by Charles Lane
In his August 9, 1872, report to the attorney general, scrawled by hand over eight pages, Whitley recommended pardon for only one of the three prisoners Gerrit Smith had named: David Collins, an illiterate sixty-three-year-old from South Carolina. However, based on his interviews in Albany, he listed twenty-one other men, none of whom Smith had mentioned, as pardon candidates—almost a third of the sixty-four incarcerated Klan convicts.112
It was far more leniency than he would have recommended if left entirely to his own devices, but far less than the Grant critics who advocated a blanket pardon had expected. The New York Herald expressed dismay that Whitley was not more supportive of clemency. The paper urged the president to “be more liberal than the judgment of his chief detective.”113
President Grant rejected the Herald’s advice. After he reviewed Whitley’s report with Attorney General Williams at the White House on August 15, 1872, the president agreed to pardon only four Klansmen: David Collins; William Teal, a twenty-six-year-old accomplice of Shotwell’s from North Carolina, who was terminally ill; and two additional low-ranking convicts who were of relatively advanced age, and had made what Whitley thought were sincere expressions of remorse. The president reserved judgment on the remaining eighteen men.114
Even this limited grant of clemency was too much for the Republicans in North Carolina, however. They were alarmed for the very reason the president had anticipated when he balked at Gerrit Smith’s request prior to the North Carolina vote: they feared violent white supremacists would not take the pardons as a federal peace gesture to be reciprocated, but as a display of federal weakness to be exploited. When Grant announced his decision publicly on August 22, 1872, North Carolina Republicans bombarded Attorney General Williams with letters pointing out, as the Chicago Post reported, that at least two of the four men “were most ferocious and cruel in their treatment of colored men and were at the head of the Ku Klux organization in their districts.”115
Williams blamed Whitley for the uproar. The Secret Service chief had given an interview about his trip to Albany, along with a summary of his report, to the New York Herald, on August 13, and the paper published it the next day—before the attorney general had a chance to present the report to the president. The coverage of what was supposed to have been a confidential mission to Albany gave pardon opponents a head start rallying public opinion.
It was never resolved whether Whitley went to the press intending to claim credit for the pardons, sabotage them, or somehow—in the detective’s byzantine way—both. When Williams questioned him about it, the Secret Service chief calmly denied any indiscretion.116
What was clear was that the Southern Republicans’ reaction forced the president to take a different tack yet again. Less than a week after Grant issued his initial offer of four pardons, Williams retracted them, citing the need for a “separate investigation” of all the “shocking barbarities,” for which the Albany prisoners had been convicted. In addition, he said, Democrats in the South had reacted to the possible pardons in a vindictive spirit; many pro-Klan newspapers claimed, Williams noted, “that the sole object of the President’s generous offer was to influence votes.” The Southern press was also spreading the notion that Grant meant to let future Klan violence go “unwhipped of justice.”117 The administration could not allow either impression to take hold.
There would be no pardons for the Klan before the presidential election on November 5, 1872. There still were none as of President Grant’s annual message to Congress on December 2, in which he seemed to dangle executive clemency as a reward for continued peace in the South: “I am disposed, as far as my sense of justice will permit, to give to these [pardon] applications a favorable consideration,” he wrote, “but any action thereon is not to be construed as indicating any change in my determination to enforce with vigor such acts so long as the conspiracies and combinations therein named disturb the peace of the country.”118
* * *
By this time, of course, the president had been reelected handily, carrying thirty-one out of thirty-seven states. The issue of clemency for the Klan was, in the end, not as decisive as it had seemed to Republican politicos who fretted over it in the heat of the campaign. What mattered more was the forced retreat of white supremacist terrorism across the South: the 1872 presidential elections were the most peaceful and orderly of any during Reconstruction. The stability impressed voters in the North; in the South, security enabled Republican voters, including hundreds of thousands of black men, to cast ballots. President Grant won eight of eleven former Confederate states, including those—the Carolinas and Alabama—where the federal campaign against the Klan had been most active. Georgia, where that campaign never gained traction, was one of the few states that Greeley carried.
The Grant administration crackdown on the Klan had mostly achieved its short-term political goal: to save the Southern states, and, potentially, the federal government, from recapture by white supremacist Democrats. Grant himself deserved the most credit. He made the tough decisions: to throw his power and prestige behind the Ku Klux Klan Act, and, later, to suspend habeas corpus in South Carolina. Also indispensable were Attorney General Akerman’s personal commitment, and the United States Army’s help in rounding up Klan suspects, especially in South Carolina, where 7th Cavalry commander Major Lewis Merrill acted with a zeal comparable to Akerman’s. Jurors, judges, and prosecution witnesses all defied death threats to bring a small but symbolically significant number of Klansmen to justice in federal courts.
Hiram C. Whitley was one of the heroes, too, though an unlikely one. Brought in relatively late to the anti-Klan struggle, he had improvised an unprecedented peacetime covert operation, maintained control over it via lines of communication stretching from New York to Mississippi, and done so without sacrificing his investigation of Joshua D. Miner’s counterfeiting ring in New York. Whitley had to cope with the vagaries of Washington politics, which abruptly cost the anti-Klan mission’s strongest supporter in the Grant administration, Amos T. Akerman, his job, obliging the Secret Service chief to cajole Akerman’s budget-conscious successor to keep his detectives on duty during the crucial final months of the campaign. Then Whitley had to help the new attorney general and President Grant manage pressures for what could have been excessive leniency toward the Klan.
Unlike Akerman, Whitley was no moralist. And unlike Joseph G. Hester, his role was not the daring one of an actual infiltrator in the field. His contribution was strategic and tactical insight, just as it had been in the Ashburn case, and just as Amos T. Akerman had expected when he turned to Whitley for help. Whitley’s expertise in disguise, infiltration, and compartmentalization enabled him to get the most out of his tight budget, and the efforts of no more than a dozen detectives in the South. He ordered them to pursue cases where there was a high probability of successful prosecution, rather “than attempt numerous cases that might in the end have to be abandoned for want of funds,” as he explained to Akerman.119
Whitley also possessed a keen and highly modern grasp of psychological warfare, worthy of the ruthless French detectives whom he admired and professed to emulate. His exploitation of his files for propaganda purposes in The Nation’s Peril showed that. Secret Service surveillance sowed suspicion, betrayal, and demoralization in Klan ranks, well beyond the direct impact of arrests and indictments. Whitley boasted of “the dread inspired in the Ku Klux orders by a belief that the government secret agents were everywhere upon their track.”120 An indication that he was right was the surge of commentary in the pro-Klan newspapers of the South, complaining about the presence of government “spies.” The angry articles themselves paid Whitley a backhanded compliment.
Conversely, Whitley concluded, the Klan terrorists’ erstwhile victims gained confidence from “the knowledge...that the Government is well informed of all movements having for their object the intimidation of voters of any class, and also, that it has its agents among the people,
working silently but effectually in ferreting out violators of the laws and bringing the perpetrators to justice.”121 Though actual convictions proved difficult to achieve, given the limited capacity of the federal courts, the Secret Service had helped shift the balance of terror to the government’s advantage, and to the advantage of the people, black and white, whom the government had pledged to protect.
During the summer of 1872, Whitley had evinced skepticism as to whether that shift was permanent or merely temporary. He suspected the Klan’s retreat was merely tactical, and urged the attorney general to keep his detectives in the field. After President Grant swept to reelection, buoyed by heavy turnout of African Americans in the South, Whitley modified his view. “The effect of the presidential election appears to have been little less than miraculous among the people of the South generally,” he exulted to Attorney General Williams in a year-end report to Washington. “Judging from all the evidence that has thus far reached me,” he remarked, “there remains but little of the Ku Klux Klan as a distinctive order.”122
In late November Whitley concluded that it would, indeed, be safe to begin reducing the Secret Service’s presence in the South. He carried out the attorney general’s orders to dismiss all but two of the detectives he had hired to investigate the Klan. He notified the chief clerk of the Department of Justice that he was “winding up our Ku Klux reports,” and informed him that he would soon need to file away the “mass of information” his detectives had accumulated.123
A Klan comeback, which Whitley had considered all too likely earlier in the year, he now rated “barely possible.” If it did occur, Whitley promised Williams, he would be on hand, as chief of the Secret Service, to “investigate the circumstances and bring the guilty parties to trial and punishment.”124
The coming months would determine the accuracy of both predictions.
6
“I am radically opposed to any
organized system of espionage.”
Hiram C. Whitley had not been the most devoted of family men since he married Catherine Bates in 1856. His work—whatever it was—always came first. Catherine followed her husband to Kansas and Louisiana before the Civil War; thereafter, she settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his mother and hers, contenting herself with visits from her New York–based husband when his duties allowed. The Whitleys had no children, though the precise reason for this was not something they discussed outside the family circle, if at all.
The conclusion of the Secret Service’s campaign against the Klan after the 1872 election provided Whitley an opportunity to focus more on his domestic situation than he had probably done for many months, or perhaps made it impossible to neglect it any longer. In the late fall of that year, he and Catherine agreed that they should end their sixteen years of childlessness.
On December 9, 1872, a personal ad appeared in the New York Herald: “A gentleman and his wife wish to adopt a female child from two to six years of age. Address with full particulars, K.B., box 127, Herald office.”
Though the initials in the return address corresponded to his wife’s maiden name—“Katie” Bates—Hiram C. Whitley had written the advertisement. Less than a day later, Lottie N. Luckey of Fishkill, New York, responded, offering the couple her three-year-old daughter, Marie Louise Gladde. “By force of circumstances, I am forced to resort to this plan,” she wrote.1
By the end of the week, Whitley had custody, paying one hundred dollars for the girl and for the mother’s promise “she will never in any manner interfere with or attempt to control” her. Ichabod C. Nettleship witnessed the transaction. Formally, it was not an adoption but an indenture, still legal in New York, and not uncommon. This was a time when the Children’s Aid Society resettled some three thousand homeless minors from New York City in the Midwest annually, placing them with farm families on terms not unlike those the Whitleys agreed with Lottie Luckey. The indenture would expire on Marie Louise Gladde’s twenty-first birthday. For all practical purposes, however, she was now the Whitleys’ child. They renamed her “Kittie Whitley.”
The “circumstances” that compelled Lottie Luckey essentially to sell her daughter were not specified, though the official record hinted that she did so because the child was not her husband J. B. Luckey’s, as the last name “Gladde” suggested. A Manhattan judge approved the transaction, but only after satisfying himself, in a “private examination” of the mother, that she gave up her child “freely and without fear or compulsion of the husband.”2
Catherine would have someone besides her aging mother and mother-in-law with whom to pass the time in Cambridge. Hiram C. Whitley would have a proper family to go along with his power and influence.
* * *
These were indeed heady times for both the Secret Service and its chief. Congress renewed the division’s annual funding on March 3, 1873, and maintained it at a total $175,000. The appropriation included money to investigate counterfeiting, fraud, and any “other crimes against the United States”—the latter being the catchall phrase authorizing the Secret Service to pursue white supremacist terrorists.
Such crimes still did occur. When a wave of attacks by the Ku Klux Klan near Frankfort, Kentucky, made headlines during August 1873, Attorney General Williams ordered Whitley to send detectives to the state. Having promised Williams the previous year that he would be ready for any Klan resurgence, the Secret Service chief took the Kentucky situation as a personal and institutional challenge. “The matter has been placed in my hands by the Hon. Attorney General and I hope to be able to give him more evidence of the skill and ability of the men of this force,” he wrote to Michael G. Bauer. Referring to the Klan, he added: “We must show them that the U.S. Secret Service is capable of finding them out and bringing them to justice. This is now a point upon which the eyes of the whole country are turned.”3
Bauer would lead a three-man team in Kentucky, posing, as usual, as a German interested in buying land for his countrymen in an area, he told the Klansmen he met, “where the negro would be kept down.” Whitley instructed his other two detectives to wear homespun suits, not manufactured clothing that might mark them as outsiders. They were to pose as itinerant counterfeiters, and to establish their white supremacist bona fides with the Klan, as Whitley suggested in a letter to his men, by “kicking up a row with some negro.”4
By October 1, 1873, Whitley’s detectives had identified the leaders of the Kentucky Klan, as well as thirty witnesses—Klan victims and defectors from the organization—who were willing to testify against them. Some thirty-nine indictments resulted.5
The Secret Service was beginning to look like an American version of the European police agencies Whitley so admired. By mid-1873, it consisted of twenty-nine full-time detectives, plus their respective assistants and informants, based in major United States cities. They specialized as always in investigating counterfeiting, and in recent months Whitley had instructed them to take that battle to previously neglected areas of the South and far West.6 They also investigated illegal silk imports on the Canadian border and cigar bootlegging in Key West. Whitley hatched a plan to station a detective in Havana, Cuba, though nothing came of it.7
A prestigious new weekly magazine, Appletons’ Journal, sent its correspondent to report on the federal government’s fascinating covert crime-fighters and their wily chief. The journalist touted his privileged access to the Secret Service office on the Treasury building’s top floor, behind a door marked POSITIVELY NO ADMITTANCE—though the Washington headquarters was, in truth, a bit of a “stall.” Whitley and his most trusted subordinates put in their real fifteen-hour workdays, and kept their most sensitive archives, at Bleecker Street in New York. The Treasury building office was more for show, to impress politicians, and the occasional journalist, whom Whitley, visiting the capital, would ostentatiously host. The rooms housed what Appletons’ Journal called a “museum of crime and cupidity,” an exhibition of the most sen
sational evidence Whitley and his detectives had collected.
There was a scrapbook of fake banknotes; safes filled with confiscated engraving plates; and, on the wall, a placard bearing the portrait, drawn from a photograph, of Thomas Ballard, Joshua D. Miner’s henchman, still on the lam: it offered a reward of five thousand dollars. Nearby hung a “most ferocious-looking” suit composed of a bloodred jacket, black muslin pants, and a black leather belt, from which dangled an eighteen-inch dagger in a leather sheath. Completing the outfit was a pointed red cap, embroidered with a black skull and crossbones, and three large letters—K.K.K.—followed by the Latin word for “death,” Mori.
Whitley kept a “wanted” poster with a photograph of Thomas Ballard, Joshua D. Miner’s master engraver of counterfeit bills, on the wall of his Washington office. (Nova Scotia Archives)
As the journalist toured this gallery, Whitley recounted how he had captured Bill Gurney, the counterfeiter, at the East River ferry landing. He expounded on his crime-fighting philosophy. No serious government could eschew surveillance or deception in all their forms, he lectured, because “desperate cases require desperate remedies.”8
Now over forty years old, the Secret Service chief was perhaps not quite the same vigorous detective who had chased down Pedro Capdeville on the muddy streets of New Orleans in 1863, or even who wrestled Gurney to the ground on that summer’s day in 1870. The incessant and nerve-racking work of the last year or two had taken a toll, to the point where another journalist, in fact, described Whitley as “lank and cadaverous.”9
Even with gray creeping into his goatee, though, Whitley was as garrulous and as intense as ever. As the captured evidence on display in the Treasury building proved, he could plausibly claim that his methods, modeled on those of Fouché and Vidocq in France, and the Bow Street Runners of England, were working. The Appletons’ correspondent certainly came away with that impression, just as Whitley undoubtedly intended: “It is with pleasure that we accord to the present efficient chief of our national police...the well-deserved encomium of the Scriptures,” the journalist wrote. “Well-done, thou good and faithful servant!”