Freedom's Detective

by Charles Lane

  Freedom’s Detective reveals the untold story of the Reconstruction-era United States Secret Service and their battle against the Ku Klux Klan, through the career of its controversial chief, Hiram C. Whitley

  In the years following the Civil War, a new battle began. Newly freed African American men had gained their voting rights and would soon have a chance to transform Southern politics. Former Confederates and other white supremacists mobilized to stop them. Thus, the KKK was born.

  After the first political assassination carried out by the Klan, Washington power brokers looked for help in breaking the growing movement. They found it in Hiram C. Whitley. He became head of the Secret Service, which had previously focused on catching counterfeiters and was at the time the government’s only intelligence organization. Whitley and his agents led the covert war against the nascent KKK and were the first to use undercover work in mass crime—what we now call terrorism—investigations.

  Like many spymasters before and since, Whitley also had a dark side. His penchant for skulduggery and dirty tricks ultimately led to his involvement in a conspiracy that would bring an end to his career and transform the Secret Service.

  Populated by intriguing historical characters—from President Grant to brave Southerners, both black and white, who stood up to the Klan—and told in a brisk narrative style, Freedom’s Detective reveals the story of this complex hero and his central role in a long-lost chapter of American history.

  ADVANCE PRAISE FOR FREEDOM’S DETECTIVE

  “Charles Lane’s Freedom’s Detective is a riveting narrative history about early attempts to crack down on and even stamp out the Ku Klux Klan’s reign of domestic terrorism. The amount of original research Lane conducted is prodigious. His prose style is irresistible. An overall magnificent read!”

  —DOUGLAS BRINKLEY, Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and professor of history at Rice University and author of Rosa Parks

  “Freedom’s Detective reads like a movie, and I’d love to see it. As the KKK rose from the ashes of the Confederacy, the American government rose to the occasion in the form of the much-opposed Secret Service. Charles Lane’s biography of former-slave-hunter-turned-undercover-agent Hiram Whitley is a much-needed cautionary tale in an age of rising tyranny—that we must hold our criminals and our cops accountable for their actions.”

  —JARED A. BROCK, author of The Road to Dawn: Josiah Henson and the Story That Sparked the Civil War

  “With a reporter’s eye for telling detail, Lane has unearthed a hidden gem of a story. Gripping and insightful, Freedom’s Detective reads like a first-rate historical novel. Hiram Whitley, the colorful protagonist, made his mark in the late 1800s, but his story has stunning relevance in 21st Century America.”

  —JULIE COHEN, producer of RBG

  “Charles Lane has brilliantly reconstructed the hidden history of America’s first Secret Service and its ingenious war on the Klan. At its heart is America’s very own 007: the charming, roguish, and ultimately heroic figure of Hiram C. Whitley. Settle in with this page-turner, and let the story sweep you away.”

  —GARY GERSTLE, author of Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present

  “I thought I knew how the Klan was destroyed after the Civil War, but after reading Charles Lane’s wonderful book, I realized I knew almost nothing.”

  —LAURENCE LEAMER, author of The Lynching: The Epic Courtroom Battle That Brought Down the Klan

  CHARLES LANE is a Washington Post editorial board member and op-ed columnist. A finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in editorial writing, he was the Post’s Supreme Court correspondent prior to joining the editorial board. He has published two previous books, including The Day Freedom Died, which the New York Times called a “riveting... legal thriller.” As editor of The New Republic, he took action against the journalistic fraud of Stephen Glass, events recounted in the 2003 film Shattered Glass. He has also worked as a foreign correspondent in Europe and Latin America; his articles have appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy and The New York Review of Books, among other publications. He is a frequent commentator on TV and radio.

  @ChuckLane1

  Also by Charles Lane

  Stay of Execution

  The Day Freedom Died

  Freedom’s Detective

  The Secret Service, the Ku Klux Klan and the Man Who Masterminded America’s First War on Terror

  Charles Lane

  For Bruce and Ann Lane

  Contents

  Quotes

  Prologue: Patrick County, Virginia, 1869

  1. “Something terrible floats on the breeze.”

  2. “You will all be blown to hell in short order.”

  3. “He has worked his way through the labyrinth of lies.”

  4. “A powerful instrument for good or evil.”

  5. “The government secret agents were everywhere upon their track.”

  6. “I am radically opposed to any organized system of espionage.”

  7. “Suspicions come from Heaven.”

  Acknowledgments

  Selected Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.

  —James Madison

  Let lawyers, judges and sentimentalists say what they will, rogues can only be fought successfully with their own weapons, and any strategy resorted to by the officers to bring them to justice is in my judgment perfectly justifiable.

  —Hiram C. Whitley, Chief, United States Treasury Secret Service Division, 1869–1874

  He had a summoner ready at hand,

  No slyer boy in England, for a band

  Of spies the fellow craftily maintained

  To let him know where something might be gained.

  One lecher he’d abide, or two, or more,

  If they could lead the way to twenty-four.

  —Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales

  PROLOGUE

  Patrick County, Virginia, 1869

  Hiram Coombs Whitley sat on his horse and gazed down upon the rushing waters of the Staunton River. The mountain rains, which had fallen so abundantly in that spring of 1869, had turned it into a foaming torrent. The water was so high that it almost touched the low-hanging branches of trees on either side. Now Whitley had to decide whether to cross over from the north bank, where he sat in his saddle, to the south.1

  He had reached this spot, deep in southern Virginia, on a mission from the new administration of President Ulysses S. Grant, inaugurated a few weeks earlier, on March 4, 1869. President Grant’s commissioner of Internal Revenue had sent Whitley to crack down on the distillers in the Virginia backcountry who insisted on making and distributing alcohol without paying the federal excise levy. Congress had enacted the tax in 1862, to help fund the Union war effort. Consequently, it had not been enforced in Virginia, or anywhere else in the South, prior to the Confederacy’s surrender in 1865. For white southern backwoodsmen, making untaxed moonshine was not just a livelihood, but also a way to show defiance of the victorious Union. For the federal government, the deployment of revenue agents like Hiram C. Whitley was not just about tax collection, but about establishing its writ across the entire territory of the United States.

  Whitley knew that his destination, the moonshiners’ stronghold in Patrick County, Virginia, lay on the other side of the white water. It was likely that illegal distillers were counting on the flooded streams of the region to protect them against the li
kes of him and his companions: two United States Army soldiers, a local guide, and a twenty-year-old clerk in the Treasury Department’s Lynchburg, Virginia, branch office, who had met Whitley as he passed through on his way to Patrick County from Washington, and volunteered to join his expedition.

  The young man’s sense of adventure might have reminded Whitley of himself as a youth. He had left his home on the Ohio frontier many years before, while still a teenager, and he had never really stopped moving since. He had worked on fishing boats out of Gloucester, Massachusetts; slung hash at a makeshift Kansas restaurant; traded sugar and molasses on the Red River of Louisiana; and, of course, he had served the United States as an agent of federal law.

  Through these experiences, Whitley had formed an appreciation for the American wilderness and the physical challenges it presented. He had grown from a skinny, bowlegged kid into a sinewy thirty-seven-year-old man, with piercing blue eyes, high cheekbones, and a vaguely menacing dark brown goatee. He had developed the skills with horses and firearms that helped make him useful to the government: he arrived at the Staunton River not only as a representative of the Treasury Department, but also as a deputy United States Marshal, carrying a sheaf of blank warrants authorizing him to arrest any violator of the tax law he might encounter. More than that, he had developed a thoroughly jaded view of human nature, and how it could be manipulated to his advantage, honestly if possible—but through deception if necessary, and convenient.

  Two local men, members of the pacifist Church of the Brethren who had lodged and fed Whitley’s group the previous night, approached Whitley as he contemplated the roaring Staunton. Solemnly, they advised him that it would be too dangerous for him and his fellow representatives of federal power to try to swim their horses across.

  Whitley hesitated. Were these pious men trying to cover for the moonshiners? And what if they were? The water certainly looked life-threatening. Adventuresome as he might be, he had not risked his neck for the Union cause on any of the Civil War’s great fields of battle. Rather, his had been what was known as “secret service”: intelligence work, in the back alleys and no-man’s-lands of the Union-occupied South. Some of these operations had been violent, to be sure, but at least they allowed for a measure of planning and control.

  He turned to his local guide. “You have the best horse,” he commanded. “Go in and swim the river first.” The man refused.

  The intrepid young clerk stepped forward and volunteered to try it on his mount. “Go it,” Whitley said. “And we will follow suit.”

  Only when he saw the clerk plunge his horse into the water, and make it safely across, did Whitley decide that he, too, could make the attempt.

  Soon, his entire party was on the south bank of the Staunton, dripping wet but ready to take on the moonshiners. Moving from point to point like a small Civil War raiding party, Whitley’s team smashed some thirty illegal stills with axes, in just a couple of weeks.

  Their most effective weapon was the element of surprise, enhanced by Whitley’s knack for the strategic lie. Riding up to one still, Whitley’s team caught a dozen of the locals filling jugs with rye and apple brandy. As they tried to flee, he shouted, “Boys, I have you surrounded by United States soldiers. There are over a hundred of them. All of you step up here and give in your names.” Believing that there was a company of troops concealed in the surrounding woods, the men did as Whitley ordered. He seized an ax and proceeded to destroy the copper boilers and winding “worm-pipes” the moonshiners had so carefully assembled to produce their booze. Then he filled out the arrest warrants for his frightened captives.

  In Whitley’s opinion, illegal distilling could not be so rampant in the area without official connivance. The local representative of the federal tax-collecting agency was a native Virginian who lived in a nearby village called Liberty. Whitley proceeded to the village and arrested the man.2

  A mob assembled outside the lodge in Liberty where Whitley and his crew were holding their detainee overnight, pending his transfer to a jail at Richmond, Virginia. An emissary from the crowd gave Whitley an ultimatum: if he and the other “damn Yankees” did not release the detainee, the people of Liberty would storm the building and take him themselves.

  Whitley responded coolly, “Go tell your friends that if they offer to come up these stairs to interfere with us, the prisoner will be shot and thrown out of the window.”

  This bluff, too, worked; the crowd dispersed. Whitley continued the next day to Lynchburg, where he and his party rested, and he glanced at the newspapers for the first time in days.

  He could hardly believe what he was reading. The Grant administration had announced a new chief for the Treasury Department’s Secret Service Division: Hiram C. Whitley.

  Officials had formally selected him on May 6, but, unable to contact him while he was in Virginia, they decided to give the information to the press, and let the news find him.3 Now it had.

  Established just four years prior to Whitley’s appointment, the Secret Service was a new unit with a new, and, for the federal government, essential, mission: the detection and suppression of counterfeiting. It was the first civilian detective bureau the United States government had ever organized in peacetime. Whitley had spent only a little of his previous career dealing with the particular breed of criminal that trafficked in fabricated currency, but for a federal lawman of his background, this was still a plum appointment, a dream come true, really. It would give Whitley command of an undercover outfit, and he certainly did know something about undercover work. It was what he lived for.

  He rushed to Washington on the next train, arriving on May 12. As procedure required, Whitley first submitted a detailed report on his Virginia trip to the commissioner of Internal Revenue. Then he handed in his resignation. The commissioner tried to dissuade him. “I have got a special fund,” he said, “and will pay you any reasonable money to remain with me.”

  Whitley was not interested. “I would rather be chief of the Secret Service,” he explained, “than president of the United States.”

  The commissioner could see there was no changing Whitley’s mind. He took him to the secretary of the Treasury, George S. Boutwell, who had signed Whitley’s letter of appointment six days earlier. “This is the most active man of my bureau,” the commissioner announced.

  Treasury officials were impressed with Whitley’s report, which contained abundant evidence that federal revenue officials in Virginia had been corrupted by the moonshiners. They immediately fired the man in charge of assessing taxes for the district through which Whitley had just passed.

  That assessor had gotten his job at the behest of a powerful member of Congress from the president’s own Republican Party. Incensed at the sudden downfall of his protégé, the politician went to the White House and demanded the assessor’s reinstatement.

  In those days before the federal civil service’s professionalization, President Grant had the final say on matters of patronage. He agreed to intervene personally on this one.

  Grant summoned Hiram C. Whitley and questioned him extensively on his report, which lay open on the president’s desk, heavily annotated in Grant’s handwriting. He seemed persuaded that Whitley had made the right judgment, but he had a lingering concern.

  “Is there anyone down there...that you can recommend for an assessor?” Grant asked Whitley.

  Whitley had to think fast. Another quality that had characterized him—for better and for worse—throughout his career was an absolute refusal to concede any point in an argument, no matter how seemingly insignificant. He did not have a substitute in mind for the official he wanted fired, yet he was loath to see the incumbent remain in office simply because he couldn’t think of an alternative.

  “No, Mr. President, I am unacquainted on that point,” he began—and then his mind suddenly went back to that moment on the north bank of the Staunton, when he had dared the young clerk
to lead the way across the perilous water. Perhaps he could help himself, and the president, by promoting the kid. He told Grant, “The sharpest and most earnest man I met while there was the young fellow...who first swam the river.”

  Grant brightened. He recalled the incident from Whitley’s report. “I read about that,” he said, “and I think he will make a good assessor.”

  “He is not quite twenty-one years of age,” Whitley cautioned.

  “I will waive his age,” the president replied, ringing a bell and summoning an aide to take an order appointing the man.

  For the commander-in-chief to side with Whitley against a lawmaker from his own party showed remarkable confidence in the new Secret Service head. Grant, though, not only esteemed Whitley’s work for the internal revenue commission. The president also knew of Whitley’s performance on behalf of the federal government in a case a year earlier, a murder investigation, of pivotal importance both to Reconstruction, the federal effort to remake Southern society and politics along more racially egalitarian lines, and to Whitley’s own career. In that case, Whitley had taken on a criminal organization that was no less deeply rooted in the South than the moonshiners, yet far, far more dangerous.

  1

  “Something terrible floats on the breeze.”

  Nothing could be seen on the empty streets of Columbus, Georgia, during the early spring nights of 1868, except what the moon might faintly illuminate. The only sounds were the familiar calls of toads and insects, mingling with the murmur of the Chattahoochee River, as it flowed over a dam, powering the town’s textile mill.

  Around the middle of March, however, it became evident that something strange must be going on amid the late-night languor. Several local men awoke in the morning to find menacing signs and symbols nailed to their front doors: crude sketches of skulls, or bones, scrawled on yellowing paper, along with written demands to leave town—or face death. One day, the Columbus tax assessor discovered a threat attached to a bundle of actual bones, dangling from his front doorknob.