What Virtue There Is in Fire: Cultural Memory and the Lynching of Sam Hose

Notes

209 Notes Introduction 1. Sam Hose was known by several different names, including Sam Holt, Sam Wilkes, and Tom Wilkes. The last is apparently his birth name. The “Sam Holt” identification might well have been influenced by the popular “Sam Holt” brand of firearms, sold by Sears Roebuck at this time. The inexpensive Sam Holt shotgun could be found in many rural homes in Georgia and elsewhere. 2. William Faulkner, Novels, 1936–1940 (New York: Library of America, 1990), 178. 3. Philip M. Weinstein, What Else But Love: The Ordeal of Race in Faulkner and Morrison (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), xviii. 4. See, for example, Dora Apel, “Torture Culture: Lynching Photographs and Images of Abu Ghraib,” Art Journal 64, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 88–100. 5. See Michele Faith Wallace, “The Good Lynching and The Birth of a Nation: Discourses and Esthetics of Jim Crow,” Cinema Journal 43, no. 1 (Fall 2003): 85–104, for a discussion of this issue. 6. Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998). 7. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 35. Chapter 1. War Fantasies 1. “The Passing Throng,” AC, September 20, 1899. Further details of Pearl Knott’s murder and Kerlin’s trial come from articles “Kerlin Makes His Statement to the Jury at Fayetteville,” AC, September 22, 1899; “Kerlin Goes Up for Life,” AC, September 23, 1899; and “Is Kerlin Crazy?” AC, October 8, 1899. See also Bruce L. Jordan, Death Unexpected: The Violent Deaths of Fayette (Atlanta: Midtown, 1997), 6–16. 210 Notes to Chapter 1 2. “The Death of Sam Hose,” Athens (Ga.) Weekly Banner, April 28, 1899. 3. C. Vann Woodward, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 332. 4. “Kerlin Makes His Statement to the Jury at Fayetteville,” AC, September 22, 1899. 5. George Kerlin died in prison in 1906. See Jordan, Death Unexpected, 15–16. 6. “Robert Lewis, Condemned to Death, Is Denied Executive Clemency,” AC, March 4, 1899; “Sad Day for Two in Tower,” AC, March 6, 1899; “Expert Declares Lewis Is Sane,” AC, March 11, 1899; “Murderer Lewis No Longer Feels the Fear He Exhibited Last Week,” AC, March 13, 1899; “Pardon Board Hears Last Plea,” AC, March 14, 1899; “Hanging of Lewis in the Tower; Charles Haynes’s Murderer Dead,” AC, March 15, 1899; “Autopsy on Lewis’s Brain,” AC, March 17, 1899. 7. Seventy-five years later, in 2001, the Georgia Supreme Court would declare this form of capital punishment unconstitutional, finding that it “inflicts purposeless physical violence and needless mutilation that makes no measurable contribution to accepted goals of punishment.” “Georgia Blocks Electric Chair Use,” AC, October 5, 2001. 8. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign against Lynching (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 140. 9. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995), 33–34. For a more recent discussion of medieval uses of torture, see also Mitchell B. Merback, The Thief, the Cross, and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); and Robert Mills, Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure and Punishment in Medieval Culture (London: Reaktion Books, 2005), both of which have provided me with ways to think about the Sam Hose execution. 10. David Garland, “Penal Excess and Surplus Meaning: Public Torture Lynchings in Twentieth Century America,” Law & Society Review, 30, no. 4 (2005): 795, 797, 798, 799, 801. 11. “Not in Position to Give Up the Chase,” Washington Post, May 1, 1899. 12. Brian McAllister Linn, The Philippine War, 1899–1902 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), 11. 13. Ibid. 14. I. F. Clarke, The Pattern of Expectation, 1644–2001 (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 130. 15. Ibid., 131. 16. H. Bruce Franklin, War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 35–37. 17. Ibid., 31–32. 18. Report available at http://www.ah.dcr.state.nc.us/1898-wrrc/report/front-matter .pdf. See also David S. Cecelski and Timothy B. Tyson, eds., Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot and Its Legacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998) for essays on the topic. 19. “Seven Are Lynched,” MT, March 24, 1899. 20. “Wholesale Lynching,” H&A, March 31, 1899. [3.142...