offended by the term. About the best a black man or woman could hope for in the newspaper was to be termed a negro, always lowercase, and given a smidgen of sympathy, as might happen, for example, if a respectable family lost its home in a fire. Field Rusk, “colored” (likely a descendant of General Thomas J. Rusk’s slaves), whose house burned in mid January, was described by Haltom as “a well to do negro and his loss was considerable.” 11 Black men who managed to reach old age without offending an undue number of white people were often referred to approvingly as “uncle” in the Sentinel, again in keeping with southern small-town newspaper standards of the time and as a vestige of slavery. Thus, on New Year’s Day Haltom noted that “Uncle Bill Collins, of Appleby, was shaking hands with friends on the streets of Nacogdoches today.” And in early April

Nacogdoches in 1902

{ 43

the editor noted that “Uncle Dave Parrish was in town today. He says it is raining so much that he can’t get any work done on his farm and has a notion of getting a boarding place and staying in town until the weather changes.” 12 But in an overwhelming number of instances, if blacks received mention in the Sentinel, the reason was crime. If a black person was the victim of a white assailant, Haltom, again following the habits of white southern editors of the time, invariably took the side of the white person, or at least came up with an excuse for the crime. An example from April 2, 1902: Shortly after noon Monday, Albert Garrett, colored, was struck on the head with a hatchet in the hands of Warner Linthicum, a white man. The negro fainted shortly afterward from loss of blood and it was thought at first that he was dead. He revived, however and later in the afternoon was able to walk about. The negro was struck by Linthicum in self defense, it appears from what The Sentinel could glean of the affair. It seems that some words had passed between them when the negro became very offensive and was in the act of attacking Linthicum with a knife, when the latter picked up a hatchet and struck him. The affair occurred at the little grocery store of T. C. Ayers, colored, on Fredonia street.13

It should come as no surprise that Linthicum was never prosecuted for the assault, according to Nacogdoches County district court records.

in early 1902 the political pot was beginning to simmer once again in a county that for a decade had had a strong third party to compete with the usually dominant Democrats and the perennially weak Republicans, whose main support came from some black voters and the odd transplanted Yankee. W. J. Campbell announced just after the new year commenced that he would try to recapture the sheriff ’s post that he lost to Spradley in 1900. A group of prohibitionists met in the courthouse and decided to present a petition for a local-option election to the commissioners’ court, so voters could decide whether Nacogdoches County should continue to allow alcohol to be sold. The county in early 1902 was decidedly “wet”; advertisements for local saloons provided a steady source of income for Haltom and his brother, Giles, who had joined him as a partner.14

44

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

Just more than 18,000 bales of cotton were shipped out of the county that year, but cotton productivity in East Texas was on the wane. As farmers learned irrigation and fertilization techniques, the bulk of Texas cotton production moved into Central and West Texas, where more open land was available. The small tenant farms prevalent in East Texas were fast becoming economically unviable for cotton production, and the agricultural emphasis was shifting to the raising of fruits and vegetables— what was called truck farming—and to raising cattle.15 Then there was timber. Once the HE&WT railroad crossed the Piney Woods of Deep East Texas, timber production began in earnest: there was now a relatively efficient way to ship it out of the area. Soon other railroads were building lines into East Texas, and by the turn of the century, a number of large lumber companies had moved into the Piney Woods, buying up vast tracts of forestland. Lumber production—sawmills, loggers, and other types of workers—hired more manufacturing employees than any other type of industry in 1902, and had, by then, been the dominant industry for three decades. It was a labor-intensive business: as much as 60 percent of the total cost of production went to wages.16 In 1902, the transition from small, family-owned sawmills to much larger companies, which often owned tens of thousands of acres, was well under way in East Texas. Nacogdoches County was in the second tier of timber-producing counties in East Texas, below Angelina and Montgomery counties, but in 1900 four sawmills in the county employed more than 100 workers.17 Unsurprisingly, black workers dominated the lower-paid strata of timber-industry workers.18 And blacks were segregated from whites in nearly all aspects of logging and milling operations, as one historian of the lumber industry in East Texas noted: In most companies members of the two races rode to the woods together, worked together, and returned home at night together but did not eat together or live together. In mill towns and logging camps, the two races occupied separate sections. The great majority of blacks were laborers, and in most companies whites held all the skilled and supervisory jobs.19

Haltom wrote about the county in 1904 for the Texas Almanac, and it is safe to say that little had changed from two years earlier. He described a heavily wooded county with lots of fruit and vegetable farms but few large livestock herds, since there were no large, natural pasturelands. Timber had become big business: “In the way of industries and manufactories, pine

Nacogdoches in 1902

{ 45

lumber ranks at the head. Sawmills are doing a large business. The timber costs them about $1 or a little more per thousand feet in the forest.” 20 Although cotton was beginning to play out, there were still more than seventy cotton gins operating in Nacogdoches County, and more than 16,000 bales of cotton were produced, according to Haltom. Put into perspective, that amount was only six-tenths of 1 percent of the total number of bales produced in Texas in 1900.21

nacogdoches had electricit y by 1902. there was a telephone system, a box factory, and a dozen or so substantial retail establishments, all of which endured violent weather and even more violent men.22 Haltom regularly reported the various violent crimes that occurred in the county, usually in a sorrowful voice, as if it were his painful duty to report the news. He remained a consistent critic of the lack of laws regulating the carrying of guns, a common theme of Texas newspaper editors of the era, who nearly to a man decried the custom of carrying sidearms too conveniently at the ready. Here is one account of violence among many from 1902: The pistol totin’ habit came near resulting in a killing on the streets of Nacogdoches Monday. In a fight between Sam Brown and Walker Stokes, both drew or attempted to draw their guns. By the accidental dropping of Brown’s pistol and the miraculous failure of Stokes’ pistol to fire, a killing was averted.23

Haltom concluded that if neither had been armed, they would have just duked it out. Since both were armed, “It is probable that they will be looking for each other loaded down with shooting irons until one or both of them get killed.” 24 Violence was a way of life in Nacogdoches, at least judging from the reports in the Daily Sentinel and from district court records. The newspaper in 1902 reported nine homicides (including the three members of the Hicks family) and at least as many attempted murders—so-called shooting or cutting affrays. According to district court records, three murder cases and fifteen assault cases—ranging from attempted murder to relatively minor fistfights—were tried in 1902. (The difference lies in cases that occurred in the previous year but were tried in 1902.)25 By comparison, 100 years later in modern Nacogdoches County, three homicides were reported in a county that by then had two and a half times more people. Convicting a white man of a violent crime in 1902 was a

46

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

relative rarity. Self-defense was nearly always employed as an excuse, usually successfully. Even if a conviction was obtained, the punishment was usually a minor fine. Texas editors, such as Haltom, weren’t as concerned with Second Amendment rights as are contemporary conservatives. When it came to firearms, white Democrats who vigorously opposed the federal government’s sovereignty when it came to equal rights for blacks would write, “We do have an overproduction of guntoters—like nearly every other town in Texas, and we don’t seem to be able to reduce the crop.” 26 The reports in the Sentinel bear out Haltom’s complaints, though his deploring of gun toters at times runs counter to his defense of some of the shooters: • In late April 1902 at the Palestine church, four miles west of Nacogdoches, Elbert Clifton and Jim Clevenger began arguing during a prayer meeting about some unnamed past disturbance. Clifton whipped out a gun and shot Clevenger in the neck while the latter’s brother watched. Joe Clevenger then shot Clifton, killing him on the spot. • Two months later a feud between the Elliott and McCall families over a cross fence ended in violence when Mayfield Elliott shot R. J. McCall and his nephew, George McKinney, when they crossed Elliott’s pasture to get to their land. Elliott promptly rode to town to give himself up. Haltom opined that the shooting “seems to be no surprise to the neighbors and those who knew of the existence of the feeling and the causes which led up to the killing.” 27

Elliott was indicted, but there is no record of his being convicted of even a lesser crime. In August 1902, Sandy Murphey rode to town from San Augustine to buy some goods at J. M. Weeks’s grocery store. A black man passed by and entered a neighboring store. Murphey heard someone mention the black man’s name. Murphey turned around, followed the man into the store, and asked him if he was George Burk. When Burk said yes, Murphey pulled out a Colt .45 and shot him in the chest. Murphey, who was arrested and charged with murder, but apparently never convicted, told authorities he was avenging the death of his father, Tom Murphey, killed thirteen years earlier. Burk had hit him over the head with a fence rail, though the reason was unknown. As Murphey lay dying, he made his young sons promise to “kill Burk when they get old

Nacogdoches in 1902

{ 47

enough.” Interestingly for the times, Burk had been acquitted of killing a white man and had moved to Nacogdoches. Haltom, unsurprisingly, took the side of the white man, writing that Murphey “is a hard working young man, sober and quiet in his habits, and there is no part of the rowdy about him. He is simply made up of that bulldog determination which led him to execute a deed which he felt it a duty to do.” 28 Just more than a month later, the Sentinel deplored yet another shooting, this time between what Haltom termed “two negro pistol toters,” in which another black man, who was apparently an innocent bystander, was killed: It is not sufficient that these fellows shoot and mangle each other in their murderous affrays, but innocent lives are sacrificed or endangered and it is hazardous to walk along the streets of civilized community, even on a peaceful Sabbath afternoon. “Let not gun toter, white or black, escape” should be the motto of every judge, jury and peace officer in Texas, and with a stern determined public sentiment to back up the officers we can reasonably hope to materially diminish the evil, if not abate it entirely.29

the case of joe bug roquemore, one of the cit y ’s most violent characters in the early part of the twentieth century, will serve as a final illustration of the East Texas laissez-faire attitude toward justice. In 1902 the movement toward prohibition was beginning to gain momentum, but saloons still were found on nearly every corner in downtown Nacogdoches. There was Dial’s Saloon, which in its advertisements in the Daily Sentinel, boasted that it was the “most pleasant resort in town,” with a wide assortment of fine wines and whiskies. The Lone Star saloon, one of whose proprietors, Charlie Slay, became one of Joe Bug’s partners in crime, featured “Red Poled Pure Rye Whiskey.” The Hollow Log saloon claimed its Planters’ Rye was “used extensively for medicinal purposes.” And the Hub Saloon advertised Hennesy’s Whiskey in its notice, published right below that of the Hollow Log.30 Joe Bug was well known in the saloons of downtown Nacogdoches— and for causing trouble. In January 1902, the Daily Sentinel reported that Joe Bug, who was white, had attacked a black Methodist preacher at the Nacogdoches depot, striking him in the head with a plank. The Reverend N. W. Stewart was in a coma for nearly two weeks before finally dying of his injuries.

48

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

Joe Bug was arrested for murder. Sentinel editor Bill Haltom came to his defense, writing on January 28, 1902, the day after Stewart died: There seems to be some suppressed excitement growing out of the occurrence, but as yet nothing has occurred to indicate that any disturbance will grow out of it. While the death of the negro is very much regretted, it is regarded by the friends of young Roquemore as an accident, as it is well known that he did not wish to kill him and only struck him in resentment of an insult.31

In early April, a jury, after a few minutes of deliberation, apparently agreed. Joe Bug was convicted of aggravated assault and fined the princely sum of $25 for killing a black preacher. Joe Bug managed to stay out of the newspaper for five months, until an old feud with the Crain family erupted again. The two families had been feuding for years. Another Roquemore family member had shot and killed R. L. Crain in Austin four years earlier. Blood was spilled again on September 8, 1902, about a month before the Hicks family was murdered. As the Dallas Morning News correspondent in Nacogdoches reported: A fatal shooting affray occurred here this evening, the result of an old feud between Dick Crain and the Roguemores [sic]. Crain received two gunshot wounds, one in the face and one in the arm. He was on Main street, near the saloon of Slay Bros. Frank and Joe Roguemore were near there, at the Ogg livery stable. Shotguns and Winchesters were used. About half a dozen shots were fired. George Chrenger, a bystander, was instantly killed across Main street in front of Lucas & Burk’s store. He was about 55 years old.32

This time, Joe Bug’s brother, Frank, was accused of the fatal shooting. Sentinel editor Haltom deplored the violence, while noting ill feelings between the two families had existed for years, adding that “one or two shooting scrapes have taken place and others narrowly averted since the trouble first began.” He criticized the local law for allowing such displays in the Oldest Town in Texas: There is a universal feeling of indignation against the reckless gunplay and the attempt to settle feudal troubles on crowded streets, and the officers are severely censured for not preventing the tragedy of yesterday,

Nacogdoches in 1902

{ 49

which was not unexpected to anybody who had eyes to see with and ears to hear with.33

Joe Bug may have been the most infamous gun toter in town, but he had plenty of company.34

besides wild men, nacogdoches count y was often beset by wild weather, including outlandish spells of rain that swelled to flood stage the two creeks that bisect the town and sent muddy water streaming through the central business district, which had grown up between those creeks. On June 27, 1902, a little more than three months before the Hicks family was murdered, what editor Bill Haltom called the “worst flood in history” swept through town. It had rained incessantly for twenty hours, but by nightfall the Lanana and Banita creeks still had not reached previous high-water marks, Haltom reported, and most folks had gone to bed. A short time later the alarm was sounded, and by midnight the two creeks surpassed the previous high-water mark by at least a foot. Several houses were washed away, as were all but one of the bridges that crossed the creeks near downtown. The railroad tracks near downtown were swept apart, and the telephone and telegraph wires were knocked down. Rescuers paddled through downtown in flat-bottom boats, offering safe passage to a number of residents. No deaths were reported. Cotton bales at the compress just west of downtown floated downstream, lodging themselves against “fences and drifts.” 35 The damage out in the county was reported to be just as severe: crops and bridges were washed away (murder suspect Jim Buchanan was hired to work on replacing one of the bridges washed away on the Attoyac River). In the northeast part of the county, the small town of Garrison, where several houses were destroyed, was especially hard hit.36 thus, by late 1902 nacogdoches was still reeling from the effects of a disastrous flood, a weak economy, and a sinking sense that progress was passing it by. That didn’t stop the town’s leaders from continually pushing to improve its sagging fortunes. In a boosterish special section that Haltom produced in the Daily Sentinel just nine days after the murders of the Hicks family, he glowingly described the county’s natural resources: abundant water and rich soil that produced 16,000 bales of cotton in 1902 from nearly six dozen gins. He bragged that “Nacogdoches holds the key to the future commercial prog-

50

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

ress of East Texas, and there is every reason to believe that it will expand into a city of manufacturing industries.” 37 Alas, that did not exactly come to pass. A number of efforts to diversify into truck farming—tomatoes, peaches, and other fruits—ultimately failed. The first producing oil well in Texas was drilled in Nacogdoches County in 1866 at Oil Springs, and the county also was home to the state’s first petroleum refinery and pipeline. Nearly four decades later, boosters were still talking up the oil business, but it had become obvious that no vast pool of black gold lay beneath the county’s surface.38 With a few exceptions, such as the approval of bonds in 1902 to create the Nacogdoches school district, most campaigns for civic progress— whether for paved streets, a professional fire department, a waterworks, or a new jail and courthouse—failed miserably. Haltom, forever the booster, never tired of scolding his readers for their unwillingness to improve the city, but by and large his entreaties fell on deaf ears. Still, he never quit trying: The Sentinel heartily seconds the Plaindealer’s motion to pave the main thoroughfares of Nacogdoches, and we wish we had a thousand voices with which to say amen to the assertion that “there isn’t a sidewalk in the city fit for a lady to walk on in the bad weather.” 39

However, one would never be able to discern the grim reality of a town stuck in the past from Haltom’s October 20 edition, intended for a group of “excursionists” coming to town, courtesy of the railroad. In that issue, Haltom made Nacogdoches sound like a virtual paradise, claiming that the “vegetables and melons grown here cannot be surpassed” and that there is “no such thing as overestimating the possibilities of this county for fruit growing.” 40 Haltom and other boosters hoped to help entice some of the 500 or so excursionists to invest in East Texas or even move here. That was the reason the editor produced this sixteen-page section, which provides a detailed—if biased—glimpse of Nacogdoches in 1902, including a number of photographs. From the distance of a century, this once-famous town, which had been home to a number of Texas’s most famous figures, was but a footnote to history by 1902. It would take a heinous crime and its aftermath to get Nacogdoches the statewide, even regional, recognition that had been lacking since Sam Houston practiced law there nearly seven decades earlier.

chapter six

A Suspect Is Caught

October 13, 1902 the night before, spradley and matthews had decided that Buchanan likely was headed toward the Pre-emption community, on the border between San Augustine and Shelby counties, where many blacks lived in relative isolation and peace. A significant number of blacks in San Augustine had retreated to this area after Reconstruction. When federal troops occupied much of the South—including San Augustine— after the end of the Civil War, a number of blacks gained political power, albeit briefly. Harry Garrett, a former slave of a prominent white plantation owner, Milton Garrett, became one of their leaders and formed his own armed company, which held regular marching drills—actions that the white populace viewed with more than a little trepidation. According to the account told by a white resident, matters came to a head after threatening letters were sent from blacks to two white residents: The white population was aroused by this threat, and responded by organizing a Klan of the Invisible Empire of Ku Klux. A body of more than two hundred men was soon enrolled under the leadership of I. D. Thomas and included not only the young men who had lately returned from the war, but also many well advanced in years. These ghostly riders of the night, with both man and horse enveloped in white, and with tall white caps and white masks over their faces, were so completely disguised that often their identity was not known to each other.1

The Klan members divided into small squads and went to the “cabins of obnoxious negroes.” 2 Those deemed to be “obnoxious” were often flogged until they promised to “reform,” which meant they would cease any attempt to gain political or economic power. It wasn’t long before

52

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

the political power of black residents had been broken, largely by use, or threats, of violence. As the writer put it, in typical white-southerner fashion, “Thus by vigorous, yet cautious action, the turbulent negroes whose minds had been inflamed by Yankee emissaries, were either driven from the county, or inspired with a wholesome respect for the white population.” 3 Although no account remains of how Harry Garrett and other blacks in San Augustine viewed the visits by the Klan, it is doubtful that they considered themselves unduly influenced by Yankees. In the years after the Civil War ended, freedmen across East Texas, like their counterparts throughout the South, faced nearly unrelenting terror from whites determined to keep former slaves from gaining any type of political or economic power. The Klan, which had its beginnings in Tennessee, was actually preceded in Texas by a number of secret organizations formed with the goal of terrorizing blacks and the whites who were sympathetic to them.4 In one three-week period in January 1867, nearly a dozen acts of violence were committed by armed whites against blacks in Harrison County— three counties to the north of San Augustine. In Marion County, just east of Harrison County, the river town of Jefferson became a hotbed of Klan activity, even hosting a Klan parade attended by a reported 1,500 spectators. The terrorism against blacks quickly spread through a number of counties north of Nacogdoches and San Augustine. Blacks, according to a leading historian of Texas during Reconstruction, began sleeping in the woods at night for safety.5

more than three decades later, the pre-emption community was still a logical retreat for a black man on the run from the law. At daylight the search began again. Spradley and Matthews split up, both making their way around a swamp east of the Attoyac River. Spradley followed the tracks of someone who had entered the swamp from an adjoining cotton field. Just a few minutes later, according to Spradley, he spotted a black man about 200 yards ahead, carrying a double-barreled shotgun. The sheriff crept up behind him, and as the man topped a hill, Spradley made his move: As he passed over the hill I ran full speed, holding my double-barrel breech-loading shotgun in front of me ready for instant use. The negro heard me but thought the noise was coming from the direction in which he was going, and so he suddenly turned back and as I got to the top of

A Suspect Is Caught

{ 53

the hill I met him face to face only a few steps from me. I saw him first and simply beat him to it by getting the drop on him. He held his gun as if he would raise it, but I yelled to him that if he moved he was a dead negro, and he did not attempt to raise it. If he had made the last move I would have filled him with buckshot. I told him to pitch his gun forward on the ground, and he did so. I then told him to lay flat on his face on the ground with his arms spread out, and he instantly obeyed. . . . I picked up the gun he had thrown down—the gun he had taken from the Hicks home—and fired it off, both barrels [to summon Matthews].6

The noise quickly brought Matthews to the scene. After tying Buchanan’s hands behind his back, the two lawmen borrowed a horse for their prisoner from the black family whose home they had shared the previous night. Jim Buchanan had been captured. Keeping him out of the hands of a lynch mob would prove far more difficult than capturing him had been.

spradley and matthews decided to head north toward Tenaha, some twenty-five miles away, because it had the closest railroad station. News of the Hicks murders, which had been discovered on Saturday, would first be published in the Daily Sentinel on Monday afternoon; the newspaper did not have a Sunday edition. A local correspondent had relayed the news to the Houston newspapers, both of which carried brief accounts on Sunday.7 But news traveled fast, especially if it involved the murder of a white family and the arrest of a black suspect. Sentinel editor Bill Haltom learned of the crime from City Marshal Mat Spradley (the sheriff ’s brother and erstwhile political opponent), who had returned to Nacogdoches on Sunday. The front-page article described it as “one of the most revolting and harrowing crimes that has ever occurred in the history of Nacogdoches county.” And though A. J. Spradley and Matthews managed to get out of Black Jack relatively unnoticed, a crowd had gathered by the time they reached Tenaha with Buchanan. Spradley later claimed several hundred armed men were waiting—probably an exaggeration, given the size of the town. In his account to Henry C. Fuller, Spradley claimed to have tricked the crowd at Tenaha by telling them that Buchanan had to answer the call of nature. He ordered Matthews to take Buchanan behind the bushes. The two hightailed it toward Logansport, just across the Louisiana line, while

54

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

Spradley engaged the crowd with a lengthy discourse on how he had captured Buchanan. After thirty minutes the crowd figured out that it had been tricked, and headed after Matthews and Buchanan. Curg Border by then had rejoined Spradley. The two commandeered a railroad handcar that had just arrived from Paxton, five miles to the east, and persuaded two men to pump it back to Paxton, where they hoped to catch up with Matthews and Buchanan. There, Spradley and Border encountered yet another group of armed men, who were angry at the lawmen’s trickery in getting Buchanan out of Tenaha. According to Spradley, Border jumped down with his Winchester drawn and said, “Throw your guns down, every damned one of you. I am Curg Border and this is John Spradley, and we will kill the last damned one of you if you even make a move.” 8 Spradley does not venture his opinion of Border’s rashness, but does say the threat worked, though a later author pointed out that the crowd most likely complied more out of fear and respect for Spradley than for Border, who generally preferred ambush to direct confrontation.9 The two headed back to Tenaha on the handcar, where an angry crowd still waited. Accounts of what happened next differ slightly. Spradley gave his account to Fuller nearly thirty years later, when he was nearly eighty years old, and some of the dates he gives don’t agree with newspaper accounts of the time. Most likely, reports in the two Shreveport papers come closest to what really happened, since they are contemporary accounts. Spradley and Border headed on the handcar toward Appleby, about eight miles north of Nacogdoches. They flagged down a southbound train and caught a ride to Appleby, where a wreck had temporarily stopped train traffic, including yet another load of angry men who had boarded the northbound train to Tenaha in search of Buchanan. Spradley convinced the crowd at Appleby that he was taking Buchanan, supposedly hidden in a bathroom on the train, back to Nacogdoches on the southbound train, which the mob boarded. Buchanan was already headed to Logansport by horse with Matthews. Spradley then jumped on the northbound train as it took off, leaving both the mob and Border, who, because of his crippled foot, couldn’t catch the train. The train stopped in Logansport and picked up Matthews and Buchanan, who had been quietly held in the DeSoto Parish jail. By shortly after midnight, Jim Buchanan was in a Shreveport jail. News of his capture would make the pages of nearly every newspaper in the South by the next day, complete with photographs and a confession.10

chapter seven

Lynchings: A Grim Fact of Life there is no doubt that the safet y of buchanan was in grave peril. Lynchings, mainly—but not exclusively— of black men, were a grim fact of life in the postbellum South, and the last decade of the nineteenth century and early years of the twentieth century saw a marked increase in their number. The Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, founded by Booker T. Washington in 1881, began keeping records of lynchings the next year, though those records are, necessarily, incomplete. Suffice it to say the totals recorded by Tuskegee represent the minimum number of people executed extralegally. These lynching statistics are not confined to those who were hanged. Lynchings also included those who were burned alive, shot hundreds of times while tied to a post, eviscerated, castrated, or otherwise tortured until death was a relief. By the 1880s, when it seemed as if former slaves might exercise some real political power, the violence meted out to blacks began to subside. In fact, from 1882 through 1889, 669 whites were lynched in the United States, as compared with 534 blacks.1 That ratio, which seems unsurprising given that whites far outnumbered blacks in the general population, would change radically. From 1890 to 1899, lynching victims nationally totaled 429 whites and 1,111 blacks. And in the South, black lynching victims had always outnumbered white.2 The increased violence against blacks coincided with the nearly complete loss of all political rights, including, in many southern counties— though not yet in Nacogdoches—the right to vote. From 1870 to 1900 in Texas, the white population increased at twice the rate of the black, further diluting blacks’ chances of having a voice.3 One historian, documenting racial violence in Kentucky from the end of the Civil War until the eve of World War II, concluded that the rise of

56

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

what was called the “lynching bee” arose because of the end of slavery and the loss of blacks’ loyalty to their white masters: During the 1880s and 1890s, many white observers lamented the passing of the loyal Negroes that slavery had produced. In their place were the “New Negroes,” who, without the civilizing influence of whites, were actually regarded by whites as retrogressing to their “barbaric” African condition.4

Blacks, of course, had quite a different viewpoint. In July 1883, a group of black men met for three days in Austin to draft a daring document, especially given the time and place. The “Report of the Committee on Grievances at the State Convention of Colored Men of Texas, 1883” is a searing—indeed damning—indictment of the failed promise of emancipation and Reconstruction. The Texas delegates drafted their document prior to a national convention to be held later that year in Kentucky. The authors accurately pointed out that whites only pretended to accept blacks’ change in status from slaves to freed people, noting that “they have never fully accepted said changes, though they have offered to accept them, because their acceptance was made the only condition upon which they could regain their former position in the Union.” 5 And as authors Mack Henson, A. R. Norris, J. N. Johnson, and J. Q. A. Potts noted in the report, “the degree to which any right is enjoyed as a citizen is measured by the willingness of the whole body of citizens to protect such a right; if there is a lack of regard there is, therefore, the lack of will to protect.” They then listed five areas in which blacks were being denied their legal rights: Miscegenation laws: Texas, like most Southern states, had made it a felony for blacks and whites to marry, though cohabiting without marrying warranted only a minor fine at most. In effect, the authors argued, the laws permitted white men to have black mistresses, but vigorously prosecuted black men who married white women. The authors did not call for an end to laws banning miscegenation, but rather urged state authorities to vigorously prosecute all engaged in “carnal intercourse between the two races.” 6 Free schools: The black authors accurately pointed out that though the Texas constitution of 1876 guaranteed a public education to all Texas children, regardless of race, the reality was that black schools were vastly inferior “as to character of buildings, furniture, number and grade of teachers as required by law.” 7

Lynchings: A Grim Fact of Life

{ 57

Treatment of convicts: The authors noted that a large proportion of the state’s convicts were black, and many were brutally treated on prison farms scattered across the state. Black prisoners were routinely beaten, placed in stocks, and worked to death. The writers urged the national convention pass a resolution condemning the common practice of chaining convicts together on prison farms.8 Railways, inns, and taverns: The authors did not lobby for the right to ride in the same railway cars, dine in the same restaurants, and sleep in the same rooms as whites while traveling. All they wanted was “the right of riding in cars equally as good.” The same went for taverns and restaurants, where these black leaders were happy to settle for “separate but equal” accommodations.9 Juries: Although state law prohibited the practice, blacks in Texas were routinely excluded from juries. The authors urged the creation of the “Colored People’s Progressive Union” to pursue lawsuits “in the support of every right guaranteed to colored people as citizens.” 10 It would be eight decades or so before the list of reforms set forth by these men would become common practice in Texas and elsewhere in the South. Black leaders often met in conventions and drafted resolutions similar to those outlined above. Meanwhile, whites blithely went about their business, intent on holding on to every possible facet of political and economic power.

by 1900, jim crow segregation laws were a way of life. In many Texas counties, voting in the Democratic Party primary was restricted to only white men, though a strong Populist Party movement in Nacogdoches County had prevented that from occurring there. But blacks were segregated from whites in virtually every aspect of life, from schools to shopping. And as the white majority tightened its hold on power, it increasingly resorted to mob rule when a black was accused of a violent crime, especially one committed against a white woman. As one writer put it, the increase in lynchings in the final decade of the nineteenth century was part of a perceived change in the uneasy coexistence of whites and blacks in the South. During the late nineteenth century, most southern whites concluded that a transformation in the tone of race relations was underway. Their dread of social amalgamation with blacks, abhorrence of black education, and contempt for black efforts toward advancement became the fodder for the violent racial ideology of a new generation of white supremacists.

58

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

Fired by the conviction that blacks, particularly those members of the new generation unschooled in appropriate behavior by slavery, were retrogressing into savagery, whites harbored growing fears of black criminality— especially fears of black rapists.11

Whereas lynchings in the past had generally been a form of “frontier justice,” quickly meted out because courts were often loath to convict anyone who claimed self-defense, lynchings in the last decade of the nineteenth century became increasingly barbaric. Lynchings often involved far more than simply hanging someone from a tree or a railroad trestle. Victims were often tortured, their extremities cut off, or they were burned alive, or shot hundreds of times while strung up. Accounts of lynchings were presented in most Southern newspapers as a straightforward matter of justice having been done—without the irritating delay of established judicial procedures. Here is an account from the New York Tribune, dated April 24, 1899, of a Georgia lynching: In the presence of nearly 2,000 people, who sent aloft yells of defiance and shouts of joy, Sam Hose (a Negro who committed two of the basest acts known to crime) was burned here at the stake in a public road, one and a half miles from here. Before the torch was applied to the pyre, the Negro was deprived of his ears, fingers and other portions of his body with surprising fortitude. Before the body was cool, it was cut to pieces, the bones were crushed into small bits and even the tree upon which the wretch met his fate was torn up and disposed of as souvenirs. The Negro’s heart was cut in several pieces, as was also his liver. Those unable to obtain the ghastly relics directly, paid more fortunate possessors extravagant sums for them. Small pieces of bone went for 25 cents and a bit of the liver, crisply cooked, for 10 cents.12

As Pulitzer Prize winner Leon F. Litwack put it in the foreword to Without Sanctuary, a grim collection of lynching photographs: What was strikingly new and different in the late nineteenth and twentieth century was the sadism and exhibitionism that characterized white violence. The ordinary modes of execution and punishment no longer satisfied the emotional appetite of the crowd. To kill the victim was not enough; the execution became public theater, a participatory ritual of torture and death prolonged as long as possible (once for seven

Lynchings: A Grim Fact of Life

{ 59

hours) for the benefit of the crowd. Newspapers on a number of occasions announced in advance the time and place of a lynching, special “excursion” trains transported spectators to the scene, employers sometimes released their workers to attend, parents sent notes to school asking teachers to excuse their children for the event, and entire families attended, the children hoisted on their parents’ shoulders to miss none of the action and accompanying festivities.13

A report by the NAACP described the burning at the stake in Tyler, Texas, in 1897 of a black man who confessed to rape and murder. An eyewitness account was printed by a local publishing company, and ended by saying: Hilliard’s (the black man) power of endurance was the most wonderful thing on record. His lower limbs burned off before he became unconscious and his body looked to be burned to the hollow. Was it decreed by an avenging God as well as an avenging people that his sufferings should be prolonged beyond the ordinary endurance of mortals? 14

Blacks were lynched with alarming regularity across the South. At times, lawmen would attempt to stop a mob from exacting revenge, but their efforts— even if sincere—were usually futile. As another writer chronicling this era put it: The most important fact about lynching was not the number of blacks who were killed but the ability of whites to kill and torture with impunity. Often composed of respectable citizens and defended by politicians and newspaper editors, lynch mobs acted without fear of arrest or punishment.15

In 1902 alone, when the Hicks family was murdered in early October, more than sixty people had been lynched in the United States, primarily in the South, according to the Tuskegee Institute. At least three black men had been lynched in Nacogdoches County in the fifteen years prior to the capture of Jim Buchanan, according to published reports. The first occurred in 1887, and there is ample evidence to conclude that Sheriff Spradley allowed mob rule to triumph in this case. On September 23, 1887, J. F. Looney, a merchant and the postmaster in Douglass, a farming community about fifteen miles west of Nacogdoches, was nearly decapitated while walking to his store from his house, where

60

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

he maintained the post office, after supper. Spradley told his biographer that Looney had been summoned to his house by a young Negro boy, who had been sent by a farmer to fetch his mail and get some medicine from Douglass physician Dr. W. I. Coon. Since Looney’s store and house were located only forty feet from each other, he readily agreed. He found the mail and handed it to the boy, who returned to the doctor’s office, got the medicine, and went home. Coon went to bed, but was soon awakened by the screams of Looney’s sister and mother. As Henry Fuller wrote: A horrible sight met their gaze. On his back halfway between the house and the store in the path, lay Joe Looney, his head almost severed from his body, a great pool of blood in which his head lay, while the flowers around were spattered with the crimson stream that had spurted from the jugular veins, both of which had been severed.16

Spradley arrived the next morning with a gallon of red paint in hand. The Douglass constable had arrested twenty black men and kept them under guard under a tree on the outskirts of Douglass. To find out who had killed Joe Looney, Spradley was about to play one of his usual tricks. He ordered the constable to send two blacks to him at a time. Spradley claimed later that he knew the first two sent down had had nothing to do with the murder, though he doesn’t explain how he knew that. He ordered them to lie on the ground and pretend to be dead, and he then poured paint on their shirts, right over their hearts, so it looked as if they were dead. He did this with four more blacks, so that six lay on the ground, pretending to be dead. When the next pair of blacks arrived, Spradley spotted the one who, he had a hunch, knew who had killed Looney. He told Fuller, “I knew he was coming to tell something as I saw him coming. His eyes bulged out and (his) face was the color of ashes. He was literally scared to death. I stepped forward pistol in hand as if ready to continue the work of shooting.” The terrified man quickly told Spradley that if he went to a certain cotton pen near Douglass and dug down into the earth, he would find the bloody clothes of Joe Adams, who, he claimed, killed Looney and then went home and changed clothes. Adams, who wasn’t in the original group of blacks held for Spradley’s arrival, was arrested while picking cotton. Spradley found the bloody clothes. Adams said that Looney caught him trying to burglarize his store when he returned from getting the farmer’s mail. He claimed that Looney

Lynchings: A Grim Fact of Life

{ 61

attacked him, and he had had no choice but to cut his throat, lamenting, “I had no motive except to cover the attempt at theft. Joe (Looney) was a good friend to me. He sold me goods on credit and I always paid for them. It was an awful thing to do and I did it only to cover up the fact that I had been caught in his store.” 17 Spradley brought Adams back to Nacogdoches and placed him in jail. The Houston Daily Post, in a piece almost certainly written by Fuller, who freelanced for the paper for several years, reported on September 26 that a mob gathered as Spradley attempted to take Adams to jail, and demanded that he be handed over for lynching. “But when they were told by Spradley that he would protect the prisoner with his life they let him pass on.” But the mob from Douglass was determined to revenge Looney’s death, and three days later it succeeded. The mob met at the narrow gauge depot about 1 o’clock, and then went to the Goff house to get the keys from O. H. K. Goff, the jailer, but he had turned the keys over to Sheriff Spradley. They next went to Mr. Spradley’s room and demanded the keys, which he refused to give up. When the mob saw they could do nothing with him they left a guard over him and the balance proceeded to the jail and took a battering ram and tried to knock in the iron grating of the windows, which they could not do. They next tried the brick wall, which soon yielded to their efforts. They then went to Reid’s blacksmith shop and took his tools and cut through the steel cell in which Adams was confined.18

It took an hour, but finally the mob cut through the bars and pulled Adams out. Adams was strung up on the chinaberry tree in the square, near the public well. When asked if he had any last words, he confessed again to the killing and implicated another black man, Tom Thorn, who had apparently (wisely) skipped the county. The Post writer concluded, “After Adams confessed he was immediately launched into eternity by two score willing hands. Quite a number of our citizens witnessed the performance by moonlight.” 19 As another Spradley biographer pointed out, the sheriff seems to have sanctioned, or at least not discouraged, the mob action in this case. The only guard posted at the jail was Spradley’s brother, Mat, and he could have sent Adams by rail to another town for safekeeping until trial. Perhaps Spradley’s extraordinary efforts to keep Jim Buchanan alive fifteen years later stemmed in part from the guilt he felt from having allowed this lynching to occur.

62

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

The little town of Douglass was the scene of another lynching four years later, in 1891. Details are sketchy, but it does not appear that Spradley had a chance to prevent it from happening. A black man named Tom Rowland was arrested for robbing a country store between Douglass and Cushing. He was being guarded by Constable Moore and a deputy named Smith, “when a mob overpowered the officers and took the negro off. When found the next morning [Rowland] was found swinging to a tree in a swamp bottom near Douglass.” 20 Before the murders of the Hicks family, the last recorded lynching in Nacogdoches County occurred in 1897. Esseck White was a young black man who had been fired from working as a laborer on a farm in Appleby owned by attorney Robert Berger. The town lies about nine miles north of Nacogdoches. According to newspaper accounts, White was angry over being discharged. A few days later, four young girls, including Berger’s daughter, were having a sleepover at the nearby home of Dr. W. P. Fears, and awoke to find a “dusky man” in the bedroom. One of the girls ran to awaken Fears, who unsuccessfully gave chase. White, who apparently had returned to the Berger residence the day after he was fired, quickly came under suspicion, as did another black man, Amos Phillips. A constable in Mount Enterprise, about twelve miles north, arrested White and brought him back to Appleby, where Sheriff Spradley had to dissuade Berger from shooting him on the spot.21 Spradley apparently released the other suspect and took White into Nacogdoches. A mob quickly gathered. Even though no actual assault had occurred, hundreds of whites were soon gathered on the square. Spradley wired the governor, asking for the state militia to come help him guard his prisoner. The local militia company, the Stone Fort Rifles, was called into action, but only four men responded.22 Perhaps all the rest were drinking at the Stone Fort Saloon. That quartet of soldiers was badly outnumbered. The correspondent for the Dallas Morning News described what happened next: Tonight the crowd gathered near the jail as with one accord. Many wore masks and had guns. A large crowd from Appleby rode up. The jail keys could not be produced. A breach was made in to the jail, and the prisoner was dragged out amid deafening yells. A gallows was quickly erected in front of the courthouse of three pieces of scaffolding set up conelike with a block and tackle at the apex. A new grass rope was placed around his neck; his hands were tied and

Lynchings: A Grim Fact of Life

{ 63

then he was allowed to talk. He virtually confessed his guilt but tried to lay it on the other negro. He was pulled up and then his struggles and contortions as he choked to death were horrible to behold.23

Esseck White’s body lay dangling in the Nacogdoches square throughout the day and into the night so that country folks could come to town and view the spectacle. It wasn’t until the next morning that White’s body was cut down and buried a half mile away, down by the railroad tracks. Spradley had spirited away the other suspect, Amos Phillips, for safekeeping. That was probably fortunate, since, according to the Dallas Morning News, “Crowds of people came to town today and viewed the scenes and discussed the affair in all its bearings. Nobody here condemns it.” 24 The state militia arrived the next day, August 9, and found a town whose citizens apparently had calmed down, now that White was dead: Everybody wanted to make them feel good and to convince them that there was no need of their presence to suppress mobs or prevent a lynching. The young negro man, Amos Phillips, who had been arrested upon suspicion of participating with the lynched negro (White) in the night entrance into the room of the four young ladies at Appleby last Tuesday night, was instantly produced by Sheriff Spradley from his hiding place, which was Spradley’s own dwelling. No search had been made for him, nor had an effort to lynch him been made, and Justice Peevey could find nobody to file complaint against him. He was released and went off on the train with the soldiers.25

five years later, jim buchanan, a black man believed to be about nineteen years old, formerly of Waco—where he had been in some trouble with the law —was very much at risk of meeting the same fate as Esseck White: death at the hands of a frenzied mob seeking revenge.26

chapter eight

Populism and Race: An Incendiary Mix by 1902 the populism movement that ten years earlier had nearly swept the entrenched Democratic Party out of power in Texas was on its last legs. But its effects were far reaching, and in Nacogdoches County the issue of populist versus Democrat still bitterly divided the citizenry. Populism began as a farmers’ alliance movement in the 1880s and was an effort to obtain higher prices for crops (cotton, mainly); to reduce costs by regulating transportation monopolies, especially the railroads; and to more fairly redistribute wealth, land in particular. As one historian put it, “The old Alliance doctrine was summarized in the words, ‘Equal rights to all, special privileges to none.’” 1 At first the alliance movement was nonpolitical, in that the alliances did not back particular candidates en masse. Its members, being overwhelmingly white, voted Democratic, although there were separate black alliances, whose members did not share their white counterparts’ affection for that party. The alliance in the South excluded blacks from membership, but didn’t oppose a separate movement to organize black farmers into the Colored Farmers’ Alliance. That so-called mobilization of blacks began in central and eastern Texas in 1886, though the extent of cooperation between blacks and whites “took place within the limits of white supremacy,” as one writer put it.2 The Grange movement of the North and Midwest, which had finally come to Texas in the 1870s, was succeeded in turn by the Farmers’ Alliance clubs, which exploded across Texas in the 1880s. By 1887 the Houston Daily Post reported that “Nacogdoches has 32 alliance clubs, with a total membership of over 2,000.” 3 If that was true, nearly 10 percent of the county’s population belonged to one or another of the southern Farmers’ Alliances. Statewide, by 1891 the alliance had more than 200,000 members in about 4,000 clubs that met monthly. Farmers across Texas, like farmers elsewhere, faced tight money supplies, and this made it difficult to bor-

Populism and Race: An Incendiary Mix

{ 65

row. Texas at the time prohibited state banks, and federal restrictions on borrowing money against land made it difficult for Lone Star farmers to get loans to buy seed or survive a poor crop. In addition, railroads set freight charges at usurious rates, further exacerbating the economic woes of farmers.4 It was not surprising that the alliances and, subsequently, the People’s Party would flourish in Deep East Texas. As noted, Nacogdoches County and its neighbors had largely missed out on the economic expansion benefiting other parts of Texas: the railroads were late coming to town, and the red-clay soil and natural forests meant that most farms were modest in size. For example, the average-sized farm (in improved acres) in Nacogdoches County was 39.4 acres, just a shade under the amount in the famous homesteading slogan “Forty acres and a mule.” 5 As one historian of populism wrote, “It was the poor, small farmer then who constituted, together with thousands of his fellows, the rank and file of the People’s Party.” 6 Lord knows there were plenty of poor, small farmers in Deep East Texas. The alliances, at least to their way of thinking, worked honestly and vigorously with the Democratic Party to try to free up currency and to regulate transportation and communication systems (telephone and telegraph), but to no avail. Finally, the farmers had enough. John Hicks, one of the early historians of the populist movement, relates this lyrical screed from an 1887 North Carolina farm journal, summarizing the grievances of the small farmer: There is something radically wrong in our industrial system. There is a screw loose. The wheels have dropped out of balance. The railroads have never been so prosperous, and yet agriculture languishes. The banks have never done better or more profitable business, and yet agriculture languishes. Manufacturing enterprises never made more money or were in a more flourishing condition, and yet agriculture languishes. Towns and cities flourish and “boom” and grow and “boom,” and yet agriculture languishes. Salaries and fees were never so temptingly high and desirable, and yet agriculture languishes . . .7

In Texas by the following year, “talk of a new party was constantly in the air, and men found it more and more necessary to take sides on the question of the desirability of a new deal in politics.” 8 The first People’s Party convention in Texas, held in August 1891, was attended by a mere fifty delegates. The executive committee had sev-

66

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

enteen members, two of whom were black. By the following summer, the movement had exploded across the state: more than 1,000 delegates attended the 1892 convention, and 2,000 populist clubs spread “out into the hills and down into the valleys, preaching their new gospel of political salvation.” 9 Populists had one basic aim: equalizing economic opportunity. Its Texas backers supported regulating railroads; reserving state land for settlers; banning foreign ownership of property by corporations, except as strictly necessary for operational needs; the unlimited coinage of silver to loosen the money supply; an eight-hour day for public employees; and direct election of the president, U.S. senators, and federal judges. They backed term limits and debated but never endorsed women’s suffrage and prohibition.10

the people’s part y of nacogdoches count y held its convention on June 11, 1892, at the courthouse. B. A. Calhoun, who would win the election for state representative over his Democratic opponent, fired a few broadsides at the Democrats for their reluctance to advocate free silver and thus loosen up the money supply, for which he was met with loud applause.11 Bill Haltom, the Democratic editor of the weekly Nacogdoches Chronicle in 1892, dutifully recorded the lengthy minutes of the People’s Party county convention, an account that nearly filled four columns of small type. All but one of the county’s fourteen precincts was represented at the convention, though a single individual represented two precincts. A total of 135 white men were listed as being entitled to seats in the convention. The minutes confirm that five black delegates were seated, three from the hamlet of Looneyville in the northwest part of the county (Ike Shears, Kit Polk, and Peter Wade), and two from Shady Grove in eastern Nacogdoches County (H. E. Bell and A. D. Martin). The minutes recorded “that the colored people throughout the county have expressed a desire to act in concert in with us in restoring this government to the people to whom it rightfully belongs.” 12 Spradley, in office for ten years, lent his name and support to the third party, all but assuring its success. As one enthusiastic, if anonymous, farmer wrote in the summer of 1892, the veteran sheriff ’s popularity was widespread. He strongly urged the People’s Party to nominate Spradley for sheriff, writing:

Populism and Race: An Incendiary Mix

{ 67

I suggest the name of a man for sheriff that is no stranger to the people of Nacogdoches county, a man who is known from the Sabine to the Rio Grande as brave and fearless, who is feared and shunned by all lawless characters, which is a guarantee of safety to our property from the depredation of thieves and outlaws. A man who has broken up a clan of thieves in this county and checked crime of all kinds, which has caused our jail door to stand unlocked for the past four months. A man whose official record is without blemish; this man’s name is A. J. Spradley.13

in nacogdoches count y, voters in the 1892 general election enthusiastically welcomed this new gospel, electing People’s Party candidates to every countywide position. Spradley led the vote getters, outpolling all other candidates by a sizable margin. Nacogdoches County voters backed the Populist candidate for governor, T. L Nugent, by a margin of 56 percent to 44 percent over East Texas Democrat Jim Hogg. (Hogg won statewide, however.) W. A. Skillern, who years later would angrily denounce the People’s Party in a series of broadsides published in the Sentinel, ran for Congress as a Populist and beat Democrat S. B. Cooper in the county, but lost district-wide. (No People’s Party candidate from Texas was ever elected to Congress, though forty-eight Populists, primarily from the Midwest and Plains states, served in Congress from 1892 through 1902.)14 A plurality of Nacogdoches County voters even backed the People’s Party presidential electors.15 The Populists managed to elect members to five Texas legislatures from 1892 through 1900, reaching a peak of twenty seats in 1894. As mentioned before, the People’s Party had similar success in San Augustine County, where the Border-Wall feud erupted as a result. The political split between old-line Democrats and the Populists was even bitterer than the Democratic-Republican fissure, because the latter, at least in Deep East Texas, ran largely along racial lines. The divide between Democrats and Populists was between hardscrabble white farmers and, for the most part, merchants and the larger landowning farmers, both of whom remained staunchly Democratic. Stuck in the middle of Texas politics was a now moribund Republican Party. Black voters were being courted by both Democrats and Populists because in the early 1890s they still could cast ballots—a right that would, in practice, end for local and state elections a little more than a decade later, as Jim Crow laws were applied to the all-important party primaries.

68

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

That courtship of black voters in Nacogdoches County quickly spurred controversy and launched a feud between Spradley, the Populist sheriff, and Haltom, the staunchly southern Democratic editor—a dispute that by 1902 had lasted for more than a decade.

as mentioned, the political power and legal privileges that blacks briefly enjoyed during Reconstruction quickly disappeared once Union soldiers left the South, and the Democratic Party gained power with the defeat of Republican Reconstruction governor E. J. Davis in 1873. Populists, at least in the early days of the People’s Party movement, first went over the heads of the established leaders, largely Republican, and sought to convert the Negroes themselves, make them good Populists by conviction, fire them with the zeal they themselves felt for the common cause, integrate them thoroughly with the party, and give them a sense of belonging and tangible evidence that they did belong.16

Or as one Texas Populist put it, “They are in the ditch just like we are.” 17 Since whites constituted the vast majority of voters in Nacogdoches and San Augustine counties—the two hotbeds of populism in Deep East Texas—People’s Party leaders there knew it was incumbent upon them to attract black voters in order to win local elections, since they did not control enough of the white vote. The People’s Party in Nacogdoches County started a weekly newspaper in late 1893 to push its agenda. The People’s Journal, published on Fridays, was a predecessor to Spradley’s Plaindealer. R. Lee Brown is listed as editor of this thoroughly political journal, which excoriated President Grover Cleveland and his opposition to free silver. The two extant issues of the People’s Journal, both from 1894, devoted at least two columns of type to Populist campaign songs, such as “The People’s Party Band”: Come all ye Texas patriots and listen to my song About the coming conflict, I won’t detain you long; The people are concentrating, to maintain our equal rights; The clans are marching to the front, all eager for the fight. chorus: Wait for the wagon. The people’s party wagon! Hop into our band wagon, and we’ll all take a ride. From the wheatfields of our widespread plains, to the Gulf of Mexico,

Populism and Race: An Incendiary Mix

{ 69

And from the Sabine river to the Rio Grandio; In the southern balmy breezes, our colors proudly wave; O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave. chorus: Wait for the wagon. The people’s party wagon! Hop into our band wagon, and we’ll all take a ride.18

The song drags on for an excruciating seven additional verses. There is no record that it was actually performed anywhere. While populist newspapers such as the People’s Journal and the Plaindealer were outnumbered six to one by Democratic papers, it has been estimated that more than 100 populist weeklies were being published across Texas by the mid-1890s.19 Spradley actively courted the black vote, and caused considerable controversy in October 1894 when he proposed to place five blacks in a jury pool. He decided to do so, the Populist sheriff announced, to test if the Democratic Party “was willing to give the negro his rights.” 20 His proposal immediately stirred outrage from white Democrats, not just locally but across the state. Under the headline “Color Line In Politics,” the Galveston Daily News reported, “This county (Nacogdoches) is in a political broil, the strife being between the populists and democrats as to who can capture the colored votes, which are the pivotal power in the coming election.” 21 J. P. Ross, chairman of the Democratic executive committee in Nacogdoches, widely circulated a letter he wrote to county judge H. F. Dunson, who was chairman of the county People’s Party. He announced that the Democrats were inalterably opposed to blacks serving on juries and challenged Dunson and his fellow candidates to publicly state whether they agreed with Spradley’s attempt to seat black jurors. There is no record of any response from Dunson. Perhaps Spradley’s proposal was a genuine effort to involve black citizens in the judicial process. The weekly newspaper he had founded that year, the Plaindealer, was notably more likely to provide positive coverage of blacks than its competitor, the News-Chronicle, edited by Haltom. But Democrats and their backers in the press labeled it a bald-faced attempt to secure the black vote through trickery. In nearby Jacksonville (about forty miles north) the Democratic editor provided his rather doubtful interpretation, which was that no rational southern white man would really favor allowing blacks to hold any type of political power. Editor J. E. McFarland claimed that Spradley expected

70

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

the Democratic lawyers to refuse to accept the blacks as jury members, and thus “furnish a text for the Populists to secure the negro vote, and apparently establish a principle, and this with no cost to the Populists.” 22 District Attorney W. M. Imboden didn’t fall for the trap, McFarland wrote. He accepted the four blacks whose names were drawn from the pool: Mr. Imboden’s intention was to allow the Negroes to sit on the jury. He knew that the white men, Democrats, would pay their fines and go to jail, if it became necessary, but he doubted the necessity, before they would sit with the colored men. He also knew that the Populists whose names were in the jury box would likewise submit to fine or imprisonment before serving with Negroes, BECAUSE THEY SAID SO. Mr. Imboden thus would force the Populists in the most possible way to declare their true position. If they served with the negroes they would lose the vote of every respectable white man in their party. If they refused to sit, as they said they would, they would lose the negro vote.23

As it turned out, the other lawyers objected, and the blacks did not serve. A mass meeting of black voters was held at the courthouse a few days later, on October 21, 1894. The group endorsed the People’s Party and, in a twisted irony of nineteenth-century racial politics, praised both Spradley and Imboden, who were both present, for supporting the right of blacks to serve on juries. Spradley interrupted chairman T. J. Fields to say that Imboden, who was a member of the People’s Party, had something he wished to say.24 Imboden set the unwary black voters straight in a hurry, saying he had never intended to allow a black to serve on a jury. As the Jacksonville editor put it, Imboden “told them that this is a white man’s country, and the white man will always rule it. No matter how intelligent the negro may be, he will never be called to serve by white men. . . . Any white man’s party that promised them equal privileges with the whites was deceiving them, and they would learn it.” 25 As the Galveston writer put it, “this caused them to drop [Imboden] like a hot brick.” Spradley agreed with the black voters’ sentiments, saying that “they should not vote for a man who said he didn’t want their votes.” 26

blacks did serve on juries in some texas counties where Populists or, in a few cases, Republicans held office.27 In Grimes

Populism and Race: An Incendiary Mix

{ 71

County, about 150 miles southwest of Nacogdoches County, a similar Populist movement had also achieved electoral success by courting blacks, who composed a bare majority of voters and had held on to some political power since Reconstruction. In 1882, for example, a black man by the name of Jim Kennard was elected district clerk, beginning what one historian termed “an interracial coalition that endured throughout the years of propagandizing in Texas by the increasingly radical Farmers Alliance and through the ensuing period of the People’s Party.” 28 By the late 1890s in Grimes County, blacks not only served on juries but also worked as sheriff ’s deputies, hired by longtime sheriff Garrett Scott, who in many ways mirrored Spradley’s transformation from traditional southern Democrat to agrarian radical. The agrarian reforms espoused by the Farmers’ Alliance and its succeeding political arm, the People’s Party, struck a chord in Grimes County not only with blacks, but also with white farmers unable to get ahead because of tight money and low crop prices. The coalition of poor whites and blacks managed to hold political power until the late 1890s, when Democrats formed a White Man’s Union and, through violence and intimidation, managed to break the coalition and eventually completely end black participation in electoral politics in Grimes County for a half century.29

spradley ’s support among blacks was reinforced when John B. Raymer came to town in September 1894 to stump for the sheriff and other local People’s Party candidates. Raymer was the preeminent leader of black populists, a transplanted North Carolina resident whose family had a long history of political dissent from the majority. His white father, Kenneth, was a prominent planter who served for two decades in the North Carolina legislature and three terms in Congress as a Whig. After being defeated for a Senate seat, Kenneth Raymer became a leader of the Know-Nothing Party, which, with its antislavery, anti-immigration, and anti-Catholic platform, appeared poised for a few years in the 1850s to become a viable alternative to the Democratic Party. John B. Raymer’s mother, Mary Ricks, a slave on Raymer’s plantation, gave birth to her son in 1850. The elder Raymer acknowledged his paternity of Ricks’s son, and reared him among his white half-siblings.30 Although John Raymer appears to have lost contact with his father after the end of the Civil War, he inherited his political activism, skill at public oratory, and devotion to republican ideals. Raymer moved to

72

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

Texas in 1880, after working in North Carolina as a recruiter for a plantation owner in Robertson County, in Central Texas. After a time, Raymer joined the upwards of 1,000 black laborers who, family tradition maintains, he had persuaded to leave North Carolina for Texas.31 As the latest biographer of Kenneth and John Raymer observed, both father and son challenged the South’s old order. The effort had largely broken Kenneth Raymer, who toiled in obscurity as a minor Washington functionary after the war. John Raymer, in his new Texas home, faced similar challenges, though the high percentage of blacks, along with a vocal group of anti–Democratic Party whites, in Robertson County made that place somewhat of an anomaly in Texas—and an excellent base of operations for the considerable ambitions of John Raymer.32 Raymer began to gain prominence in Texas politics during the first prohibition referendum in 1887, when he shrewdly realized that blacks could gain a measure of power by voting as a bloc in favor of banning booze from the state. Since prohibition at the time was opposed by the Democratic Party, the success of the measure would have the twofold purpose of advancing temperance and seriously injuring the Democrats, who opposed at every turn blacks’ gaining any measure of political or economic power. Raymer helped organize black churches and their ministers to turn out the vote for temperance, even though he was a former liquor store operator. But his attempt to deliver the black vote failed, partly because other black leaders objected to prohibition as a further curtailment of personal freedom and didn’t necessarily take Raymer’s long-range view that the issue was an ideal way to cripple the Bourbon Democrats. (So named after the French royal family whose antics spurred the French Revolution, not the whiskey they hoped to keep legally flowing.) Prohibition failed miserably, and Raymer withdrew from politics in the late 1880s, when Texas and much of the rest of the nation suffered through a drought and a depression that helped spur the populist movement.33 As biographer Gregg Cantrell noted: Texas was experiencing some of the hardest economic times in the state’s history. The years from 1885 to 1887 had witnessed the most severe drought in anyone’s memory. The price of cotton had sunk to 8.6 cents a pound, and farmers found themselves more deeply ensnared in the crop lien system with each passing year. As bleak as prospects looked for white farmers, blacks’ prospects seemed even dimmer. The majority of

Populism and Race: An Incendiary Mix

{ 73

adult black racial attitudes on the part of whites accompanied the deepening agricultural depression.34

When the Populists convened in Texas for the first time in 1892 to select a field of candidates, Raymer was already working for the party, trying to persuade blacks in Robertson and neighboring counties to abandon the Republican Party. The party’s high hopes of statewide success that year were dashed when the results came in, though Populists fared well in Nacogdoches County and picked up eight seats in the legislature. But the party’s leaders were convinced that 1894 would be the watershed year: The black Populists of Texas left the 1894 convention with higher spirits than ever before. A Democratic defeat at the hands of the Populists would not mean sudden equality for blacks; no one, black or white, pretended that it would. But it would mean the defeat of the South’s most unequivocal champions of white supremacy and the accession to power of men who seemed honestly committed to improving the plight of the working poor.35

Raymer became a full-time People’s Party speaker, often billed as the “Silver-Tongued Orator of the Colored Race.” 36 Raymer brought his silver tongue to Deep East Texas in the late summer of 1894 to stump for Spradley. He had already made a number of speeches throughout the region, even venturing into the uncharted territory of North Texas before returning to the more familiar climes of the Piney Woods as summer drew to a close. As he reported in the Dallas-based Southern Mercury, published by the Farmers State Alliance Company: I have just finished a most glorious and successful canvass in the counties of Nacogdoches and San Augustine. The people in those two counties are patriotic and brave, and even the democrats are learning to be tolerant and considerate, for I broke up the democracy in these two counties, and painted despair on the cheeks of the county candidates. Not an unkind word was said to me in those two counties. The best sheriff in Texas is A. J. Spradly [sic] of Nacogdoches county; he is a full-fledged populist; brave as a lion, and as kind hearted as a woman.37

as the election approached in nacogdoches count y , feelings ran high. Spradley, seeking his seventh term, worked hard, “writ-

74

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

ing circulars to catch votes from every possible source.” 38 And, at least according to the correspondent for the Galveston Daily News, there was genuine concern that serious trouble might erupt: There are two sentiments figuring in the contest that distress good citizens, namely prejudices stirred up between the blacks and whites, and between farmers and town people. Fears are entertained by some that these antagonistic feelings may lead to serious trouble and injure the good name of the county. Thoughtless and inconsiderate agitators are liable to run into extremes and lead to clashes of races and classes.39

Spradley sent a letter to the Dallas Morning News that was published on October 28, 1894. It contained a rather convoluted explanation of the machinations involved in his decision to try to place blacks in a jury pool. As the election approached, Spradley claimed, Democrats supposedly began telling blacks that the party had passed a law allowing them to sit on juries, but since the party was out of power, it couldn’t enforce the law. The implication was that if the Democratic Party were put back in power, blacks could serve on juries. The wily campaigner decided to put that theory to the test: I wanted to see if it was a good law and if the democrats were sincere or fooling the negroes, and to test the practicability of them serving on the juries I summoned five educated, sober, well-qualified negroes on the regular panel of thirty-six jurors, and when I did so the democrats proved to the world that they were trying to deceive the negroes to catch their votes.40

on the eve of the 1894 general election, the people’s Party was still confident of victory once again in Nacogdoches County. One local politico wrote in the Southern Mercury, “Say to the boys in the fork of the creek that old Nacogdoches will roll up a 1,000 majority for T. C. Nugent and will elect every officer in the county.” 41 The prediction was dead wrong. Nugent, the People’s Party candidate for governor, indeed defeated the Democratic candidate in Nacogdoches County—by two votes. It appears that Spradley’s attempt to place blacks in the jury pool, for whatever reason, backfired badly. The local Populists were swept out of office in the general election a few days later; every local race was split nearly 50 –50, but the “pops” lost every single one. Spradley lost his first election ever, the pain no doubt compounded by the

Populism and Race: An Incendiary Mix

{ 75

fact that it was to his brother, Mat, running as a Democrat; the margin was 36 votes—1,706 to 1,670. County judge H. L. Dunson, a Populist, was ousted by the Democratic nominee, J. L. M. Pirtle, by 95 votes. And newspaper editor Bill Haltom, as fierce a Democrat as lived west of the Sabine River, slipped into the district clerk’s office, beating the Populist incumbent, Z. C. Vaught, 1,740 to 1,692. For the next two years, the tables were turned. Spradley would return to private life, making a living by farming, running a saloon, and editing a newspaper, while Haltom would hold elective office and edit a competing newspaper on the side. McFarland, the Jacksonville editor, bragged that: Victory was wrested from a foe as confident of the result as Napoleon before the opening guns of Waterloo. Nacogdoches county, whose history and traditions are all Democratic, had without any good reason got out of the party gear.42

Victory had been achieved, he claimed, by “exposing the errors and delusions of Populism.” But victory was short-lived. The People’s Party in Nacogdoches County roared back in 1896, as local voters backed all the statewide third-party candidates (none of whom were actually elected). And Populists once again took over the Nacogdoches County courthouse, from county judge down to sheriff, an office that A. J. Spradley—that “perennial officeseeker,” as Bill Haltom sneeringly referred to him—retook by beating his brother Mat by more than 200 votes. As for Haltom, he lost the district clerk’s position by roughly the same margin to the People’s Party candidate, which no doubt was a bitter pill to swallow — especially since Spradley’s Plaindealer had confounded most predictions and survived, if not exactly thrived, two years after beginning publication. In late September, a few weeks before the 1896 election, Spradley beat back rumors that the Plaindealer was about to suspend publication, after an issue came out two days late because the press had broken down: We have heard it is circulated that the paper has been suspended, and we have returned to the democratic party. There is no probability of the paper suspending, as there is no reason why it should, regardless of what the result of that election may be. It is possible that we may go crazy or commit suicide, but one thing is sure, we will never return to the democratic party until it returns to democratic principles.43

76

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

Spradley would remain a Populist until 1906, long after the party was played out as a political force in Texas.44 Between 1896 and 1902 —the year Jim Buchanan was arrested for murder—his and Haltom’s political rivalry and visceral dislike for each other would result in a number of angry, even potentially violent confrontations.

chapter nine

The SpradleyHaltom Feud sheriff a. j. spradley and editor bill haltom had been sniping at each other for at least a decade by the time of the Hicks murders in 1902. The differences between these two headstrong men stemmed primarily from their political rivalry. Spradley was a confirmed Populist and Haltom a staunch Democrat. But after Spradley established the Plaindealer to compete first with Haltom’s Chronicle and then the Daily Sentinel, those differences became personal. In 1892 James H. Haltom Sr. ran for sheriff against John Rusk in the Democratic Party primary, the winner to face Spradley, who had switched to the Populist Party that year, in the general election. Haltom was likely an uncle of Bill Haltom’s. Meanwhile, Bill Haltom was running for reelection as justice of the peace for Precinct 1. Neither Haltom won, since the Populists swept nearly all the county positions.1 When Spradley took to populism, he did so with a fervor that for all intents and purposes outlasted the movement itself. He attended the county convention held on Saturday, June 11, 1892, at the courthouse. Spradley had a letter published in the Nacogdoches Star-News, a competing weekly to Haltom’s Chronicle. The letter, under the headline “An Explanation,” succinctly outlined why the sheriff, after ten years as an elected Democrat, was switching parties: I have long since recognized the depressed condition of the laboring people, and hearing their meritorious demands and seemingly no relief promised from either of the old parties I had fully and deliberately promised my undivided support to the people’s party. There has been a rumor originated from some source I know not, and on last Saturday, a report came to me that the People’s Party regarded me as a traitor and a wolf in sheep’s clothing, smarting with indignation and a spirit of revenge I announced that I would not support their party longer but would support the Democratic ticket, but after I had walked into the trap, I saw that it

78

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

was a deep laid scheme for me to renounce the people’s party, and when I saw the trick it has bound me to the people’s party stronger than the strength of a thousand chains. I am far from wanting to stir up discord among the people, but we have a great battle to fight in defense of our homes. We have against us the combined capital of the county, and the lawyer, the doctor and even the school teachers their burden is light and their wages good. It behooves us people to rally together and help each other fight the battle. Stand as brothers and let the party bury its dead. There must be discipline in all successful battles. We must have it in ours, and on the first Tuesday in November the lightning will flash and the thunder will roar and there will be one grand march to the ballot box. The battle will be fought and our victory won. a. j. spradley 2

The editor of the Star-News, a Democrat by the name of T. J. Carraway, felt compelled to respond. After all, the county’s leading vote getter for the past decade was joining the breakaway movement, which was actively courting black votes, and had even named five black delegates to the county convention—anathema to most white Democrats. He wrote, in part: Never in the history of our country has the democratic party been in the presence of such danger as confronts us. Wrestlessness [sic], bitterness, all the evils incident to class prejudice stand out as danger signals, warning us to be careful how we proceed and to be fair in all we do. Many of our best citizens are leaving the democratic party and enlisting themselves in the third party. Everything that increases or intensifies the bitterness of disappointment adds strength to the class prejudice that is causing so much turbulence in our ranks. Let white-winged peace widen the halo of sweet contentment.3

Just above Spradley’s announcement that he was sticking with the People’s Party in 1892 was a notice that the executive committee of the Nacogdoches County Democratic Party for the next two years had been elected at the county convention. The minutes were recorded by Bill Haltom, secretary. Haltom dismissed the notion that local black voters would levitate to the People’s Party, writing that:

The Spradley-Haltom Feud

{ 79

The colored wing of the republican party in Texas is now pretty thoroughly organized and those who are counting on them to help strengthen the people’s party are reckoning too previously. The negroes will support their own ticket more solidly than usual, for they believe now is their time to strike while the white people are splitting the democratic party.4

Haltom was proven wrong, of course, as black votes certainly helped propel the People’s Party over the top in Nacogdoches County.

spradley was one of the most famous sheriffs in texas because of his investigative abilities, and he had held office for more than a decade because of strong support from both whites and blacks. And although his willingness to grant political power to blacks was rare in the South, he was not alone. In Grimes County, 150 miles southwest of Nacogdoches County, Garrett Scott also had become radicalized by the plight of most farmers, including those in his family. He was first elected sheriff on the Independent Greenback ticket in 1882 —the same year Spradley first took office as a Democrat, backed by an interracial coalition that would keep him in office for nearly two decades.5 Scott briefly returned to the Democratic Party after the collapse of the Greenbackers, but enthusiastically joined with other Grimes County farmers in forming the People’s Party in 1892. Grimes County at the time was majority black, though just barely. As a result, blacks had held political office there since Reconstruction—unlike the blacks of Nacogdoches County, who had never won an election. Scott even went so far as to hire black deputies. It would take nearly a decade, but the resentment of white Democrats in Grimes County eventually resulted in formation of the White Man’s Union, which began conducting a campaign of terror against People’s Party leaders, both black and white. That campaign ended in 1900 with an all-out assault on the sheriff and his allies, during which Scott was seriously wounded, his brother killed, and several black Populist leaders also slain. Blacks began to leave Grimes County in droves, and those who stayed knew better than to dabble in politics.6 spradley may have been as fierce an adherent of populism as his counterpart in Grimes County, but he was considerably more circumspect about whether blacks should exercise political power beyond voting and, possibly, serving on juries. His nemesis, editor Haltom, was a consistent foe of lynching and other overtly racist measures, but was

80

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

unalterably opposed to blacks having any type of political power—an area in which he and Spradley sharply differed. As one of Spradley’s biographers put it, unlike many of his Populist counterparts elsewhere, the sheriff didn’t attempt to bully blacks into voting for the People’s Party candidates. The Nacogdoches Party, on the other hand, went out of its way to recruit the Negro by demonstrations of friendship. This is shown as much by the racial slurs cast on the Populists by the Democrats (for example, the vilification of a prominent Populist for publicly shaking hands with a Negro) as by Spradley’s calling Negroes for jury duty in the face of statewide condemnation. It is also borne out by the fact that Nacogdoches Negroes felt that Spradley was fair with them, and they did not fear to go to him when they were victimized by white criminals.7

Bill Haltom was a far more typical white southerner. Quite often in his commentaries he distinguished between negroes and “niggers,” the latter term reserved for blacks accused of breaking the law or otherwise acting badly. He firmly held to the sentiment, common among white southerners, that blacks were far more prone to commit criminal acts, once writing that the reason there were more executions in the South than in the North was “on account of a large negro population and its proclivity to crime.” 8 Like other Southern editors, Haltom decried lynching while at the same time writing that he understood how the passion of a mob could be inflamed by the depredations of black criminals. He once chided the courts for fining black “pistol toters” the maximum fine of $100 while usually letting off white miscreants with a $1 fine: “It is perfectly right and legal to give the pistol toter the full penalty of the law for his offense, but the color of his skin should not save the equally guilty white man.” 9 But when it came to allowing blacks to vote, Haltom was an unflinching foe, praising the passage of Jim Crow laws that began sweeping the country at the turn of the century and resulted in the exclusion of blacks from the Democratic primary: The experiment of negro suffrage in the South has failed so singlely [sic] and was such an unqualified crime against civilization from the start that even in the north the fact is now recognized that the southern states must protect themselves against it by constitutional amendment.10

The Spradley-Haltom Feud

{ 81

In one anecdote, Haltom managed to insult both local blacks and Populists, under the heading “Took the Populist Oath”: A tale is current that a few days ago two darkies out in Pine Knot neighborhood got into a lawsuit about something, and the one who lost the case appealed it to the county court. He was the plaintiff in the court below and being unable to give bond had taken the pauper’s oath. The other negro complained of this and told some of the court house officials that there was no use in trying to beat that other negro as he had gone and taken the “populist oath” and wouldn’t have to pay anything even if he was beaten. The negro said it beat anything he ever heard of that a democrat would be mean enough to sue a fellow and take the “populist oath” to keep from paying the costs.11

as noted, spradley established the p l a i n d e a l e r in 1894, and two years later was filling its sheets with harsh criticisms of Democrats: Those blood sucking free silver democratic leaders are smart, it is true, but their smartness won’t compare with their effrontery. They stole part of the Populist platform in the state. They confused and crippled the Populist ticket, and last week they invaded the republican state convention and tried to stampede them but had the cold shoulder turned to them. . . . The democrats were at the republican state convention in great shape trying to get the republicans to fuse with them on the state ticket. They had quite a number of colored men who pretended to be republicans, but in fact were there as hirelings of the democrats. They got the marble heart.12

In 1898 Spradley prepared to leave office after being defeated by W. J. Campbell, commonly called “the gunless sheriff ” because he refused to carry a firearm. Spradley was fighting charges made by Campbell and Haltom that he had stolen money from the county, writing sarcastically that “The Plaindealer is quietly awaiting the efforts of the new administration to recover those ‘six thousand dollars’ alleged to have been stolen by Spradley. Yes, we are. When you see those suits filed you can confidently look for the end of the world a few days later.” 13 There is no record of any suits being filed to recover stolen money. In the same issue, Spradley reprinted a lengthy screed originally pub-

82

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

lished in the News-Chronicle (Haltom had merged with the weekly News some time earlier). In part, Haltom had written of his adversary’s newspaper: The audacity of the Plaindealer had raised a stench that smelled to high heaven, unsettled the equilibrium of the elements, busted into the . . . bellied buzzard and cut a hole in the sky. . . . That as a reveler in filth, it simply out Herrods Herrod [sic]. That it slings its slime so far that it misled the Cario [sic] crows, and although its loads are fired at the private citizens of its home city; and although the vultures could hear it and smell it, they really could not see it in that light, as the owl said to the bat. They would smell it but they “couldn’t see it,” and its scandalous load has evidently missed the whole earth and bespattered the walls of Jericho or the walls of San Augustine, where a thousand copies of the scandalmonger go.14

Haltom vented his spleen ad nauseam and filled nearly a full column of newsprint. In full dudgeon, he wrote there was “nothing on land or sea half so rotten as The Plaindealer.” Spradley duly reprinted Haltom’s rantings and simply replied, “The Plaindealer observes with regret that the News-Chronicle means to continue as the organ of the buzzards. The editor thereof only lacks the wings to be one of them.” 15 The election of 1898 was a pitched battle in Nacogdoches County between the Democrats and Populists. As mentioned previously, a huge uproar over Spradley’s having chosen blacks for the jury pool had garnered statewide attention and apparently contributed to his defeat four years earlier by his brother Mat. Spradley came back to win two years later, and almost certainly worked successfully to get Haltom defeated when the editor sought reelection as district clerk. By 1898 the tide had shifted slightly in the county, and Democrats managed to win all the countywide races, albeit by narrow margins. Two years later, in 1900, Spradley once again roared back to regain the sheriff ’s office. Before Spradley could be sworn in, Haltom, obviously bitter that he had been defeated in yet another election bid—this time for state representative— questioned whether Spradley could legally take office. To make matters even more embarrassing, Haltom had been defeated by People’s Party nominee B. A. Calhoun of Nacogdoches, who would be the sole—and last—Populist member of the Texas Legislature when the 1901 legislative session convened.16

The Spradley-Haltom Feud

{ 83

No doubt piqued by Spradley’s success and his own defeat at the polls, which Haltom admitted blaming on the sheriff, the editor revealed for the first time in print what probably almost everybody in town already knew. Just before the election of 1898, the sheriff had challenged Haltom to a duel: On a certain occasion previous to the election in 1898, A. J. Spradley did challenge me to fight a duel. Such report is true. Without referring to the date at this time it is sufficient to say that I was on my way home from my office on Friday evening. It was about dusk, and I came down South Fredonia street. . . . I met A. J. Spradley a few steps from the corner of Henning’s yard. He told me he wished to talk to me. I told him all right, to go ahead. He then declared he had rather die than be branded as a coward, and that as I seemed persistent in my efforts to make a personal matter of the campaign then in progress, he proposed that we settle the matter then and there. He then opened his coat and displaying two large pistols, said he would lay them both on the ground, that I could take one and he the other and we would step out on the vacant lot near the creek and shoot it out. It was a plain and simple challenge to deadly combat, and I declined to accept his proposition. It is also a fact that on Sunday morning about the same time Mr. Spradley challenged Capt. J. W. Ireson to get a gun and meet him down on the Banita bayou to engage in deadly combat.17

Haltom claimed a high-minded purpose in reminding readers about the challenge from Spradley to end their animosity at thirty paces, a claim no doubt met with skepticism by anyone who knew of the long-standing feud between the two men. He quoted from the Texas Constitution a provision in the oath of office: And I do solemnly swear that since the adoption of the constitution of this State, I, being a citizen of this State, have not fought a duel with deadly weapons within this State nor out of it. Nor have I sent or accepted a challenge to fight a duel, nor have I acted as a second in carrying a challenge or aided, advised or assisted any person thus offending, etc. . . .18

It was his duty, Haltom wrote, to bring this ugly matter to the public’s attention: “When a man violates a constitutional provision, plain in its

84

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

intent and purpose, his act, however malicious, ceases to be a personal affair and becomes the concern of the entire state, without reference to any particular county or locality.” Although there is no record that Spradley denied he had indeed challenged the editor to a duel, nothing ever came of Haltom’s last-ditch attempt to bar Spradley from taking office.

the fact that nacogdoches count y remained one of the last bastions of populism in Texas no doubt grated on Haltom. The Plaindealer (though Spradley had sold his interest and was no longer officially associated with the paper) remained a People’s Party organ and a staunch backer of the Farmers’ Alliance, which had spawned that political party. As the election neared, the vitriolic rhetoric in the two papers increased to fever pitch. Haltom, perhaps realizing that he was about to lose his own election, became even nastier: We have got the editor of the Platedealer [Haltom’s sarcastic nickname for his competitor] in the hip and the first he knows we will give him a trip that will break his neck. He is so far at sea in a decent controversy that he can’t touch top, side, nor bottom and the very best he can do is to squirt nastiness through his teeth. If we had maintained our self respect as we ought to have done, we would not take notice of such vermin.19

A week later, on September 26, 1900, Haltom published a circular from W. A. Skillern, who had been one of the major forces in the People’s Party in Nacogdoches County from its inception. Skillern ran for state senator on the People’s Party banner in 1892, the first year the party entered politics, and at least in Nacogdoches County, easily outpolled his Democratic opponent, though he lost district-wide. But eight years later Skillern was a bitter old man, and claimed to have been bilked out of money by a party run by people willing to commit fraud and any manner of chicanery to win an election. His “Open Letter No. 3,” filling nearly an entire tabloid page, was rancorous in the extreme. Skillern claimed that he had given $1,000 to the People’s Party in 1894 because he had been promised the party’s nomination to Congress, which was not forthcoming. He further claimed that Henry C. Fuller, the newspaper writer who later served as Spradley’s biographer, won the nomination that year but withdrew when he learned of the fraud committed on his behalf. For example, Skillern claimed, black voters were told to

The Spradley-Haltom Feud

{ 85

vote only for Fuller, and no primary election was held in Chireno because People’s Party leaders knew Skillern would fare well there. Skillern averred, “I shall ever contend that I have been robbed through false and deceptive pledges made me by the party,” a contention with which Haltom agreed.20 As Haltom wrote: The Populist Party in this county from its inception to this good hour has been dominated by a clique of tricksters who have not only been ready and willing to stab and butcher one another, but have in addition thereto used the Alliance as the great cloak for their mischief, and the closet in which to hide their bony skeleton of discord and deception.21

Haltom was a former member of the Farmer’s Alliance. He claimed to have broken ranks with it over the issue of forming a third party; according to the Plaindealer editor, he had been tossed out when he found that he couldn’t use the alliance to advance his own political career. Haltom concluded, “The Alliance in Nacogdoches county is strictly a third party institution and is being rode to death by chronic place hunters.” 22 And of the people Haltom labeled “chronic place hunters,” Spradley topped the list.

by early 1902, the campaign cycle was about to begin anew, and the war between Democrats and Populists, embodied in large part by Haltom and Spradley, continued unabated. In February, as candidates began throwing their hats in the ring and the biennial skirmishing for political advantage began in the local newspapers, Haltom issued a “Warning to Democratic Candidates.” He said that any prospective Democratic office seeker who was so presumptuous as to announce his candidacy in the Plaindealer was “either a very sorry democrat or a darn fool.” He warned that reports of the demise of the local People’s Party were indeed premature: “There is nothing on earth as smart as a Nacogdoches county Populist, and one of their boldest diplomatic strokes is to employ a democrat to edit their organ.” 23 Haltom’s warnings notwithstanding, by 1902 the Populist movement in Texas was on life support. Nacogdoches County was one of the few places left where there were any viable candidates, and the Populists there hatched a plot to run under an “independent” party moniker and not under the People’s Party banner. This infuriated Haltom to no end,

86

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

and he spent the next several months fulminating against the “perennial office seekers,” Spradley and Calhoun in particular. He wrote, probably correctly: The populists have not the slightest hope of electing but two men, and they are afraid to run them on the straight populist ticket. This is what brings on this talk of an independent ticket. But the independent ticket will only serve as the pedestal from which they will see their idols fall next November.24

The politicos formerly known as Populists met in early June, as reported sarcastically by Haltom, who called the new party “a church that would take in all creeds—and, admitting the futility of the losing name, Populist, they bade it a fond farewell.” 25 A few weeks later Haltom, tongue firmly in cheek, denied he was making fun of Populists for trying to drum up supporters under the guise of an independent ticket, writing, “those fellows who are trying to whip them into a partisan move by discarding their party’s name and taking up an alias, yet organizing with precisely the same old crowd of Populists and the same old set of chronic officeseekers, are making themselves so ridiculous that we have to indulge in a little levity.” 26 Since the leaders of the new independent movement were the same folks who had been active in the People’s Party from its local inception a decade earlier, he likely had a point. The “Independent Citizens Ticket” held its primary on August 2, 1902; Calhoun, the incumbent state representative, and Spradley, the incumbent sheriff seeking election once again, led the ticket. Compared to the Democratic primary, the vote was light: around 525 men cast ballots. (More than 3,600 would vote in the November general election.) Haltom made fun of what he claimed was the excuse used by the Populist leaders to explain the light turnout, that “there was no whiskey used and no effort made to buy votes. Not a very brilliant compliment to those who did not vote but are claimed as the Populist and independent element.” 27 Haltom and the Plaindealer editor, A. F. Henning, kept up their sniping at each other throughout the summer and the rest of the fall. Haltom wrote, as the election neared, “The ‘independents’ didn’t have enough confidence in the people’s party to make another race under it’s [sic] banner. That’s why they came out on a ‘mongrel’ ticket. All manly populists ought to resent the insult.” 28

The Spradley-Haltom Feud

{ 87

When Haltom complained because none of the independent candidates (the same ones he called “mongrels”) would advertise in the Daily Sentinel, Henning retorted, “A little less hoggishness on the part of our contemporary in this case at least would have been more profitable all round.” Haltom printed Henning’s complaint verbatim and testily replied that “The Plaindealer is more completely under the thumbs of its bosses than ever, notwithstanding its boast of independence.” 29 Now it was mid-October of 1902. Once again Spradley—presumably still one of the Plaindealer’s “bosses”—and Haltom girded for political battle. With an election just a few weeks away, there now was the added wrinkle of a high-profile murder suspect whose whereabouts were unknown, and a controversial sheriff being assisted by a gunman turned lawman.

chapter ten

Buchanan Confesses in Shreveport I killed the old man first. I shot him. He never woke up. Then I shot the old woman. She woke up and I had to shoot her again. She fought me and I had to hit her on the head with the butt of her gun. Then the daughter came in but tried to run and I then clubbed her to death. I hit her a number of times and her brains were all over the floor. I did not outrage her. After they were dead I went out into the yard and took a sheet off the fence and covered up the bodies. Then I went into the woods. I stole the gun I shot the white people with. I killed them because they hurt the feelings of a friend of mine. I wanted to be called a bad nigger, a desperado. confession of jim buchanan in the s h r e v e p o rt t i m e s , october 15, 1902

October 14, 1902 sentinel editor bill haltom was furious. Unconfirmed reports ran rampant as to the whereabouts of Jim Buchanan, the accused killer of the Hicks family: he was in the Rusk prison, he had barely escaped a howling mob in Tenaha, he had been seen in Appleby. As it turned out, there was some truth to all of these reports. But Sheriff A. J. Spradley was nowhere to be found. The Daily Sentinel was an afternoon paper, which meant that by late morning Haltom had no choice but to go to press with what little news he had to fill his modest four-page sheet. Most of the newspaper’s day-today content consisted of display ads and filler advertisements— disguised as stories—attesting to the efficacy of various patent medicines. There were no wire reports of news elsewhere because Haltom couldn’t afford to subscribe to the Associated Press. Haltom relied heavily on the “exchange” papers from other Texas towns to provide his readers with news of the outside world, albeit several days late. Running a daily newspaper in a tiny town was backbreaking work, a

Buchanan Confesses in Shreveport

{ 89

never-ending cycle of setting type (picking up a single character at a time and placing it in a wooden frame), running a balky press, dealing with unhappy readers, trying to cadge cash from both advertisers and subscribers—all the while attempting to hold on to printers and typesetters prone to go on drunken benders and disappear for days at a time. Haltom wasn’t shy about complaining about the hardships of running a small-town daily newspaper in a town that wasn’t exactly booming. In June 1902 he ominously announced, after a spate of typographical errors had slipped into the newspaper: “There hasn’t been a killing in the office yet, but the editor is still on the warpath.” 1 A few years earlier he had complained that the newspaper had expanded the number of pages published daily, but a proportional increase in revenue had not been forthcoming: “It was suggested that The Daily Sentinel would get more advertising if it would enlarge. We have made it larger. Where are the ads?” 2 By 1902 Haltom had had more than two decades of newspaper experience, but it had all been at weeklies. Running a daily that published Monday through Saturday was a far more expensive, and riskier, financial proposition. By 1902 Haltom and his younger brother, Giles, had managed to survive three years with a daily newspaper and had beaten back a challenge from the Populist Plaindealer, which under new ownership had gone to daily publication in March— only to revert back to weekly publication in late summer. Now that Spradley, the sheriff, no longer had an active role at the Plaindealer, the disputes between the two newspapers were more political than personal. On the day the Plaindealer went daily, Haltom wrote, “We may get to scrapping once in a while like the proverbial old man and his wife, but we won’t allow anyone else to monkey with our affairs, and we shall guard with a jealous eye the best interest and welfare of the East Texas Metropolis.” 3 And when the Plaindealer (though only temporarily) rescinded its plans to cease daily publication, Haltom pronounced himself pleased, reasoning that readers liked to subscribe to both papers and compare their separate political positions, and predicted that readership would actually drop if there were only one local newspaper. However, as later events demonstrated, the enmity between Haltom and Spradley continued unabated.

what little haltom had learned about the manhunt for the killers of the Hicks family was contained in a thin front-page

90

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

story published on Tuesday, October 14, 1902, four days after the murders, under a headline titled “Where is Sheriff Spradley?” The article was sandwiched between ads for Mayer & Schmidt’s mercantile store and Perkins Bros., which sold drugs, jewelry, and stationery. Haltom reported the unconfirmed sightings of the suspect and Spradley: The town was full of all kinds of rumors last night, one to the effect that the sheriff was in Teneha [sic] with the prisoner, surrounded by a howling mob, and escape was impossible; another that he brought the negro to Sterne and was unable to come through because of the railroad wreck; and still another that he had been seen in Appleby last night. All the variations have been played on these and other rumors today, but in the absence of definite knowledge, the general conclusion seems to be that the sheriff has safely eluded the mob and has his prisoner in Rusk within the walls of the penitentiary.4

Haltom further announced that hundreds of citizens had signed a petition presented to District Judge Tom C. Davis, asking to have Buchanan brought to town and promising that he would receive a fair trial: “The signers of this petition embrace the great body of the citizenship of Nacogdoches, and if the negro is brought here now there will be no lynching.” But the authorities best bring Buchanan to town soon. That was the unspoken threat, and Haltom echoed it in his editorial comments on the second page. He warned of mob action if a trial was delayed. As in nearly every case in the South when the suspect was black, Buchanan was presumed guilty from the moment that Sheriff Spradley decided he had committed the crime. If the past was any indicator, his fate likely was sealed there and then. All that was left to determine was whether it would be at the hands of a lynch mob or after a legally held trial. Dozens of lynchings in the past attested to this presumption, and hundreds more would follow in the decades to come. Haltom echoed the sentiments of newspaper editors and other “respectable” citizens throughout the South. They condemned lynchings as a matter of course, yet often defended the lynch mobs, whose members claimed to be exacting revenge only because the judicial system had failed to quickly act: The Sentinel will never advocate the reign of the mob while there are laws in Texas and officers to execute them, but it has been demonstrated

Buchanan Confesses in Shreveport

{ 91

numberless times in the past, as it will be in the future, that the swift and pitiless justice of Southern mobs will avenge the wrongs of Southern women at the hands of these negro fiends despite the mandates of law and theories of civilization.5

Haltom, to his credit, went out of his way to point out that it wasn’t fair to blame all blacks because of Buchanan’s crime. Like almost everyone else, he immediately assumed that Buchanan was guilty. But he was quick to point out, using the vernacular of the time, that “the overwhelming majority of negroes in the South are peaceable and law abiding.” On the same day that Haltom ran “Where is Sheriff Spradley?” he published another short piece that editorialized against condemning all blacks because of the actions of a few, saying it is “rank injustice, which can only do harm in the long run, to denounce all negroes for the crimes of the few.” 6 Though hundreds of angry white men milled about town, ready to exact vengeance if the legal system was reluctant to do so, there does not seem to have been any widespread retaliation against other blacks in Nacogdoches in those first few days after the murder of the Hicks family. Perhaps Haltom’s words did have some effect in cooling tempers.

while haltom and the rest of nacogdoches remained in an uproar, Jim Buchanan was having his portrait struck in the execution room of the Caddo Parish jail in Shreveport. A short while later, the three lawmen—Spradley, Matthews, and Constable Curg Border (who had arrived that morning after missing the train in Appleby)—headed down to Dambly’s Studio and also had their photographs taken. All these likenesses were for the next morning’s newspaper. The Shreveport Times ran the photographs the next day, along with the account of Buchanan’s capture and the odyssey to Louisiana previously described. Spradley and Border sported cowboy hats and thick moustaches, and both wore jackets and vests. Matthews was more casually dressed, a rather rumpled-looking man. Buchanan is pictured twice in that issue of the Times, once wearing a hat and once without. He is slender and wears a light-colored shirt and suspenders. In both photographs he stares unsmiling at the camera. He looks as if he knows that he is a dead man walking. buchanan sat in the execution room in the caddo Parish jail, the gallows nearby. He asked for and was given something to eat and a cigarette to smoke. And then he calmly confessed to killing the

92

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

three members of the Hicks family. Reporters from both the Times and the Shreveport Journal were present. Their accounts vary only in the detail of why Buchanan went to the Hicks home in the first place. The Journal said he went there to see about making money picking cotton. The Times reporter simply said he showed up, without explaining why. According to the Times, Buchanan stated that he went to the Hicks home on last Friday night and found the people in bed. He was armed with a safety rifle and with it he first shot the old man. He then fired one shot into the body of the mother, but the bullet did not kill her, and she arose from the bed and tried to seize the murderer’s weapon. He then fired the other shot into her.7

The Times clearly had the more spectacular presentation of the confession. In a four-column box underneath photos of Spradley and Buchanan, it read: I killed the old man first. I shot him. He never woke up. Then I shot the old woman. She woke up and I had to shoot her again. She fought me and I had to hit her on the head with the butt of her gun. Then the daughter came in but tried to run and I then clubbed her to death. I hit her a number of times and her brains were all over the floor. I did not outrage her.8

Buchanan steadfastly contended, though he was largely disbelieved, that he didn’t rape Allie Hicks. He never wavered from that contention even as his execution grew imminent. The Times reporter described Buchanan as a young negro of a dark griffe color. . . . He is very proud of his crime and the notoriety he has achieved. He was open in his confession of the horrible crime in his conversation with the newspaper men and the deputy sheriffs in the jail, and when he was shoved into the cage of the parish jail and one of the prisoners asked him if was in for stealing he boastingly answered, “No, indeed. I am here for murder. I killed a lot of white people in Texas.” 9

In the Journal, the reporter noted that despite the howling mob gathered outside the jailhouse doors,

Buchanan Confesses in Shreveport

{ 93

Buchanan in the Caddo jail this morning calmly smoked a cigarette, discussed in evenness of tone the details of his awful triple crime, laughed as occasion arose, and sat serenely on the platform of the gallows in the jail while Sheriff Spradley and the photographer posed him for a picture to be taken across the trap door.10

Buchanan steadfastly maintained that he did not rape the Hicks daughter: I know I am going to die, and if I had done it, I would say so. That part of it, I did not do. I went to the Hicks home about sundown to talk with Mr. Hicks about picking cotton. I had a shotgun, a breech-loader, and he came out on the gallery, and we began to talk. He brought his rifle out to talk about swapping it for my gun. He made a remark about my race that I didn’t like. It was about a white doctor boarding with a negro. When he did this, I shot him. The old woman came running out then and began hollering and I picked up the old man’s gun and shot her. Then I went into the house and the young woman began screaming. She started across the bed and I knocked her down with the rifle barrel. She fell on the floor. By this time the old woman began screaming and hollering again, and I shot her again. I then followed the young woman as she began to run and knocked her in the head. I killed them because they would go and tell on me.11

So why did Jim Buchanan kill the Hicks family, if his confession is to be believed? (And according to Spradley, Buchanan gave a similar confession as they fled the mob in Tenaha and escaped to Shreveport.) In both newspaper accounts, Buchanan said he became angry because Duncan Hicks, the family patriarch, began talking disparagingly about a white doctor who lived with a black person. (It’s not clear if the latter was a male or female.) There is an oblique reference to a Black Jack doctor in the May 27, 1902, edition of the Sentinel, in which Haltom noted, “A sensation has been sprung at Black Jack, involving a physician and a well-known family of that place. Our Black Jack correspondent writes that the affair is quite serious and it is feared may end badly.” There is a brief, innocuous reference a month later to a Dr. Blackshear who lived in Black Jack. Then in September of the same year, a month before the killings of the Hicks family, Ed Blackshear, the son of Dr. Blackshear, was shot

94

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

by Charlie Roberts, “a young man who drives J. M. Fuller’s team” of horses. The Black Jack correspondent provided the following account to Haltom: A difficulty arose late Saturday evening between Charlie Roberts and Eddie Blackshear about some ladies, resulting in Blackshear receiving a very dangerous shot through the body. The ball entered the upper portion of the right lung, ranging downward, coming out at the back to the right of the spinal column. A 45 Colt’s pistol was the weapon used. Young Blackshear is the youngest son of our worthy Doctor, and has many friends here who hope to see him recover. Mr. Roberts, it is said, received several blows on the head with a pistol, necessitating a physician to make thirty-two stitches to close his wounds. Mr. Roberts has always been a peaceful, industrious young man. Consequently all regret the affair very much.12

Blackshear died on September 3. Roberts was indicted on September 24 for Blackshear’s murder.13 Unsurprisingly, there is no record that Roberts was ever convicted. Clearly there had been some recent trouble involving the doctor’s family. It’s not certain Blackshear was even the same doctor to whom Buchanan referred, though it is unlikely that Black Jack had more than one physician. An account earlier in the year by the village correspondent had listed a single doctor’s office. There perhaps was another reason that Buchanan committed such a brutal crime, one for which he certainly knew he soon would die. According to both Shreveport newspaper accounts, Jim Buchanan, a petty thief and an accomplished escape artist, wanted to go down as a desperado, as a “bad nigger.” The phrase “bad nigger” was used by blacks and whites alike beginning in the 1890s to describe a certain class of young black men who ignored Jim Crow laws, refused to stay “in their place,” and violated many of the social and moral standards of society. As one historian of the Jim Crow era wrote: The “bad nigger” came to be celebrated in black lore and song for his cunning, boldness, coolness and wit, often in the face of overwhelming odds, and for the uncanny ability and imaginative powers he displayed in outwitting his enemies. Unlike his counterparts in white folklore, he did not rob from the rich and give to the poor. He preyed on his own people

Buchanan Confesses in Shreveport

{ 95

as well as whites, terrorizing both blacks and whites, the innocent and the guilty, the wealthy and the poor. Rather than show any remorse for his depredations, he mocked piety and expressed indifference about his fate.14

As Buchanan ate his dinner, smoked his cigarettes, and calmly described how he killed the Hicks family, perhaps he was recalling the tales of similar “bad niggers.” The exploits of some had even made it into song. As another writer put it: From the late nineteenth century black lore was filled with tales, toasts, and songs of hard, merciless toughs and killers confronting and generally vanquishing their adversaries without hesitation and without remorse. . . . Postbellum black songs are studded with boasts, threats and the language of violence.15

In one example of the phenomenon, John Hardy, a black steel driver, killed a man in a craps game and was hanged for it in 1894. Not long after, songs abounded about Hardy, including one in which, when asked, as he stood on the gallows, if he had any last words, he replied, “Just give me time to kill another man, Lord, Lord / Just give me time to kill another man.” 16 It’s impossible to conclude whether Buchanan wanted to go down in black lore as a bandit, celebrated in song long after he was dead. Certainly his actions after the murders indicate Buchanan didn’t want to get caught, but once captured, he appeared to enjoy the attention he received.

it was well past dark. crowds of men still gathered near the Caddo Parish jail. Sheriff S. J. Ward and his men quietly took their prisoner out to a carriage at the corner of McNeil and Milam streets. From there, the lawmen boldly took the carriage to Union Station, right in downtown Shreveport, surely the last place a lynch mob would have expected them to go. Constable Border and Marshal Matthews boarded the train with Jim Buchanan and headed back to East Texas, though not to Nacogdoches. As the Times reporter wrote, “The work of removing Buchanan from the jail was so perfectly arranged that many did not realize what was going on.” 17 The hundred or so people gathered outside the Shreveport jail exchanged rumors of a special train coming from Nacogdoches to collect the prisoner, and made plans to lynch or burn Buchanan if they could get

96

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

their hands on him. It was not until the next morning that they realized they were too late, that Buchanan had escaped across the Sabine River and back into Texas. The Journal the next afternoon stood with one foot squarely in the camp of law and order and the other in the camp of Judge Lynch: The delivery from a mob of the human brute Jim Buchanan, through the coolness and bravery of Sheriff Spradley, while calling for just commendation for civil officers who perform their sworn duty, does not furnish ground for wholesale condemnation of the people who would burn a brute such as Buchanan. We are apt when we coolly condemn people for a fearful infliction of punishment upon such wretches, to forget how we would feel and act under like conditions, and when any one places himself in the place of those who have been robbed of kindred and had a member of the family fiendishly outraged and then murdered, he cannot blame the people of Texas who would have burned the negro fiend could they have once gained possession of him.18

The writer implied that the lynch mob waiting outside the Shreveport jail was composed of relatives of victims of past outrages by people such as Jim Buchanan. That, of course, was highly unlikely.

meanwhile, his prisoner now safely under guard and on the way back to East Texas, Spradley decided it was time to catch the train home to Nacogdoches.

chapter eleven

A Desperate Journey across East Texas October 15, 1902 spradley returned to nacogdoches on wednesday morning, while lawmen Curg Border and A. Y. Matthews headed to East Texas with confessed murderer Jim Buchanan. Bill Haltom, probably to nobody’s surprise, didn’t get much information out of his longtime enemy. He had to rely heavily on the Shreveport Times account to print a skimpy story that day on the Sentinel ’s front page—which was sandwiched once again between ads for Mayer & Schmidt (dry goods) and Perkins Bros. (druggists, jewelers, and stationers). When asked by the “Sentinel man” what had happened to Buchanan, Spradley, tongue firmly in cheek, replied, “We tried to cross (the) Red river with him in a skiff, and the blamed thing turned over, and the last I saw of Buchanan an alligator had him by the leg; and that’s as near the truth as you’ll get out of me.” 1 Haltom ended his account by writing that a telephone message had arrived from Longview, stating that Buchanan had just been spirited away in a hack from that town, sixty miles north. That was all he was able to provide his readers— certainly not a very impressive display of journalism for the newspaper that, after all, should have been providing the most thorough coverage of any. The Plaindealer, on the other hand, which had reverted to weekly publication after a brief experiment as a daily, provided a far fuller account in its October 16 issue. Spradley, the paper’s founder and former editor, was far more forthcoming to its reporter about his role in capturing the confessed killer of the Hicks family and spiriting him away from the mob in Tenaha. The paper also reported that a petition was circulating, asking that District Judge Tom C. Davis bring Buchanan back from wherever he was being held for trial. “Nearly everybody signed it,” the Plaindealer claimed,

98

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

adding, “This is quite proper. Since he is out of reach of lynch law and will otherwise remain so, he should be tried, convicted and hanged in Nacogdoches for the credit of the city.” 2 Spradley was praised for his part in capturing Buchanan and delivering him safely: To go with several hundred men and capture a negro murderer and rapist and get thru [sic] forty miles of hostile territory on horseback and a hundred miles or so by rail in safety is a feat rarely performed in this age of mob violence. Telephone connections thru the entire country traversed made it all the harder to accomplish. It is one of the rare occurrences.3

A. F. Henning, the Plaindealer editor, predicted that Buchanan “will be tried here if the proper arrangements are made for protecting him, and inside of a month he will be hung, high and dry.” But whether Buchanan and those in charge of keeping him alive would make it to safety was still a wide-open question.

under the cover of darkness, matthews and border left Shreveport on a westbound Texas and Pacific train with their prisoner. A passenger on the train, J. M. Smart, said the mob that the lawmen eluded in Shreveport was the most dangerous group of men he had ever seen: “Every man was armed with a Winchester or shotgun and one to three pistols.” 4 But the mob had indeed been fooled, and even the train’s passengers didn’t realize Buchanan was aboard until the train was twenty miles west of Shreveport, across the Texas line. The original plan was to travel to Jacksonville, about 120 miles southwest of Shreveport. From there it would be an easy trip of fourteen miles south to Rusk and the penitentiary—where, behind its brick walls, Buchanan would be safe until his trial.5 But along the way, at every stop, crowds of angry, armed men were gathering. In Longview, sixty miles west of Shreveport, Buchanan was placed in jail at about two on Wednesday morning while his captors awaited the noon train, a southbound Great Northern, to take them to Rusk. Somehow Matthews and Border managed to get Buchanan on the train and out of town before the crowd could get to them. The trio managed to elude yet another mob at Kilgore, some ten miles south, but soon learned that a sizable crowd had gathered at Jacksonville. The two lawmen decided to leave the train, and borrowed a carriage

A Desperate Journey across East Texas

{ 99

and horses to travel to Overton, about twenty-five miles southwest of Longview. It was in Overton that the two lawmen parted ways. Border, perhaps realizing that the two were increasingly becoming outnumbered, told Matthews that he had “urgent business” and headed back to Longview to catch the train to Shreveport. A Times reporter unsuccessfully tried to catch up with the gunman-turned-lawman, who no doubt felt that it was time to return home to renew his campaign to wear the sheriff ’s badge in San Augustine County— especially since he could do so and leave Matthews, his opponent, out in the middle of nowhere, alone and trying to protect a confessed murderer from a lynch mob. Border tried to salve his conscience by telling police in Shreveport that Matthews and Buchanan had a clear road ahead to the Henderson jail.6 It’s unclear whether Matthews was as sanguine about his prospects. The fifteen-mile journey from Overton to Henderson must have seemed like 150 miles to the veteran lawman. Matthews said he had to “take to the woods” in order to evade the lynchers who gathered at every railroad stop and were scouring the roads when it became known that the duo had left the train at Kilgore. But somehow Matthews managed to slip Buchanan into the Rusk County jail in Henderson by early evening. He immediately wired Spradley, who was back in Nacogdoches, to come at once with reinforcements. An angry mob was gathered outside the jail and, as one reporter wrote, its numbers were growing hourly.7

by wednesday evening, just five days after the hicks family had been murdered, Jim Buchanan had become infamous across the Deep South, his name bandied about in dozens of newspapers. The crime to which he had confessed—a black man murdering three members of a white family and allegedly sexually assaulting the teenage daughter—fueled the outrage of white southerners everywhere, judging from newspaper accounts in cities across Dixie. Since Reconstruction, southern whites by and large had viewed virtually every able-bodied black male as a potential rapist, intent on stealing the honor of southern female purity. As one writer on the sexual tensions between the races put it: The early years of Reconstruction marked the beginning of an era of terrorism in the American South. Those vanquished patriarchs and their sympathizers replaced slavery with lethal violence in an effort to maintain

100

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

control over the political, economic, and social activities of freedpeople, including control over the sexual agency of black men and women.8

As noted earlier, untold numbers of black men met horrible deaths because they were falsely accused of sexual crimes against white women— or, at least, the evidence was far from overwhelming. Jim Buchanan had already confessed to killing Duncan, Nerva, and Allie Hicks, though he denied sexually assaulting twenty-one-year-old Allie. His denial of raping a white woman notwithstanding, Buchanan’s capture, criminal background, and subsequent confession to the murders had stoked outrage in Deep East Texas to a white-hot level. At least 100 men were gathered at the Henderson jail, and telephone reports indicated that a mob was forming in Nacogdoches with the intent of traveling the forty-five miles north to Henderson to “take the negro.” 9 What kind of person would join a mob intent on killing someone accused of a crime, rather than allow the justice system to run its course? Many accounts of lynchings note that mob members came from all social strata—the white skin of the participants being the primary commonality. As one examination of Southern mob violence put it: Members of every social class were implicated in mob violence and vigilante activity. . . . Vigilantism became more or less institutionalized. Extra-legal and semimilitary organizations were formed to supplement the state militias and sheriffs’ posses, which the law sanctioned.10

In the case of the mobs that gathered at every railroad station from Shreveport to Henderson in order to kill Jim Buchanan, there is only anecdotal evidence on which to base a conclusion. Editor Haltom described people streaming in from the outlying communities in the days following the Hicks murders, and there is little doubt that those coming to town were white farmers who were through with cotton harvests and had the time to indulge their reactions to this heinous crime. In addition, as noted earlier, Nacogdoches and other East Texas towns had their share of ne’er-do-wells with too much time on their hands. That was a common trait in small towns through the South: Every town had its quota of able-bodied men who made at least a parttime vocation of loafing around the streets or drinking away boredom in the local saloons. When excitement did not come unbidden they summoned it. Prewar standards of law and order deteriorated even further.

A Desperate Journey across East Texas

{ 101

All but the oldest and gentlest of men took to carrying guns wherever they went. . . . Brawls and shooting affrays, lubricated with legal and bootleg whiskey, became matters of general regret and just as general occurrence.11

Throughout East Texas, in the small towns that dotted the pine horizons, there was a sizable and dangerous group of white men just waiting for an excuse to resort to violence, whether it was in their perceived defense of southern womanhood or to reassert white dominance over former slaves and their offspring. In the fall of 1902, Jim Buchanan was their momentary diversion.

before spradley left to answer matthews’s desperate plea for help, he made a decision that no doubt saved Buchanan from a lynch mob’s vengeance in Henderson. Spradley said that he wired Governor Joseph D. Sayers and asked him to call out the Texas Volunteer Guard (the official name of what was commonly called the state militia) to protect Buchanan from the throng gathering in Henderson.12 In Sayers’s personal papers are two telegrams dated October 15, 1902. Neither is from Spradley, though that doesn’t necessarily prove that the sheriff didn’t also wire Sayers to send troops to Henderson. Joel N. Hale, the sheriff in Rusk County, definitely sent the governor a telegram at 7: 12 p.m. from Henderson that said, simply, “Order out local military co[mpany] and all other available men by special train to protect prisoner.” 13 The governor received at least one other telegram on October 15, at 4:48 p.m. It was from the Shreveport Times: “Considerable controversy over action of sheriff Spradley of Nacogdoches county in removing negro Buchanan to Rusk. Has his course your unqualified approval? Please answer.” The telegram was ink-stamped, presumably by the governor’s office, “Answer Via The Postal.” Sayers’s response, lost to history, likely arrived days after the situation had been settled. Spradley headed to Henderson early in the evening, accompanied by three deputies, on a forty-five-mile trip that in 1902 took six hours.14 In the meantime, the governor called out the Henderson Rifles, the state militia unit geographically closest to the prisoner. Within hours, four more militia units had been called up—from nearby Tyler, Marshall, Rusk, and Palestine—and dispatched to Henderson to protect Buchanan from being burned alive.

102

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

An uneasy stalemate ensued. Company H—the Henderson Rifles— under the command of Captain E. W. Vinson, guarded the jail against an ever-growing mob. As the Houston Daily Post correspondent wrote, “Neither side is making a move, both awaiting reinforcements.” 15 The mob apparently wasn’t willing to risk battle with soldiers carrying bayonets who, after all, were local boys—neighbors and possibly even kinfolk. According to the Post, “They feel that the Nacogdoches county men are more vitally interested in the punishment of the negro. . . . But they are determined that the negro shall not be taken away until the Nacogdoches men get here.” 16 In Garrison, twenty miles north of Nacogdoches, a mob was being organized to head to Henderson and provide reinforcements for the men coming from Nacogdoches. Meanwhile Thomas Scurry, adjutant general (leader of the state’s military forces), telegraphed Captain John T. Bonner, commander of the Tyler company, known as the Horace Chilton Volunteers, at 8 : 30 p.m. (Tyler is thirty-five miles northwest of Henderson.) Scurry ordered Bonner to assemble his company at the armory in Tyler and await the arrival of a special train that would carry the company to Henderson and, from there, transport Buchanan to Rusk. Bonner also was advised to place soldiers on the railroad track from Henderson to Overton to prevent sabotage. A 1: 30 a.m. dispatch from Henderson reported that the jail was still being held by Sheriff Hale, who is very positive that he will keep the negro until the arrival of Spradley. . . . None of the outside militia has yet arrived. They should arrive here about the time Sheriff Spradley does. There will be no occasion to hoodwink the mob, as the force will be sufficiently large to take the negro through a much larger mob than is assembled here.17

Meanwhile, in Nacogdoches, one of the mob leaders confirmed that Spradley made the right decision in not bringing Buchanan immediately back to Nacogdoches, where at least twice before he had lost prisoners to lynch mobs: One of the mob leaders stated today that had the negro been brought here by Spradley, he would have been roasted to death. Plans were laid for digging a pit in the public square and spreading rails across, chaining the negro to them. Extremists still favor this method of treatment of the negro if he is ever brought here.18

A Desperate Journey across East Texas

{ 103

It would be the job of the Texas Volunteer Guard to prevent that from happening.

the state’s militia units had their origins in the Texas Republic, when Texas was an independent nation and was fighting to remain so against incursions from Mexico and raids from hostile Indians. The Milam Guards of Houston were the first militia unit to organize, in 1838, followed by the Galveston Artillery two years later. Soldiers had to supply their own weapons, and were given a monthly allowance for ammunition and a bit extra for using their own horses. But payment was sporadic and often in the nearly worthless specie of the Republic.19 The militia in Texas lost influence after annexation in 1845, since the United States Army took responsibility for defending the Mexican border and the Indian frontier, while the Texas Rangers tried to keep law and order inside the state’s borders. During the Civil War, the state militia, as one writer put it, served “as a haven for men avoiding Confederate service.” 20 After Northern occupation of Texas ended in 1870 and the state was readmitted to the Union, the Republican governor, Edmund J. Davis, persuaded the legislature to create a three-branch force under the adjutant general: the State Police (discussed earlier, generally despised), a Reserve Militia, and the State Guard. The latter was primarily used to quell civil unrest resulting from Davis’s attempt to increase the political power of blacks and the Republican Party. After Davis lost power in 1873, the Democratic majority in the legislature merged the State Guard and Reserve Militia into one organization. The integration insisted upon by Davis was curtailed, and separate white and black units were formed The militia, called the Uniformed Militia after Davis was ousted from office, was known as the Texas Volunteer Guard from 1879 to 1903, when it became the Texas National Guard, its current name. In the 1870s, the militia was freed from having to defend the frontier by the creation of the Frontier Battalion, a branch of the Texas Rangers. Thus the militia’s duties evolved into quelling civil unrest and providing security and assistance during natural disasters. And by 1902, its duties in large part consisted of trying to protect people such as Jim Buchanan from bloodthirsty lynch mobs.21 when the troops were called out by governor sayers to protect Jim Buchanan on Oct. 15, 1902, it was the tenth time in twentytwo months that units of the Texas Volunteer Guard had been asked

104

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

to protect a black man from mobs bent on lynching or burning him to death.22 A total of 3,000 men and officers served in the state’s single division, split up into “one signal corps of two companies; one squadron of cavalry of three troops; one battalion of artillery of four batteries; and four regiments of (white) infantry of twelve companies each, divided into two brigades of two regiments each; and one battalion of colored infantry of four companies.” 23 The soldiers called up to protect Jim Buchanan were in the infantry. Scurry, the adjutant general, gently complained in his annual report that the troops were poorly compensated, writing, “This force can be maintained to a reasonable degree of efficiency by a more generous recognition on the part of the Legislature in the way of appropriations.” 24 Scurry added, The Texas Volunteer Guard, as a force, has been useful, in fact, necessary, to guard life and property in time of riots, mobs and tumults, as will be seen later on from the report of service in aid of civil authorities, which shows the patriotic willingness of the officers and men to serve their State promptly and effectively when called upon.25

As noted, the guard was called out every two months or so, on average. It was not popular duty for these generally young soldiers, who were called upon to protect someone accused of a heinous crime, from a mob that at times comprised their fellow townspeople (as turned out to be the case for the Henderson Rifles, first dispatched to protect Buchanan in their hometown). Scurry was demonstrably proud of his troops: In most instances their services have been needed to protect prisoners charged with rape against mob violence. This crime is as hideous in the eyes of the officers and enlisted men of the Texas Volunteer Guard as it can possibly be to any member of a mob, but the prompt and effective manner in which they have performed their duty, whenever they have been called upon and have been able to reach the prisoner in time, is an evidence of their high respect for the law, of their good discipline, and of their patriotic desire to do their full duty as members of the Texas Volunteer Guard.26

And, the records show, the guard did its duty as best it could. Of the ten times the militia was called out to protect a prisoner from mob violence, soldiers succeeded six times in preventing a lynching, according to

A Desperate Journey across East Texas

{ 105

Scurry’s report. The other four times, the militia wasn’t called up early enough to get to the scene in time, the adjutant general wrote. That seems to have been the case in March 1901, when a mob in Corsicana, a small town fifty-five miles east of Waco, was preparing to burn a man for the murder of a Mrs. Younger. By the time the telegram was received in Waco, ordering the deployment of two companies of soldiers, Joe Henderson, a black man accused of the murder, had been burned to death. The troops were called back.27 In Trinity County, about sixty miles southwest of Nacogdoches, the militia played a crucial role in keeping alive a black man accused of raping a young white woman in June 1901. The prisoner was brought back to Groveton, the county seat, from Houston so that the accuser could make a positive identification. The victim was accompanied by a few hundred citizens, who appeared to be more interested in getting hold of the prisoner than in helping the young woman identify her attacker. At one point Captain George McCormick was surrounded by seventy-five citizens, who tried to force him to give up the prisoner. With help from reinforcements, McCormick managed to get the prisoner out of Trinity County and safely into Rusk Penitentiary, against what seemed at the time to be overwhelming odds.28 In the northeast Texas town of Quitman, a message to the superintendent of the International and Great Northern railroad, requesting a special train to transport troops to that town to prevent a lynching, wasn’t delivered for several hours. By the time the train had been secured, the sheriff of Wood County wired that Galner Gordon had been lynched. The troops were never dispatched.29 Just three months before Jim Buchanan was placed in the Henderson jail, an elderly black man named Brisco Fredricson had been arrested in that town for the assault of a seventeen-year-old white girl. The girl was described as the “simple-minded daughter of a Rusk County planter,” who was connected with some of the most prominent families of the area. Fredricson, who was seventy, had lived on the family’s plantation for many years. The family and its friends were incensed, and soon the jail was surrounded, in a scene replayed time and again across the South, by a howling mob bent on vengeance. Sheriff Hale wired the governor and requested that the militia be dispatched to protect Fredricson.30 Of course, the hometown Henderson Rifles were the first to arrive. Commander Vinson, in what turned out to be a rehearsal for his role in protecting Buchanan, arrived at the jail with forty-two officers and

106

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

soldiers (and two cooks). Companies from Tyler and Marshall also were called out by Governor Sayers at the sheriff ’s request.31 It was Sunday evening, and although most members of those two out-of-town companies reported to the special trains waiting at their respective depots, five soldiers from each company missed the train and paid for their own tickets on the next scheduled train in order to get to Henderson. The Dallas Morning News correspondent stated that this was the first time in history that it had been necessary to call out the state militia to protect a prisoner in Henderson, though it wouldn’t be the last.32 A trial was quickly held. District Judge R. B. Levy, taking no chances, ordered sixty soldiers to guard Fredricson during the day, as dozens of armed men still milled about town. Each day during Fredricson’s trial, eighteen soldiers escorted the prisoner from the jail to the courthouse. The troops were cloistered in a side room so as to not prejudice the jury. On Wednesday morning, July 23, Brisco Fredricson was found guilty of assault and “sentenced to hang for his hellish deed,” as Haltom put it. The Sentinel editor even took the unusual step of identifying the victim, saying that she was “a simpleminded, or partially demented, girl of 17, the daughter of Thad Hart of Bellview neighborhood.” 33 It was decided that Fredricson would be taken to Rusk Penitentiary while his case was appealed. The three companies of soldiers marched through the main part of town as if they were escorting the prisoner to the depot, complete with both an advance and rear guard. Meanwhile, the sheriff took some of the soldiers and sneaked Fredricson to the depot down some side streets and onto a train. The militia accompanied him as far as Jacksonville before deciding that the sheriff and his prisoner could safely travel to Rusk Penitentiary.34 Before the troops left, they were “entertained” with “commendatory talks” from the county and district attorneys and the candidate for state senator, Judge Brachfield—political hot air that the commander, Major G. P. Raines rather fawningly, and ridiculously, claimed “considerably compensated the men for their lack of ordinary camp comforts.” 35

now, three months later, the henderson rifles were once again protecting a black man from an angry mob. A special train from Tyler arrived with a company of the Horace Chilton Volunteers, and another train from Marshall brought the Rudd Rifles, both arriving in the wee hours of the morning. The other two companies called out, from Rusk and Palestine, still had not arrived. Neither had Spradley,

A Desperate Journey across East Texas

{ 107

traveling by surrey with his three deputies: Josh Henson, Will Reid, and Bob Collins.36 Raines of the 3rd Infantry was now in command in Henderson, and he decided that he had sufficient manpower to safely move Jim Buchanan out of the jail and to the special train waiting to take his infamous charge to Rusk Penitentiary. As luck would have it, the special train left for Rusk just before Spradley and his deputies arrived in Henderson. They ended up waiting an additional hour for the regular train to arrive, which they took to Rusk. Spradley and the deputies slept inside the penitentiary, though the sheriff admitted that he slept very little that night. At long last, Jim Buchanan was safely behind the walls of Rusk Penitentiary, the construction of which had been completed in 1883 to relieve overcrowding at the Huntsville prison. The Rusk prison, containing 528 cells with two beds apiece, could hold 1,056 prisoners. A brick wall twenty feet high and thirty inches wide surrounded the prison. In Nacogdoches hundreds of angry men awaited the prisoner’s return. As Spradley slept fitfully inside those prison walls, waking often throughout the few remaining hours of the night, no doubt he was wondering how he— even with five companies of soldiers—would be able to keep Buchanan alive once they returned to Nacogdoches.

chapter twelve

Preparations Made for Buchanan’s Trial October 16, 1902 upon learning that jim buchanan was safely ensconced in the Rusk Penitentiary, Adjutant General Thomas Scurry phoned District Judge Tom C. Davis in Nacogdoches to let him know that the prisoner was secure. Scurry also wired Sheriff Reagan of Cherokee County, where Rusk is the county seat, and instructed him to have Spradley tell Scurry what type of military protection he would need to get Buchanan safely to Nacogdoches and to guard him during the trial. In addition, Spradley called the judge and asked if a trial could be held quickly. Buchanan had already been indicted by a grand jury on Tuesday, the day after he was captured, for the murders of the Hicks family. Davis agreed that a jury could be quickly impaneled if necessary.1 Late that afternoon Spradley wired the governor—sans punctuation, to save on money: Order Militia to proceed to Nacogdoches on my arrival at Rusk with Buchanan trial set tomorrow militia bring him back to Rusk till day of execution this will be satisfactory to the people and save bloodshed answer me here at once.2

Meanwhile, in Nacogdoches, hundreds of citizens milled about downtown, openly discussing burning Buchanan alive. The headline in the Austin Statesman on this day, in its lead story on the front page, summed it up: “They Want To Barbecue Him.” As the subhead further explained, “The Citizens of Nacogdoches Are Eager to Get Hold Of Jim Buchanan.” That sentiment, according to Haltom, was held not just by whites but also by at least some black citizens, who also were so greatly appalled at this horrific crime that they called for extralegal vengeance. He reported:

Preparations Made for Buchanan’s Trial

{ 109

Said a law-abiding negro on the street this morning, “The white folks can’t do too much to that nigger that killed the Hicks family, and I’ll be glad to help ’em do it. He’s a wild beast and ought not to be treated like a human being. And the worst part of it for our race is that it makes it all the harder for us who obey the law and hate a crime like this as much as the white people do, for they judge us all alike and say one’s as bad as the other.” 3

Haltom editorialized, “This is true in part only, and it would become entirely untrue if the negroes would make themselves as alert as the whites in capturing the criminals of their race and rise above racial sympathy and prejudice in promoting law and order.” 4 Other citizens, both black and white, wanted to see justice done quickly—but legally. A petition signed by “hundreds of our best citizens,” according to Haltom, had been presented to Davis asking that Buchanan be brought to town at once and guaranteed a fair trial. Haltom wrote, apparently with no trace of irony, “The people of Nacogdoches have given Judge Davis the fullest assurance in writing that this murderer shall be given a fair trial in the district here if brought back now, and we can conceive of no reason why this should not be done.” Providing a “fair trial” to someone who in the same paragraph is matter-of-factly labeled a murderer strikes the modern observer, a century later, as a bit incongruous. But the fact remained that Buchanan had publicly confessed, in front of newspaper reporters. The reporters not only recorded what Buchanan said, but also described how calmly and deliberately he had smoked a cigarette and described killing Duncan, Nerva, and Allie Hicks in Black Jack on that cool October evening. There is no doubt that the extensive publicity that resulted fanned the fires of revenge even more than usual. A. F. Henning, editor of the Plaindealer, expressed similar sentiments to Haltom’s, writing that Buchanan should be returned to town: “Since he is out of reach of lynch law and will otherwise remain so, he should be tried, convicted and hung in Nacogdoches for the credit of the city.” 5 Meanwhile, the Sentinel announced on its front page that the “colored citizens” planned to meet at the CME (Colored Methodist Episcopal) church near downtown Nacogdoches: “The object of the meeting is to show to the public our disapproval of such crime as that enacted by Jim Buchanan.” The town’s local newspaper reporters were invited to attend.6

110

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

It is certain that the black citizens of Nacogdoches were fearful of reprisals from white citizens who were angry over this crime and ready to get revenge on any black person. As noted, such episodes were painfully common throughout the South both before and after the Hicks murders in 1902. There is strong evidence that entire communities in Texas, such as Greenville and Vidor, were emptied of their black populations after such crimes, even if it was never proved that a black person was responsible. There is no doubt that black citizens of Nacogdoches County found this crime every bit as reprehensible as the white population did and were eager to see justice done. On Thursday night, about fifty black citizens gathered at the CME Church. Presiding Elder A. H. Hughes was elected chairman of this committee, and Haltom, who was present, reported that a number of “very excellent speeches were made.” 7 Hughes, in his fifteen-minute speech, bemoaned the fact that Buchanan’s crime adversely affected all blacks. He worried that there was a lack of understanding between the two races and that this ignorance “seems to drift them further apart as time rolls on.” The group condemned the crime and announced its intention to denounce “all crime, no matter where nor by whom committed, and to show the world that it was their sincere desire to uphold the law.” The black citizens then passed two extraordinary resolutions that sadly demonstrated the tenuous and terribly unequal relationship between blacks and whites in East Texas and throughout the South. Haltom reprinted the resolutions in full on the day after Buchanan’s trial: Whereas it is commonly said that all negroes are alike and that they sympathize with criminals of their color, no matter what the gravity of the offense is; and whereas it is a fact that some members of our race who are so depraved that they would not hesitate to commit the vilest crime; and there is an element among us who try to live for right, give right counsel, and to stand for a pure and law-abiding citizenship; and whereas we believe the Southern white man is our friend, the South is our home, and here we must work out our destiny, we are not unmindful of the fact that the majority of Southern whites are kindly disposed toward us, and it being our desire to cultivate this friendly feeling and to have them justly understand us, be it: Resolved— That whereas a most diabolic crime has been committed by the negro brute Jim Buchanan, upon the family of Mr. Hicks, we condemn this and all crimes in the strongest terms and hope that he will be brought swiftly to the death he so much merits.

Preparations Made for Buchanan’s Trial

{ 111

Resolved— That we as a body pledge ourselves to labor with untiring efforts to secure more cooperation and interest to our churches, Sabbath schools and public schools on the part of the careless, shiftless and imprudent element, believing this to be a material gospel method of dealing with and meeting the conditions as they present themselves.8

While the law-abiding black citizens of Nacogdoches doubtless condemned this horrific crime, these resolutions appear to be largely an attempt to forestall any widespread attacks on the black population, especially in the charged racial atmosphere of those first few days after the murders. With the typical condescension of a white editor in Deep East Texas in 1902, Haltom praised the black citizens for condemning the murders and distancing themselves from Buchanan. He wrote, “There was an earnestness and sincerity depicted upon the features of each individual present, that showed that they felt the importance and solemnity of the occasion.” Condescension aside, the Sentinel editor appeared to honestly try to dampen the passions of those bent on taking revenge against anyone with dark skin for the apparent crimes of a single man. Only five white men were present at the meeting, all described as members of the press.

at first, apparently, davis planned to hold buchanan’s trial on the following Tuesday, October 21.9 But it must have become obvious to him that the situation in downtown Nacogdoches by then would be even more dangerous than it was on Thursday. Hundreds of people streamed into town daily from the outlying communities. Tension was high. It was entirely possible that the crowd, if forced to wait another five days for a trial, would vent its frustrations on innocent black citizens— or even on the courthouse and its officials, for delaying the trial. By Tuesday it was possible that no number of soldiers could safely protect Jim Buchanan, especially since the Nacogdoches County jail was in such poor condition that Buchanan himself had already twice escaped, apparently with minimal effort. Five companies of the Texas Volunteer Guard were now in Rusk with Buchanan. Spradley and his three deputies were there, too. Davis decided that the trial of Jim Buchanan would begin on Friday, October 17. He contacted Major Raines and told him to prepare to transport the prisoner by special train to Nacogdoches early the next morning. The trial of Jim Buchanan would begin at 9 a.m., just one week after the murders of the Hicks family.

c h a p t e r t h i rt e e n

Buchanan Returns for Trial October 17, 1902 under cover of darkness, a specially commissioned train left the Rusk railroad station at 3:00 a.m. on Friday. The autumn air was crisp, the temperature in the mid-forties.1 By road, it was only thirty-five miles from Rusk to Nacogdoches. The route was a bit more convoluted by rail because there was no direct connection between the two cities. The old Houston, East and West Texas (HE&WT) rail line had been purchased three years earlier by Southern Pacific, but no new lines had been built.2 Thus, to get from Rusk to Nacogdoches by train required traveling forty-three miles south on the St. Louis, Arkansas and Texas line to Lufkin, switching trains there, and traveling twenty miles back north on the HE&WT to Nacogdoches. The special train would have to make the rail switch in Lufkin, where it was possible that yet another hostile mob would be waiting.3 The train’s passengers included Spradley and his three deputies; Sheriff Reagan of Cherokee County; and five companies of state militia, a total of approximately 200 soldiers. This formidable military and civil force had been assembled and charged with guarding the life of a single person: Jim Buchanan, a nineteen-year-old black man who had confessed to killing Duncan and Nerva Hicks and their twenty-one-year-old daughter, Allie, seven days earlier, in their home in Black Jack, in eastern Nacogdoches County. Against great odds, Buchanan had been kept from lynch mobs determined to kill him either by hanging or burning, from Tenaha to Shreveport, and from Longview to Henderson. The first part of the final test would be getting the prisoner safely into the Nacogdoches County courthouse from the train station, located about three blocks west on Main Street. It would not be easy. Hundreds of people were streaming into the city from the outlying areas, especially from Chireno, Melrose, and (of course)

Buchanan Returns for Trial

{ 113

Black Jack in the eastern part of the county, but also from Douglass and Alto to the west. A trainload of Lufkin residents, from the south, was rumored to be on the way aboard the HE&WT. From Cushing and Garrison to the north still more people were streaming into town. By noon it was estimated that at least 5,000 people—more than twice the population of Nacogdoches—milled about the square. Nearly all of them were white, judging from photographs of the crowds and offhand comments made by Haltom in the Sentinel. The train slowly made its way from Rusk through the Deep East Texas countryside, passing through the tiny communities of Alto and Linwood and finally into Lufkin. After switching tracks, the special train trudged back north on the HE&WT line, as the sun rose upon what would be a balmy, sunny day. A sizable crowd had gathered at the Nacogdoches depot to await the train’s arrival, which came shortly before eight. There is no doubt that the crowd intended to circumvent the necessity of a trial by taking Buchanan and stringing him up— or worse. A crude gallows had already been fashioned in the center of the downtown square, consisting simply of a tripod of poles lashed together near the top, “without the carefully planned details of the modern gallows,” as one writer put it. A bolt was placed through the top to brace it, and a pulley attached to the top, from which was wound a new rope.4 Three crosspieces were nailed to the tripod about eight feet up. A wider piece of lumber was nailed on top of two of the crosspieces to serve as a makeshift platform, with a rudimentary trapdoor attached.5 However, hanging might not be enough to sate the mob’s desire for vengeance. Perhaps those who a day earlier had boasted of roasting the young man alive on a pit would get their wish. A howl arose when the crowd realized that the train was empty except for its engineer and fireman. Militia commander Major G. P. Raines sagely had ordered the train to stop a quarter mile south of town. The soldiers, lawmen, and the infamous suspect had slipped off the train before it arrived at the depot. Spradley and Buchanan were completely surrounded by the troops as they prepared to march into downtown. Meanwhile, a “bunch of Nacogdoches boys,” as Spradley later called them, were determined to ensure that Buchanan’s fate would be decided in downtown Nacogdoches on this fine autumn day, one way or another.6 First, they ordered the train to pull out of town, back toward Lufkin. The engineer and his lone fireman wisely did so without protest. Here, accounts vary. Spradley, in his memoirs written three decades

114

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

later, claimed that the train was commandeered, taken a mile south, and then pulled off onto a switch sideline. Henry Fuller—who later would be Spradley’s biographer, but in 1902 was a correspondent for the Houston Daily Post —reported that a rail was taken from the track on each side of the special train to make it inoperable.7 Regardless of which version is true, the special train— called out by Governor Joseph D. Sayers to bring Jim Buchanan to justice and to keep him out of the hands of a lynch mob—wasn’t going to leave Nacogdoches with its prisoner, whatever the reason. As Fuller wrote, “The fact that the train was empty is what caused the determination to become firmly fixed that the negro had to die here and at this time.” 8 Just to make certain that Jim Buchanan’s fate would be decided on this day, telegraph and telephone lines also were severed some time after the train was commandeered.9 Thus, the little town of Nacogdoches, which only in the last two decades of the nineteenth century had begun to escape the desperate isolation of the post–Civil War era, was once again cut off from the outside world, as an increasingly angry mob milled about downtown— eager, even bloodthirsty, for revenge. As the troops formed into a column—Buchanan and Spradley hidden in the middle— the outside world unsuccessfully tried to get in touch with someone— anyone—who could tell it what was about to take place in the Oldest Town in Texas.

the troops had disembarked from the train a bit south of the cotton compress, where farmers brought ginned bales to be compacted so more bales could be shipped in less space. The troops likely marched up Calle del Norte, North Street, the main thoroughfare through town, and took a right on Pilar Street past Charles Hoya’s land office, and then went on to the decrepit courthouse, then located on the southwest corner of the Spanish-style plaza. Voters earlier that year had overwhelmingly turned down a $60,000 bond issue to build a new courthouse, as well as a $20,000 bond issue for a new jail, to replace the one from which Buchanan had escaped twice earlier that year. It would be nearly a decade before a similar proposal would pass, and this courthouse finally be demolished. The two-story courthouse was built of brick with large vertical windows and twin steeply pitched gables. It appears to have had at least six fireplaces, none of which would have been in use on this warm day. Next to the courthouse was a two-story building with a veranda on the top

Buchanan Returns for Trial

{ 115

floor; Haltom later said that ladies on the veranda were afforded an unimpeded view of the spectacle about to unfurl.10 Some of the soldiers escorted Buchanan into the courthouse, and the remaining troops formed a solid line in front of the building. Guards were posted at every entrance. Spectators would not be allowed inside for this trial. The only people who would be granted passage into District Judge Tom C. Davis’s courtroom—besides Buchanan, Spradley, and the soldiers—would be the judge, attorneys, witnesses, jurors, and a number of newspapermen, including Haltom, Fuller, and Henning, the three scribes whose accounts would inform the world of what took place in the Oldest Town in Texas on this fall day.11 A jury had been impaneled before Buchanan entered the courtroom; Robert Murphey served as foreman. The other jurors were John Rusk (the failed sheriff candidate in 1892), Ollie Hall, James Shaw, Rob Blackwell, Isaac Skillern, Frank Richardson, Thomas Grimes, Turner King, J. F. Bingham, Ed Delamar, and James Derrick. District Attorney W. E. Donnelly served as the county’s lead prosecutor, though this would be one case in which whatever prowess he possessed as a prosecutor would not be necessary. Buchanan sat in the courtroom, wearing the same clothes in which he had been arrested: a white shirt, light-colored trousers held up with suspenders, and lace-up ankle-length boots. Buchanan was wearing a felt hat with a peaked brim when Spradley arrested him, though it is likely that Judge Davis—a stern-looking jurist with many years of experience on the bench— ordered it removed. The Post writer—almost certainly Henry Fuller—noted, “On one side of (Buchanan) sat a soldier with a loaded rifle; on the other, a deputy sheriff held a shotgun across his knees.” 12 Buchanan is described in all accounts as being almost indifferent to his surroundings, chain-smoking cigarettes and grinning at those gathered in the courtroom to decide his fate—as if there were any doubt what that fate would be. Donnelly read the indictment, which charged Buchanan with the three murders and the sexual assault of Allie Hicks. He then turned to Buchanan, who was asked to rise. “Guilty or not guilty?” Donnelly asked. The young black man stood up and raised his right hand above his head. In what was described as “an audible though not loud tone,” Buchanan pleaded guilty to the three murder charges, but not guilty to the rape charge.13

116

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

Davis accepted Buchanan’s plea. Donnelly called two witnesses. The first was A. Y. Matthews, the San Augustine city marshal and a Democratic candidate for sheriff in that county, who had been with Spradley when Buchanan was caught. Matthews was in Shreveport with the prisoner when he confessed. Matthews testified that Buchanan’s confession had been voluntary and that the suspect had been warned against the dangers of self-incrimination. Next on the stand was A. C. Fall, the justice of the peace to whom had fallen the gruesome task of performing the inquest on the three victims. He described the wounds and showed jurors the rifle that the murderer had broken in clubbing Allie Hicks to death. He also displayed the bullets he had taken from the bodies of Duncan and Nerva Hicks.14 There had been no attorney present when Buchanan confessed, six decades before the legal requirements of a Miranda warning went into effect. There was no attorney present in the courtroom to represent the defendant. Buchanan certainly didn’t have the money to hire one, nor was one appointed. Besides, it was unlikely that any local attorney would have had the gumption to represent a black man in a small town where virtually everybody wanted Buchanan put to death soon, by legal means or otherwise. The young man was quite alone. The case went to the jury, which took a grand total of three minutes to consider Buchanan’s plea of guilty and the testimony of the two witnesses before returning with a verdict. Robert Murphey, the foreman, read the following in Case No. 3839 —State of Texas vs. Jim Buchanan: We the jury find the defendant guilty of murder in the first degree and assess his punishment at death.15

What had seemed highly likely from the moment Sheriff Spradley had captured Buchanan four days earlier in the swamp bottom of the Attoyac River would now come to pass: Jim Buchanan would die for the murders of the Hicks family. Buchanan sat calmly, smoking another cigarette. Judge Davis accepted the verdict and death sentence and, as required by law, ordered the execution delayed for thirty days, until November 17, to allow Buchanan time to appeal, if he desired. He ordered the prisoner to be returned to Rusk Penitentiary in the meantime.16 A full morning’s work completed in a matter of minutes, the judge adjourned the court and went to eat an early lunch at Hart House, a restaurant, accompanied by Fuller.17

Buchanan Returns for Trial

{ 117

What Davis apparently failed to consider— or, at least, was unaware of when he set the execution for a month hence and ordered Buchanan returned to Rusk—was that the train had been disabled, the telegraph and telephone lines cut, and the plaza outside the courtroom filled with hundreds of angry men who had no intention of waiting another month for vengeance. There was no way Jim Buchanan would get out of town alive.

c h a p t e r f o u rt e e n

A Hanging in Nacogdoches w o r d s o o n s p r e a d o u t s i d e t h e c o u rt h o u s e t h at Buchanan had pleaded guilty and been sentenced to death, but that Judge Davis had given the condemned man the required thirty days to appeal the sentence. He ordered the prisoner returned to Rusk Penitentiary. It soon became obvious that Buchanan wasn’t going anywhere. As Fuller later wrote in Spradley’s biography: There was an ominous stillness in the atmosphere as the dense crowd milled around the streets. There were no paved streets in those days. The old public well was in the center of the square. A fence was around it, and several chinaberry trees stood on the inside of the fence. Practically all business was at a standstill.1

Soon, small clusters of white men gathered and began entering local stores, bringing out empty cardboard boxes and more recruits, saying, again and again, “Men with nerve come at once to the public square.” Soon hundreds of men, nearly all of them armed, were busy piling up drygoods boxes in a corner of the square.2 The soldiers continued to protect the courthouse, but made no effort to stop the men from constructing what was intended to be Buchanan’s funeral pyre— except that the convicted murderer would be very much alive when the kindling was lighted beneath him. Couriers were sent to find Judge Davis, who was enjoying his leisurely lunch. Former district attorney I. M. Imboden and John Garrison, described as another “leading citizen” of the community, made speeches imploring the men to do nothing rash, that the “negro would be executed legally and almost at once if they would be patient.” 3 The crowd, however, was in no mood for fine words and reassurances; those present were more interested in violence than verbosity. As the Shreveport Times writer put it, “They were hungry for vengeance on the

A Hanging in Nacogdoches

{ 119

lecherous brute who had been doomed to die, and they were determined that there should be no long drawn out legal delays.” 4 Davis quickly returned to the courthouse and conferred with the sheriff. Spradley told the judge that he was helpless to stop the mob, now numbering several hundred, from burning Buchanan alive, and it didn’t appear that the soldiers were going to do much to prevent it from happening, either. Davis ordered Spradley to call the court back into session and have Buchanan returned to the bar. Surely Buchanan knew by then that a far grislier—and more painful—fate awaited him if the crowd got hold of him. Despite his youth, certainly he had heard stories of other prolonged tortures, of black men who had had their genitals severed, their fingers pulled off one by one, their bodies skinned alive, all in an attempt to cause as much pain as possible before death. No doubt he realized, as he listened through the open windows of the courthouse to the shouts and curses of angry men lusting to inflict as painful and torturous a death as possible upon him, that hanging—although neither relatively quick nor painless—was preferable to being burned alive. Or worse. Davis asked Buchanan if he wished to waive his right to appeal and be hanged at once. As Fuller put it, “The trembling culprit who had so wantonly and fiendishly murdered the helpless Hicks family answered hardly above a whisper that he desired to waive the time set by the court and would be hung at once.” 5 Well, not quite at once. Major Raines, commander of the five companies of soldiers charged with protecting Buchanan and ensuring justice was done, was in a quandary. He managed to get a telegram off to Governor Sayers at 10 : 33 a.m. (original punctuation): Nacogdoches, Texas, October 17th, 1902 Governor Sayers, Austin Texas The prisoner has waived all rights and wants to be hung at once will be done by sheriff shall I turn him over to the Sheriff the district judge and Sheriff say this is legal. I have written order from sheriff to allow him, the sheriff to hang prisoner at once telegraph in haste. G. P. Raines, Maj. Commanding 6

The governor responded quickly, sending the following telegraph to Davis: As Major G. P. Raines of the Volunteer Guard has been directed to obey your orders and instructions in all matters respecting the custody

120

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

and protection of the prisoner, Buchanan, I have to request that you will reduce all such orders and instructions you may see proper to give him to writing, so that he make report of same to adjutant general when his present service shall have terminated.7

In addition, Adjutant General Scurry telegraphed Raines: Telegram to governor of this date received. Obtain from district judge written order to deliver prisoner to sheriff. As heretofore ordered, you are to act under direct orders and instructions of the judge in all matters touching the prisoner. Show the judge this telegram.8

By their actions, it’s clear that both Sayers and Scurry were washing their hands of the entire affair and leaving it to Davis to decide whether to hang Buchanan at once. Not long after, apparently, the telegraph and telephone lines were cut, no doubt to keep more troops from being dispatched. It didn’t really matter by that point. After this flurry of dispatches, the soldiers’ duty was not to keep Buchanan from being hanged but to ensure that order prevailed. The time first set for the hanging was 11 :30 a.m., just an hour after Raines had telegraphed the governor. The speeches continued, with both Captain Fowler, of the Burkitt Rifles of Palestine, and J. B. Harris begging the crowd to behave itself and show the world that this was a legal execution. Imboden—the former district attorney who eight years earlier had told a group of blacks that he would always oppose their having political power, that East Texas would always be a “white man’s country”—now implored a mob of armed, angry white men to behave themselves and not take vengeance on a black man just convicted of the most heinous crime imaginable, at least in the view of white southerners.9 Apparently some considerate soul thought about all those people streaming into town from out in the county. If Buchanan were hanged before lunch, many of the citizens coming from Linn Flat and Looneyville, or San Augustine and Lufkin, would miss out on the festivities. One account says, “a vote was taken” to delay the hanging until 3 : 30 p.m., though it’s unclear who voted—the jury, the mob, or the soldiers. Major Raines then addressed the crowd and warned it that he had an unpleasant duty to perform: ensuring that Buchanan was legally hanged and not lynched or burned. He said that his duty was to make certain that

A Hanging in Nacogdoches

{ 121

Spradley’s orders were followed to the letter, and that he had “plenty of men and ammunition and could get more.” From where such reinforcements would come wasn’t clear, given that all communication lines had been severed. Still, Raines’s bravery in the face of an increasingly hostile crowd was unmistakable. Some of the crowd continued to gather boxes, pine kindling, and cans of kerosene. Spradley, who had lost two prisoners to lynchings in the past eleven years, did not want to lose a third. He feared that if authorities waited another four hours to hang Buchanan, as hundreds more angry citizens streamed into town, then he and the soldiers would be unable to prevent the execution from turning into a barbaric burning. Such an anarchic event would forever brand Nacogdoches as a place where mob rule prevailed, given the widespread publicity that the Hicks murders and the subsequent flight with Buchanan across East Texas had already received. Spradley overruled the “voters” and said that Buchanan would be hanged as soon as possible.

word spread quickly that the hanging would soon take place, and the crowd, which had thinned when the delay until 3 :30 p.m. was announced, began to file into the square again. As the Shreveport Times reporter put it, “Thousands of persons filled the public square and in all of the windows in the stores surrounding the open grounds were crowds of spectators, including many ladies who were there to witness the execution.” 10 The militia’s bugler called the troops together as the rope hanging from the tripod’s pulley was tested. Captain John Garrison, described by Fuller as “a man of influence and popularity,” mounted the ladder that led to a narrow platform crudely nailed on top of two of the tripod’s crosspieces. He asked the crowd to promise there would be no shooting at Buchanan as he dangled from the rope—a common activity at lynchings. He warned that any such shots would surely cause trouble with the soldiers, and it was possible that innocent lives would be lost.11 It was nearly noon. A group of soldiers formed a cordon around the gallows, keeping a clear space around the execution area. The doors to the courthouse sprang open. Once again ringed by soldiers, Buchanan, Spradley, and A. Y. Matthews—the rather rumpledlooking lawman who had bravely managed to slip the prisoner safely into the Henderson jail—began the 150-yard walk from the courthouse to the gallows.

122

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

Buchanan was smoking a cigarette as he walked across the square. He was described as “calm and the least disturbed of any.” From the moment of Buchanan’s capture until his execution, every reporter who wrote about him took note of his calm demeanor: how he matter-of-factly confessed to these gruesome acts and how he placidly faced death for a week, first from lynch mobs at every train depot, until now, with the final moments of his life at hand. The Shreveport Times reporter theorized that Buchanan was what would in modern times be labeled a sociopath: Jim Buchanan, the executed negro, has been closely studied during the past week by men who have given attention to the study of criminology. They pronounced him a man who was imbued with a homicide mania. He murdered because it pleased him. As he had carried out his murderous instincts, he gloried in the success of his plans. His happiest moments were those spent talking about his murderous deeds. . . . In the very presence of death on the gallows, his nerve was remarkable and his self-control supreme.12

buchanan’s wrists were loosely bound with a rope so he could be pulled up the ladder to the scaffold, if necessary. It would not be necessary. Josh Henson, one of the deputies who had accompanied Spradley to Henderson and then to Rusk, climbed the ladder first, holding on to the rope tied to Buchanan’s wrist. Buchanan readily followed, one writer noting he seemed “ready to die.” Spradley and another man followed Buchanan up the ladder. They tied ropes around the condemned man’s hands and feet, and Spradley asked if he had any last words. No minister was present, and Buchanan didn’t ask for one. But he did ask to pray. This didn’t sit well with the crowd, which began to hiss and curse, drowning out both Spradley and Buchanan. Whatever shortcomings one might believe the veteran sheriff possessed, Spradley was indisputably fearless. By force of personality, he ordered the crowd— estimated by some at 5,000 —into silence. Buchanan, still wearing his felt hat, sank to his knees, his face to the mob, and began praying loudly. By one account his prayer was extraordinary, at least from the perspective of the white men and women gathered. He thanked God for granting him “the nerve to die like a man. He also asked that all of his race be blessed in the same way to face such a trying

A Hanging in Nacogdoches

{ 123

ordeal. He was never repentant, asked for no forgiveness of his sins but rather resignedly consigned his soul to paradise.” 13 The Associated Press account differed markedly, quoting Buchanan as praying, “Oh Lord, have mercy on my soul. I am a sinner and must appear before you in a few minutes. Have mercy on my name and its posterity. Forgive me my sins.” 14 Bill Haltom gave yet another account in the Daily Sentinel, claiming that Buchanan sarcastically “congratulated himself that he had so many friends among the white people,” because of the huge crowd that had gathered to watch him die. “He was an idiot, a savage,” Haltom concluded.” 15 Whether Buchanan prayed or caustically thanked the thousands of white people present for his execution, one thing is certain: once Buchanan finished talking and rose to his feet, the sheriff—wearing a tengallon hat and a long black coat—wasted no time in cutting the rope that held the crudely built trapdoor. The account of the hanging written by the Shreveport Times correspondent (most likely the Plaindealer’s A. F. Henning) is the most compelling and detailed: The negro’s body shot through the trap like a stone through a catapault [sic], and as the slack gave out the body turned around like a top. The neck was not broken by the fall, and it was twenty minutes before the doctors pronounced him dead. The body remained hanging for an hour when City Marshal Spradley (the sheriff ’s brother) cut it down. Then there was a wild rush for him, and the crowd dragged the body from him, saying the people from the surrounding country had not arrived and that it should remain hanging until they arrived and had their fill of the law’s vindication.16

Jim Buchanan was dead. But that wouldn’t be enough to satisfy those gathered on the square on this autumn day. At long last, the Oldest Town in Texas had a genuine tourist attraction and the mob, now fully in charge, had no intention of shutting down this three-ring circus early. The gallows, that crude tripod of pine timber, was moved to a side of the square, and Buchanan’s lifeless body was hoisted back into the air, where it dangled until dusk. Finally, about five, Buchanan’s body was cut down, placed in a pine box, and buried. Where he was buried is lost to history. For the rest of the

124

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

afternoon, the saloons were ordered closed to prevent any rash actions fueled by alcohol, and “leading citizens of the town mingled with the crowd throughout the day, maintaining law and order.” 17 It was nearly press time for Haltom’s Sentinel, which usually hit the streets around five. There is no doubt that he and his small crew had to work feverishly to get the story of the hanging set into type. The Sentinel in 1902 was still hand-set, meaning that every piece of type had to be placed by hand into a wooden frame, which was locked down into the press, inked, and then had a sheet of paper drawn across it—a painstakingly slow process even under the best of circumstances. Nearly all the front page was devoted to the hanging, the only exception being the previously mentioned account of the “Colored Citizens Meeting” that took up about half a column in the lower-right corner of the page. For the first time, an illustration or photograph—it is unclear which— produced on deadline was published on the front page of the Daily Sentinel. It was a silhouette of Buchanan hanging from the three-pole gallows, wearing a cocked hat, his wrists bound behind his back, his ankles also tied. The picture takes up nearly one-fourth of the page. In 1902, publishing either a photograph or an illustration in a country newspaper on deadline was an impressive achievement. The technology existed, but was not readily available in small towns such as Nacogdoches. If Haltom wanted to publish a photograph—and these were generally printed only in special editions meant to attract new residents and investment—he sent off the photographs to a big-city company, which would produce a metal etching, a process that usually took a couple of weeks. It is still not known how Haltom managed to get a newspaper on the streets just five hours or so after Buchanan died, complete with a photograph or illustration on the front page. It is known that three days after the execution a local studio photographer, J. H. Casley, was advertising photos of the hanging for sale in the Daily Sentinel, with the pitch “If you didn’t see the NEGRO HUNG, come around and I’ll show you how it was done. If you want a photo, you can have one.” Likely, Casley printed up a photograph that Haltom made into a stark black-and-white illustration with no shades of gray, similar to the woodcuts and metal plates then widely used in early twentieth-century newspapers. In whatever manner the depiction of Buchanan’s hanging was produced, there’s little doubt that the October 17 edition of the Daily Sentinel,

A Hanging in Nacogdoches

{ 125

which had recently entered its fourth year of existence, was the hottest seller in the newspaper’s young history. The headline over the story of the hanging read: FIEND AND MURDERER BUCHANAN HANGED J U RY O U T T H R E E M I N U T E S F O U N D G U I LT Y G I V E N D E AT H S E N T E N C E — P R I S O N E R A S K E D F O R I M M E D I AT E E X E C U T I O N 18 Haltom’s lead paragraph left no doubt about where he stood on the matter of this extraordinarily swift trial and execution: “Today has been one of unparalleled excitement in Nacogdoches, and it has witnessed perhaps the most wonderful legal trial for a capital offense ever had in Texas or any other State in [the] Union.” His account is somewhat sketchier than those produced the next day in the Shreveport and Houston newspapers, whose correspondents had time to include more detail, since they were morning newspapers that would publish the next day. And Haltom’s story made no pretense of objectivity, freely mixing editorial comments with reportage, saying of Buchanan as he stood on the gallows: “And what a mean, loathsome, venomous reptile he looked. It gives a decent man an appetite to kill him just to look at him. Of small stature, not over 20 years of age and copper colored, he was a perfect type of the ‘bad nigger’ of the new generation.” His description of the crowd’s reaction when Spradley cut the trapdoor—Buchanan’s “vestibule to hell”—probably accurately reflects the sentiments of those gathered: “Shouts and jeers resounded on all sides from the thousands of spectators, and there was wild, fierce joy among all those people that the fiend was in his last agony and could no more ravish the daughters of Nacogdoches and murder their parents.” Haltom noted that blacks were scarce on the streets of Nacogdoches that day, “but law-abiding negroes have nothing to fear.” He added that a large crowd of Lufkin people arrived too late to see the hanging and were sorely disappointed, while “a vast crowd of people came in from all parts of the county . . . but arrived after it was all over.” The execution over and the crowd peaceful, the five companies of the

126

} A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

Texas Volunteer Guard were allowed to stand down. The train was retrieved from wherever it had been taken. The soldiers were treated to refreshments and greeted warmly by the men and women still downtown, now that the mob had gotten its wish. The Dallas Morning News writer concluded his account of the hanging with a poetic flair: “And after all the great noise came a great calm.” 19 The troops boarded the train and headed home at dusk.

Sheriff A. J. Spradley, right, prepares to kick the trapdoor loose as a noose dangles around Jim Buchanan’s neck. (Photo courtesy of Juanita Tarpley Peters.) The grand Banita Hotel, along with a half dozen or so other inns, provided a haven for travelers to Nacogdoches around 1900. (Photo courtesy of the Center for East Texas Studies, Stephen F. Austin State University.)

R. W. Haltom poses with a young girl, probably his daughter, Ruby, in front of the office of the weekly Nacogdoches Chronicle, a precursor to Haltom’s Daily Sentinel. (Photo courtesy of the Center for East Texas Studies, Stephen F. Austin State University.)

Deputy A. Y. Matthews helped keep Jim Buchanan away from lynch mobs gathered throughout East Texas. ( Daily Sentinel file photo.)

Curg Border went from gunman to lawman in the fall of 1902 and helped capture Buchanan. ( Daily Sentinel file photo.)

Members of the Texas Volunteer Guard keep the crowd away from Jim Buchanan, who was hanged on October 17, 1902, after pleading guilty to murdering the Hicks family. (Photo courtesy of Juanita Tarpley Peters.)

Hundreds of people gathered in downtown Nacogdoches to witness the hanging of Buchanan. (Photo courtesy of Jerry Larabee.)

This headline in the Austin Statesman the day before Buchanan was hanged reflected the feelings of many of the white citizens of Nacogdoches.

Headline of the Daily Sentinel story describing the hanging of Jim Buchanan.

Headline of the initial story in the Daily Sentinel on the Hicks murders.

Duncan, Nerva, and Allie Hicks were found murdered at their home in Black Jack, about twenty-four miles east of Nacogdoches. (Graphic by Jaime Maldonado, Daily Sentinel.)

A view of North Street, the main north-south thoroughfare in Nacogdoches in the early 1900s. (Photo courtesy of the East Texas Research Center, Stephen F. Austin State University.)

The Nacogdoches depot, where an angry crowd gathered to lynch Buchanan. Soldiers kept Buchanan safe by taking him off the train before it arrived. (Photo courtesy of the East Texas Research Center, Stephen F. Austin State University.)

Nacogdoches University provided an education for young men and women from 1858. This building still stands on Washington Square, just north of downtown. (Undated photo courtesy of the East Texas Research Center, Stephen F. Austin State University.)

The Perkins brothers, owners of a Nacogdoches drugstore, were major Sentinel advertisers. They bought the Old Stone Fort, hoping to expand their business, but eventually tore down the venerable structure. (Photo courtesy of the East Texas Research Center, Stephen F. Austin State University.)

Downtown Nacogdoches, 1898. The town was originally laid out in the Spanish style, centered on an open plaza, and included a public well. (Photo courtesy of the East Texas Research Center, Stephen F. Austin State University.)

After capturing Buchanan, lawmen took a circuitous route to protect him from lynch mobs: from Black Jack through Appleby to Tenaha, from there to Shreveport, then back through East Texas. (Graphic by Jaime Maldonado, Daily Sentinel.)

A typical front page from the Daily Sentinel in 1902 — crowded with advertisements. Each issue was usually four pages.

Opposite page: Sentinel editor Bill Haltom is barely visible through the doorway of his Church Street office as his children, Maury (on the pony) and Ruby pose in front. The photo is from either 1900 or 1901. ( Daily Sentinel file photo.)

This picture of Jim Buchanan hanging was published on the front page of the Daily Sentinel on October 17, 1902. It is not clear if this is a photograph or a woodcut. ( Daily Sentinel file photo.)

This photo of Jim Buchanan was taken at Dambly’s Studio in Shreveport and published in the Shreveport Times. (Reproduced from a microfilm of the Dallas Morning News.)

A. J. Spradley in 1902 bore a resemblance to Bat Masterson, the famous gambler, gunman, and occasional sportswriter. (Reproduced from a microfilm of the Dallas Morning News.)

Duncan, Nerva, and Allie Hicks are buried in a small cemetery in Black Jack. ( Daily Sentinel photo by Andy Brosig.)

Sheriff A. J. Spradley is shown in his later years with one of his famed bloodhounds. During his three decades as a lawman, his investigative skills kept him in demand throughout the South. (Photo courtesy of Carol Spradley.)

A large crowd gathered around the crude tripod that served as a scaffold for Jim Buchanan’s execution. (Photo courtesy of the East Texas Research Center, Stephen F. Austin State University.)

A number of soldiers from the Texas Volunteer Guard pose with their bayonets and rifles around Jim Buchanan. (Photo courtesy of Juanita Tarpley Peters.)

In 1910 wagons were still the preferred mode of coming to town from the hundreds of small farms throughout Nacogdoches County. (Photo courtesy of the East Texas Research Center, Stephen F. Austin State University.)

Built by pioneer Gil Ibarvo in 1779, the Old Stone Fort served as a store and later as a saloon. This photo is from the late nineteenth century. (Photo courtesy of the East Texas Research Center, Stephen F. Austin State University.)

The Cox Building, which once housed the Chronicle, here accommodates a hardware store. The building still stands on the corner of Main and Fredonia streets. (Photo courtesy of the East Texas Research Center, Stephen F. Austin State University.)

In the early part of the twentieth century, one of the city’s major mercantile establishments was Tucker-Zeve-Dotson, shown in this photo from the early 1900s. (Photo courtesy of the East Texas Research Center, Stephen F. Austin State University.)

Spradley’s telegram to the governor, advising him to send the militia to Nacogdoches for Buchanan’s trial. (Reproduced from the holdings of the Texas State Library.)

There is nothing left but pasture and woodlands on the plot of land that once was the Hicks homesite near the Attoyac River in eastern Nacogdoches County. (Sentinel photo by Andy Brosig.)

District Judge Tom Davis. He later regretted the swiftness of Buchanan’s hanging, but claimed he had seen no alternative. ( Sentinel file photo.)

R. W. Haltom. A lifelong newspaperman, he achieved his political aspirations when he was finally elected to the Texas Legislature, but illness cut short both his political career and his life. (Sentinel file photo.)

A local photographer, advertising in the Daily Sentinel, offered to sell images of the hanging of Jim Buchanan.

pa rt i i

Aftermath

THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

chapter fifteen

Quick Hanging Sparks Criticism and Praise it didn’t take long for the editorial writers across the South to weigh in on the hanging of Jim Buchanan. The day after Buchanan’s death, Bill Haltom of the Sentinel praised the quick dispensing of “justice”: Yesterday was a great day in the annals of Nacogdoches and is an example to all the South. We tried, convicted, sentenced and executed a negro murderer and rape fiend in the space of about six hours [actually it was just over three hours], and the law was scrupulously obeyed from start to finish. No people ever had stronger provocation to sweep the law aside and deal summary justice by the most savage methods to a fiend in human shape, but the laws of Texas were respected and obeyed, and that nigger is just as dead as though he had been burnt at the stake by a lawless mob. It was a great day for Nacogdoches, for justice and for law.1

Meanwhile, Judge Tom C. Davis felt compelled to defend his actions in allowing Buchanan to waive his rights and be executed a few hours after being sentenced. He submitted a statement to Henry Fuller, the Houston Daily Post correspondent: I had a private talk with the defendant. He told me he had killed the Hicks family and how he had done it. He stated further that he ought to be hanged and knew he would be hanged, and that he wanted to be hanged at once. I told him that he had the right to postpone the trial of the case for two days and to have a venire summoned from which to select the jury. He stated that he did not wish any delay; that he wanted to be tried at once and waived all these matters. I then had a jury placed in the box and asked him if the jury was satisfactory to him. He stated that it was. The indictment was then read and he pleaded guilty.2

130

} Aftermath

Davis described the testimony of the two witnesses, confirmed that he left the courtroom for a while, and upon returning, “was told by someone that the negro did not desire a stay of his execution for thirty days, but that it was his wish to be executed at once.” Davis said that he called Buchanan before the bar and asked him if that was true, and Buchanan said it was, and “I so ordered under article 22, criminal procedure.” 3 The elderly judge was a bit disingenuous in his explanation. He didn’t mention that it was a certainty that Buchanan would have been seized and burned at the stake if he didn’t agree to be hanged at once; that the soldiers appeared unwilling to risk their lives to delay the inevitable; and that the “someone” who told him Buchanan wanted to be hanged at once was Sheriff Spradley, who had summoned Davis from his lunch (with Fuller) to tell him the town was about to erupt in a riot. Davis clearly had misgivings about Buchanan’s quick hanging. He wrote Governor Sayers on October 23, six days after the execution, to explain his role. Davis truly intended to have Buchanan returned to Rusk after sentencing, saying that he told the Cherokee County sheriff to find Major Raines, the troop commander, and “have him take charge of the prisoner at once.” Davis said that after leaving the courthouse, he heard that the train had been taken away, and that “some parties had taken all the dynamite which could be found in town with a mind to blowing up the railway. People were flocking to the town by this time from all the surrounding country and by their acts it was evident they intended to take the defendant from the soldiers.” 4 Davis, it should be noted, only reluctantly made the decision to allow Buchanan to be hanged immediately: I am now and was at the time fully aware that it was a most dangerous precedent to allow the execution in the manner in which I did, but to have failed to allow it would have at once precipitated trouble between the troops and the citizens. . . . I alone was responsible for the order putting the boys composing the troops in this dangerous attitude, and I took the responsibility of throwing around the execution all the semblance of legality that I could. I regret the occurrence as much as anyone, but it was the only solution of the case as I saw it.5

The judge clearly was concerned that the soldiers, who indeed were nearly all young men, boys really—judging by photographs taken at the scene—would be no match for a crowd of thousands of angry, armed men. Surely, Davis must have decided that the life of a confessed mur-

Quick Hanging Sparks Criticism and Praise

{ 131

derer wasn’t worth risking the lives of what he certainly would have considered to be some of East Texas’s finest white youth. Especially, he likely concluded, when the murderer was a black man guilty of killing three respectable white people. Spradley harbored no illusions that Buchanan’s hanging was a triumph of justice, even while newspapers across the state heaped praise upon him—a fact that irked Haltom to no end and ultimately led him to actually blame Spradley for the deaths of the Hicks family. Nearly three decades later, the long-retired sheriff, then seventy-eight years old, dictated to Fuller—the indefatigable scribe, former fellow Populist, and lifelong friend—his account of the lynching of Joe Adams in 1887, described in Chapter Seven. Spradley noted that Adams’s lynching was the first in his thirty-year career as sheriff, followed a decade later by that of Esseck White. He concluded by noting that the final man lynched under his watch was Jim Buchanan. The cagey old sheriff, who by then had been out of office for fifteen years but was still occasionally called upon to bring out his bloodhounds and catch a fugitive, concluded flatly that “Jim Buchanan was tried with all the formalities of law, but it was in truth a lynching.” 6 Haltom, meanwhile, steadfastly continued in his self-appointed role of town booster. He took issue with the Shreveport Times account of the hanging because it claimed that “hundreds of men, all having pistols at their waists, took a conspicuous part in the affair.” Haltom rather unbelievably claimed that he freely circulated about the crowd and that the only people he saw carrying weapons were the law officers and soldiers.7 What makes Haltom’s statement even harder to believe is that just four days earlier he had complained that the country people were afraid to come to Nacogdoches, “as they didn’t know what moment they might be shot to death on the streets by stray bullets.” 8 He quoted one citizen he talked to on Saturday morning as saying, “I am sick and tired of this gun play in Nacogdoches, such as we had last night. A man can’t tell when his life is safe.” The night referred to was October 17, when Buchanan was hanged. It stretches belief to accept Haltom’s assertion that while there apparently was gunplay that night, nobody toted a pistol earlier that day, as thousands milled about eager to witness—and participate in, if necessary—Buchanan’s death. Southern newspaper editorial writers began to opine upon the event.9 In the Austin Statesman edition published the day after Buchanan’s death, the writer had no objection to Buchanan’s execution, regretting only that

132

} Aftermath

his death was relatively painless compared to that of his victims. But he was concerned that the Nacogdoches legal authorities were, in essence, accessories to a crime: It is undeniably true, however, that his [Buchanan’s] death was a suicide and that the sheriff, by polite acquiescence in his request, was an aider and abetter in the suicide and therefore technically guilty of murder. It will thus be seen that when a man, rather than bear the ills he has, desires to fly to others that he knows not of, it is not always safe to gratify him and that while many persons would be glad to elevate the negro, legal complications may possibly result when one, even at his own request, elevates him with a rope.10

This double entendre use of “elevation” cropped up at least once more, when Haltom, as the election of 1902 approached, rhetorically asked how any black could vote against the Democratic ticket, claiming rather surrealistically that Texas “has done more to educate and elevate the colored people than any other state in the Union.” The Houston Daily Post editorial writer tartly replied that Buchanan’s hanging proved that “Nacogdoches is certainly an authority on the ‘elevation’ of the negro,” a remark that Haltom reprinted in the Sentinel. That smart-aleck comment launched Haltom on a column-long diatribe in defense of the Democrats and his contention that scheming Republicans and Populists “are responsible for more ‘mean niggers’ than anything else outside of the naturally depraved nature of the utterly ignorant negro.” 11 The Post writer apparently fancied himself a master of comedy, since within a few days of Buchanan’s hanging, he delivered the following oneliners on the editorial page: “Judge Davis of Nacogdoches may not be an eloquent man, but the negro at least fairly hung on his words” and “Perhaps Buchanan thought Judge Davis was only stringing him along.” 12 Other newspaper editors joined in, their comments often reprinted in the Sentinel, along with Haltom’s ripostes. The Tyler Courier called the execution a “hurry-up job,” to which Haltom replied that the event was a hint to Texas courts to be quicker about dispensing justice. The Post eventually weighed in favorably, saying that the hanging “shows what the law can do when the people are behind it.” 13 The Waco Telephone wrote sarcastically that “Jim Buchanan was railroaded to eternity according to law and at his own request. Who says a negro can’t get justice in Texas?” As was common, the editorial writer at the Galveston Daily News reprinted the Waco commentary and replied:

Quick Hanging Sparks Criticism and Praise

{ 133

There is no doubt that the criminal received what he should have received, and if there had been any punishment with which to punish him for his crime greater than inflicted, perhaps it ought to have been inflicted. But he was not executed according to law. The law specially provides that a man shall not be executed till 30 days after his conviction. He can not waive this right, and no one can waive it for him. The mob did not execute him, but the mob had him executed.14

Both Shreveport daily newspapers approved of the hanging of Buchanan, the Times writing that “Buchanan has gone the way of other lecherous beasts who proceeded [sic] him to the gallows. Justice has been satisfied and the murder of the Hicks family avenged.” 15 The Journal editorialist said, as did others, that Buchanan would have been burned at the stake if the execution had been delayed: Our Northern brethren will no doubt comment adversely upon the course of the Texas officials, but then they comment adversely upon almost everything done south of Mason’s and Dixon’s line and are not in position to appreciate and intelligently discuss conditions which grow out of the presence and inhuman conduct of fiends in human shape.16

The Journal writer’s attitude is hardly surprising, even for a relatively large city such as Shreveport. The Red River parishes of northwestern Louisiana were the most violent in the state after the Civil War, and blacks were quite often the victims. As the author of one study of homicides in Louisiana in the two decades after the war concluded, the Red River parishes had been spared the ravages of that war. As a result—much as in East Texas, but apparently even more severely—the white community did not accept that it had been vanquished and that blacks were now entitled to economic and political rights. The number of blacks killed by “unknown parties” was so high in Caddo Parish in the mid-1870s that the parish coroner resigned out of fear for his life.17 That attitude of violence toward blacks changed little in the ensuing decades. Northwest Louisiana continued to lead a violent state in the number of blacks lynched, so it is no surprise that the Shreveport editorial writer would defend Buchanan’s execution. The entire event was likely considered an improvement on the “lynching bees” common to the Red River parishes. Both the Hallettsville Herald and the Pittsburg Chronicle, two small Texas weeklies, commented favorably on the hanging, and were praised

134

} Aftermath

by Haltom for their “sensible opinions.” The Chronicle suggested that if such rapidity in trials, sentencing, and executions became the norm, “it will not be long until lynching bees will have been relegated to the rear.” 18 Even the St. Louis Post-Dispatch weighed in, writing with apparent approval: “A mob would have been little swifter in punishing Jim Buchanan, negro murderer, than were the regularly constituted authorities, who tried condemned and hanged him in three hours, and observed all the formalities of law.” 19

wishful thinking notwithstanding, lynching bees continued. Two black men from Hempstead, about forty miles west of Houston, were arrested the day before Buchanan was caught. They were charged with killing and raping a farmer’s wife. In language similar to that used to describe the murder of the Hicks family, the crime was described as “one of the blackest and foulest crimes ever committed in the South.” The two black men—Reddick Barton and Jim Wesley—were brothers-in-law. They were arrested, confessed, and then taken to the Houston jail for safekeeping; a large group of citizens met and pledged to let justice take its course, and not to lynch the pair of suspects. The trial was set for October 21, nine days after the body of Susan Lewis, described as an “elderly Christian woman,” was found dead in her yard. Bloodhounds had tracked down the two men. On the day of the trial, the headline over the Post story read “Go To Hempstead Today.” While the writer doubtless meant that the two black suspects would go to Hempstead on that day, the mob heading to Hempstead, if they even read the story, doubtless found a different meaning. District Judge Wells Thompson seems to have done his best to make sure a legal trial and execution was held. He met with a large crowd outside the courthouse the day before, and warned those gathered that if he couldn’t have their assurance that there would be no mob violence, he wouldn’t allow the prisoners to be brought back to Hempstead for trial. The crowd gave its word, and the prisoners were returned for trial. After pleading guilty, they were convicted and sentenced to death, all in the course of a day. Hours later, before the two could be returned to Houston for the requisite thirty-day appeal, a large group of men broke through the line of deputies guarding the courthouse, seized the pair, and strung them up on a telephone pole. Thompson, the district judge, wired Governor Sayers

Quick Hanging Sparks Criticism and Praise

{ 135

at 4:07 p.m.: “Send me 100 men on special train have them here quick as possible. Howling mob seem [sic] determined to have prisoners on trial.” 20 There is no record in the adjutant general’s report that soldiers were ever dispatched. If they were, obviously they didn’t arrive in Hempstead in time. Haltom’s dry comment concerning the Hempstead lynchings: “The Nacogdoches plan didn’t fully work down there.” 21 The Houston editor wasn’t amused. Under the headline, “Lynching Doesn’t Deter,” he pointed out that less than two months earlier another black man accused of rape had been lynched from the same telephone pole used to hang Barton and Wesley: This teaches very plainly that lynching does not deter. It is an open question whether legal executions would do any more good in the way of prevention, but the thought occurs that it would be worth while to try legal remedies. . . . It would seem that by this time this simple truth ought to be apparent to the dullest comprehension, and that the most violently disposed would be willing to give the law a chance.22

In the same issue in which Haltom reported the lynchings at Hempstead, he noted that the excursionists—potential investors in the community—who had arrived in Nacogdoches too late to witness Buchanan’s hanging, didn’t go away empty-handed: [They] all carried away with them a piece of the extempore gallows on which the execution took place last Friday. They were anxious to secure the souvenirs, because they thought the swift legal justice done marked a new era. They were unanimous in their approval of the magnificent self control of the people of Nacogdoches.23

It’s unknown if the city’s dispensation of “swift legal justice” managed to persuade any of the visitors to make Nacogdoches their home.

less than two weeks later, haltom reverted to form. He once again turned on Spradley and began to attack the sheriff ’s role in Buchanan’s hanging—largely for political reasons, since the 1902 general election was only a few days away. What set Haltom off were some fawning editorial comments in the Dallas Morning News, praising Spradley, the editor’s longtime nemesis. Three days after Buchanan’s hanging, the Morning News characterized

136

} Aftermath

the sheriff as a hero and a patriot, writing that he had “done about as much for the good name of Texas as any man.” 24 The next day the Morning News again heaped kudos upon Spradley: “If there were more Sheriff Spradleys, there would be less lynching.” Haltom devoted nearly a half page of type to fulminating against the veteran sheriff and the newspaper’s fawning upon him. He reprinted the Morning News editorial and, as was common then, added his own take on the situation: “Now ain’t that slush for you? It makes Nacogdoches folks laugh, and we have seen so much of the same kind of stuff from papers that are absolutely ignorant of the true situation that we are almost sick in disgust.” 25 Haltom accurately pointed out that while Spradley deserved credit for his part in Buchanan’s capture, trial, and execution, he didn’t act alone: A. Y. Matthews, Curg Border, the Texas Volunteer Guard, Judge Davis, Governor Sayers, and the several hundred citizens who promised that Buchanan would have a fair trial all also deserved credit. Haltom’s criticisms hit the mark in another area. He wrote that “the mob” (as Haltom repeatedly referred to the crowd in this piece) had had every one of its demands met. The prisoner was quickly returned to Nacogdoches for trial, as demanded. “The mob” commandeered the train and cut the telegraph wires. “The mob” threatened to burn Buchanan, and thus persuaded him to waive his rights to a thirty-day stay. “The mob” refused to allow the hanging to be postponed until late afternoon, Haltom claims. (Spradley said it was his decision to hold the hanging immediately.) “The mob” objected to Buchanan’s face being covered with a black cloth. Spradley obliged and removed it. “The mob” hoisted Buchanan’s body back up in the air after Mat Spradley had cut it down, with no objection from either Spradley. “And in this way Sheriff Spradley is made a ‘hero’ and a ‘patriot,’” Haltom wrote sarcastically. But the curmudgeonly editor—who just a few days earlier had published an ad to sell some land he owned: “If you want it at $20 an acre on usual terms, come and see me. If you just want to talk about it, you can find lots of folks that know all about the land. Talk to them”—wasn’t finished going after Spradley. He pointed out that twice before Spradley had lost prisoners to lynchings and that Spradley’s predecessor, W. J. Campbell, had been defeated in 1900, by Spradley, because “he brought a felon to trial in spite of a mob.” 26 Haltom was referring to the hanging of F. M. Smith, a white Confederate veteran who lived between Nacogdoches and Appleby. In early 1900 he had been convicted for killing his neighbor; she had turned out

Quick Hanging Sparks Criticism and Praise

{ 137

her hogs, and they were tearing up Smith’s garden. He walked up to Mrs. Theodore Vawters and asked her if she had turned out the hogs, and she said she had. Smith went home, grabbed his double-barreled shotgun, came back, and shot Mrs. Vawters in the back while she was picking turnip greens. Then he walked to Nacogdoches and surrendered. Mrs. Vawters died later that day. A few days later, a mob gathered and headed to town, intending to break Smith out of the sieve-like Nacogdoches jail and string him up. But Campbell had spirited Smith away first to Lufkin and then to Rusk Penitentiary. Smith was duly convicted and sentenced to death, but managed to delay his hanging for several months through appeals. Finally he was brought back to town from Rusk on October 27, 1900, to be hanged, an event that drew what the Dallas Morning News writer claimed at the time was the largest crowd ever seen in Nacogdoches. Before 9 o’clock last night every wagon yard, cotton yard and every available camping place within the city limits was crowded to its utmost, and there were people here who could not obtain sleeping places and were compelled to stay up all night. Several times today the streets have been absolutely blockaded, and it required an hour’s time to drive a team from one end of town to the other.27

But Smith was granted a last-minute two-week reprieve while an appeals court considered his claim of insanity. The crowd was angry and disappointed, and the writer noted that some had traveled as far as 100 miles to see the hanging: And to have to return [home] without gratifying a morbid vein, a sort of thirst for human gore that runs through the animal nature of mankind, was indeed a sore disappointment to them. It is said that a large crowd went out to the gallows this afternoon and hung a poor and friendless dog, so determined were they to see some sort of execution upon the dread machine.28

A hanged dog would have to suffice in serving the crowd’s bloodlust for two weeks, until Smith was returned to face the gallows. But three days before the two-week reprieve had expired, the November general election was held. Campbell, nicknamed the “gunless sheriff ” because he wouldn’t pack a pistol, faced Spradley once again. Campbell had defeated the vet-

138

} Aftermath

eran campaigner by a few hundred votes in 1898. But in 1900 Spradley came back to beat Campbell by 176 votes, one of only two People’s Party candidates to win locally. (The other was B. A. Calhoun, who stymied Haltom’s bid to win a seat in the state legislature.) Haltom contended that Campbell’s insistence on following the law — keeping Smith from the disappointed mob two weeks earlier, after the hanging had been postponed—had cost the sheriff the election. There is no way to prove or disprove his theory, of course. As for Smith, his appeal was denied, and on November 9 the lameduck sheriff hanged him, in front of an estimated 5,000 people, on a gallows set up a mile north of town. Unlike the lingering death throes that accompanied Buchanan’s execution, when the trapdoor was sprung from beneath Smith, the drop was sufficient to break his neck and kill him instantly. The fact that Smith had killed a woman in cold blood, while her back was turned, seemed to have aroused an ire similar to the passions invoked two years later by the Hicks family murders. But Smith, who was white, and a Confederate army veteran to boot, was allowed a number of appeals and access to an attorney. Buchanan, it is true, waived his appeals and elected for an immediate execution. But it is clear that he faced a far worse fate than hanging if the mob got to him, and it’s likely the soldiers would not have been able to prevent that from happening. the dallas morning news soon began to have second thoughts about the legality of Buchanan’s hanging, commenting on an extract from another paper that Buchanan “was not executed according to law. When a criminal is not executed according to law, he is the victim of mob law.” 29 Haltom reprinted this with some glee, noting it “would be hard to tell where Sheriff Spradley stands in the estimation of the Newses.” 30 With a hotly contested election nearing, Haltom continued his attacks on Spradley, who was running as an independent and would face H. L. Turner, the Democratic nominee, in November. (As noted earlier, the Populists decided they stood a better chance of winning by abandoning the People’s Party rubric in this election, though most of the candidates were veteran “pops” and well known as such to the county’s voters.) The editor had decided not to run for office this time around, and had quashed a short-lived movement to draft him for another run for state representative. But Haltom remained as fierce a Democratic partisan as ever, and was desperate to keep Spradley from being reelected. He latched on to the Buchanan affair in an attempt to undermine the sheriff.

Quick Hanging Sparks Criticism and Praise

{ 139

The week before the election, under the headline “More Rot,” he published an account from the Jackson (Miss.) Clarion-Ledger that had been partially reproduced in the Plaindealer. The Mississippi newspaper told Spradley’s life story, how he had killed two brothers in self-defense and left for Texas. The article, effusive in its praise, concluded by acknowledging that Spradley had gotten into “some difficulty” with Haltom, the editor of the Chronicle, and had challenged him to a duel. What was no doubt amusing to Haltom or anyone who followed local politics—and just about everyone, literate or not, did so back then—was that the article claimed Haltom was a “populite” and Spradley was a “democrat,” which was exactly opposite of the truth. As often happened, then as now, a few days before a hotly contested election, things got nasty. A. F. Henning, the Plaindealer editor who was plainly backing Spradley, the paper’s founder, wrote that the condition of the jail was responsible for the murder of the Hicks family, since Buchanan had twice escaped from it. He blamed the “bullheaded commissioners court” because it wouldn’t appropriate the money to repair the jail—the result being “three newly made graves and a skeleton for some medical college.” 31 (The latter presumably refers to Buchanan.) Haltom was having none of it. He pointed out the bond issue to build a new jail had failed, and that the commissioners’ court had then entered into a contract with neighboring Angelina County to house prisoners until the local jail could be made safe. But Spradley wouldn’t cooperate and “flatly refused to obey the order of the court, and when the prisoners, Buchanan among them, broke out again he let them stay out.” The fiery editor then made an outrageous assertion, and it is surprising it didn’t result in a second challenge to a duel from Spradley. According to Haltom, “No living man is more responsible for the murder of the Hicks family than the sheriff of Nacogdoches county. Call this ‘campaign thunder’ if you want to, but remember, ‘the devil is entitled to his dues.’ ” 32

but haltom’s last-minute lightning-bolt charge that Spradley bore the blood of the Hicks family on his hands wasn’t enough to keep the veteran sheriff and “perpetual campaigner” from winning yet another term. He defeated his Democratic opponent in the November 1902 general election by a slim margin of 83 votes, out of nearly 3,600 cast. Spradley was the only “independent” candidate in Nacogdoches County to win. (Haltom called the Populists running under this guise the “mongrels.”) Democrats captured all the other county posts.

140

} Aftermath

There can be little doubt that Spradley’s successful handling of the Buchanan affair proved decisive in his victory, since all the other former People’s Party candidates went down to decisive defeat. At least for the next two years, Spradley would continue to be a thorn in Haltom’s side, and vice versa. The antipathy between the two would only increase in coming months, as events would show.

chapter sixteen

Wettermark, Whitecapping, and a Whipping the year 1903 began inauspiciously. the violence of the previous decade or so continued unabated. The hanging of Jim Buchanan and the bitter election just a few weeks later seemed to contribute to an even more hostile atmosphere for black residents. And the economic doldrums that had enveloped the area since the Depression of 1893 worsened. In the first six weeks of the year: • A downtown bank closed its doors on the fifth day of the year, and the son of the owner fled the country, having absconded with more than a half million dollars. He was never brought to justice. • One week later, two large brick buildings downtown caught fire and were destroyed, taking along with them a number of smaller wooden structures. • By the end of the month, the county was again gaining national notoriety, this time because “whitecappers” were terrorizing black families across the county and forcing them to flee for their lives. • Just after Valentine’s Day, Sheriff Spradley, in front of Dial’s Saloon, walloped editor Haltom about the head with a heavy stick.

A. Wettermark & Son was a privately chartered bank founded by a Norwegian immigrant in Henderson, apparently in the 1870s. A Nacogdoches branch opened in 1883 and was operated by Colonel B. S. Wettermark, son of the founder. The town’s first publicly chartered bank, Commercial National Bank, opened in 1901, but a considerable number of local businessmen and investors stayed with Wettermark’s bank, which was not subject to regulation, since the state did not begin issuing charters until 1905.

142

} Aftermath

Henry Fuller, moonlighting as a correspondent for the St. Louis PostDispatch, provided the most detail of B. S. Wettermark’s background, probably because he was writing for an audience not familiar with the man—unlike Haltom’s readers, who no doubt were. Fuller described Wettermark as a Texas A&M graduate, about forty years old, very active in local civic and business affairs, and prone to spend his money “freely and without stint.” Wettermark served a term as mayor of the city; was active in the Presbyterian Church and the Masons; was secretary and treasurer of the Nacogdoches Compress and Warehouse Co.; held the same position with the Merchants and Farmers Oil Mill Co.; and had begun sinking money into the oil wells being drilled in the eastern part of the county. He was a busy man, a big fish in a small pond, and he readily lent money to “nearly every business concern in Nacogdoches, amounts ranging from $1,000 to $5,000, taking their notes as security.”1 Those notes would prove to be Wettermark’s undoing, according to Fuller. Haltom announced the bank’s closing on January 5 in melodramatic fashion, saying it came “like a clap of thunder from a clear blue sky.” People gathered in knots to read the notice posted on the bank’s locked doors. The notice said that creditors were to meet that morning with attorneys June C. Harris in Nacogdoches and E. B. Alford in Henderson. Apparently, at least in Nacogdoches, Harris was persuasive enough that depositors were satisfied they would recover their money (this was more than three decades before bank deposits would be guaranteed by the government), and those gathered passed a resolution expressing confidence in the Wettermarks. Haltom, ever the booster, tried to put a good face on the situation: The entire community greatly deplores the embarrassment that has befallen the Wettermark bank. Their many years of work have given them very great prominence and popularity. Public confidence remains strong, and public sympathy is unbounded, both at home and abroad. Col. B. S. Wettermark’s unlimited devotion to the public, especially to this town and county is proverbial. His big-heartedness is beyond question. . . . His creditors all have faith in his father, too, and so they will stand by these noble men to the end, trusting in their paying dollar for dollar.2

Haltom’s confidence was short-lived. By the next day’s issue, his story began, “The outlook concerning the affairs of the Wettermark bank has a

Wettermark, Whitecapping, and a Whipping

{ 143

gloomier appearance today, and many who spoke kindly of Col. Wettermark yesterday, expressing confidence in him, have changed their verdict today.” 3 The younger Wettermark—whose title of colonel came from his rank in the Stone Fort Rifles, the local chapter of the Texas Volunteer Guard—had fled, leaving high and dry a number of farmers who had entrusted his bank with what little cash they had, as well as merchants who had deposited Christmas sales receipts but hadn’t paid their bills yet. “It is feared the worst is yet to come,” Haltom warned. Col. A. Wettermark (it is not clear where the elder earned his sobriquet) was arrested in Houston a few days later, charged with receiving deposits when he knew his bank was insolvent, and returned to Henderson. It is fairly obvious that the father had no idea of his son’s duplicity, as a group of that town’s leading citizens met the train and made his bond. The son was long gone, leaving his second wife and the three children of his late first wife stranded in Nacogdoches. Estimates of the amount of money he stole were as high as $700,000. Sheriff A. J. Spradley lost $8,000, and his brothers lost another $20,000, which provided a powerful incentive for the veteran fugitive hunter to go full-bore after Wettermark.4 Fuller, writing in the St. Louis newspaper, provided the best description of Wettermark’s financial downfall. A series of stock investments had turned sour, and Wettermark began selling notes he had made to local businessmen at a discount to other banks across the country—including, apparently, in St. Louis. He pocketed the payments made by the original creditor in a Ponzi scheme that, as most do, finally collapsed. A Garrison merchant, who had borrowed $6,000 from Wettermark, was contacted by a distant banking house that now held his note and wanted its money— even though the merchant had paid off the note to Wettermark and had proof of it. Wettermark asked the merchant for a couple of days’ time in which to investigate. Instead, he began preparing to flee. He dismissed his bank clerks, went home, called his attorney, June Harris, and made out his will in front of his wife and three children—leaving everything to them. It is unclear whether there was anything left after the creditors and the state got through with him.5 After signing his will, B. S. Wettermark, former mayor and wheelerdealer, disappeared from sight. Spradley ultimately concluded that Wettermark fled from New Orleans to Mobile, Alabama, and from there boarded a freighter either back to his native Norway or to South America.

144

} Aftermath

Eight months later, in September, Haltom reprinted a letter that had been published in the New Orleans Picayune, written by a staff correspondent stationed at Puerto Cortez, Honduras. The greatest contrast of them all is seen in the life which Wettermark, who wrecked the banks around Nacogdoches, Texas is having. From the rich, distinguished citizen he has turned into the sun-burned, hardened cattle puncher of the ropes. A few weeks ago he applied to a firm of Mexicans and Americans for a job. They gave him a position on the Inca, and soon the banker let fall his identity, although he is still carried as Thomas on the payrolls. He occasionally comes into Truxillo, but his home is sixty miles up in the woods.6

Haltom was highly skeptical of Wettermark’s being in Honduras, or of his even having left the United States. And if Wettermark had managed to make it to Honduras, Haltom pointed out, it wasn’t likely he could be extradited to the United States. Wettermark was never brought to justice, though rumors of sightings popped up from time to time.7 There is a street named after him several blocks north of town, in what was once General Thomas J. Rusk’s pecan orchard.

meanwhile, the killings, stabbings, and other trage dies continued apace in Nacogdoches and the surrounding area. On January 31, 1903, Haltom in side-by-side stories reported two gruesome events near Tenaha, up in Shelby County. First, a young farmwife by the name of Mrs. John Gary was standing too close to the fire and caught her dress ablaze. Enveloped in flames, she ran out of the house and jumped into a nearby pond to put out the fire, but she was horribly burned. Her three children watched in horror as she ran back inside the house, grabbed a razor from the mantel board, and “slit her throat from ear to ear,” just as her husband arrived. She died seconds later, “with a fond husband and three small children standing by her.” 8 On the same day, also near Tenaha, three small children were found murdered inside the house, and the parents were missing. It didn’t take long to find Mrs. Charles Rowe in the adjoining cook room, her head split open. Charles Rowe was found in the field, his throat cut. Haltom said the gruesome murders-suicide were no surprise, because Rowe was “said to have been mentally imbalanced at times all his life and was gradually growing worse.”

Wettermark, Whitecapping, and a Whipping

{ 145

Throughout the year, the violence continued, seemingly out of proportion to the sparse population. Some representative examples: • Up in Cushing, eighteen miles northwest of Nacogdoches, a group of “railroad negroes” got in a ruckus over a gambling game—the account isn’t specific as to what—and the pistols commenced to firing. Before it was over, three men were dead and three others were in jail.9 • J. Y. Stone, who lived near Alazan, west of the city, came to town in late March to turn himself in after he killed a black neighbor named John Finley. Stone claimed that Finley had come into his yard and started threatening him. Stone grabbed a shotgun filled with buckshot and emptied it into Finley’s chest. The black man walked home and died. Haltom, typically, defended Stone, who presumably was white: “Stone is a young man of quiet disposition, and it is believed the killing was purely in self defense.” 10 • Ten days earlier, in Libby—a community that just six weeks earlier had been the scene of a series of racially motivated acts of terror—merchant Cash Linthicum and Dr. J. M. McCall finally had it out. The two had fallen out over some arcane issue several weeks earlier, and finally met up by coincidence in the middle of the road near Appleby. Linthicum shot McCall after the latter pulled a pistol. There is no record of him being indicted. • One of the most spectacular acts of murder and mayhem occurred in early June, when two men were killed in Melrose, about ten miles east of Nacogdoches. It seems a young man by the name of Gus Skillern had seduced the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. W. H. Miley. Under the threat of a shotgun wedding, he returned to the Miley home with a preacher (his father, Bob Skillern) and his companion, Will Tutt. The couple was duly married, but Gus Skillern reportedly spurned his bride and used “disrespectful language.” His brand-new father-in-law pulled a pistol, but young Gus was nimble enough to get out of the range of fire. Mrs. Miley, however, took matters into her own hands, grabbed her husband’s pistol, and shot Bob Skillern and Will Tutt, who both died from their wounds. Mrs. Miley and her husband were charged with murder and attempted murder and granted “light” bail, but were apparently never prosecuted.11 • In late July, Haltom, in an extremely rare instance, took the side of a black man who killed a young white man. The victim had ventured onto the black man’s property, apparently in hopes of having sex with one of his daughters. This wasn’t the first instance, and the white man was shot

146

} Aftermath

and killed. Haltom noted, “The white people of Tenaha who are familiar with the circumstances are in sympathy with the negro. The white man had been a common nuisance in the vicinity, until he had no friends nor sympathizers, and it was a relief to the community to be rid of him.” 12

Haltom’s defense of a black man who killed a white man is notable because it was so rare, not just for him, but for most small-town Southern editors of the time, whose views generally reflected that of their mainly white readers. As noted before, time after time Haltom sprang to the defense of whites who attacked or even killed blacks, as in the case of the previously discussed Joe Bug Roquemore, who was fined $50 for killing a black preacher at the railroad depot in broad daylight. But in this case, apparently, the egregiousness of the dead man’s advances toward the black man’s family proved too much even for Haltom to stand up for his race—for a change.

just six days after the wettermark bank closed, a fire broke out downtown, at 3 : 30 in the morning, at the corner of Main and Church streets, across from the Opera House where the Marx Brothers would perform six years later. The blaze started in a restaurant and soon enveloped the Tucker-Hardeman Building, a two-story brick structure. From there it spread to a number of wooden buildings and “shanties,” as Haltom called them. The heat was so great that it broke the plate-glass window at Commercial National Bank and caught some of the wooden ornaments on the Opera House on fire, though those blazes were easily extinguished. A total of eight buildings were destroyed and five others damaged in the blaze.13 The fire pointed up a continuing problem in Nacogdoches, one that Haltom continually harped upon, which was that the city possessed neither an adequate waterworks system with fire hydrants nor a professional fire department. Another fire in mid-April threatened to wipe out downtown, but again the bucket brigade managed to confine the blaze to a single structure, the Huntley Building on the south side of East Main Street. As was the custom, the “fire alarm” consisted of men firing their pistols in the air to summon the volunteers. The custom was that whoever first spotted a fire would fire a weapon. For this blaze, Haltom dryly noted that “from the fusillade that took place we are ready to swear that there must have been 25 people who ‘saw it first.’ ” 14

Wettermark, Whitecapping, and a Whipping

{ 147

A few months later, Haltom humorously recounted the confusion of two visitors from Dallas. Hearing gunfire, they inquired if there was a fight in town: “Pshaw, no,” was the reply. “It’s just a fire.” “Well, do you put out fires in Nacogdoches by shooting at them,” was the astonished query. We have nothing to say in regard to the fire alarm system, except that when kept up too long as it was Tuesday morning, it delays the game. No one is going to charge the bullet swept streets with a bucket of water until the firing has lulled, and there is some assurance that he won’t have his head shot off.15

Three months later, Haltom brought up the issue of fire protection once again: “Has Nacogdoches forgotten all about providing any adequate fire protection? The need is just as real, just as pressing, and just as apparent to strangers as it was a year ago, and still we act as though we lived in a city of fireproof buildings.” 16 Fires would continue to plague downtown, but it would be another four years before the city council authorized construction of a waterworks system and organized a city fire department.17

fire didn’t plague only downtown merchants. it was used with some effectiveness by so-called “whitecappers,” who attempted to run a number of black families out of the county—and sometimes succeeded—beginning in mid-1902 and reaching a peak at the end of January 1903. The activities of whitecappers were similar to those of members of the Ku Klux Klan, which had peaked in the early years of Reconstruction and was largely a moribund force in 1903, though it would again become influential in the early 1920s. The origin of the term “whitecapper” for these groups isn’t clear. Most historians assume it is a reference to members of the Ku Klux Klan, who wore white hoods to disguise themselves, though the Whitecaps made no effort to disguise themselves. The term—and the practice— originated in Mississippi in the early 1890s, when local merchants, often Jewish, began foreclosing on white farmers whose mortgages were in arrears. The merchants often would hire black farmers to work the land. Some white farmers began to retaliate by terrorizing the blacks, often leaving written

148

} Aftermath

placards and notes ordering them to get off the land by a set time or face being burned out or worse. The whitecappers resented the success of black farmers and coveted their land, whether it was owned or rented, and they feared the competition. The whitecappers were also strongly anti-Semitic, often threatening blacks who traded with Jews. Whitecapping represented the dark side of populism, a resentment of both Jewish merchants who were perceived as having taken unfair economic advantage of white farmers and of those black farmers who were more successful than deemed proper.18 Whether they assumed the title “whitecaps” or operated anonymously, white farmers since the end of the Civil War had chosen to take out many of their racial and economic frustrations on black farmers. . . . White terrorist bands, mostly operating at night, were wreaking a deadly violence on “quiet, industrious, law-abiding” blacks whose only offense was renting, owning, residing on, and cultivating farms.19

The first published incident of whitecapping in Nacogdoches County came in June 1902, and Haltom, surprisingly, was fairly sympathetic to the black victim who reported it. Jeff Ferguson had been beaten by some white men for supposedly throwing rocks at a little girl passing by the field he was plowing—a charge he stoutly denied, saying it was a pretext to run him out of his home near Melrose, about ten miles east of Nacogdoches. The negro owns his own home and has become a fixture in the neighborhood. He came to town to file complaint against four white men, and the real facts will be brought out in the investigating trial. It is feared that the trouble is not yet over with, as the negro has white friends who are in sympathy with him and are urging him to prosecute the whitecappers.20

No further mention could be found in court records or in the Sentinel of any legal action being taken against the white attackers of Jim Ferguson. The practice of whitecapping had begun in 1893, but then largely ceased in the South until late 1902. The movement renewed itself that year in Mississippi because of unfounded fears that blacks were forming a secret organization to resist white power. A number of so-called Farmers’ Protective Associations began springing up across the Mississippi Delta. Although most white members were peaceful, violent incidents began cropping up. In December 1902, in a single night in Franklin County, Mississippi, more than fifty notices were posted on farms owned or oper-

Wettermark, Whitecapping, and a Whipping

{ 149

ated by blacks, ordering the residents to leave.21 It’s altogether likely that these incidents in Mississippi—where many Nacogdoches County residents had emigrated from—influenced some white farmers to emulate the practice in Nacogdoches County. The next report of trouble in Nacogdoches County came toward the end of January 1903, in the tiny communities of Libby and Martinsville, both about fourteen miles northeast of Nacogdoches. City Marshal Mat Spradley received a phone call from Cash Linthicum of Libby, who said that on the night of January 29 a band of whitecappers had shot into a black family’s house, burned another house down, and abducted and apparently killed a black man by the name of Jim Pleasant. A “small negro cabin” near Pleasant’s house had been burned, presumably to run him out of hiding. Haltom reverted to stereotype here, describing Pleasant as a “mean negro” and a “great thief, and it is believed that it was the intention of the whitecappers to either give him a good flogging or drive him from the community.” The editor added, “A number of negroes have been scared out of the settlement of late.” 22

the freeman , a black weekly newspaper published in Indianapolis, Indiana, beginning in 1888, called itself “A National Illustrated Colored Newspaper,” and it did indeed publish news from across the country, especially from the South, where many of its readers had migrated from. In the January 31, 1903, edition, the Freeman published a plaintive account from a black resident of Nacogdoches, explaining the problems facing both the town in general and the black population in particular: In the last twelve months there have been three preachers whipped and not less than 12 or 15 men beat up. Rev. Steward died from [a] lick on the back of his head [ Joe Bug Roquemore’s victim]. This is a very unpleasant place to live at some seasons of the year. In a community 12 miles from this place known as Belview, the colored people have been driven from their homes that they owned; some have gone to the territory, others to Ft. Worth as the result of the whitecappers. So all can see from these incidents just about how times are here. You people that are doing well, remember us here.23

The account also reports the failing of Wettermark, noting that several black people lost “substantial amounts” in the failure, and concludes, after

150

} Aftermath

announcing several changes in pastorships of local black churches, “We hope to accomplish more in the future than in the past.” Yet another account of what happened to the black residents of Libby and Martinsville appeared the following day on the front page of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, thanks to Henry Fuller, the inveterate newspaper correspondent from Nacogdoches. Negroes in the neighborhood of Libby and Martinsville are being terrorized, it is said, by a regularly organized band of kuklux [sic] under a captain. The work is being done at night. Eight negroes have been forced to leave their homes during the past two months. Jess Robertson was taken from his home and whipped almost to death, and his family was run off the place. The kuklux went to the home of Jim Martin, a negro school teacher, fired into the house, ran his folks off and took him away. His clothes were found today and his barn was burned down. The supposition is that he was killed and then burned to prevent discovery. More trouble is feared. . . . Another negro is reported as missing from his home at Appleby today. His house was fired into and he was taken away.24

Because of slow mail, it took nearly two weeks for the Post-Dispatch story to make its way back to Nacogdoches. When it finally arrived, Haltom took utter umbrage at Fuller’s account of the whitecapping incidents at Libby and Martinsville. Fuller’s account was, as usual, far more detailed than Haltom’s, but Haltom still fulminated and fumed. The further from home the “news” goes, the yellower it grows. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has a shameful and disgustingly overdrawn account of the trouble with the negroes in the Libby community. Just a little truth colored by the vulgar pen of the unscrupulous reporter, who would sell the good name of his country for a “mess of pottage,” becomes a falsehood under the flaring headlines of a metropolitan sheet. It is a great pity that our metropolitan press persists in coloring the news with variegated hues that rob it of both truth and decency.25

That was published on Friday, February 13. By Monday, Fuller had prepared a lengthy response and had persuaded Spradley, Constable J. E.

Wettermark, Whitecapping, and a Whipping

{ 151

Watson, and his deputy, Hiram Morris to also write letters defending his account. Haltom, to his credit, published all three letters in full. Fuller’s defense came first: The report in the Post-Dispatch to which above reference is made [is] absolutely correct with the exception that it was an outhouse and not a barn that was burned. The correctness of the report is vouched for by the sheriff, deputy sheriff, constable and deputy constable and the names of citizens too numerous to mention are at hand for further proof. . . . I do this in justice to myself and the papers I represent, disclaiming any idea or intention of precipitating foolish and unnecessary controversy. Yours for the plain truth, regardless of who it pleases or displeases. h. c. fuller 26

the next letter was from spradley, and it was devastating to Haltom’s contention that the whitecapping at Libby had been overblown. The sheriff matter-of-factly listed the blacks who had been terrorized: • Steve White, “an old gray-haired ex-slave, who bore a reputation of being inoffensive,” was beaten badly, and when he turned to the authorities, he was warned by the whitecappers that he best flee or be killed. White fled. Spradley said the only excuse for the whipping was that the ex-slave sold more cottonseed than he actually possessed. • The door of Doc Watkins’s house was broken down one night and the black man shot to death for unknown reasons. • In the past, Spradley claimed, blacks were forcibly taken to the polls and ordered to vote at the “will of the white men.” That didn’t happen at the last election. Blacks supposedly were allowed to vote as they pleased, “and a great change was made in the result of the election at the box.” (The change, of course, resulted in Spradley’s reelection, since the Martinsville box went for him 119 to 41.) • Jess Robinson (probably the same man Haltom referred to as Jeff Ferguson) had his head beaten in with a six-shooter and came to town to file a complaint. “He left his home and stayed overnight with a negro near Nacogdoches and next morning found on the gate the following notice: ‘Jess R., we will give you twenty-four hours to leave here and if you don’t your hide won’t hold mustard seed when we get through with you, you _____ _____ _____.’” (Robinson indeed fled for his life, Spradley wrote.)

152

} Aftermath

• The account of Jim Pleasant was repeated with the same details given by Haltom and Fuller (though the latter got the man’s name wrong).

Spradley said several whitecap notices were given to him by blacks, and they had been ordered to leave home at once. The veteran sheriff seemed genuinely outraged by these depredations against blacks by such scofflaws: It seems that the courts and jurors have winked at these crimes and an officer is held up to ridicule who attempts to enforce the law. It is generally known who these violators of the law are, many of whom have had serious charges of violating the law against them but are prominent in politics. There are rumors to the effect that some of these white-cappers are living with negro women and that negroes have been forced to give up their property on some false claim. For these outrages many of the peaceful negroes have left that community and many more will leave unless this white-cap business ceases.

Constable Watson and Deputy Morris vouched for Fuller’s account in a one-paragraph letter that followed Spradley’s. Then it was Haltom’s turn, since editors always get to have the last word. Haltom stuck to his position, saying Fuller, Spradley, Watson, and Morris were “slandering the good name of Nacogdoches county by distorting the truth and magnifying real facts until they become falsehoods, or at least create false and damaging impressions abroad.” He, in effect, said the three lawmen either were lying about the severity of the situation or were incompetent, since nobody had been arrested. It was a classic ad hominem argument, criticizing the quartet for besmirching the county’s “good name” while offering no evidence that anything they had reported was untrue or overblown. That didn’t sit well with Spradley, now pushing fifty but still in good physical condition. The next day, February 17, he stepped out of Dial’s Saloon as Haltom was walking by. Perhaps fortified by a few stiff drinks, the sheriff grabbed the editor by the collar and hit him twice on the head with a heavy stick, inflicting two deep cuts. In a front-page account published on the same day of the attack, Haltom emphasized his own courage: I caught the stick and finally succeeded in taking it from Spradley, though I think he let it go to reach for his gun (of which I am informed he had two). Officers interfered and the trouble was stopped, and in all

Wettermark, Whitecapping, and a Whipping

{ 153

probability the high sheriff of Nacogdoches was prevented from committing a murder.27

The fact that Spradley and Haltom had finally come to blows isn’t surprising. The sheriff had challenged the editor to a duel during the election of 1898, and just a few months before the attack Haltom had accused Spradley of complicity in the murders of the Hicks family because the jail couldn’t hold Jim Buchanan. Haltom, no doubt suffering from a whale of a headache, got his full editorial dander up later on the day of the attack: No power on earth can intimidate this paper nor turn the editor from his determination to defend the good name of Nacogdoches against the slanderer, as long as there is life in our body, and we continue to wield the editorial pen. Threats and blows will not turn us from our path of duty. The Sentinel will continue true to its country, to its friends, and to the good name of Nacogdoches county as long as the name of R. W. Haltom appears at its masthead.28

Spradley’s attack on Haltom did not seem to draw much notice elsewhere, and no legal action was taken, as far as can be ascertained. Haltom’s sole published response after the initial story was to reprint an editorial from the Orange (Texas) Tribune that sympathized with him and took Spradley to task for abusing his position: The official position [Spradley] holds gives him a right to carry arms, but he is sworn to preserve the peace, and is supposed to use his weapons only in such endeavors. He allowed his personal animus to lead him to violate the law he is sworn to uphold, and he took a cowardly advantage.29

It clearly was not Spradley’s finest hour. Ironically, Haltom’s Sentinel and the Plaindealer, the once-Populist weekly founded by Spradley and now operated by A. F. Henning, just four days earlier had finally made public the two-month-old merger of their printing and publishing businesses as the Nacogdoches Printing Company. All three newspapers, the Daily Sentinel, the Weekly Sentinel, and the weekly Plaindealer, continued to publish as separate entities. Henning, a former People’s Party backer, had declared himself an independent in the election of 1902. In the merger announcement, the partners made it clear that “in campaigns the papers will be as much at loggerheads as usual.” 30

chapter seventeen

Conclusion

the political fortunes of haltom and spradley headed in opposite directions in 1904. At the urging of fellow Democrats, Haltom made his third try for the state legislature. He lost his first bid, in the 1898 Democratic primary, to J. B. Stripling, who narrowly defeated the Populist candidate, W. A. Skillern. Haltom managed to win the Democratic nomination for state representative in 1900, but lost to Populist B. A. Calhoun, 2,008 votes to 1,940 —thus earning the dubious distinction of being the last Democratic candidate to lose a legislative race in Texas to a Populist candidate.1 In early February 1904, Haltom, at age forty-seven, admitted in an editorial that he had harbored ambitions of serving in the legislature for twenty-five years, “not for the sake of office alone, but for experience and self improvement.” 2 He stopped just short of formally announcing, acknowledging that he was being encouraged to run, but wanting to ruminate a while: “If I am wanted, the people know where to find me.” The People’s Party, meanwhile, was in shambles. Nacogdoches County chairman A. J. Murphey issued a plaintive call a few days after Haltom’s nonannouncement, asking if there was enough interest in fielding a slate of candidates in a primary election. Spradley was the only local Populist still in office. The Plaindealer, long that party’s organ, had renounced populism and returned to the Democratic fold, and Haltom claimed that blacks had also deserted the People’s Party. He said that many prominent Populists had announced their plans to return to the fold of the Democratic Party, and he encouraged the local Democrats to embrace the “double primary” to accommodate the large number of local candidates. The double primary is the system under which the state’s political parties now operate. It means that if no candidate gets a majority in the first primary, a run-off is held within a month or so between the top two candidates. Before its adoption, the candidate with the highest number of votes in the first primary was the nominee, even if he lacked a majority.3

Conclusion

{ 155

Next to weigh in on the issues of populism and the double primary was A. F. Henning, an erstwhile “pop” and a Plaindealer editor. Haltom favored the double primary because he feared the former Populists would dominate the first primary: they were more united behind their candidates, unlike the Democrats. Not so, Henning wrote, in an article reprinted in the Sentinel. He claimed that Populists were no more united than Democrats: “This county has ever been rather independent in voting. Died in the wool pops and Bourbon democrats have scratched their tickets unmercifully when it suited their inclination.” 4 Henning used Hardy Dial as an example. Dial was the Populist ex– saloon owner who had declared bankruptcy a few weeks before the 1903 local-option election, and now sought semigainful employment as county assessor. Henning pointed out that Hardy doubtless had voted in 1902 for his brother, W. H. Dial, who was running for county attorney, and for his cousin A. J. Spradley, who was running for sheriff, both on the People’s Party ticket. Henning, the former People’s Party secretary, claimed that Hardy Dial was a confirmed ticket splitter and never a member of good standing in the party. Henning wrote, “We are pretty certain that Hardy toed the mark, and previous to his coming here he voted ’er straight [Democratic] all his life.” Although ticket splitters were acceptable, in Henning’s view, he opposed “anyone prominent in the populist movement asking for nominations of the democratic ticket in this election at least.” In his view, “turncoats” shouldn’t be allowed to run just because they needed a job. He, like Haltom, also favored the double primary to keep the vote from being diluted by so many candidates that someone could win with a relatively small percentage of the vote.5 Ten days later, Haltom made it official, announcing on the Sentinel ’s front page that he would be a candidate for state representative in the July 9 Democratic primary. His announcement was terse, just two sentences long, outlining his hopes “to be found worthy and sufficiently well qualified to merit election.” 6 Surprisingly, Henning warmly welcomed Haltom’s candidacy. The Plaindealer editor had once been Haltom’s “bitterest foe,” though really Spradley fit that description better, at least by longevity. Haltom claimed that Henning’s support proved that “strife no longer exists between populism and democracy.” Henning, for his part, stated that he no longer harbored malice, and supported Haltom because the latter wouldn’t try to “get up a new road law or propose any constitutional amendments. He

156

} Aftermath

will represent the county in a creditable manner as a decent citizen should without endeavoring to set the woods aflame.” 7 Perhaps, as Haltom headlined his reprinting of Henning’s article from the Plaindealer, political lines truly had been broken. Haltom adopted a straightforward approach to running for state representative. He would say as little as possible and, if elected, “surrender his personal views to the subserviency of the majority of the people.” 8 He faced two opponents, Homer Dotson and Steve King, in the Democratic primary. Whoever won was certain to win in the November general election, since the local Republican Party was moribund. The Populists, at least the faithful few who remained, seemed determined to maintain those “political lines” for which Haltom, perhaps prematurely, had written an obituary. They met in May and appointed a committee that included Spradley, with the intention of coming up with a full county ticket. Haltom was skeptical, pointing out only two precincts, Alazan and Etoile, sent representatives to the meeting, and the latter voted against a full ticket. Deploring political disunity as always, he maintained his view that the Democrats ought to run things, and that that was that: “It is hoped that a half dozen discordant office seeking individuals will not be permitted to endanger the county with another fierce and unfriendly political fight, such as we have gone through during recent years.” 9 For about a month, it seemed that Haltom would get his wish: Spradley, who had been appointed to a People’s Party committee to find local candidates, announced he would run for sheriff as a Democrat for the first time in fourteen years. The “perennial office-seeker” was returning to the party that had first elected him, in what would be his twelfth straight campaign for sheriff. Haltom, who had been Spradley’s arch enemy for well over a decade, assured readers that he would support Spradley in November if the sheriff won the Democratic nomination in July: “The doors of democracy have been opened for the return of the prodigals. Let them return and while we feel no obligation to kill the fatted calf, nevertheless we find pleasure in extending the hand of welcome.” 10 A dozen years after the People’s Party had swept virtually every elective office in Nacogdoches County, its most famous standard bearer abandoned it.

haltom’s two opponents decided to meet on the stump, but the editor declined to join them. Haltom wrote that after

Conclusion

{ 157

twenty-seven years of telling readers where he stood, he saw no reason to “make the rounds with” his opponents: We stated at the outset that we would not “scramble” for the office; that we were opposed to stump-speaking; that we believed too many “orators” have already been elected to the legislatures, that we should have shorter sessions, more work and less “hot air” in the legislature, and we are still running on that platform.11

While Haltom stayed above the fray, other members of the Democratic Party were preparing to take a momentous step. Despite considerable opposition, the party’s executive committee was preparing to consider whether to adopt the “white man’s primaries” rule, which would bar blacks from voting in the only election that really mattered in Deep East Texas and the entire South: the Democratic primary. The Fifteenth Amendment prohibited the disenfranchisement of blacks. But white Southerners by the early 1900s had figured out ways to get around the Constitution. First, they required a literacy test (though not in Texas); next, they levied a poll tax (adopted in Texas as a constitutional amendment in 1902); and finally, they converted party primaries into white men’s clubs from which blacks could be excluded. The “white man’s primary” movement began in South Carolina in 1896 and rapidly spread across the South; many Texas counties adopted it in 1903.12 Nacogdoches County, because of the vestigial influence of the People’s Party, had resisted—largely out of fear that its adoption would result in a resurgence of the Populists, led by Spradley, who commanded strong support from black voters. Any last remnants of political power that the People’s Party held seemed to have been swept away with Spradley’s return to the Democratic Party. That emboldened that party’s committee members to move to disenfranchise blacks. One committeeman, Jesse J. Watkins, wrote to Haltom less than two weeks before the county convention and proposed excluding blacks from the primary to thwart former Populists, such as Spradley, who were now running as Democrats and presumably would command the support of most black voters.13 Not everyone agreed. Delegates to the Precinct 1 Democratic convention in Nacogdoches County met a few days after Watkins had published his views, and passed a resolution opposing a white man’s primary, saying it “at this time would be detrimental to the best interests of our party, and

158

} Aftermath

unfair to a large number of colored men in the county whose fealty to the democratic party is unquestioned and of long standing.” 14 That turned out to be a minority view. Spradley, just four days before the June 15 county convention, withdrew from the Democratic primary, apparently in hopes that by removing his name from the ballot, he could salvage the right of blacks to vote in that election. Most of the Democratic committee members opposed Spradley and feared that he would win the nomination, and thus the election, because of his solid core of black support. The once-dormant Republican Party even held a convention in July and elected delegates to the state convention, though no local candidates would appear on the ballot.15 Moreover, Spradley was outraged that both former Populists and blacks would be barred from the Democratic primary, the former no doubt out of vengeance, saying that when he announced that he was switching parties, he had assumed that anyone who paid his poll tax would be allowed to vote, “whether he be rich or poor, white or black.” 16 Spradley said he wanted to vote for newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst for president, “but [Hearst] has no chance against men backed by the combined money power.” And in his withdrawal letter to the Sentinel, Spradley said that he intended to vote in the Democratic primary “unless disenfranchised tomorrow.” 17 Haltom, though he ultimately supported the decision to turn to a “white man’s primary,” at first editorialized against disenfranchising blacks, fearing that the county “will soon be again in the throes of political warfare.” But once the decision was made, he backed it firmly: “If the committee has deemed it wise and expedient to take this step, it is not our business to thwart it.” 18 Haltom pointed out that black registered voters made up only about a fifth of the total voting roll; apparently, disenfranchising 20 percent of the eligible voters from the only election that really counted in local races was justifiable. Since Haltom hoped to win the party’s nomination for state representative in the primary, just six weeks away, it is understandable why the editor didn’t wish to anger the local Democratic leaders by criticizing their actions, which were followed in August by a similar move at the state party convention.19 The Precinct 1 Populists met on June 25 and suggested a slate of candidates for office, including, of course, A. J. Spradley. He accepted the nomination and ran once again under the People’s Party banner, this time against Eugene Buckner, the Democratic nominee.

Conclusion

{ 159

Buckner operated a cotton gin, and he claimed to have little time to campaign and to combat Spradley’s circulars. But in a letter to the Sentinel just days before the election, Buckner hit on the fact that Spradley was a biennial office seeker and claimed that young men would have white hair before Spradley willingly relinquished the office. Buckner promised to serve no more than two terms as sheriff and ridiculed Spradley’s claim that his experience made him more qualified to serve: This county is full of men with brains enough to make good sheriffs. And after my friend Spradley and myself have long since mouldered back into dust, and our memory [is] only a very faint mystic legend, this county will have good, experienced sheriffs.20

When the November election arrived, it was clear that the political sway of the People’s Party in Nacogdoches County had finally ended. No countywide candidate won, though Populist candidates were elected in precinct races for constable and justice of the peace in Cushing and Douglass, respectively. But Spradley lost his race for sheriff by 166 votes, 1,389 to 1,223. Bill Haltom, on the other hand, had finally realized his twenty-fiveyear dream. He had narrowly won the Democratic primary in July, beating Steve King by only 56 votes.21 (Homer Dotson had withdrawn.) But Haltom handily won the general election race over the People’s Party candidate, W. F. Carnes, 1,549 to 1,044. The curmudgeonly editor with the thick moustache and dark eyes would be headed to Austin in January to represent Nacogdoches County in the Texas House of Representatives. Eight other newspaper editors from across the state also won terms in the House in 1904.22 Haltom was typically modest about his goals as a state representative, though referring to himself in the third person: “He doesn’t expect to correct all the evils that exist in Texas; neither does he expect to gain a great reputation as a law-maker. It will be his aim to work for those measures that will build Texas up.” 23

the sevent y-ninth session of the texas legislature began on January 11, 1905. Bill’s brother, Giles, was left in charge of running the Sentinel, which he had worked on since 1900. Giles Haltom began working for his older brother Bill at the Nacogdoches News in 1878 as a printer’s devil, the term used in the nineteenth

160

} Aftermath

century for an apprentice. Giles, who was ten years younger than Bill, proved to be every bit the town booster his older brother had been, but he was no great shakes as a writer; quite often he hired editors to produce the copy, preferring to concentrate on the business end of the newspaper. In 1887, as a young man of twenty, Giles was involved in a racial incident that became known in Nacogdoches lore as the Battle of Potawatomi, according to longtime and now retired county attorney Bryan Holt Davis, one of Haltom’s descendants. The battle apparently was named after a Great Lakes tribe that eventually was forced to migrate into Kansas, Oklahoma, and East Texas near the headwaters of the Sabine. Apparently the white men involved in the fracas liked the alliteration, according to Davis. The fight erupted after an Indian medicine show was held between the University Building on Washington Square, a block north of downtown, and the City Cemetery. That is perhaps why the fight ended up being called the Battle of Potawatomi. An account in the Houston Daily Post squarely, and typically, lays the blame on the blacks involved, though subsequent action by the district attorney’s office, as well as the account handed down through the Orton and Haltom families, casts some doubt on that reportage. About fifteen negroes met and halted seven white boys, and a pitched battle ensued, in which Giles Halton [sic], a white boy of good standing, had his leg broken by a 15-bullet: Jeff Simmons, a negro, was shot through the heart, and Potter Anderson was shot to the spine. The doctors say he cannot recover. Two other negroes, Tom Thorn and Levy Allison, were badly but not fatally wounded. The negroes provoked the fight by halting the whites and drawing pistols.24

The Daily Post published two accounts in two days. The first claimed that at least fifty shots had been fired in the first ten seconds. Both accounts claimed that the “battle” stemmed from long-simmering bad blood between these groups of white and black youths. The account of the battle handed down through Davis’s family blamed whites’ resentment of blacks’ failure to be quick enough in observing the “courtesies” that whites expected of them. “They didn’t snatch their hats off quick enough,” as Davis put it when recalling the story told to him by his grandmother, Mattie Orton. In her version, the fight started when a white youth pushed a black youth down. The black youth left and returned with a group of his friends, and the fight was on. His grandmother described it as “kind of a pitched battle,” Davis said.25

Conclusion

{ 161

An inquest was held that night over the body of Jeff Simmons. Justice of the Peace B. F. Kinsley ruled that Simmons had been shot by Josh Henson, but that Giles and eight other white men were “principals” in the attack. (Although the Sentinel claimed only seven whites were involved.) All were ordered arrested after the two wounded black men, Tom Thorn and Levi Amason (it was spelled “Allison” in the Post account), gave their version of what happened. It was recorded in the Inquest Minute Book: “A crowd of white boys attacked some negro boys and men, and during the affray, deceased was killed by Josh Henson, and one other negro fatally wounded, and two other negroes wounded, and one white boy wounded.” 26 Amason, in his account to Kinsley, said that the white men drew their pistols and began firing on us. Josh Henson first shot at me and then turned around upon Jeff Simmons, who was instantly killed, and Giles Haltom was shooting at me or at Porter Anderson, and I jerked myself loose from Porter Anderson, whereupon Giles Haltom said to Porter Anderson, “Now I have got you.” Porter Anderson was shot down by Giles Haltom. The rest of the crowd were shooting at the same time.27

Tom Thorn, the other black youth who was shot and wounded, also claimed that the whites started the fracas. Haltom, who at the time of the shooting worked for his brother at the weekly Star-News, was indicted on August 11, 1887, on a charge of murder and released on $1,000 bond. His brother, Bill, was one of the cosigners on the bond, the form for which, in an ironic twist, had been printed by the Star-News printing company.28 The story becomes a bit murky after this. There is no record of Giles being convicted, and it is doubtful that he even stood trial. The only record to be found is an October 30, 1887, newspaper account from the Houston Daily Post. It reported that Levi Amason, one of the black youths who claimed that the white youths had fired first, had been sentenced to four years in prison for attempted murder. Amason didn’t take the sentence very well: Just as the sentence was passed and the sheriff was adjourning court, Amison [spelled differently, once again] made a break for liberty. Sheriff Spradley caught him at the top of the stairs but did not get a good enough hold on him to hold him, when Amison broke away. The sheriff shot once as he was going down the stairs. The negro exclaimed, “Don’t

162

} Aftermath

kill me.” It is not known where the shot took effect, but it knocked him off his feet so that he fell down the balance of the stairs, leaving large spots of blood.29

Amason made good his escape: Spradley was reluctant to shoot again because of the crowd in the courthouse. No published accounts of whether Amason was ever caught, or whether any action was taken against Giles, could be found.

as it turned out, bill haltom would never return to running the newspaper. After serving just seventeen days in the legislature, Haltom came down with “a prolonged and aggravated case of the grippe,” a catchall phrase for any number of debilitating viruses, including influenza. Haltom, only forty-seven, and until then apparently in robust health, was hit hard by this malady. After being laid up in Austin for several months, he headed to Fort Davis in West Texas, apparently in hopes that the high altitude and dry climate would facilitate his recovery. After a few months in Fort Davis, Haltom moved to the hot, dusty border town of Del Rio in November 1905 and began editing the Del Rio Herald, a weekly newspaper. He sent occasional dispatches back east to Nacogdoches, once remarking about attending a bullfight across the Rio Grande in Mexico. He joked about starting a newspaper in Del Rio, but decided his yellow-dog Democrat viewpoint wouldn’t be viewed as favorably in far West Texas as it had been in the Piney Woods: “I intended to run a partisan democratic paper, and this is a sheep country and everybody is a half brother to the republican party.” 30 As 1906 arrived, Haltom sent a hopeful and sentimental dispatch to Nacogdoches, under the heading “Getting Straightened Out.” He was thinking seriously about running for reelection, pointing out humorously that since he served only seventeen days in the last session, he had “no record to boast of nor defend. I reckon I couldn’t do worse if elected to the 30th legislature.” Haltom clearly was homesick, and reiterated that Nacogdoches was his home. “That I am not there is the greatest calamity that has ever befallen me,” he wrote.31 Two months later, in March 1906, Haltom declared himself well enough to run for reelection, and his name was once again on the masthead of the Daily Sentinel as editor, though he still planned to live in West Texas, at least until the typically wet, cold winter of his native Piney

Conclusion

{ 163

Woods had passed. With typical aplomb, Haltom claimed that his short stint as representative still provided him an advantage over any “firsttermer.” By the next month, Haltom’s health had again deteriorated, and he withdrew from the race. Having had another trial at Austin and after consulting with physicians, I am convinced that I am doing my people an injustice in asking to be reelected to the Legislature. Owing to the uncertainty of my health and the strong probability that I could not fill my seat half the time if re-elected, I hereby tender my withdrawal from the race.32

Haltom remained in Del Rio for another year, sending occasional dispatches, often amusing, sometimes sad. I am sorry to inform my friends that the prospects of regaining my health and returning soon to my old stamping ground are not encouraging. I am holding my own (though that is not saying much, for I am still feeble, and I may live many years yet in this climate, but I have quit figuring on the time that I may probably return home and to my work).33

After two years of living in Del Rio and hoping to recover from the grippe, Haltom finally came home to East Texas to die. In late June 1907, three of his brothers— Giles, James, and John—went to get him so that “he might live the remainder of his allotted time among his relatives and friends that are so dear to him.” Bill Haltom was put up at the Banita Hotel to wait out his dying.34 A month later, Haltom had recovered sufficiently to “apologize to readers for still being alive, especially after the boys took the trouble to bring me all the way back from Del Rio to die that I have taken a contrary notion about it, and have decided to put it off awhile.” 35 That was on July 31. Just over three months later, on November 4, 1907, Bill Haltom, the eldest of ten children and a Nacogdoches newspaper editor for thirty years, died in his home on South Fredonia Street, near downtown and his beloved newspaper office, at the age of fifty. He and his wife of twenty-five years, Louvinia Chapman, had four children, two of whom died in infancy. Haltom had been a force in Nacogdoches newspapering and politics for three decades, and the city turned out in force for his burial in what

164

} Aftermath

is now known as Oak Grove Cemetery, but was then called City Cemetery, just east of downtown. In the place where three signers of the Texas Declaration of Independence are buried, Haltom was laid to rest, “in the presence of the largest concourse of people that has assembled in this ancient city of the dead in many years, if indeed the gathering has ever been exceeded in numbers,” as the Sentinel reported.36 Every business in town closed for Haltom’s funeral, and the teachers and students of nearby Nacogdoches High School were released from classes to attend. Bill Haltom, who lost more political races than he won, who was an unwavering Democrat and unabashed racist, who possessed both a considerable temper and a mordant sense of humor, was sent off in grand fashion, the mound of his grave, “where the remains of a useful man and a priceless citizen were consigned to its tenement of clay,” covered in flowers. Haltom, like all editors, hated finding typographical errors in his newspaper. He once threatened that there would be a killing in the office if the typos didn’t cease. So when the Daily Sentinel memorialized his achievements upon his death, taking up nearly a full page, the columns divided by the thick black borders commonly used by newspapers to denote mourning, Haltom likely would have climbed out of his grave, bullwhip in hand, if he had seen the headline over his own obituary in the November 5, 1907 issue. The heartfelt tribute, written by a relatively new editor, Will Hawkins, was headlined: OUR CHEIF NO MORE.37 It is possible that Bill Haltom would have laughed at the misspelling in the headline over his own obituary—but not probable.

after his defeat in the november 1904 general election, Spradley returned to his farm in southern Nacogdoches County. By no means had he left law enforcement. Spradley immediately began to work as a private investigator both locally and in other counties. He was appointed a deputy U.S. marshal in January 1906, and this allowed him to legally pursue criminals while preparing for yet another run for sheriff. Spradley waited until May to enter the race, although candidates usually declared in late December or early January. He took up three columns of space in the Sentinel to give his views on what made a good sheriff—in short, the protection of lives and property against the lawless class. He humorously critiqued his fellow candidates, saying of Buckner, the incumbent, that he was an excellent machinist, but that Spradley “would never employ him as a man catcher.” Bill Campbell, the “gunless sheriff,”

Conclusion

{ 165

was trying to make a comeback. Spradley, in a backhanded compliment, said that there was no better judge of a mule in the county, and that the county needed more farmers like him. George Blackburn, a butcher, was praised for his keen eye for fatted calves, and Spradley urged voters to reject him because the price of cattle would drop if he were elected.38 Blackburn, the butcher, finished first in the July primary, Spradley came in second, and Buckner finished a poor third. Buckner’s poor showing in part stemmed from a pair of indictments handed down against him in the summer and fall of 1905 for allowing two prisoners to escape, though he was never convicted. There certainly was some irony in the indictments: when Spradley was sheriff, escapes from the still-porous jail were common.39 Jim Buchanan, the convicted killer of the Hicks family, twice escaped on Spradley’s watch. In the August runoff, Blackburn handed Spradley the worst defeat of his career. The veteran lawman only received 42 percent of the vote, his support undoubtedly eroded now that blacks were excluded from the Democratic primary.40 Spradley continued serving as a U.S. marshal. In January 1908, as the political pot once again began to be stirred and candidates began filling the town’s newspapers with announcements of their candidacies, a genuine national figure arrived in Nacogdoches. William Jennings Bryan, the two-time presidential candidate who, after being passed over in 1904, was gearing up for a third try at the White House, came to town to test the political waters. Bryan, then forty-eight, was a hero to many Populists because of his advocacy of free silver and tariff reform, and certainly Spradley was one of his admirers. Bryan arrived on January 3, 1908, on the HE&WT train from Shreveport, and was greeted by more than 1,000 people at the railroad station. The regionally famous Hoo Hoo band from Lufkin played “Hail to the Chief.” The Sentinel ran a drawing of Bryan the next day and welcomed him as the next president of the United States.41 Bryan’s fiery rhetoric had been preceded, however, by a genuine fire earlier that afternoon in the Davidson Building, occupied by the Weeks Drug Company. Four businesses were destroyed, including the mercantile establishment of Mayer & Schmidt, when the bucket brigade proved inadequate to stop the conflagration. Bill Haltom had gone to his grave without seeing his dream of a city waterworks established, but this blaze would finally spark a successful effort to put in a municipal water system. Undeterred, Bryan spoke from the balcony of the Redland Hotel and “practically announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for

166

} Aftermath

the presidency.” So many people crowded onto the hotel balcony from which he spoke that Bryan joked that he was fearful it might collapse from the weight. He didn’t speak long, so perhaps he was serious about fearing a balcony collapse. Bryan concluded his speech with the following: I have spoken long enough to satisfy your curiosity. I could not speak long enough to wear out your Democracy, and those of you who may never have an opportunity to hear a real live president of the United States speak, you can at least say now that you have heard one speak who on two different occasions cherished the delusion that he was going to be a real live president, and he feels the disease coming on again.42

Later that night, Bryan delivered a lecture on “The Average Man” to what was described as the largest audience ever assembled in the Nacogdoches High School auditorium. Like Bryan, who would gain the Democratic nomination but again lose, Spradley was hardly finished with politicking. The former sheriff continued to garner considerable publicity through his investigative work as a U.S. marshal and in pursuing bootleggers, as well as with his frequent letters to the editor. Spradley announced another run for sheriff in March 1908, and after narrowly trailing in the July primary, decisively defeated Blackburn in the August runoff. For the first time in eighteen years, Spradley would take office in November under the mantle of the Democratic Party (he was unopposed in the general election). Times were changing in Nacogdoches. Automobiles were seen on city streets, though a horse and carriage was still the preferred mode of transportation. The violent crimes that had plagued the county during the past decade were declining. The demise of the saloons seemed to have a salubrious effect on wanton violence. An April 1909 grand jury even went so far as to report: There exists less violation of the law in the county at this time than has been true for the past twenty years . . . and we feel sure that the good citizens of Nacogdoches county will lend their sincere and best efforts at all times to the advancement and the improvement of these conditions until Nacogdoches county shall truly become a model county of law abiding citizens and a community of peaceful homes.43

Conclusion

{ 167

Spradley, as one biographer pointed out, now was able to spend more time using his famed bloodhounds to chase down fugitives in other towns, some as far away as Arkansas and south Louisiana.44 Despite the drop in crime, the election of 1910 proved to be both bitter and violent. Spradley faced three opponents in the Democratic primary, but at first it was not his race that garnered the most attention. The Precinct One constable’s race featured Mart Andis, Spradley’s chief deputy, and, Walter C. Turner, a personal friend, as well as two other candidates. Turner assumed that Spradley would endorse him, but the sheriff backed Andis instead. Turner did not take the news well. He spent the night nursing a bottle, and then ambushed Spradley as he headed to City Bakery on a Sunday morning in April 1910. Only a shouted warning from a black man who saw Turner following Spradley with gun drawn saved the sheriff. He turned his head just as Turner fired, and the bullet struck the base of his skull and exited below his ear. George Blackburn, the former sheriff, owned a grocery store that Spradley had just patronized. He heard the shot and rushed outside, only to meet Turner, who announced, “Well, I have got the old boss myself.” 45 Turner was wrong. Spradley, incredibly, was not seriously injured, but the attack at long last changed his views on prohibition. Before the shooting, the sheriff was staunchly opposed to prohibition. At one time he even allowed his name to be used by Shreveport liquor lobbyists who claimed that the ban on booze was harming the growth and prosperity of Nacogdoches and East Texas in general. But as Spradley took time to recover from his head wound, he received a letter from the Rev. W. W. Watts, the Methodist preacher who had coedited the Option Optic, an antiliquor newspaper published during the prohibition campaign of 1903. Watts, now preaching in Orange, wrote a letter to Spradley: Dear John: I note from the newspapers that you had a close call from the bullet of an assassin. John, I take this as a Providential message that your life has been preserved for higher and better ideals. I hear that the young man who fired the shot that came near ending your life was under the influence of liquor. John, let me ask you now to change your way of living and espouse the cause of prohibition, for as I say, I feel that your life was spared by Providence in order that you might be of service to your fellowmen. Please change your way of living and your belief on the prohibition question.46

168

} Aftermath

Henry Fuller, in his biography of Spradley, claimed that the letter moved the sheriff to tears, and that from that moment on Spradley was an “ardent friend of prohibition in any and every form.” 47 Spradley nearly won a majority in the July primary, taking 47 percent of the vote. He felt confident enough that he would easily win the runoff against H. C. Rich, a political newcomer, that he promised voters that this would be his last race. Rich, who lived in Cushing, in the northwest part of the county, had also apparently made the mistake of allowing supporters to ship kegs of beer over from Lufkin for his hometown voters during the first primary. With the fervor of a fresh convert to prohibition, Spradley raised a stink about what he called “the open and outrageous conduct of the flow of free beer at Cushing on primary day.” He placed an advertisement in the Sentinel that said he had in his possession a copy of the waybill from the Lufkin beer wholesaler. The bill bore the signatures of four of Rich’s supporters, who had previously signed a statement denying they had bought the beer. “Find where I have lied, and I will resign the office,” Spradley’s advertisement concluded. He was confident that the beer bust would deal the deathblow to Rich’s political ambitions.48 In addition, C. M. Walters, who had finished a close third, endorsed Spradley, saying he was “one of the best criminal sheriffs in Texas.” 49 The turnout was heavy, but the result wasn’t even close. Spradley was badly defeated, receiving just 44 percent of the vote. Once again, as he had done in 1898, he wrote a farewell letter to his friends, saying that he was retiring to private life and would feel very much relieved when I shift the responsibility from my shoulders. . . . I know I was not defeated for dereliction of duty or inability to perform my duties, but because I exercised my right as an American citizen and advocated the election of Cone Johnson for governor, and honesty and sobriety in public office. . . . I will retire to private life and enjoy nature’s environments, hunting, fishing and looking after my private affairs, and as Bill Longly said, “Let the wild world wag as it will, I’ll be gay and happy still.” As to my successor, if he makes good his promise to the people, that he could serve them well and as good as any other man, I will be one of his strongest supporters two years hence.50

It’s not clear why Spradley believed that supporting East Texan Cone Johnson for governor had contributed to his loss in the sheriff ’s race.

Conclusion

{ 169

Johnson was a staunch advocate of prohibition, practiced law in nearby Tyler, and had held a number of elective positions. He exhibited some populist tendencies, including earning a reputation as a trustbuster, and had been one of the early backers of creating a Texas Railroad Commission; the latter two issues likely explain Spradley’s support.51 His latest valedictory address notwithstanding, Spradley couldn’t stay completely out of politics. In 1911 he stumped heavily for a $90,000 bond issue to build a new courthouse and jail, one of his pet projects. The defeat of a similar issue in the spring of 1902 had become a campaign issue after Jim Buchanan escaped from the porous jail and murdered the Hicks family. Now, nine years later, voters at last agreed, by a heavy majority, that it was time to replace the old facilities, which literally were crumbling. In addition, Spradley stumped for the proposed Texas constitutional amendment for prohibition, which passed in the county but failed statewide.52 Spradley apparently decided that his successor’s performance as sheriff wasn’t up to his standards, and he hit the campaign trail once again in 1912 to try to win the office back from Rich. He kept his job as a U.S. marshal and conducted a “front-porch campaign,” confining his stumping to letters to the editor. The technique didn’t work. Spradley managed to make the runoff, but was soundly defeated by the incumbent, 1,614 to 954. Spradley won in only three rural boxes and lost badly inside the city. It was the first time he had been defeated twice in a row, and it appeared, at long last, that his long political career was over.53 But the old sheriff, now sixty-one, had one more race left in him. Two years later, in 1914, he hit the hustings again, campaigning earnestly this time, as he joined a crowded field of seven in the Democratic primary (Rich having decided not to seek a third term). Spradley’s solving of a sensational murder case in Louisiana, one with a Nacogdoches connection, proved pivotal in the election. John and Mary Chandler, seventy-five and seventy years of age respectively, lived in Winn Parish, Louisiana, located about 150 miles east of Nacogdoches. Their son, also named John, was a Nacogdoches County tenant farmer who worked for Spradley’s brother Henry. The Chandlers had apparently accumulated a considerable amount of money. The senior John Chandler insisted on always being paid in gold, and it was widely rumored that he kept it locked in a trunk somewhere on his property. The couple was murdered in April 1914. Mrs. Chandler’s skull had been crushed with an iron pipe; her husband’s bullet-riddled

170

} Aftermath

body was found near the barn. A trunk inside the house had been pried open, and $600 in cash was believed missing. Attention at first focused on five black men who were working temporarily at a nearby sawmill, and they were arrested. A lynching seemed imminent until attention was focused on a son-in-law, Tom Fanning, who was in debt to his father-in-law and had an unsavory reputation. Sheriff Payne of Winn Parish arrested Fanning, but the younger John Chandler, after talking to his brother-in-law, was convinced that he was innocent. He asked Spradley to head to Louisiana and investigate.54 Spradley employed his usual subterfuge. First he posed as a lawyer representing Fanning and talked to his wife, who acknowledged that her husband had a checkered past (he had fled Arkansas after being accused of hog theft). But she was adamant that Fanning had been home with her when they heard gunshots; they had immediately raced to the scene.55 Spradley then talked Sheriff Payne into allowing Spradley to disguise himself as a prisoner and be placed into the jail cell where Fanning and others were being held. Spradley pulled a small saw out of his pocket and told the other prisoners that he planned to saw through the bars and escape. He invited his cellmates to join him. Fanning was the only prisoner to decline, saying that he was innocent and planned to stay to fight the murder charges in court. That convinced Spradley of Fanning’s innocence, and he began to investigate. He found the tracks of two men near the barn. He talked to a neighbor, who said Chandler had told him the day before he was killed that two unknown black men had been on his property, and he had asked them to leave. He tracked one of the men, Seth Jefferson—who had worked briefly at the sawmill but disappeared after the killings—from Louisiana to Arkansas without success. Then, as was common at the time, Spradley placed a notice in several newspapers, including the Shreveport Times, describing the man he was hunting. Jefferson was being held in jail for another crime, just over the Texas border. Jefferson confessed to the murders, said that robbery was the motive, was convicted and hanged.56 Once again, Spradley had gotten his man. The old sheriff finished first in the July primary, but didn’t capture a majority. He promised voters that this really would be his last term if elected. Spradley won the runoff in August 1914 by a paltry nineteen votes, and faced only token opposition in the fall from a Socialist Party candidate. The 1914 election was indeed his final campaign. Nacogdoches was entering the modern age: automobile ads were sprinkled throughout the

Conclusion

{ 171

Sentinel, and a movie theater was in operation. The published crime reports were reduced to incidents as minor as the theft of someone’s pants at a fishing camp on the Angelina River.57 As the 1916 campaign began, for the first time in thirty-four years Andrew Jackson Spradley’s name was not on the ballot. The man who ultimately won, twenty-nine-year-old Luther Prince, a constable in Garrison, hadn’t even been born when Spradley first took office in 1882. Spradley had run for sheriff in seventeen straight elections, winning thirteen. He wrote yet another valedictory letter to the people of Nacogdoches. But this time, Spradley’s farewell to public office would be permanent: to the citizens and people of nacogdoches count y: Today I return to you or your choice as my successor, the sheriff ’s office I have held by your consent for a quarter of a century. I turn it back to you with a thousand thanks for your oft expressed confidence in my honesty. I turn it back to you with an honest conscience, and, I believe, a clean record, as I have tried to do my duty in all things as I understood it. As a private citizen I expect to do my full duty as a law-abiding citizen. I will be in favor of the progress of the time, clean politics, good schools and good roads. I am in favor of prohibition [in every] precinct, county, state and nation. I am in favor of granting to our women every right that a man claims as a citizen, and will hail with delight the opportunity to so vote and work. Two years ago many citizens asked this question: “If you are elected sheriff, will you clean out the courthouse and keep it clean?” I knew what they meant. I answered “yes,” and I believe that I have made my promise good. You have now an empty jail and a clear criminal docket, except for a few continued murder cases. I have helped to bring about this condition and in so doing I have made my enemies, but I am proud to know that my numerous friends are among the very best citizenship [sic] of Nacogdoches county, and the State of Texas. Again, thanking you for the many favors shown me in the past, let me assure you that you will ever have a friend in need. very respectfully, a. j. spradley 58

Spradley stayed active in retirement. Much of his farm was leased out to tenants, which allowed him to continue, well into his dotage, to pursue

172

} Aftermath

criminal cases that intrigued him. For example, at age seventy-four, in 1927, he helped investigate the well-publicized murder of the paymaster for Frost Lumber Industries; he had been ambushed near Woden. A black man named Tom Ross was arrested for the crime, which netted him no money because the payroll bag he stole was a fake, the real one being hidden under the car seat. Ross was convicted and sent to death row in Huntsville, where he was sent to the electric chair the next year. Ross was the first, and remains the only, Nacogdoches resident to date to be executed since the state took over executions in 1923 and stopped allowing counties to perform them.59 Spradley died in 1940 at the age of eighty-seven, a law-enforcement legend and undoubtedly one of the most famous lawmen of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

the plaindealer, the populist newspaper that spradley had started in 1894, had, by 1904, abandoned its third-party principles several years earlier, but still managed to survive far longer than anyone expected. Finally, in 1908, the newspaper was merged with the weekly Redland Herald, which had begun publishing in 1899 and would compete against the Sentinel for more than three decades. a 1902 photo of the hanging of jim buchanan is displayed, along with other old photos, in the Historic Town Center in downtown Nacogdoches, less than 100 feet from where Buchanan died for the murders of the Hicks family. The building was constructed in 1917 and originally served as a post office, then served as the public library for several decades. It has been beautifully restored, and now is the tourism center for a still vibrant downtown. The photograph has been displayed in public places for many years under the caption “The Last Hanging in Nacogdoches.” Buchanan’s hanging in 1902 was not the last one in Nacogdoches. There were at least two more legal hangings and one possible lynching (that of Jim Pleasant in 1903, described in Chapter Eighteen). On April 20, 1906, Simon Spencer was hanged for the 1903 murder of Isaiah Mayfield. Spencer and Mayfield, both black, had been gambling out in the woods. Mayfield won all of Spencer’s money, and the latter responded by beating Mayfield to death with a club. He then buried the body and left town for several months. Mayfield’s body remained missing. Spencer finally returned, and kept asking about Mayfield’s whereabouts.

Conclusion

{ 173

This aroused Spradley’s suspicions, and he managed to trick Spencer into confessing to a friend that he had killed Mayfield. Spencer was tried, convicted, and sentenced to hang, but possibly because this crime involved two blacks and had no racial overtones, there was no rush to quickly enact vengeance. Spencer, unlike Buchanan, was represented by court-appointed attorneys—former county judge V. E. Middlebrook and Moss Adams, both well-respected local lawyers. They appealed Spencer’s conviction and even tried to get a last-minute reprieve from the governor, but to no avail. A large crowd gathered to watch Spencer hang. He told officers that he had made his peace with God and was ready to die: “He stated that the Lord had forgiven him of his sins and that he was fully prepared to die, and the sooner the execution took place just that soon would he be ready.” 60 After being ministered to by several black preachers and getting a final haircut and shave, Spencer was hanged in front of a large crowd that once again gathered in the square to see a black man die.

gambling also was involved in the last crime known to have resulted in a public hanging in Nacogdoches. It wasn’t quite as swift a punishment as befell Jim Buchanan, but Dock Bailey, who also was black, died for killing Dee Owens, a young white man, just two months and three days after the crime was committed. Owens, who lived in Linn Flat—site of the famous Linn Flat Wars of the early 1870s—had gone to town a few days before his death and secured a marriage license to wed Maggie Wilkerson, described as the daughter of a well-to-do farmer in the same community. They were to be married on Thursday, September 5, 1907, and that night a number of their friends and family gathered at the bride’s house to “witness the happy union.” But Owens failed to show up. A search party began hunting for the young man and learned he had been last seen the day before, riding up the road with a black man. They soon found a man who said a black man named Dock Bailey had been negotiating to buy Owens’s horse and saddle.61 The party found Owens’s body early the next morning, lying in a fallen treetop, a bullet in his chest and his skull crushed. A piece of rope had been tied to his neck, and it was obvious he had been killed elsewhere and dragged to this spot. On the same day, the sheriff in Rusk arrested Bailey on suspicion of having sold a stolen horse and saddle to a local resident. It didn’t take

174

} Aftermath

long to determine that it was Owens’s horse and saddle. Bailey also was wearing Owens’s coat and carrying a pistol with a piece broken off it. The missing piece had been found at the scene of the crime. Bailey quickly confessed, but said the difficulty arose during an impromptu crap game. Apparently Owens felt compelled to sow a few more wild oats before getting married, and wound up getting killed for his efforts. Bailey used Owens’s horse to drag the latter’s body into the woods. He was arrested the day after the crime, convicted exactly one month later, and executed one month after that. More than 5,000 people attended the hanging, according to the Daily Sentinel. Sheriff George Blackburn brought the prisoner back from the Rusk penitentiary early that morning. While the crowd was huge, there was apparently no fear of a lynching or any other type of mob violence. Bailey was led to the scaffold, where, at Bailey’s request, an old preacher known as “Uncle Wiley” met and prayed with the condemned man: Just before the black cap was placed over his face, Bailey made a brief talk, in which he admonished all colored people to never gamble, and in no case to gamble with white people. He said that he, and he alone, had killed Dee Owens, but that the Lord had forgiven him for the deed. He quoted several sentences from the 23rd Psalm and asserted that he was going straight to heaven.62

Though the crowd yelled and exulted as Bailey’s body plunged through the hole in the scaffold’s platform, there was none of the barbarism that characterized Buchanan’s hanging—and rehanging— five years earlier. Bailey’s body was cut down, placed in a coffin, and taken to the pauper’s cemetery for burial. The hanging of Dock Bailey truly was the final time someone dangled from a rope in the dusty plaza of Nacogdoches. It’s notable that after Buchanan’s swift hanging, even with its trappings of legality, the last two hangings in Nacogdoches, both of black men, were done only after all legal niceties had been followed, albeit at a much hastier pace than in modern times. Both men had lawyers who filed appeals and made at least some effort to properly represent their clients—amenities that Buchanan was never offered, and apparently had no desire to take.

Epilogue

nacogdoches, from the period following reconstruc tion to the eve of World War I—where this story ends—arguably was no more violent or racist than any other small southern town of the time. Killings and cutting affrays were a fact of life in this violent time, and contemporary newspapers were filled with similar accounts of such crimes. Southern editors loved to reprint accounts of heinous crimes committed elsewhere, especially if the accused was black and the victim— or victims—white. Such accounts seemed to confirm the racial fears so common among rural southern white males, particularly the fear that marauding black males were bent on ravishing white women. In fact, the old Indian village that now bills itself as the Oldest Town in Texas was depressingly similar to other southern towns. Whether fueled by alcohol, grudges both real and imagined, or racial tensions and family feuds, life in Deep East Texas was continually fraught with the potential for violence. About a fourth of the county’s population was black, and only a few of those former slaves, or their descendants, were significantly better off than they had been under slavery. It is true that blacks had more opportunities for an education, though it was vastly inferior to that received by white children. Blacks were free to marry anyone of their race they wished, though they risked their lives if the object of their ardor was white. And they could worship in their own churches and even own a spot of land, as long as their ambitions didn’t overreach the bounds whites still placed upon them economically or politically. Those blacks who tried to accumulate too much risked being “whitecapped” and run out of the county. As the anonymous black correspondent wrote plaintively to the Indianapolis Freeman a few months after Buchanan’s execution, “We are tormented.” Legal niceties notwithstanding, blacks in Deep East Texas and throughout much of the rural South at the turn of the century were still essentially indentured servants, chained to tenant farms economically though (barely) not literally. Most whites were better off than they had

176

} A Hanging in Nacogdoches

been before the war, but only in comparison to blacks. The vast majority of whites were small-time farmers who barely eked out a living growing cotton or truck crops. The middle class was decidedly small, and the moneyed class was predictably tiny but possessed of influence far out of proportion to its numbers. The tensions of class, booze, gambling, lousy economic conditions, and the vestiges of a frontier mentality all led to a propensity for violence, both in Nacogdoches and throughout the South. It didn’t help matters that virtually everybody carried a gun or kept one within easy reach. For a brief time in the 1890s there appeared to be a chance that dispossessed blacks and whites would work together throughout parts of the South and Midwest to gain political power by virtue of their sheer numbers. Nacogdoches was a hotbed for populism, but the movement fell apart there as it did elsewhere. Why? Primarily because those who opposed the populist movement—mainly white male Democrats—successfully exploited the primal fear of all whites, even the poorest, that blacks might gain a political toehold. They played on that fear by reminding whites of the “horrors” of Reconstruction. And every crime a black man committed— or was falsely accused of committing—against a white person, especially a woman, only added fuel to the racial fire. There is no reason to believe that Jim Buchanan didn’t murder three members of the Hicks family on October 11, 1902. He confessed at least three times to the crimes, though he denied to the end that he raped Allie, the twenty-one-year-old daughter of Duncan and Nerva Hicks. Buchanan was an accused thief who had twice escaped from jail. He told reporters he wanted to be known as a “bad nigger,” reflecting a minor trend at that time in black culture, a trend that glorified violent criminals, often in song, even those who preyed on their own race. But there is also no doubt Buchanan was the victim of a “legal lynching,” as Sheriff Spradley put it three decades later. Buchanan saved himself from a far worse fate by agreeing to be hanged right after pleading guilty. Buchanan didn’t have access even to legal counsel, much less, by modern standards, a fair trial. Spradley deserves special mention in this conclusion. The longtime lawman showed considerable courage in protecting Buchanan from the lynch mobs. Throughout his career, Spradley, according to all existing accounts, treated blacks fairly, especially when compared to most white lawmen of that time. And as black populist John B. Raymer said while stumping for him in Spradley’s 1894 campaign, the sheriff was as “brave as a lion.”

Epilogue

{ 177

It is no coincidence, in my view, that a wave of whitecapping in Nacogdoches County followed Buchanan’s hanging, or that blacks lost the right to vote in the all-important Democratic primary just eighteen months later. By whatever means, the white majority was determined to hold absolute power, both politically and economically. By the early 1900s, it had succeeded. Nacogdoches seemed consigned to the fate of its fellow East Texas hamlets during the early part of the twentieth century. Attached to the Old South—isolated, rural, with a sparse and largely uneducated population—East Texas had little to offer future generations beyond a grueling existence in timber or farming. Finally, in 1923, the town’s boosters hit the jackpot. After decades of unsuccessfully promoting schemes to drill oil, sow tobacco fields manned by Dutch immigrants, or grow the world’s greatest tomato crop, Nacogdoches was named the site for Stephen F. Austin Teacher’s College, the state’s newest public institution of higher education. The college was named after the so-called “Father of Texas,” who had been instrumental in colonizing Texas when it was under Mexican rule. Austin passed through Nacogdoches in 1821 on his way to San Antonio to work out an agreement to establish a colony in Texas, and stopped again on his return trip to the United States—his sole apparent connection to Nacogdoches. The creation of SFA eventually transformed Nacogdoches into a vibrant college town, setting it apart from other cities in East Texas. The cultural events such an institution offers and the sheer diversity of its faculty and students have helped the town maintain this vibrancy. Nacogdoches is still heavily wedded to its past, though the 12,000-plus college students who inhabit it for a few years are unaware of that past. Like most East Texas towns, it is still largely segregated in its civic clubs, churches, neighborhoods—really everything except public schools and government jobs. In this ongoing racial divide, Nacogdoches is representative of the South. Its legacy of violence is also unexceptional: its few lynchings and other racial atrocities, and its slow, lurching progress toward at least some semblance of racial equality and economic opportunity for all. It is this writer’s wish that this account of the travails of one little town in Deep East Texas will provide some idea of what it was like to live in the South during that uneasy time between Reconstruction and the dawn of the modern age.

THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

Notes

Chapter One. Three Killed in Black Jack

1. Nacogdoches (TX) Daily Sentinel, June 28, 1902. 2. Weather records kept in Nacogdoches County by Captain H. H. Cooper for the U.S. Weather Bureau, then under the Department of Agriculture. Archived at the East Texas Research Center, Stephen F. Austin State University, Nacogdoches, Texas. See also Daily Sentinel, October 3, 1902. 3. The community of Black Jack in 1902 had recently been renamed Attoyac by the U.S. Postal Service, which had established an office there, but most folks referred to the community by its old name. I will refer to it as Black Jack, since that is what it is still called today. It is likely that the origin of the name stems from the blackjack oak that commonly grows in Deep East Texas, and the community name was spelled both as one word and two. I’m following editor Bill Haltom’s style here in spelling it as two words. 4. Daily Sentinel, January 24, 1902. 5. U.S. Census records for 1900; recollections of Juanita Tarpley Peters (since deceased), granddaughter of Lizzie Hicks Brumley. Mrs. Peters said Lizzie did not learn of the murders of her parents and sister for three months. In 1903 Lizzie and her family moved back to the Hicks homeplace in Black Jack, where she had another child, the mother of Mrs. Peters. Eventually the family moved off the Hicks place, and it was sold. The house is no longer standing ( Juanita Tarpley Peters, interview with the author, December 20, 2002). 6. Henry C. Fuller, A Texas Sheriff (privately printed, 1931; reprinted, San Augustine, Tex.: S. Malone, Printer, 1983), 11. Citations are to the Malone edition. 7. Daily Sentinel, October 10, 1902. 8. “Yellow dog” Democrats, a phrase increasingly out of style these days, were voters who cast straight tickets for the Democratic Party. The expression referred to people who would vote for even a sorry yellow dog if the creature were running as a Democrat. 9. Daily Sentinel, October 10, 1902. The Black Jack correspondent reported in the Sentinel on February 2, 1902, that the community now had phone service, but it is unclear how far the service reached. It is unlikely that phone lines had been strung to Nacogdoches; if they had, the numerous floods may have disrupted the lines. 10. Fuller, Texas Sheriff, 11.

180

} Notes to pages 6–13

Chapter Two. A City with a Long Past

1. Jere L. Jackson, “Nacogdoches: A Brief History,” in The Portable Handbook of Texas (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2000), 274. 2. Robert Carlton Clark, “Louis Juchereau de Saint-Denis and the Re-Establishment of the Tejas Missions,” Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association 6, no. 1 ( July 1902): 7 –9. 3. Ibid., 4. 4. The Handbook of Texas Online, s.v. “Old San Antonio Road,” http://www.tsha .utexas.edu /handbook /online/articles/print /OO/exo4.html (last accessed May 3, 2005). 5. Joe Erickson, Carolyn Erickson, Archie McDonald, and James A. Partin, Nacogdoches: The History of Texas’ Oldest City (Lufkin, Tex.: Best of East Texas Publishers, 1995). 6. Donald E. Chipman, Spanish Texas, 1519 –1821 (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1992), 104. 7. Ibid., 105. 8. Ibid., 113. 9. Ibid. 10. Herbert E. Bolton, “Spanish Abandonment and Re-Occupation of East Texas, 1773 –1779,” Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association 9, no. 2 (Oct. 1905): 74 –75. Spain would trade Louisiana back to France in 1800 for a small piece of Italy, although the terms of the agreement allowed Louisiana to remain nominally under Spanish control. 11. Ibid., 78. 12. Ibid., 90. 13. Ibid., 85. 14. Ibid., 123 –130. 15. Chipman, Spanish Texas, 187. 16. The Handbook of Texas Online, s.v. “Old Stone Fort,” http://www.tsha.utexas .edu /handbook /online/articles/view/OO/cco3.html (last accessed May 5, 2005). 17. Erickson, Nacogdoches, 68 –70. 18. Ibid., 94. 19. Robert S. Maxwell, Whistle in the Piney Woods: Paul Bremond and the Houston, East and West Texas Railway (Houston: Texas Gulf Coast Historical Association, 1963), 2 –3. 20. Lois Fitzhugh Foster Blount, “The Story of Old Pattonia,” East Texas Historical Journal 5, no. 1 (March 1967): 14 –15. 21. Carl H. Moneyhon, Republicanism in Reconstruction Texas (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1980), 14. 22. Ralph A. Wooster, “Life in Civil War East Texas,” East Texas Historical Journal 3, no. 2: 96. 23. Moneyhon, Republicanism in Texas, 17. 24. James M. Smallwood, Time of Hope, Time of Despair: Black Texans during Reconstruction (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1981), 30. 25. Ibid., 32. 26. John Nathan Cravens, James Harper Starr (Austin: Daughters of the Republic of Texas, 1950), 126 –127.

Notes to pages 14–23

{ 181

27. James H. Starr papers, East Texas Research Center, Stephen F. Austin State University, Nacogdoches, Texas. Letter dated November 18, 1870; Box 1, Folder 2. 28. Ibid. 29. Cravens, Starr, 155. 30. Smallwood, Time of Hope, 15. 31. Barry A. Crouch, The Freedmen’s Bureau and Black Texans (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1992), 1–3. 32. Ibid., 12. 33. Ibid., 39. 34. Cravens, Starr, 155. 35. Ibid., 162. 36. Smallwood, Time of Hope, 30. 37. Claude F. Oubre, Forty Acres and a Mule: The Freedmen’s Bureau and Black Land Ownership (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1978), 37. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., 160. 40. Register of Complaints, Field Office of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands for Texas, Nacogdoches County, August 1867 to December 1868, National Archives, Washington, D.C. (hereinafter cited as Register of Complaints.) 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid.; Records of Criminal Offenses Committed in the State of Texas (hereinafter cited as Records of Criminal Offenses), from Records of the Assistant Commissioner, for the State of Texas, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, 1865 –1869, microfilm roll no. 32, National Archives, Washington, D.C. 43. Records of the Assistant Commissioner for the State of Texas, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, 1865 –1869, microfilm roll no. 32, National Archives, Washington, D.C. 44. Records of Criminal Offenses. 45. Register of Complaints. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid. 50. Columbus Hazlett’s last name is spelled with one t in the Freedmen’s Bureau records, but several later histories, including this one, spell it with two. 51. Register of Complaints. 52. Texas Republican (Marshall), September 18, 1868. 53. Austin Republican, September 21, 1868. 54. Ibid., October 26, 1968. 55. The Handbook of Texas Online, s.v. “Texas National Guard,” http://www.tsha .utexas.edu /handbook /online/articles/view/ TT/qnt2.html (last accessed May 5, 2005). 56. Ann Patton Baenziger, “The Texas State Police during Reconstruction: A Reexamination,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 72 (April 1969): 470 – 491. 57. Ibid. 58. Richard W. Haltom, The History of Nacogdoches County (privately printed, 1880; reprinted, Austin: Jenkins Printing Company, n.d.), 39. Citations are to the Jenkins edition.

182

} Notes to pages 23–33

59. Joseph E. Mayfield Collection, East Texas Research Center, Stephen F. Austin State University. 60. Ibid. 61. Haltom, Nacogdoches County, 41. 62. Mayfield Collection. 63. Haltom, Nacogdoches County, 41. 64. Ibid., 42. 65. Mayfield Collection. 66. Haltom, Nacogdoches County, 43 – 44. 67. Ibid., 41. 68. Mayfield Collection. 69. Ibid. 70. Baenziger, “Texas State Police,” 272. 71. Ibid. Chapter Three. A Texas Sheriff

1. Fuller, Texas Sheriff, 4. 2. Ibid., 3 – 6. 3. Ibid., 6 4. Ibid., 70 –71. 5. Ibid., 71. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. The book, which was written by Henry C. Fuller, a veteran newspaperman who once edited Spradley’s Plaindealer, is filled with accounts of Spradley’s being called upon to assist lawmen elsewhere. In addition, there are numerous news stories in the Sentinel throughout Spradley’s long career of his being asked to assist in other cases. 8. Dallas Morning News, January 9, 1886. 9. Ibid., December 4, 1896. 10. Nacogdoches County election records. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. Chapter Four. A Suspect and a Possible Motive

1. Daily Sentinel, October 13, 1902; Fuller, Texas Sheriff, 11. 2. Fuller, Texas Sheriff, 12. 3. Daily Sentinel, June 4, 1902. Haltom later reported Buchanan was from Waco. 4. Ibid., June 6, 1902. 5. Ibid., May 7, June 11, and July 7, 1902. 6. Daily Sentinel, February 12, 1902. 7. Fuller, Texas Sheriff, 35 –36. 8. Joe F. Combs, Gunsmoke in the Redlands (San Antonio: Naylor, 1968), 14 –15. 9. George L. Crocket, Notes of East Texas, vol. 1 (San Augustine, Tex.: S. Malone, Printer, 1984), 50. (The original material is in the East Texas Research Center, Stephen F. Austin State University.)

Notes to pages 34–37

{ 183

10. Combs, Gunsmoke, 21; C. L. Sonnichsen, I’ll Die Before I Run: The Story of the Great Feuds of Texas (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951), 234. 11. Fuller, Texas Sheriff, 36. 12. Combs, Gunsmoke, 19 –21. 13. Ibid., 22. 14. San Augustine District Court Records, Case No. 2585, State of Texas v. C. L. Border, April 25, 1900. Contained in the San Augustine History Center, San Augustine, Texas. 15. Crocket, Notes of East Texas, 56 –57. 16. Weekly Sentinel, April 26, 1900. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Combs, Gunsmoke, 89 –94. 20. Texas v. Border. 21. Galveston Daily News, June 4, 1900. 22. Texas vs. Border, September 12, 1900. 23. Ibid. 24. Border was elected a month after the murders of the Hicks family, defeating Matthews 680 – 497. He took office on December 1, 1902, and soon got into hot water. Constable W. S. “Sneed” Noble was ordered to arrest the sheriff on February 27, 1903, after a San Augustine County grand jury indicted Border on a misdemeanor charge of illegally placing a bet at a pool table. Border appeared to survive that rather minor charge, but a year later he faced far more serious allegations. One of a Texas sheriff ’s duties in small counties back then was to serve also as tax assessor-collector, for which he was paid a commission, as was also the case with the collection of fees and fines. In late February 1904, Border was accused of having collected $925.41 in taxes in the summer of 1903, for both that tax year and the previous year, and of having pocketed the money. Once again, Constable Noble was instructed to deliver the notice of indictment to the embattled sheriff, this time for felony theft. The commissioners’ court, according to court documents, began demanding in the summer of 1903 that Border fork over the taxes he had collected, and he ignored them. Finally, in November the commissioners ordered County Attorney W. T. Davis to file suit to collect the money. It’s unclear why it took another three months for Border’s stint as sheriff to come to an end. And there are conflicting reasons about why he was removed from office. On February 19, 1904, Sentinel editor Haltom wrote, “It seems that a great deal of trouble has risen over the prohibition question and that the sheriff has taken a position unsatisfactory to his bondsmen. Private letters state that a distressing state of affairs now exists in San Augustine and much trouble is feared.” On the same page, Haltom noted, “Things are getting in bad shape in San Augustine again, and it seems the old factorial feeling is again stirred up. An attempt to override the local option law is responsible for the present trouble.” “Prohibition” and “the local option law” referred to outlawing the sale of liquor in the county. San Augustine County voters had overwhelmingly voted to go “dry” in November 1903, the margin in the city being 253 –264; it was even more lopsided,

184

} Note to page 37

110 –115, in Denning, a community west of San Augustine. Now, there was at least some attempt to revisit the issue and hold another election. There was no doubt about Border’s stand on prohibition. A number of accounts indicate that he was a confirmed habitué of San Augustine’s saloons. However, the court documents indicate that his removal was due to the stolen tax money. District Judge Tom C. Davis accepted a petition of local citizens and ordered Border removed from office on February 26, 1904. Appointed in his place was Sneed Noble, the constable who had twice arrested the sheriff during the latter’s brief tenure in office. The gunman-turned-lawman soon would revert to his previous calling. The record is sketchy about what Border was up to during the next few months— until early May 1904, when Haltom reprinted a story from the Center Daily News, which reported that Border had recently been arrested in Lufkin “on a charge of alleged shortage with San Augustine County,” and had made bond in Center. The Houston Daily Post reported he had been taken to Shelby County because the San Augustine jail wasn’t secure, and some friends from Shelby County made Border’s bond. The Post also put the charges against Border more bluntly, saying he had been charged with embezzlement. The newspaper added that Border was about thirty-one years old, and had killed four men in his relatively young life. Border, the Sentinel reported, did not dispute owing San Augustine County the tax money, but claimed the balance owed him by the county in commissions more than offset his debt. Using terms reminiscent of the claim he made when he had been held in jail in the shooting death of the Roberts brother four years earlier, Border stated that he was being persecuted and was “being charged with many offences [sic] that he is entirely innocent of.” A week after making bond, Border was dead. There are a number of accounts, but none is as colorful as that in Gunsmoke in the Redlands, written in the 1960s by newspaper writer Joe Combs, who was a youngster in Shelby County in 1904. As he told it, Border, accompanied by his sister, Cora, and their black bodyguard, Arch Price, came to town to pick up a load of whiskey at the depot. All three were heavily armed, of course. Border, a few snorts of rotgut under his belt, soon began threatening to kill Sheriff Noble, his successor. Another eyewitness, Hal Tucker of Nacogdoches, happened to be in San Augustine that morning. His account appeared in the Sentinel of May 9, 1904: Border was parading the streets in a threatening manner and was armed . . . The fact that Border was armed was reported to Sheriff Noble, who undertook to arrest him for carrying a gun. As he approached Border, the latter being mounted, he wheeled on his horse and drew his pistol, when the sheriff shot him through the head, killing him instantly. Several shots were fired, but only the first took effect.

The Houston Daily Post account differed, saying all four shots hit their mark, but it was the bullet Border took in the head that killed him. It also stated that Noble had another warrant of an unknown nature for Border’s arrest at the time of the gunfight. Whether one bullet or four pierced Curg Border’s body, the head shot was enough to end a reign of terror that had lasted, off and on, for ten years, ever since Uncle Buck Wall had led the Populists to victory in San Augustine County.

Notes to pages 39– 45

{ 185

With Border’s death, the Border-Wall feud finally ended. As Combs wrote, “Sheriff Noble had brought a decade of killing and feuding to an end with one well directed shot” (Gunsmoke in the Redlands, 88). Chapter Five. Nacogdoches in 1902

1. Census data compiled by the University of Virginia Library’s Geospatial and Statistical Data Center: http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu /. Because East Texas farms were planted on cleared forestland, in general they were much smaller than those found in the central and western parts of the state. 2. Ibid. Out of 9,428 white males in the county in 1900, 1,217 (13 percent) were listed as illiterate by census takers. Among the 3,403 black males, 1,975 (58 percent) were illiterate. Although figures do not appear to be available, there is no reason to suppose that there was any significant difference in the rates among females. 3. Daily Sentinel, October 20, 1902. 4. Ibid., January 1, 1902. 5. Ibid., January 15, 1902. 6. Ibid., March 15, 1902. 7. Erickson, Nacogdoches, 121. In 1936, the state of Texas built a replica of the Old Stone Fort in honor of the state’s centennial on the campus of what is now Stephen F. Austin State University. The Old Stone Fort Museum remains a popular tourist destination, though there is a common misunderstanding that this is the original structure built by Ibarvo in 1779. It isn’t. 8. Daily Sentinel, May 20, 1903. 9. Maxwell, Whistle in the Piney Woods, 67. 10. Ibid., 71. 11. Daily Sentinel, January 14, 1902. 12. Ibid., April 2, 1902. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., January 3 and 7, 1902. 15. The Handbook of Texas Online, s.v. “Cotton Culture,” http://www.tsha.utexas .edu /handbook /online/articles/view/CC /afc3.html (last accessed May 3, 2005). 16. Ruth Alice Allen, East Texas Lumber Workers: An Economic and Social Picture, 1870 –1950 (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1961), 14 –17. 17. Ibid., 30. 18. Ibid., 54. 19. Robert S. Maxwell and Robert D. Baker, Sawdust Empire: The Texas Lumber Industry, 1830 –1940 (College Station: Texas A&M Univ. Press, 1983), 69. 20. Texas Almanac, 1904 ed., 334 –335. 21. The Handbook of Texas Online, s.v. “Late Nineteenth-Century Texas,” http:// www.tsha.utexas.edu /handbook /online/articles/view/LL /npl1.html (last accessed May 3, 2005). 22. In fact, Nacogdoches was connected by telephone, by October 1902, to many of the neighboring hamlets in the county and even to San Augustine, Hemphill, and Center, county seats east of Nacogdoches. 23. Daily Sentinel, January 15, 1902. 24. Ibid.

186

} Notes to pages 45 –53

25. Compiled from the Daily Sentinel, 1902, and Nacogdoches County District Court minutes for 1902. 26. Daily Sentinel, September 13, 1902. 27. Ibid., June 23, 1902. 28. Ibid., August 9, 1902. 29. Ibid., October 1, 1902. 30. Ibid., various issues from 1902. 31. Ibid., January 28, 1902. 32. Dallas Morning News, September 8, 1902. 33. Daily Sentinel, September 9, 1902. 34. Joe Bug managed to avoid prison for another six years, despite a number of shootings and cuttings, including at least two other homicides, a couple of armed robberies, and several other scraps and scrapes. He finally hightailed it to California while out on appeal bond for murder, where he once again was arrested, this time for killing someone over a poker-game dispute. He ended up in San Quentin prison, where he served ten years before being pardoned by the governor. After prison, Joe Bug returned home and settled down; one of the county’s most infamous outlaws finally became semidomesticated. He lived out his last days working in a saloon across the Attoyac River in San Augustine County. In 1937, at age fifty-six, his body broken down by alcohol and physical abuse, Joe Bug died in a back storage room of the saloon. Dr. Stephen Tucker, who treated patients in the area for more than half a century, went to see the old criminal as he was about to draw his last breath. Tucker said that Joe Bug told him, “Doc, I’ve lived a wild life. I’ve broken every law on the books, both man’s and God’s. So there’s no need to call a preacher. And at my funeral tell ’em to say no words over me.” It is unlikely that anyone did. 35. Daily Sentinel, June 28, 1902. 36. Ibid. 37. Daily Sentinel, October 20, 1902; Texas Almanac, 1904 ed., 334. 38. Erickson, Nacogdoches, 107. 39. Daily Sentinel, February 23, 1902. 40. Ibid., October 20, 1902. Chapter Six: A Suspect Is Caught

1. Crocket, Notes of East Texas, 98 –99. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid., 105. 4. James Smallwood, “When the Klan Rode: White Terror in Reconstruction Texas,” Journal of the West 25, no. 4 (Oct. 1986): 2. 5. Ibid., 8 –9. 6. Fuller, Texas Sheriff, 13. 7. The correspondent almost certainly was Henry C. Fuller, who dabbled in populist politics and worked for Spradley’s Plaindealer during the late 1890s. Fuller was a longtime newspaperman who, three decades later, would write Spradley’s biography.

Notes to pages 54– 63

{ 187

8. Fuller, Texas Sheriff, 14. 9. Ibid., 14 –16. 10. Shreveport Journal and Shreveport Times, October 14 –15, 1902. Chapter Seven. Lynchings: A Grim Fact of Life

1. Statistics compiled by the Tuskegee Institute, taken from the Charles Chesnutt Digital Archive (www.bereqa.edu). According to Tuskegee, 669 whites were lynched from 1882 to 1889, as compared with 534 blacks. 2. Ibid. 3. Lawrence Delbert, “The Negro in Texas, 1874 –1900” (dissertation, Texas Tech Univ., 1967), 58. 4. George C. Wright, Racial Violence in Kentucky, 1865 –1940 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1990), 10. 5. Thomas R. Frazier, ed., Afro-American History: Primary Sources (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1970), 178 –179. 6. Ibid., 180. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., 181–182. 9. Ibid., 182 –183. 10. Ibid., 183. 11. W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880 –1930 (Urbana, Illinois: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1993), 53. 12. Reprinted in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Thirty Years of Lynching in the U.S., 1889 –1918 (New York: Arno, 1969 [reprint ed.]), 13. Parentheses are in the original quotation. 13. James Allen, John Lewis, Leon F. Litwack, and Hilton Als, eds. Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe, N.M.: Twin Palms, 2000), 13 –14. 14. NAACP, Thirty Years of Lynching, 12. 15. Adam Fairclough, Better Day Coming: Blacks and Equality, 1890 –2000 (New York: Penguin, 2001), 24. 16. Fuller, Texas Sheriff, 67. 17. Ibid., 68 – 69. 18. Houston Daily Post, October 1, 1887. 19. Ibid. 20. Dallas Morning News, February 24, 1891. 21. Ibid., August 8, 1897. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Dallas Morning News, August 9, 1897. 25. Ibid., August 11, 1897. 26. The Waco Times-Herald, commenting on Buchanan’s arrest for the Hicks family slayings, wrote on October 15, 1902, that “Jas. Buchanan formerly lived in Waco and left here several weeks ago to go with a bridge gang on the International and Great Northern railroad. He is known to all of the officers and has not a very enviable reputation.”

188

} Notes to pages 64– 72

Chapter Eight. Populism and Race: An Incendiary Mix

1. Roscoe C. Martin, The People’s Party in Texas: A Study in Third Party Politics (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press 1970 [reprint; orig. pub. 1933 as UT Bulletin No. 3308]), 46. 2. Robert C. McMath, Jr., Populist Vanguard: A History of the Southern Farmer’s Alliance (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1975), 44 – 46. 3. Houston Post, October 13, 1887. 4. Alwyn Barr, Reconstruction to Reform: Texas Politics, 1876 –1906 (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1971), 95 –96. 5. Martin, People’s Party, 63. 6. Ibid., 61. 7. John D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt: A History of the Farmer’s Alliance and the People’s Party (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1931), 54. 8. Martin, People’s Party, 35. 9. Ibid., 41. 10. Barr, Reconstruction to Reform, 144 –145. 11. Nacogdoches Chronicle, June 15, 1892. 12. Ibid. 13. Nacogdoches Star-News, July 22, 1892. 14. Congressional Biographical Directory, http://bioguide.congress.gov/biosearch / biosearch.asp (last accessed May 3, 2005). 15. Nacogdoches County election records. Spradley, easily beat the Democratic candidate, John Rush, 1,793 –1,207. People’s Party candidate H. F. Dunson won the county judge’s race, 1,609 –1,392, over J. L. M. Pirtle. Populist electors in the county received 1,432 votes; Democratic electors, 1,264; and Republican electors, 299. 16. C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1974), 60 – 61. 17. Ibid. 18. People’s Journal, April 6, 1894. 19. Barr, Reconstruction to Reform, 147. 20. Jacksonville Banner, November 2, 1894. 21. Galveston Daily News, October 19, 1894. 22. Jacksonville Banner, November 2, 1894. 23. Ibid. Capitalization is from the original. 24. Galveston Daily News, October 23, 1894. 25. Jacksonville Banner, November 2, 1894. 26. Galveston Daily News, October 23, 1894. 27. Lawrence C. Goodwyn, “Populist Dreams and Negro Rights: East Texas as a Case Study,” American Historical Review 76, no. 5 (Dec. 1971): 1435 –1437. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 1446. 30. Gregg Cantrell, Kenneth and John B. Raymer and the Limits of Southern Dissent (Urbana and Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1993), 80 – 84, 178 –179. 31. Ibid., 189.

Notes to pages 72 – 83

{ 189

32. Ibid., 190 –191. 33. Ibid., 194 –199. 34. Ibid., 198. 35. Ibid., 215. 36. Ibid., 209, 215. 37. Dallas Southern Mercury, September 20, 1894. 38. Galveston Daily News, November 1, 1894. 39. Ibid. 40. Dallas Morning News, October 28, 1894. 41. Southern Mercury, October 25, 1894. 42. Jacksonville Banner, November 9, 1894. 43. Plaindealer, September 18, 1896. 44. Nacogdoches County election records. Chapter Nine. The Spradley-Haltom Feud

1. Nacogdoches County election results, Nacogdoches County courthouse. 2. Nacogdoches Star-News, July 22, 1892. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Goodwyn, “Populist Dreams,” 1436 –1437. 6. Ibid., 1438 –1447. 7. John Raymond Ross, “Andrew Jackson Spradley, ‘A Texas Sheriff ’” (master’s thesis, Stephen F. Austin State University, December 1973), 38. Ross interviewed the Rev. and Mrs. C. C. White in October 1973. 8. Daily Sentinel, May 2, 1902. 9. Ibid., August 10, 1902. 10. Weekly Sentinel, April 26, 1900. 11. Ibid., September 26, 1900. 12. Plaindealer, September 18, 1896. 13. Ibid., December 1, 1898. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. The Handbook of Texas Online, s.v. “Texas Legislature,” http://www.tsha.utexas .edu /handbook /online/articles/view/ TT/mkt2.html (last accessed May 3, 2005); Comanche Chief as quoted in the Weekly Sentinel, November 28, 1900. 17. Weekly Sentinel, November 28, 1900. 18. Ibid. The actual text from the oath is as follows: And I do further solemnly swear, (or affirm), that since the adoption of the constitution of this State, I, being a citizen of this State, have not fought a duel with deadly weapons, within this State nor out of it, nor have I sent or accepted a challenge to fight a duel with deadly weapons, nor have I acted as a second in carrying a challenge or aided, advised or assisted any person thus offending. constitution of the state of texas (1876), art. xvi, sec. 1.

190

} Notes to pages 84–99

The text is available online at http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu /constitutions/text / IART16.html (last accessed May 3, 2005). 19. Plaindealer, September 19, 1900. 20. Weekly Sentinel, September 26, 1900. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., September 5, 1900. 23. Ibid., September 26, 1900. 24. Daily Sentinel, May 27, 1902. 25. Ibid., June 9, 1902. 26. Ibid., June 23, 1902. 27. Ibid., August 4, 1902. 28. Ibid., October 25, 1902. 29. Ibid., June 27, 1902. Chapter Ten. Buchanan Confesses in Shreveport

1. Daily Sentinel, June 6, 1902. 2. Ibid., January 15, 1900. 3. Ibid., March 27, 1902. 4. Ibid., October 14, 1902. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. Shreveport Times, October 15, 1902. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Shreveport Journal, October 14, 1902. 11. Ibid. 12. Daily Sentinel, September 3, 1902. 13. Ibid., September 1, 4, and 25, 1902. 14. Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow. (New York: Vintage, 1999), 438. 15. Lawrence R. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), 408 – 410. 16. Ibid. 17. Shreveport Times, October 15, 1902. 18. Shreveport Journal, October 15, 1902. Chapter Eleven. A Desperate Journey across East Texas

1. Daily Sentinel, October 15, 1902. 2. Plaindealer, October 16, 1902. 3. Ibid. 4. Dallas Morning News, October 16, 1902. 5. Fuller, Texas Sheriff, 15. 6. Shreveport Times, October 16, 1902; Fuller, Texas Sheriff, 15. 7. Houston Daily Post, October 16, 1902.

Notes to pages 100 –109

{ 191

8. Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1997), 148. 9. Dallas Morning News, October 16, 1902. 10. Allen W. Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1971), xlii. 11. Ibid. 12. Fuller, Texas Sheriff, 15. 13. Papers of Gov. Joseph D. Sayers, Texas State Archives, Austin. 14. Fuller, Spradley’s biographer, says that the sheriff left with two deputies, but three are listed by name in contemporary newspaper accounts. 15. Houston Daily Post, October 16, 1902. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. The Handbook of Texas Online, s.v. “Texas National Guard,” http://www.tsha .utexas.edu /handbook /online/articles/view/ TT/qnt2.html (last accessed May 3, 2005). 20. Ibid. I have relied heavily on Bruce A. Olson’s history of the Texas National Guard in The Handbook of Texas Online to summarize the state militia’s history up to 1902. 21. Ibid. 22. Compiled from the Report of Adjutant General, October 20, 1902. Depository document at Stephen F. Austin State University. 23. Ibid., 3. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., 4. 26. Ibid., 21. 27. Ibid., 20 –21. 28. Ibid., 22. 29. Ibid., 24 –25. 30. Dallas Morning News, July 20 and 21, 1902. 31. Report of Adjutant General, 26. 32. Dallas Morning News, September 22, 1902. 33. The Daily Sentinel, July 25, 1903. 34. Report of Adjutant General, 121–122. 35. Ibid. The major’s name is spelled both with an e and without it in newspaper accounts and in the adjutant general’s report. However, in a telegram he sent to the governor, it’s spelled with an e, and that is how it is spelled here. 36. Dallas Morning News, October 16, 1902. Chapter Twelve. Preparations Made for Buchanan’s Trial

1. Houston Daily Post, October 15, 1902. 2. Governor A. J. Sayers’s papers. 3. Daily Sentinel, October 14, 1902. 4. Ibid. 5. Plaindealer, October 16, 1902.

192

} Notes to pages 109–121

6. Daily Sentinel, October 16, 1902. 7. Ibid., October 17, 1902. 8. Ibid., October 18, 1902. 9. Houston Daily Post, October 16, 1902. Chapter Thirteen. Buchanan Returns for Trial

1. Weather records kept in Nacogdoches County by Captain H. H. Cooper for the U.S. Weather Bureau, then under the Department of Agriculture. Archived at the East Texas Research Center, Stephen F. Austin State University. 2. Maxwell, Whistle in the Piney Woods, 46. 3. The train route from Rusk to Nacogdoches is based on an 1886 map of the East Texas railroad system in the East Texas Research Center. Also, a careful reading of Maxwell’s Whistle in the Piney Woods does not indicate any connecting lines built between Rusk and Nacogdoches. 4. Houston Post, October 18, 1902. 5. Description derived from an enlarged photograph of the hanging scene. 6. Fuller, Texas Sheriff, 16. 7. Houston Daily Post, October 18, 1902. 8. Ibid. 9. It’s unclear exactly when the lines were cut, though all accounts say that they were. But Major G. P. Raines, commander of the five companies of the Texas Volunteer Guard protecting Buchanan, wired the governor at 10:33 a.m. to seek advice on whether to allow Buchanan to be hanged. 10. The building with a veranda, now owned by Charles Bright, is the only one on that side of downtown that was still in existence in 2003. Its exterior does not look markedly different today. 11. Houston Daily Post, October 18, 1902. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., Shreveport Times, October 18, 1902. 14. Shreveport Times, October 18, 1902. 15. Nacogdoches County District Clerk Minutes, October 17, 1902. 16. Shreveport Times, October 18, 1902. 17. Fuller, Texas Sheriff, 16. Chapter Fourteen. A Hanging in Nacogdoches

1. Fuller, Texas Sheriff, 16. 2. Ibid., Shreveport Times, October 18, 1902. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. Austin Statesman, October 18, 1902. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Houston Daily Post, October 18, 1902. 10. Shreveport Times, October 18, 1902.

Notes to pages 121–135

{ 193

11. The preceding account and what follows is blended from the three eyewitness accounts published in the October 17 edition of the Daily Sentinel and the October 18 editions of the Houston Daily Post and the Shreveport Times. 12. Shreveport Times, October 18, 1902. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Daily Sentinel, October 17, 1902. 16. Shreveport Times, October 18, 1902. 17. Ibid. 18. Daily Sentinel, October 17, 1902. All remaining quotations from the Sentinel in this chapter are from this issue. 19. Dallas Morning News, October 18, 1902. Chapter Fifteen. Quick Hanging Sparks Criticism and Praise

1. Daily Sentinel, October 18, 1902. 2. Houston Daily Post, October 19, 1902. 3. Ibid. 4. Letter from Davis to Sayers, October 23, 1902, in Sayers’s papers. 5. Ibid. 6. Fuller, Texas Sheriff, 69. 7. Daily Sentinel, October 22, 1902. 8. Ibid., October 29, 1902. 9. The black press, at least the copies of it still available from 1902, was silent on the hanging of Jim Buchanan. An exhaustive search was possible because of the publication in 1998 of African-American Newspapers and Periodicals: A National Biography (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1998; edited by James P. Danky). Of the relatively few existing copies or microfilm rolls of black newspapers from late 1902, the author found none that mentioned Buchanan. That isn’t terribly surprising, considering that Nacogdoches was isolated and that Buchanan was legally hanged (at least technically) in a time when extralegal lynchings of a more spectacular nature were common. A black newspaper editor would have had little to gain by defending a black man who, after all, repeatedly confessed to committing a triple murder. 10. Austin Statesman, October 18, 1902. 11. Daily Sentinel, November 3, 1902. 12. Houston Daily Post, October 19 and 21, 1902. 13. Daily Sentinel, October 20, 1902. 14. Galveston Daily News, October 25, 1902. 15. Shreveport Times, October 18, 1902. 16. Shreveport Journal, October 19, 1902. 17. Gilles Vandal, Rethinking Southern Violence: Homicides in Post–Civil War Louisiana, 1866 –1874 (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 2000), 11, 45 –50. 18. Quoted in the Daily Sentinel, October 25, 1902. 19. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 18, 1902. 20. Quoted in the Daily Sentinel, October 25, 1902. 21. Daily Sentinel, October 22, 1902.

194

} Notes to pages 135 –144

22. Houston Daily Post, October 23, 1902. 23. Daily Sentinel, October 22, 1902. 24. Dallas Morning News, October 20, 1902. 25. Daily Sentinel, October 29, 1902. 26. Ibid. 27. Dallas Morning News, October 28, 1900. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., October 26, 1902. 30. Daily Sentinel, October 29, 1902. By “Newses,” Haltom was referring to the Dallas Morning News and the Galveston News, both of which were owned by the same family. 31. Plaindealer, quoted in the Daily Sentinel, October 31, 1902. 32. Daily Sentinel, October 31, 1902. Chapter Sixteen. Wettermark, Whitecapping, and a Whipping

1. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 18, 1903. 2. Daily Sentinel, January 5, 1903. 3. Ibid., January 6, 1903. 4. Daily Sentinel, January 23, 1903. 5. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 18, 1903. 6. Daily Sentinel, September 17, 1903. 7. Over the years, reported sightings of Ben Wettermark would pop up from time to time. As late as 1916, word spread like wildfire through Nacogdoches that B. S. Wettermark was a “banana millionaire” living in either Honduras or Nicaragua. A local man claimed he spotted Wettermark while visiting Central America, according to the indefatigable Henry Fuller, who urged Spradley’s successor-elect, Luther Prince, to go after the fugitive. Fuller’s populist sentiments don’t seem to have lessened much over the years. In a letter to the editor in the Daily Sentinel, he claimed, “If a man was to sell a pint of whiskey in Nacogdoches [then dry] he would be followed to Morocco, brought back and sent to the penitentiary, whereas a banker who makes a get-away with thousands of dollars of money belonging to the poor people of the county is assisted in getting away, and protected even after he gets away.” Spradley was finishing up his final term as sheriff in 1916. At age sixty-three, he had run for office biannually for thirty-five years, and he and Fuller had been friends and political allies for nearly that long. On the issue of going after Ben Wettermark, Spradley and his old ally—whom he addressed continually as Friend Henry in the letter he wrote in response— did not agree. Spradley pointed out that he and his family had lost several thousand dollars when the Wettermark Bank failed. Spradley claimed the sheriff of Los Angeles guaranteed that he could kidnap and deliver the fugitive through bounty hunters for $5,000, but the most Spradley could raise in the effort was $35. Spradley pointed out that the expense of traveling to South America on an “unlawful mission” would have bankrupted the sheriff ’s office. He sarcastically offered

Notes to pages 144–157

{ 195

to appoint Fuller as a deputy sheriff and bid him “God-speed to Honduras” to find Wettermark. Fuller didn’t take Spradley up on his offer, and the banker was never brought to justice. A considerable number of Nacogdoches businessmen and farmers ended up considerably poorer, and perhaps wiser, for having dealt with Ben Wettermark. 8. Daily Sentinel, January 31, 1903. 9. Ibid., March 3 and 6, 1903. 10. Ibid., March 24, 1903. 11. Ibid., June 8 and 9, 1903. 12. Ibid., July 20, 1903. 13. Ibid., January 12, 1903. 14. Ibid., April 14, 1903. 15. Ibid., July 1, 1903. 16. Ibid., October 3, 1903. 17. Erickson, Nacogdoches, 122 –123. 18. William F. Holmes, “Whitecapping: Agrarian Violence in Mississippi, 1902 – 1906,” Journal of Southern History 35 (1969): 165 –168. 19. Litwack, Trouble in Mind, 157 –158. 20. Daily Sentinel, June 5, 1902. 21. Holmes, “Whitecapping,” 169. 22. Daily Sentinel, June 5, 1902. 23. Freeman, January 31, 1903. 24. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 1, 1903. 25. Daily Sentinel, February 13, 1903. 26. Ibid., February 16, 1903. 27. Ibid., February 17, 1903. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., February 23, 1903. 30. Ibid., February 13, 1903. The merger lasted only five more months. On July 13 the Haltom brothers and Henning announced the dissolution of the partnership and the reversion of the newspapers to their original owners. Chapter Seventeen. Conclusion

1. Nacogdoches County election results, Nacogdoches County courthouse. 2. Daily Sentinel, February 1, 1904. 3. Ibid., February 12, 1904. 4. Ibid., February 19, 1904. 5. Ibid. 6. Daily Sentinel, March 1, 1904. 7. Ibid., March 11, 1904. 8. Ibid., March 21, 1904. 9. Ibid., May 10 and 12, 1904. 10. Ibid., May 18, 1904. 11. Ibid., May 20, 1904. 12. Woodward, Strange Career of Jim Crow, 84 – 86.

196

} Notes to pages 157–170

13. Daily Sentinel, June 2, 1904. 14. Ibid., June 6, 1904. 15. Ibid., July 19, 1904. 16. Ibid., June 15, 1904. 17. Weekly Sentinel, June 15, 1904. 18. Daily Sentinel, June 20, 1904. 19. Ibid., June 29, 1904. 20. Ibid., November 2, 1904. 21. Ibid., September 20, 1904. 22. Ibid., August 3 and November 16, 1904. 23. Ibid., November 22, 1904. 24. Houston Daily Post, August 16, 1887. 25. Bryan Holt Davis, interview with the author, October 31, 2003. 26. Inquest Minute Book, Nacogdoches County court records, now stored in the East Texas Research Center, Stephen F. Austin State University. 27. Ibid. The individual named as Porter Anderson in the inquest is referred to as Potter Anderson in the Houston Daily Post article (quoted on page 160). 28. Ibid. 29. Houston Daily Post, October 30, 1887. 30. Daily Sentinel, May 28, 1906. 31. Daily Sentinel, January 9, 1906. 32. Ibid., April 18, 1906. 33. Ibid., April 11, 1907. 34. Ibid., June 25, 1907. 35. Ibid., July 31, 1907. 36. Ibid., November 5, 1907. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., May 16, 1906. 39. Nacogdoches County District Court records, September and October 1905. 40. Nacogdoches County election results, Nacogdoches County courthouse. 41. Daily Sentinel, January 3, 1908. 42. Weekly Sentinel, January 9, 1908. 43. Daily Sentinel, April 17, 1909. 44. Ross, “Andrew Jackson Spradley,” 123 –125. 45. Fuller, Texas Sheriff, 7 – 8; Daily Sentinel, April 18, 1910. 46. Fuller, Texas Sheriff, 7 – 8. 47. Ibid., 8. 48. Daily Sentinel, August 12, 1910. 49. Ibid., August 1, 1910. 50. Ibid., August 29, 1910. 51. The Handbook of Texas Online, s.v. “Johnson, Cone,” http://www.tsha.utexas .edu /handbook /online/articles/view/JJ/fjo8.html (last accessed May 3, 2005). 52. Ross, “Andrew Jackson Spradley,” 129 –130. 53. Daily Sentinel, August 12, 1902. 54. Fuller, Texas Sheriff, 59 – 61; Daily Sentinel, April 11 and June 5, 1914. 55. There is a contradiction between the contemporary account in the Daily Sentinel and Spradley’s memoirs. The newspaper said the couple was beaten to death;

Notes to pages 170 –174

{ 197

Spradley’s account, written seventeen years later, said they were shot to death. Given the passage of time and the fading of memory, the author has gone with the Sentinel’s version of how the couple died. 56. Fuller, Texas Sheriff, 61– 62. 57. Ross, “Andrew Jackson Spradley,” 142. 58. Daily Sentinel, November 28, 1916. 59. Ross, “Andrew Jackson Spradley,” 150; Texas Department of Criminal Justice Web site, www.tdcj.state.tx.us/stat /prefurman /all.htm (accessed March 12, 2005). 60. Daily Sentinel, April 20, 1906. 61. Weekly Sentinel, September 12, 1907. 62. Daily Sentinel, November 7, 1907.

THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

Bibliography

Newspapers

Austin, Texas: Austin Statesman, Daily Austin Republican Dallas, Texas: Dallas Morning News, Southern Mercury Galveston, Texas: Galveston Daily News Houston, Texas: Houston Daily Post Indianapolis, Indiana: Freeman Jacksonville, Texas: Jacksonville Banner Marshall, Texas: Texas Republican Nacogdoches, Texas: Chronicle, Daily Sentinel, People’s Journal, Plaindealer, Star-News, Weekly Sentinel Shreveport, Louisiana: Shreveport Times, Shreveport Journal St. Louis, Missouri: St. Louis Post-Dispatch Waco, Texas: Waco Times-Herald Archives and Collections

Austin, Texas State Archive, Texas State Library Texas Newspaper Collection, Center for American History, University of Texas Nacogdoches, Texas Center for East Texas Studies, Stephen F. Austin State University District Court records and election records, county courthouse East Texas Research Center, Ralph Steen Library, Stephen F. Austin State University San Augustine, Texas San Augustine History Center Washington, D.C. Newspaper Collection, Library of Congress Records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, National Archives Books, Periodicals, and Papers

Allen, James, John Lewis, Leon F. Litwack, and Hilton Als, eds. Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America. Santa Fe: Twin Palms, 2000.

200

} A Hanging in Nacogdoches

Allen, Ruth Alice. East Texas Lumber Workers: An Economic and Social Picture, 1870 – 1950. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1961. Baenziger, Ann Patton. “The Texas State Police during Reconstruction: A Reexamination.” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 72 (April 1969): 470 – 491. Barkely, Roy R., and Mark F. Odintz, eds. The Portable Handbook of Texas. Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2000. Barr, Alwyn. Reconstruction to Reform: Texas Politics, 1876 –1906. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1971. Blount, Lois Fitzhugh Foster. “The Story of Old Pattonia.” East Texas Historical Journal 5, no. 1 (March 1967): 13 –28. Bolton, Herbert E. “Spanish Abandonment and Re-Occupation of East Texas.” Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association 9, no. 2 (October 1905): 67 –137. Brundage, W. Fitzhugh. Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880 –1930. Urbana, Illinois: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1993. Cantrell, Gregg. Kenneth and John B. Raymer and the Limits of Southern Dissent. Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1993. Chipman, Donald E. Spanish Texas, 1519 –1821. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1992. Clark, Robert Carlton. “Louis Juchereau de Saint Denis and the Re-Establishment of the Tejas Missions.” Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association 6, no. 1 ( July 1902): 1–27. Combs, Joe F. Gunsmoke in the Redlands. San Antonio: Naylor, 1968. Cravens, John Nathan. James Harper Starr. Austin: Daughters of the Republic of Texas, 1950. Crocket, George L. Notes of East Texas. Vol. 1. San Augustine, Texas: S. Malone, Printer, 1984. (Reprint of original.) Crouch, Barry A. The Freedmen’s Bureau and Black Texans. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1992. Danky, James P., ed. African-American Newspapers and Periodicals: A National Biography. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1998. Delbert, Lawrence. “The Negro in Texas, 1874 –1900.” PhD diss., Texas Tech University, 1967. Erickson, Joe, Carolyn Erickson, Archie McDonald, and James A. Partin. Nacogdoches: The History of Texas’ Oldest City. Lufkin, Tex.: Best of East Texas Publishers, 1995. Fairclough, Adam. Better Day Coming: Blacks and Equality, 1890 –2000. New York: Penguin, 2001. Frazier, Thomas R. Afro-American History: Primary Sources. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970. Fuller, Henry C. A Texas Sheriff. San Augustine, Texas: S. Malone, Printer, 1983. (Reprint of original.) Goodwyn, Lawrence C. “Populist Dreams and Negro Rights: East Texas as a Case Study.” American Historical Review 76, no. 5 (Dec. 1971): 1435 –1456. Haltom, Richard W. The History of Nacogdoches County. Austin: Jenkins, n.d. (reprint; original publication, 1880). Hicks, John D. The Populist Revolt: A History of the Farmer’s Alliance and the People’s Party. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1931.

Bibliography

{ 201

Hodes, Martha. White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1997. Holmes, William F. “Whitecapping: Agrarian Violence in Mississippi, 1902 –1906.” Journal of Southern History 35 (1969). Ivy, H. A. Rum on the Run: A Brief History of Prohibition in the Lone Star State. Dallas: Temperance Publishing Co., 1910. Jackson, Jere L. “Nacogdoches: A Brief History.” In The Portable Handbook of Texas. Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2000. Levine, Lawrence. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977. Litwack, Leon F. Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow. New York: Vintage, 1999. Martin, Roscoe C. The People’s Party in Texas: A Study in Third Party Politics. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1970 (Reprint edition). Maxwell, Robert S. Whistle in the Piney Woods: Paul Bremond and the Houston, East & West Texas Railway. Houston: Texas Gulf Coast Historical Association, 1963. Maxwell, Robert S., and Robert D. Baker. Sawdust Empire: The Texas Lumber Industry, 1830 –1940. College Station: Texas A&M Univ. Press, 1983. McMath, Robert C., Jr. Populist Vanguard: A History of the Southern Farmers’ Alliance. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1975. Moneyhon, Carl H. Republicanism in Reconstruction Texas. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1980. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Thirty Years of Lynching in the U.S., 1889 –1918. New York: Arno, 1969 (Reprint edition). Oubre, Claude F. Forty Acres and a Mule: The Freedmen’s Bureau and Black Land Ownership. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1978. Ross, John Raymond. “Andrew Jackson Spradley: A Texas Sheriff.” Master’s thesis, Stephen F. Austin State University, 1973. Scurry, Thomas. Biennial Report of the Adjutant General of Texas for the Period Ending November 30, 1902. Austin: Von Boeckmann-Jones Co., state printers, 1902. Smallwood, James. Time of Hope, Time of Despair: Black Texans during Reconstruction. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1981. ———. “When the Klan Rode: White Terror in Reconstruction Texas.” Journal of the West 25, no. 4 (Oct. 1986). Sonnichsen, C. L. I’ll Die Before I Run: The Story of the Great Feuds of Texas. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951. Trelease, Allen W. White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1971. Vandal, Gilles. Rethinking Southern Violence: Homicides in Post–Civil War Louisiana, 1866 –1874. Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 2000. Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1974. Wooster, Ralph A. “Life in Civil War East Texas.” East Texas Historical Journal 3, no.2 (Spring 1965): 93 –102. Wright, George C. Racial Violence in Kentucky, 1865 –1940. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1990.

202

} A Hanging in Nacogdoches

Online Sources

The Handbook of Texas Online: www.tsha.utexas.edu /handbook /online The Charles Chesnutt Digital Archive: www.berea.edu /ENG/chesnutt /lynching University of Virginia Library’s Geospatial and Statistical Center: http://fisher.lib .virginia.edu Congressional Biographical Directory: http://bioguide.congress.gov/biosearch

Index

Adams, Joe, 60 Adams, Moss, 173 Alford, E. B., 142 Amason, Levi, 161 Anderson, Porter (or Potter), 160, 161 Andis, Mart, 167 Angelina (steamboat), 11 Appleby, Texas, 54 Attoyac River, flooding of, 3, 52 Austin Statesman, 108, 131–132 Ayers, T. C., 43 Baenziger, Ann Patton, 25 Bailey, Dock, 173 –174 Banita Creek, 6 Barton, Reddick, 134 Battle of Potawatomi, 160 –161 Bell, H. E., 66 Berger, Robert, 62 Bingham, J. F., 115 Birdwell, John, 24 Black Belt counties, 16 Blackburn, George, 165, 167, 174 Black Jack, Texas: bodies found in, 31; description of, 4; location of, 3; phone service in, 179n9; renamed, 179n3 Blacks: called “bad niggers,” 94 –95; face hostility, 13, 99 –101; protest conditions, 56; react to Hicks murders, 109 –111; as whitecapping victims, 147 –152 Blackshear, Dr., 93 Blackshear, Ed, 93 –94 Blackwell, Rob, 115 Blankenship, Bill, 31

Bonner, John T., 102 Border, Cora, 36 Border, Curg, 33 –38; and Buchanan, 95 –96, 99; election, removal and death, 183 –185n24; rejoins Spradley, 54, 91 Border-Wall feud, 33 –37 Broocks, Ben, 37 Brown, Sam, 45 Bryan, William Jennings, 165 –166 Buchanan, Jim: captured, 52 –53; confesses, 88, 91–93; denies rape, 93; desperate journey of, 97 –99; hanged, 118 –124; mobs gather to see, 100; murder motives of, 93 –95; portrait made of, 91; as suspect in murders, 32; taken to Rusk, 106 –107; on trial, 112 –115; in Waco, 187n26 Buckner, Eugene, 158 –159 Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, 15. See also Freedmen’s Bureau; Reconstruction Burk, George, 46 Burkitt Rifles, 120 Byrd, Charley, 32 Caddo Parish jail, 91 Calhoun, B. A., 66, 82, 138, 154 Campbell, W. J., 29, 43, 81, 136, 137 –138, 164 Cantrell, Gregg, 72 –73 Carnes, W. F., 159 Carraway, T. J., 78 Chandler, John and Mary, 169 –170 Chapman, Louvinia, 163 Clapp, Emory, 14

204

} A Hanging in Nacogdoches

Clevenger, Jim, 46 Clifton, Elbert, 46 Collins, Bob, 107 Commercial National Bank (Nacogdoches), 141, 146 Coon, W. I., 60 Cooper, S. B., 67 Corsicana, Texas, 105 Cotton, 45 Crain, R. L., 48 Crocket, George L. 33, 36 Crouch, W. C., 35 Daily Phone, 4 Daily Sentinel, 87; background of, 88 – 89; and boosterism, 39, 49 –50; and Buchanan, 90 –91, 93, 97, 106; on the hanging, 123 –125; on meeting of blacks, 109 –111; merger of, with Plaindealer, 153; on the murders, 53; trial account in, 113; and Wettermark bank, 142 –144; and whitecapping, 148. See also Haltom, Bill Dallas Morning News, 74, 126, 137 lynching account in, 62 – 63; and Spradley, 135 –138 Dambly’s Studio, 91 Davis, Bryan Holt, 160 Davis, Edmund J., 22, 103 Davis, Tom C., 36, 90, 108; defends execution, 129 –131; and hanging, 118 –119; presides over trial, 115 –116; sets trial, 111 Delamar, Ed, 115 Del Rio Herald, 162 Derrick, James, 115 Dial, Hardy, 155 Dial, W. H., 155 Dial’s Saloon, 47 Donnelly, W. E., 115, 116 Dotson, Homer, 156 Douglass, Texas, 60 – 62 Dunson, H. F., 69, 75 Eagle Pass, 7 East Texas: and Civil War, 12; racial relationships in, 42

Ebbets, George A., 14 Edwards, Hayden, 10 El Camino Real (King’s Highway), 4; and network of trails, 6 Excursionists, 50 Fall, A. C., 116 Fanning, Tom, 170 Farmers’ Protective Associations, 148 Fears, W. P., 62 Ferdinand VI (king of Spain), 7 Ferguson, Alexander, 19 Ferguson, Jeff, 148 Finley, John, 145 Flores, Gil, 8 Floyd, John, 31 Fredonia Rebellion, 10 Fredricson, Brisco, 105 –106 Freedmen’s Bureau: complaints to, 17 –20; established in Nacogdoches, 15, 17. See also Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands; Reconstruction Fuller, Henry C., describes square, 118; on Judge Davis, 129; and Looney murder, 60 – 61; as Spradley’s biographer, 26, 53, 84; trial account of, 114; and Wettermark bank, 142 –143; and whitecapping, 150 –151 Gaceta de Tejas, 9, 12 Galveston Artillery, 103 Galveston Daily News, 69, 74; defends hanging, 132 –133 Garrett, Albert, 43 Garrett, Harry, 51 Garrett, J. T., 20 Garrett, Milton, 51 Garrett, Sam, 35 Garrett, T. B., 19 Garrison, John, 118, 121 Garrison, Texas, 102 Gary, Mrs. John, 144 Goff, O. H. K., 61 Gordon, Galner, 105 Grange movement, 64 Granger, Gordon, 12

Index Grayson, William J., 23 –24 Grimes, Thomas, 115 Grimes County, Texas, 70 –71 “Gun toters,” 39, 45 – 49 Hale, Joel N., 101, 105 Hall, Ollie, 115 Halletsville Herald, 133 Haltom, Giles, 43; background of, 159 –162 Haltom, James H., 77 Haltom, R. W. (Bill): 4, 5, 32, 36, 43 – 44, 48, 50, 78, 88, 131, 135, 138 –140; attitude of, toward blacks, 79 – 81, 91, 111, 145 –146; becomes ill, dies, 162 –164; criticizes Plaindealer, 82; defends white attacker, 47; deplores gun toters, 48 – 49; feud of, with Spradley, 68, 83 – 84, 97, 135 –136, 152 –153; hanging account of, 123 –126, 129; and Linn Flat raid, 22 –25; opposes Populism, 66, 84 – 85; and rigors of newspapering, 88 – 89; runs for and is elected to Legislature, 154 –159; and “speedy justice,” 90, 108 –109; and Wettermark bank, 142 –144; and whitecappers, 150 –151 Hardy, John, 95 Harris, J. B., 120 Harris, June C., 142 –143 Harris, W. H., 22 Harrison County, Texas, 52 Hart, Jane B., 19 Hart House, 116 Harvell, David W., 23 Hasinai, 6 Hayden, Brigadier General, 14 Hazlett, Columbus, 20, 23 –24 Hazlett, Marion, 23, 25 Hempstead, Texas, 134 Henderson, Texas, 99 Henderson Rifles, 102, 104 –107 Henning, A. F., 86 – 87, 109, 155; on jail conditions, 139; predicts Buchanan’s hanging, 98 Henson, Josh, 107, 122 Henson, Mack, 56

{ 205

Hicks, Allie, 3, 31, 112; found dead, 5 Hicks, Duncan, 3, 31, 92, 93, 112; background of, 4; found dead, 5 Hicks, John, 65 Hicks, Lizzie, 4, 179n5 Hicks, Nerva, 3, 31, 112; background of, 4; found dead, 5 Hidalgo, Francisco, 6 –7 Hogg, Jim, 67 Hollow Log Saloon, 47 Hooker Bend, Louisiana, 4, 179n5 Horace Chilton Volunteers, 102, 106 Hose, Sam, 58 Houston, East and West Texas Railway, 41, 44, 112 Houston, Sam, 10 Houston Daily Post, 64, 102, 132, 160 –161, 184 –185n24 Hughes, A. H., 110 Ibarvo, Gil, 8 –9 Imboden, W. M., 188, 120 Independent Citizens Ticket, 86 – 87 Indianapolis Freeman, 149 –150 Ingraham, George F., 41 Jackson (Mississippi) Clarion-Ledger, 139 Jacksonville, Texas, 69, 98 Jefferson, Seth, 170 Jernigan, J. W., 5 Jim Crow laws, 57 Johnson, Andrew, 16 Johnson, Cone, 168 –169 Johnson, J. N., 56 Kennard, Jim, 71 Kilgore, Texas, 98 King, Steve, 156, 159 King, Turner, 115 King’s Highway (El Camino Real), 4 Kinsley, B. F., 161 Know-Nothing Party, 71 Ku Klux Klan, 51–52 La Casa Piedra (Stone House), 9 Lanana Creek, 5

206

} A Hanging in Nacogdoches

Lèon, Alsono de, 6 Levy, R. B., 106 Lewis, Susan, 134 Linn Flatt Raid, 22 –25 Linthicum, Cash, 145, 149 Linthicum, Warner, 43 Litwack, Leon, 58 Lone Star Saloon, 47 Longley, A. H., 21 Longview, Texas, 98 Looney, J. F., 59 – 61 Looneyville, Texas, 66 Lynch, John, 34 Lynching: barbarity of, 58 –59; in Douglass, Texas, 62; of Esseck White, 62 – 63; increase of, in 1890s, 57 –59; of Joe Adams, 60 – 61; in Louisiana, 133; and lynching bee, 56; in Nacogdoches County, 59 – 63; statistics on, 55; in Tyler, Texas, 59; in 1902, 59; white participants in, 100 –101 Marion County, Texas, 52 Martin, A. D., 66 Martin, Jim, 150 Massanet, Father Damian, 6 Matthews, A. Y., 33, 51, 53, 91, 121; with Buchanan, 95 –96, 98 –99; testifies, 116 Mayer and Schmidt, 165 Mayfield, Isaiah, 172 Mayfield, Joseph: account of Linn Flat raid, 23, 25, 28 McCall, J. M., 145 McCormick, George, 105 McFarland, J. E., 69 –70, 75 McGaughey, S. W., 19 Middlebrook, V. E., 173 Milam Guards, 103 Miley, W. H., 145 Miscegenation laws in Texas, 56 Morris, Hiram, 151 Murphey, A. J., 154 Murphey, Robert, 115, 116 Murphey, Sandy, 46 Murphey, Tom, 46

NAACP lynching report, 59 Nacogdoches, Texas (county and city): amenities of, in 1902, 45; and Battle of Nacogodches, 10; and Battle of Potawatomi, 160 –161; bond issue in, 32, 114; census in, 39; city incorporated, 11; cotton production in, 45; courthouse in, 114 –115, 169; description of, 1903, 41; enters modern era, 166; and excursionists, 42, 50; failure of bank in, 141–144; fires in, 146 –147, 165; floods in, 49; fortunes rise in, 177; jail escapes in, 32, 40, 111; Linn Flat raid in, 22 –25; North Street in, 114; Oak Grove Cemetery in, 164; oil production in, 50; Opera House in, 114 –115; prohibition movement in, 43; racial conditions in, 175 –177; saloons in, 47; timber production in, 44; violence in, 18 –20, 45 – 49, 145 –146 Nacogdoches Chronicle (also NewsChronicle), 66, 81– 82 New York Tribune, 58 Norris, A. R., 56 Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de los Nacogdoches, 7 Nugent, T. L., 67 Option Optic, 167 Orange (Texas) Tribune, 153 Orton, Mattie, 160 Orton, R. D.: hires Spradley, 27; and Linn Flat raid, 23 –24; as Nacogdoches sheriff, 22 Overton, Texas, 99 Owens, Dee, 173 –174 Paris Vindicator, 21 Pattonia, 11 People’s Journal, 68 – 69 People’s Party, 57, 70; conventions, 65 – 66; dissolves, 154 –155; in 1884 election, 73 –75; in 1898 election, 82; in Grimes County, 79; in Nacogdoches, 66; in 1912, 85 – 87; Spradley

Index joins, 29, 66 – 67; sweeps San Augustine, 34. See also Populism Peters, Juanita Tarpley, 179n5 Philips, Amos, 62 – 63 Piedras, Colonel José de las, 10 Pittsburgh Chronicle, 133 Plaindealer, 29, 42, 68 – 69, 75 –76, 81, 84 – 85, 139; becomes daily, 89; on Buchanan’s capture, 97 –98; merges, 153, 172; renounces Populism, 154 Pleasant, Jim, 149 Polk, Kit, 66 Populism: and alliance movement, 64 – 65; and blacks, 68; and elections, 66 – 67; goal of, 66; and John Raymer, 71–73; and newspapers, 68 – 69. See also People’s Party Potts, J. Q. A., 56 Pre-emption community, 51 Price, Arch, 36 Prince, Luther, 171 Prohibition, 43, 72 Quitman, Texas, 105 Raguet, Anna, 10 Raguet, Henry, 10 Railroads, 11, 41, 42, 44, 112 Raines, G. P., 106, 111, 130; stops train, 113; wires governor, 119 Ramón, Diego, 7 Ramón, Domingo, 7 Raymer, John B., 71–73 Reconstruction: blacks face brutality during, 13, 51–52, 99 –101; election fraud during, 20; Linn Flat raid during, 22 –25; in Nacogdoches, 13. See also Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands; Reconstruction Redland Herald, 172 Reid, Will, 107 Rich, H. C., 168 Richardson, Frank, 115 Ricks, Mary, 71

{ 207

Ringgold, C. W., 28 Ríos, Domingo Terán de los, 6 Roach, Dick, 35 Roberts, A. S., 37 Roberts, Charlie, 94 Roberts, Noel, 37 Robertson, Jess, 150 Robert S. Patton (steamboat), 11 Robinson, Jess, 150 Rogers, Bill, 27 Roquemore, Frank, 48 Roquemore, Joe Bug, 47 – 49, 186n34 Ross, J. P., 69 Rowe, Charles, 144 Rowe, Mrs. Charles, 144 Rowland, Tom, 62 Rubi, Marquès de, 7, 8 Rudd Rifles, 106 Rusk, John, 77, 115 Rusk, Thomas J., 10 Rusk Penitentiary, 88, 105 San Augustine, Texas, 21; Ku Klux Klan in, 51–52; Pre-emption community near, 51–52 Sànchez, Manuela, 7 Sanders, Edmon, 19 San Juan Bautista del Rìo Grande, 7 Sayers, A. J., 114, 130; calls out guard, 101; wires Scurry, 119 –120 Scott, Garrett, 71, 79 Scurry, Thomas, 102, 104, 108, 120 Shaw, James, 115 Shears, Ike, 66 Shreveport, Louisiana, 54 Shreveport Journal, 96, 133 Shreveport Times, 91, 95, 118, 170; defends hanging, 133; hanging account in, 121–23; queries Sayers, 101 Simmons, Jeff, 161 Skillern, Bob, 145 Skillern, Gus, 145 Skillern, Isaac, 115 Skillern, W. A., 67, 154; blasts Populists, 84 – 85 Slaughter, G. W., 35

208

} A Hanging in Nacogdoches

Slay, Charlie, 47 Smart, J. M., 98 Smith, Edmund Kirby, 12 Smith, E. E., 35 Smith, F. M., 136 Southern Mercury, 73 –74 Southern Pacific railroad, 42, 112 Spencer, Simon, 172 Spradley, A. J., 51, 60, 69, 87, 91, 102, 111–113; assessment of, 174; background of, 26 –30; back in office, 75; bids farewell, 171; captures Buchanan, 52 –53; describes Hicks family, 4; and election of 1904, 156 –159; feuds with Haltom, 68, 83 – 84, 135 –136; final races of, 164 –171; hangs Buchanan, 121–124; heads to Black Jack, 5; heads to Henderson, 101; hunts killer, 31–33; joins Populists, 66 – 67, 77 –78; and “legal lynching,” 131; loses first election, 74 –75; loses, wins, 82; praised, 71, 73; retirement and death of, 171–172; returns without Buchanan, 97; shot, 167 –168; and whitecapping, 150 –152; wins in 1902, 139 –140; wires governor, 108 Spradley, Mat, 29, 31, 53, 61, 149; defeats brother, 75 Star-News, 77 Starr, James Harper: background of, 13; business dealings of, 14; opposes Union occupation, 14 –15 State police force and militia, 21–22 St. Denis, Louis Juchereau de, 6 –7 Steamboats, 11. See also under names of specific steamboats Stewart, Rev. N. W., 47 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 134, 150 Stokes, Walker, 45 Stone, J. Y., 145 Stone Fort, Old: dismantled, 40 – 41; popular name of, 9; replica of, 185n7. See also Stone House Stone Fort Rifles, 37, 62 Stone House, 9. See also Stone Fort, Old Stripling, J. B., 154

Tenaha, Texas, 53 Texas: blacks in, and post-war treatment of, 56 –57; increase in, of white population, 55; Reserve Militia in, 103; State Police in, 21–23, 25, 103; Volunteer Guard in, 101, 103 –106 Thomas, I. D., 51 Thomas J. Rusk (steamboat), 11 Thompson, Wells, 134 –135 Thorn, Mrs. James F., 14 Thorn, Tom, 61, 161 Throckmorton, J. W., 14 Timber production in Nacogdoches County, 44 – 45 Trinity County, Texas, 105 Turner, H. L., 138 Turner, Walter C., 167 Tuskegee Institute, 55, 59 Tutt, Will, 145 Tyler, Texas, 59 Tyler Courier, 132 Uniformed Militia (Texas), 103 Union Station (Shreveport), 95 Varona, Gregorio de Salinas, 6 Vaught, Z. C., 75 Vawters, Mrs. Theodore, 137 Waco Telephone, 132 Wade, Peter, 66 Wall, Brune, 34 Wall, Eugene, 34, 37 Wall, George, 33 –35 Wall, W. A. (Uncle Buck), 33 Walter, C. M., 168 Ward, S. J., 95 –96 Watkins, Doc, 151 Watson, Doc, 31 Watson, J. E., 150 –151 Watts, Rev. W. W., 167 Weeks, J. M., 46 Weeks Drug Company, 165 Wesley, Jim, 134 Wettermark, A., 143

Index Wettermark, A. & Son, 141 Wettermark, B. S. (Ben), 141; flees, 143 –144; later sightings of, 194 –195n7 White, Esseck, 62 – 63 White, John, 19 White, Steve, 151

{ 209

Whitecappers: in Nacogdoches, 148 –152; origins of, 147 –149 White Man’s Primaries, 157 –159 White Man’s Union, 71, 79 Wilkerson, Maggie, 173 Yellow-dog Democrats, 17n8