-
Chapter 2: “Shoot or Get Out of the Way!”: The Murder of Texas Freedmen’s Bureau Agent William G. Kirkman by Cullen Baker—and the Historians
- University of North Texas Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
63 CHAPTER 2 “Shoot or Get Out of the Way!”: The Murder of Texas Freedmen’s Bureau Agent William G. Kirkman by Cullen Baker—and the Historians by William L. Richter D eep in the northeast corner of Texas dominated by the misty swamps that form the Sulphur River lies Bowie County, named after the famous knife-wielding frontiersman who died at the Alamo . Created in 1841, Bowie County had a pre-Civil War white population dominated by planters who emigrated from the Deep South. Steeped in the slavery system of antebellum Dixie, these whites voted overwhelmingly (96 percent) to secede twenty years later. As if to taunt the whites for their miscalculation in supporting the Lost Cause, newly freed slaves made up a majority (64 percent) of the citizens of Bowie County in 1865 and registered voters (55 percent) in 1867. Even the name of the county seat, Boston, has a strange Yankee-like ring that continues to mock its rich southern heritage. Nowadays some do claim that the town was actually named after the New England metropolis by its first settlers, the Burnam brothers. Other more-unreconstructed souls insist just as vehemently that it received its seemingly-out-of-place appellation from the surname of an early store owner.1 Be that as it may, the Sulphur area’s claim to fame now revolves around reports that it is reputedly haunted by the apparition of the Fouke monster, or the Skunk Ape, a southern version of the legendary Big Foot. But 125 years ago different ghosts roamed the swamps and byways of Bowie County. These shadowy figures were the white-robed members of the Ku Klux Klan, the infamous masked regulators of white supremacy, who fought a violent guerrilla war against their perceived enemies. The “Kluckers,” as the Klansmen were known locally, sought to stymie those 64 William L. Richter who aided in the Reconstruction of Texas: the formation of a loyal Union state government and the enfranchisement of the recently freed slaves. Through very inflammatory adjectives, the Kluckers stereotyped their opponents: “blue-coated dogs of despotism,” Union soldiers who occupied the defeated Confederacy; “Scalawags,” southern whites who stayed loyal to the federal cause; “Carpetbaggers,” Yankee civilian newcomers; and “free niggers,” the ex-slaves who dared to believe in the promises of Emancipation.2 Most of all, the Kluckers targeted the activities of those whom they ridiculed as “the drawers of the bureau ” the agents of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands. This was the quasi-military federal agency charged with the tasks of easing and speeding the transition of the former slaves into free American citizens endowed with equal civil rights, administering plantation lands abandoned during the war, and assisting loyal refugees to return home for a new start.3 Although technically a part of the War Department, the Bureau possessed an independent command system consisting of a commissioner, Bvt. Maj. Gen. Oliver Otis Howard; twelve assistant commissioners, who controlled activities in sixteen states (including Texas) and two territories below the Mason-Dixon line; and numerous subassistant commissioners , the agents who were in direct contact with the blacks on the local level. By 1867, there were sixty-nine such agents in Texas alone, who operated in fifty-nine subdistricts in the area east of the hundredth meridian, a zone about the size of Alabama and Mississippi combined.4 As the Bureau agent assigned to Boston and Bowie County, Subassistant Commissioner William Gilbert Kirkman’s Reconstruction operations have drawn inordinate attention from historians.5 This is quite understandable. Kirkman’s records are among the most complete of any Bureau agent who served in Texas, extending down to actual field orders and judicial proceedings, giving the current scholar easy access to how agents operated and leading to two biographical treatments in the last twenty-five years. Unfortunately neither study has fully explored Kirkman’s sojourn in Boston faithfully nor completely. Each erroneously treats the Bureau agent as an isolated part of the Reconstruction process in northeastern Texas and southern Arkansas. James Smallwood’s 1970 article in Texana , for example, portrays Kirkman as a dedicated, Protestant social reformer, checked on all fronts by violence or the threat of violence, valiantly struggling to improve local conditions for the black people, finally shot down in a street gun battle by his vicious opponents. But he may [3.87.209.162] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 11:35 GMT) “Shoot or Get Out of the Way!” 65 argue beyond the evidence...