Bluecoats and Tar Heels: Soldiers and Civilians in Reconstruction North Carolina

9. Fighting Terrorism

217 Chapter Nine FIGHTING tERRORISM The Army and the Klan The years 1870 and 1871 marked the height of the Klan terror in North Carolina. The army refused at first to step in, believing it a disturbance the civil authorities were equipped to handle. Only after the assassination of two county Republican leaders, numerous other Klan-related atrocities , the Conservative electoral triumph of 1870, and the impeachment of Governor Holden did the president and Congress decide to intervene. Ignoring Conservative accusations of “bayonet rule,” the army assisted federal law enforcement agents in arresting Klansmen and moonshiners . Although the army helped to subdue the Klan, it failed to corner the Lowry band, half a dozen outlaws who had terrorized Robeson County since the CivilWar.The bluecoats continued to preserve order at the polls on election day, facilitating the Republican resurgence of 1871. At 1 a.M. on Saturday, February 26, 1870, a column of one hundred horsemen clad in white robes and hooded masks rode south down Graham’s Main Street toward the Alamance County courthouse.The night was dark and cold and the air still damp after a late-night drizzle, but the column shone with the bright light of numerous pine torches. The procession was greeted by a chorus of barking dogs, followed by the flickering of lights in several bedroom windows.1 The nightriders halted before the home of Wyatt Outlaw, a fifty-yearold woodworker, Union army veteran, town commissioner, and Union 218 Bluecoats and Tar Heels League leader. Outlaw was the foremost African American in Alamance County and a voice of restraint in unsettled times.When local blacks met to decide on a response to mounting Klan violence, Outlaw answered the cries for vengeance by urging his hearers to obey the law. Since the meeting, most blacks in the county had followed Outlaw’s counsel, but the outrages continued to multiply.2 Twenty nightriders dismounted, forced open Outlaw’s front door, and burst into the four-room house. In addition to torches, many men carried swords or revolvers.They first entered the bedroom occupied by Outlaw’s mother, Jemima Phillips, and threw off her covers. “Where is Wyatt?” they demanded, threatening to kill her if she refused to talk. Before Phillips could answer, the men left the room. By the time she reached her son’s bedroom, they had surrounded him. Phillips grabbed a stick and “laid away as hard as I could” into them. Several men knocked her down and then stamped on her head, chest, and arms.The nightriders found Phillips so difficult to subdue that they had to knock her down two more times. Outlaw meanwhile pulled on his pants. As he was led barefoot into the night, his youngest son cried, “Oh daddy, oh daddy!” A few men entered the house of Outlaw’s neighbor, Henry Holt, with the intention of carrying him off, but they did not find him there.They settled for a five-foot length of cord. Outlaw was pushed and prodded down Main Street toward the courthouse by three men, one of them dressed in black, conspicuous amid a sea of white. Shrieking the rebel yell, several horsemen thundered ahead to the courthouse square, a few buggies clattering along close behind.3 The procession briefly halted as several men at the head of the column surveyed the square for a sturdy tree from which to hang Outlaw. They chose a tall elm near the center of town.The cord was swung over a branch that pointed toward the courthouse just thirty yards away. Outlaw ’s body was left hanging from the tree. He was found with a paper pinned to his coat that read, “Beware, you guilty, both white and black.” His hanging in the shadow of the county courthouse served notice that Klan justice reigned supreme in Alamance.At 11 a.M., Sheriff Albert Murray , a former Klansman, finally cut him down. The coroner ruled that Outlaw had died at the hands of persons unknown. Sheriff Murray made no attempt to track down the perpetrators. As far as the local Conservatives were concerned, the Wyatt Outlaw lynching case was closed.4 The Klan’s campaign of terror appeared to be an unqualified success, for many Republicans were fleeing Alamance and the leaderless county Fighting Terrorism 219 Union League soon dissolved. But the atrocity also galvanized Governor Holden into action. On February 28, five Graham Republicans notified...