Death at Cross Plains: An Alabama Reconstruction Tragedy

DEATH AT CROSS PLAINS

DEATH AT CROSS PLAINS

AN ALABAMA RECONSTRUCTION TRAGEDY

GENE L. HOWARD

With a Foreword by Gary B. Mills

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

Copyright © 1984

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Howard, Gene L., 1940–

   Death at Cross Plains.

   Bibliography: p.

   Includes index.

   1. Reconstruction—Alabama—Cross Plains. 2. Cross Plains (Ala.)—Race relations. 3. Lynching—Alabama—Cross Plains—History—19th century. 4. Luke, William C., d. 1870. 5. Missionaries—Alabama—Cross Plains—Biography. 6. Civil rights workers—Alabama—Cross Plains—Biography. 7. Cross Plains (Ala.)—

Biography. I. Title.

F334.C68H68   1984         364.1′523′0976163         83-5839

ISBN 0-8173-0749-4

ISBN 978-0-8173-0749-3

ISBN-13: 978-0-8173-8937-6 (electronic)

TO:

William J. Calvert; a gentleman

and a friend.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Foreword

I. Cross Plains in 1870

II. The Morning After

III. William Luke’s Introduction to Alabama

IV. William Luke as Minister

V. Ku Klux Klan Terrorism

VI. A New Start for William Luke

VII. Community Antagonism to William Luke

VIII. Violence Erupts in Cross Plains

IX. The Trial and Klan Justice

X. Aftermath of the Tragedy

XI. Justice Denied

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliographical Note

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My experience with the Cross Plains story began in late 1978, when Lane Weatherbee, editor of the Piedmont Independent-Journal, shared several articles with me about a mass hanging that was part of the city’s history. He obtained much of his information from county historian Jack Boozer, and serialized an account of the tragedy for his readers.

The articles intrigued me as I recognized several universal themes in the story of old Cross Plains. I became curious about William Luke and why he became the center of controversy so far removed from his native Canada, and why Patona never experienced the industrial growth that would have made the town a thriving metropolis. The answer to these questions is this work, essentially an interpretive synthesis of several years of historical research.

I am grateful to Dr. Grace Gates, author and historian, whose editorial advice contributed to the success of the study.

As we remember again what others seem so willing to forget, the justification for our recollections—if we need one—can be framed by a line from William Faulkner’s novel, Intruder in the Dust: The past is never dead. It is not even past.

GENE HOWARD

FOREWORD

The political, social, and economic turmoil that gripped the South after the Civil War created an atmosphere conducive to violence amid a people already fiercely proud and exceedingly passionate. The federal Reconstruction of the defeated Confederacy closed to southerners those avenues of protest against injustice that are customary in civilized society, forcing them to seek both defense and vengeance by more surreptitious means, against whatever targets might be accessible. The subjected southerners could do nothing to reach the roots of the very real problems caused by a lost war and a ruined economy, but they could—and did—strike at the people who contributed to their plight; and amid their frustration, it seldom mattered whether their victims were actually guilty or merely symbolic.

Traditionally, history has tended to relate all violence during this era to organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and to portray the victims as innocent idealists. In reality, there can be no doubt that some of the deaths and assaults were unrelated to politics. Personal vengeance and satisfaction for affronts to honor were important tenets of the code inherited by generations of southerners. Such individual expressions of violence continued to occur during Reconstruction, and many victims of this era were by no means innocent. Some had fomented violence or had purposefully acted in a provocative manner.

The newly potent groups within southern society—the carpetbaggers, scalawags, and blacks—were a myriad assortment, motivated by diverse factors. To view them all as righteous idealists intent upon creating a utopia in the South is both naive and indefensible. The southern-born scalawag certainly was aware of the nature of his own people, he presumably calculated his personal risk, and he could hardly have been surprised at the South’s response to the problems of Reconstruction. The carpetbagger, alien to the southern culture, displayed little tolerance for the values he did not understand and consequently brought wrath upon himself with ease. Finally, there were the more noble-minded, who did not fear even though they might vaguely realize the dangers of their mission. The apostles of enlightenment, spirited and zealous, did indeed exist. Beclouded by their idealism, such men saw only the good they expected their ministry to accomplish and were unresponsive to the discomfort that their narrow-minded righteousness stirred in others. Incredulity often marked such men, who ultimately confronted death in the eyes of an angry mob.

Such a man was William C. Luke, a former minister who had fallen from grace and been reborn as a missionary, committed to the goals he had set for himself in his second chance at living a spiritual life. Southerners saw him as a do-gooder in search of good to do. Ironically, in but a few months after he found his purpose, he lost his life.

Why? Fundamentally, Luke did not understand humanity as it existed in the great mission field that he chose for himself. As a Canadian, he could not empathize with the southern psyche, the anomalous state in which individuals could display abundant hospitality to strangers while their society remained impenetrable. Unexposed to the years of civil conflict, he did not comprehend the desire for vengeance that simmers in a conquered people long after their forced surrender. As a disciple of brotherly love, he could not fathom the fear that is felt by people who have simultaneously been stripped of their defenses and overwhelmed by masses of freedmen eager to assert their independence and power. In the course of southern Reconstruction untold numbers of men fell victim to misunderstanding. Luke was such a man.

Gene Howard’s exhaustive research and penetrating scrutiny of the events surrounding the death of William C. Luke has failed to uncover the stereotyped carpetbagger. Luke was not the proverbial opportunist, unscrupulous and corrupt, determined to enrich himself at the expense of an unfortunate people. Neither a politician nor a Radical Republican, he was at heart a teacher. From the onset of his brief southern sojourn, his varied talents were committed to the service of unfortunates of both races. The fortitude with which he met his death was equivalent to that of any martyr.

What of the men who placed the fatal rope around the neck of Luke and his comrades-in-death? Again, stereotype pervades the historical treatment of such classes in American writings. They were uniformly callous to the feelings of humanity, their cowardice cloaked in sheets of white as if to offer a symbolic purification and exaltation of their deeds. Howard’s Death at Cross Plains belies this stereotype. Luke’s executioners emerge as forthright, though misguided, and by cultural heritage, too prone to violence. They were sincere in their concern for their society, purposeful in their quest for a solution, and passionate in its execution. Yet through the fatal climax, Luke’s adversaries evidenced a peculiar respect toward their victim, for it is part of the southern character to admire a fearless and unwavering foe.

To what end were the lynchings which occurred that fateful night in 1870 at Cross Plains, Alabama? The men who executed this deed, and countless others across the South, saw the act as a clear and potent warning to those who threatened the South’s traditional way of life. To their political enemies, it represented another explosive episode—even a welcomed tool—to underscore their argument that the South remained unreconstructed and that harsher measures of retribution and control should be applied. Yet political Reconstruction did end in the South, in the midst of many continued acts of rebellion; and the South has undergone far more changes than even those feared by the men of Cross Plains.

The effectiveness or the futility of the actions taken at countless crossroads of the postwar South has been one of the most unresolved questions of American history. Howard’s Death at Cross Plains does not purport to offer the ultimate analysis of the issue. It does provide a poignant view of one critical episode in history, and it will surely serve to fuel continued debates.

GARY B. MILLS

The University of Alabama

I

Cross Plains in 1870

THE VILLAGE OF Cross Plains was set in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, where the plateaus diminish in northeastern Alabama and the Appalachian Valley opens into the coastal plains. The Weisner Ridges bounded the village on the north and south. The southern ridge was known as Duggar Mountain, twenty-one hundred feet of timber and rock adjoining Rattlesnake Mountain.¹

The village was in the borderlands, between the mountains and the lowland plains—between the mountain people and the cotton planters.²

The country was divided into natural gateways, small ridges, rolling hills, and crossroads. Fifty inches of annual rainfall washed millions of tons of native topsoil into the Gulf of Mexico each year. In many places around the village, the loss of soil exposed barren, red hills.³

Calhoun County was surveyed from a Creek land cession. The Creeks (Muskogees) ceded the territory in March 1832; the county was organized the following December. The Indians that formerly occupied the land traveled the infamous Trail of Tears to Oklahoma, leaving their natural heritage to the white man. These civilized tribes left behind only the names of towns, streams, and other landmarks in the county.⁴

Gold was discovered along the southernmost border of the old county line in the 1830s. Arbacoochee and Chulafinnee flourished as booming gold towns until news of the California bonanza drew the adventurous miners westward.⁵

The old boundary line that divided the Cherokee Indian nation in the upland fields of northeastern Alabama from the Creeks, who had inhabited the waterways in the central part of the state, crossed the county below the village. West of Cross Plains the Choccolocco Mountains began; the most prominent elevation, Chimney Peak, rose sharply, clearly visible eleven miles from the village. Georgia was fourteen miles to the east.⁶

Jacksonville, the county seat, was built on a square atop one of the long, rolling hills so common to the area. The courthouse was in the middle of the hilltop square. Strategically located in the center of the county, Jacksonville, with 958 citizens in 1870, led the political and economic affairs of the area.⁷

Several tall-columned mansions had been built along the main roads of the town, reflecting the wealth of its leading citizens. Following the Civil War, Jacksonville was the home for many former Confederate officers. The Forney family sent five of its sons to fight in the army, two of them serving as generals. Gallant John Pelham was buried in the local cemetery after a short, heroic career as a gunnery officer.⁸

The people of Calhoun County, like most southerners, were democratic by nature. They maintained a proud independence, considering themselves equal to all other men. Eighteen hundred voted for the Democratic party in the 1870 elections while four hundred cast Republican ballots.⁹

The road between Cross Plains and Jacksonville lay through open plantation fields and unbroken pine forests. At times it paralleled the new railroad bed. During the wet season the road was little more than a width of mud in which the wheels of wagons and buggies sank halfway up to the axles.

Cross Plains was a scattered and loosely organized village in 1870. The essential feature that gave it some semblance of a municipality was the intersection of two main roads that crossed, forming the heart of the community.

From the north a road from Kentucky and Tennessee passed through the village to southern Alabama and southern Georgia. From the Appalachian Valley to the northeast another important road from Knoxville and Rome crossed the northern route to Montgomery and Mobile. On the south side of the crossroads was a public well, a benevolent gesture to the travelers who plied the thoroughfares.

About the distance of