by Charles Lane
Benjamin Bristow and Bluford Wilson got wind of these doings and reacted with alarm. Their alarm grew when their investigation showed that the anonymous letters to cabinet wives had been delivered on or near the dates of Whitley’s periodic visits to Washington.15 “I am willing enough...to see the scandal suppressed,” Wilson wrote to his brother. “I am not willing however to invoke the aid of an infernal damned scoundrel like Whitley...nor am I willing to see the President placed unwittingly in the power of such a man.” Threatening to go over his head to President Grant, Bristow and Wilson prevailed upon Babcock to abandon Whitley’s plan.16
Undaunted, Whitley continued to pressure Babcock, either personally or through a trusted intermediary, his erstwhile Secret Service operative, Abner B. Newcomb. In August 1875 Whitley told Babcock he was willing to leave Washington for the frontier boomtown of Pueblo, in the remote Colorado Territory. The region was familiar to Whitley from pre–Civil War days, when it was his refuge from Kansas abolitionists. All he asked for in return was appointment to a federal job there.17
By this time, however, Babcock was facing his own scandal. In May 1875 Secretary of the Treasury Bristow had revealed a massive embezzlement conspiracy in his department known as the Whiskey Ring, and was pursuing indications Babcock might be involved. Unable to do much else, Babcock apparently told Whitley he would take care of him eventually, if he would just lie low in Pueblo until the Whiskey Ring uproar blew over.
Whitley was in Pueblo when the House of Representatives reconvened in Washington on December 4, 1875. That body was no longer under Republican control. The Democrats had won the November 1874 midterm elections, overwhelmingly, benefiting politically from the safe burglary and other scandals, as well as from the brutal economic recession that began in late 1873. What had been a 110-seat Republican majority in the House was now a 77-seat Democratic majority, though the Republicans held on to the Senate.
Democratic control of the House for the first time since before the Civil War meant that that chamber would favor the South’s white supremacists. The Democratic members, many of them former Confederate military officers, could not pass legislation over Senate opposition and President Grant’s veto, but they could use investigation and oversight to harass and discredit the Republican administration. One of the first cases the Democratic House reopened was the safe burglary.
Whitley’s erstwhile lieutenant, Ichabod C. Nettleship, saw this as an opportunity. Though indicted with Whitley in 1874, Nettleship had not stood trial: he had absconded to his hometown, Newark, New Jersey, where his cronies in the local police helped him evade the United States Marshals. By 1876, Nettleship was growing tired of life on the lam. He offered to tell the House Judiciary Committee what he knew about the safe burglary, if the committee would ask the attorney general to grant him immunity from prosecution.18
When word that Nettleship was turning state’s evidence reached Whitley in Pueblo, he hurried back to Washington, arriving on March 21, 1876, to explore a similar deal for himself.19 Having failed to secure immunity from prosecution and a new job from Babcock, despite months of mutual manipulation between the two men, Whitley apparently felt he had a right to turn against the president’s aide.
The result was a series of sensational hearings before the House Judiciary Committee, in April 1876. First Nettleship, then Whitley, admitted they had staged the safe burglary to frame Columbus Alexander, and that the whole business got started due to Babcock’s wish to discredit the congressional investigation of the public works program in Washington. Babcock had “great influence over the Secret Service,” Whitley said in a press interview. “Anything that he required of us had to be done.”20 On April 15, 1876, the Washington grand jury brought new indictments for conspiracy, this time with Babcock’s name atop the list of defendants. The Department of Justice quickly agreed to give Whitley and Nettleship immunity from prosecution in return for their testimony against Babcock.
Babcock’s trial convened in September 1876. Incredibly enough, the two lawyers who contested Joshua D. Miner’s 1871 counterfeiting case in New York faced each other again in this one. Edwards Pierrepont, Miner’s erstwhile prosecutor, had replaced George H. Williams as attorney general of the United States; in that capacity, he oversaw the prosecution of Babcock. Babcock, meanwhile, had hired William S. Fullerton as his defense attorney, the same expert in cross-examination who had picked Whitley apart during the Miner trial, and would have to break him down in this case, too, if Babcock was to win.
Whitley and Nettleship hardly made the most credible prosecution witnesses. Their confessions before the House Judiciary Committee obviously meant that both men had heretofore flagrantly lied—to Congress, to Bluford Wilson, and to the public—about their involvement in the plot against Columbus Alexander. Fullerton wasted no time in confronting Whitley with that fact. Whitley hemmed and hawed, as he had done at the Miner trial. He admitted “evasions” and “mental reservations” in his past testimony about the safe burglary, but attempted to justify them by claiming that he had been in “personal danger.” In any case, Whitley testified, “I had not believed that any man could commit burglary on his own safe. I knew of no safe burglary, in that sense.”21
Babcock’s defense was that he had merely ordered the former Secret Service chief to spy on hostile newspaper reporters, and only learned that Whitley had interpreted this as authority to hatch the frame-up of Columbus Alexander after the whole plot came undone. Babcock’s version was not admirable, but it did have the advantage of being truthful. Under cross-examination by Fullerton, Whitley conceded that Babcock never expressly told him to frame Alexander. For his part, Ichabod C. Nettleship testified that the whole conspiracy had been Whitley’s idea.22
The jury took less than an hour to return a “not guilty” verdict on September 30, 1876. A crowd of Babcock’s friends cheered at his second acquittal in less than a year.23 He had also been indicted in the Whiskey Ring scandal, but a jury found him not guilty in that case, too, in part because President Grant testified in his defense.
Babcock’s political enemies complained that the Grant administration, through Edwards Pierrepont, the attorney general, had somehow fixed the safe burglary trial so that none of the alleged principals—not Babcock, not Whitley, not Nettleship—would ever go to the penitentiary. There was, a prominent journalist later wrote, “a general belief that the whole affair was a shrewdly managed game, in which the first move had been to procure immunity for Whitley and Nettleship, and then, by pre-arranged admissions and contradictions on their part, to insure the escape of Babcock.”24
If the fix had been in, Babcock certainly went to a lot of unnecessary expense to hire an expert on cross-examining Whitley as his lawyer. Nor was there anything feigned about the fury Babcock and his partisan allies directed at the turncoat detective. The pro-Babcock National Republican filled its pages with stories of Whitley’s purported past misdeeds, from shooting an innocent man in New Orleans and claiming it was Pedro Capdeville during the Civil War, to robbing a safe the government assigned him to protect after the conflict ended.25 Supposedly he had even set up a traveling hypnotism show during which he “mesmerized a lady” in Selma, Alabama, and “endeavored to violate her person.”
After Babcock’s acquittal, the National Republican opined:
The chief plotter and perjurer Hiram C. Whitley has secured his freedom while attempting to blast the reputation of honorable men, and today walks the earth an outcast from respectable society, with the mark of Cain indelibly stamped upon his brow, while those he tried to injure have passed through the refiner’s fire, and come forth to occupy high stations among men and enjoy their confidence and esteem.26
Actually, Orville E. Babcock did not emerge with his public “esteem” intact. Concluding that his longtime friend and ally had become a political liability, President Grant fired Babcock, though, in March 1877, during his last few days in office, the president made him a
supervisor of federal lighthouses on the Atlantic Coast. The aide who had previously wielded vast behind-the-scenes power in Washington lost his life in 1884 when his boat capsized as he was surveying a lighthouse site near Mosquito Inlet, Florida.
Secretary of the Treasury Benjamin Bristow did not win his campaign for the presidency in 1876. Supporters offered him as a candidate at the Republican National Convention, touting his purge of the Secret Service and other efforts to clean up Washington, but party regulars, bitter that Bristow had embarrassed Grant by pursuing Babcock and Whitley, blocked his candidacy. Finished in politics, Bristow practiced law in New York City until he died in 1896. Bluford Wilson went home to Springfield, Illinois, where he, too, practiced law until his death in 1924.
The eventual 1876 Republican nominee, Governor Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio, captured the White House after a prolonged dispute over the results that threatened to plunge the country into renewed civil war. That struggle did not end until March 1877, when Republicans acquiesced in a return of Democratic rule in the last three Southern states that had not yet been “redeemed” for white supremacy, and Democrats, in turn, acquiesced in a Hayes presidency. Congress remained divided between a Democratic House and a Republican Senate.
For Whitley, the situation offered no hope of a comeback. Democrats could never forgive him for waging clandestine war against the Ku Klux Klan. Both wings of the divided Republican Party, meanwhile, had something against him. Bristow-like reformers wanted nothing to do with the author of the safe burglary and other skulduggery; pro-Grant party stalwarts might still appreciate his anti-Klan effort, but could not forgive his betrayal of Orville E. Babcock.
Whitley could not even count on all of his old friends from the Secret Service anymore. His relationship with Ichabod C. Nettleship was damaged beyond repair: Nettleship paid dearly for Whitley’s refusal to heed his doubts about the safe burglary plan, and could not quite forgive his ex-boss for it. The best Nettleship could manage after escaping prosecution in that case was to go back home to Newark and take a position as justice of the peace. He died in 1887, at the age of fifty-four.27
In all the world, Whitley enjoyed the support of just four people: Abner B. Newcomb, his trusty subordinate at the Secret Service; his mother, Hannah; his wife, Catherine; and their adopted daughter, Kittie, who turned seven on December 2, 1876. He collected his mother, wife, and child at their house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and, sometime after Hayes’s inauguration on March 5, 1877, set out for a new home in the West. It was the second time in his life that Whitley made the move from Massachusetts to Kansas. The first sojourn ended in 1859, when Whitley fled to New Orleans after making himself a pariah to both pro-and antislavery forces. Now, a pariah once again, for different reasons, he was going back.
He had recently gone through Emporia, Kansas, on his way to and from Pueblo, Colorado, on the new Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway. Whitley noted Emporia’s thriving commercial center and strategic position at a major railroad intersection. There could be business opportunities in such a location.
Above all, its people seemed not to know or care much about his past, which meant that Emporia was one of the few places in America where Hiram C. Whitley could have a future.
* * *
The Democrats’ political resurgence, both in the Southern states and in Washington, showed that the Grant administration victory over the Ku Klux Klan in 1871 and 1872 had been far more transitory than many Republicans believed at the time.
Taking his reelection as proof that he had almost vanquished white supremacist terrorism, and that it was both safe and politic finally to do so, President Grant during his second term ordered the release from Albany Penitentiary of forty-three Klansmen. By the end of 1874, all but two of the seventy-nine Klan terrorists from North Carolina, South Carolina, and Alabama imprisoned for federal crimes against African Americans and white Republicans had gotten out from behind bars, either by completing brief sentences or through executive clemency. (One died in prison; Grant pardoned another in March 1875.) Even the high-level offenders for whom Hiram C. Whitley had opposed clemency, Samuel G. Brown and Randolph A. Shotwell, received pardons in 1873.28
Grant and his advisers hoped Southern Democrats would reciprocate by ceasing opposition to Reconstruction and accepting the new political and racial order. Similar thinking may have influenced the Grant administration’s choice of a successor for Whitley, amid the 1874 midterm election campaign. Solicitor of the Treasury Bluford Wilson tapped the uncontroversial police chief of Chicago, Illinois.
In doing so, he rebuffed the many Republicans who wanted Joseph G. Hester to take the job: they considered the aggressive detective a hero for his anti-Klan covert operations for the Secret Service in North Carolina, and hoped that he might continue to lead the division in such work as chief. As a North Carolina Republican member of the House of Representatives wrote to Grant: “The Country and our State owe him a debt of gratitude for his brilliant achievements and valuable services during the Ku Klux reign of terror at the South.”29
Passed over as Whitley’s replacement, Hester continued as a federal detective, infiltrating white supremacist terror groups in the South through the end of the 1876 election. Thereafter, he conducted a census of the Eastern Cherokee for the Interior Department in 1883, then settled in Washington, D.C., where he ran a real estate business until his death in 1901.30
After the pardons, Southern white supremacists made a show of responding favorably to the Grant administration’s more conciliatory posture. “The ear of the president is open to the appeal of the Southern men who now obey the laws as faithfully as, during the war, they served the South,” a Charleston, South Carolina, newspaper exulted. “The action of the president does him honor and time will show that his conduct in the Kuklux [sic] matter was as wise as it is generous and just.”31 Actually, they interpreted the Grant administration’s gestures, not inaccurately, as signs of Republican weakness, division, and exhaustion with Reconstruction. With federal pressure abating, they reorganized and resumed political violence, much as Whitley had predicted they would in his secret reports to Washington during the anti-Klan effort. Terror groups took different names—the White League in Louisiana, the Red Shirts in South Carolina—but they had the same goals as the Klan. Their attacks suppressed African American voting, paving the way for Southern Democratic gains at the polls in both 1874 and 1876.
During Rutherford B. Hayes’s single-term presidency, from March 1877 to March 1881, Democrats used their new power in Congress to attack the federal law enforcement authority upon which Southern Republicans, white and black, had relied for protection. The Democrats tried to cut the United States Army’s budget, and passed the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibited the United States Marshals from summoning troops to enforce court orders or to suppress white supremacist insurrection.
Congress slashed the Justice Department’s budget for investigating “other crimes against the United States”—understood to encompass white supremacist violence in the South. Lawmakers also cut appropriations for the Secret Service, the erstwhile infiltrators of the Klan, specifying that the detective force’s funds could be used to fight counterfeiting “and for no other purpose whatever.”32
After Democrats took control of the Senate in the 1878 election, with the aid of fraud and violence in the South, they intensified their attack on institutions the Republicans had built during Reconstruction, including the Secret Service. In a long speech on the House floor decrying the Republicans’ post–Civil War deviation from Jeffersonian small-government principles, New York Democratic Representative Benjamin Willis went out of his way to condemn the “employment of unprincipled detectives who for partisan purposes have not hesitated to attempt the ruin of innocent civilians.”33 Federal “spies and detectives” had not gone South to investigate terrorism, Democratic Representative James Ronald Chalmers of Mississippi, a former Confederate cavalry officer, declar
ed, but to “brand the whole community with the faults of a few.”34 Democrat Ebenezer Finley of Ohio complained that there was “no law authorizing the employment of these secret detectives,” and that Congress had never received a report on how, exactly, the Secret Service spent its money.35
Led by James B. Beck of Kentucky, now a senator, Democrats tried repeatedly during 1879 and 1880 to repeal Reconstruction-era civil rights laws, through riders attached to must-pass government funding bills. President Hayes, repenting his attempts to conciliate the South, vetoed these measures, even at the risk of shutting down the government.36 Hayes’s gambit worked: most voters blamed Democrats for the impasse. In May 1880, with elections just six months away, Democrats bowed to political reality and agreed to negotiate.
In the resulting compromises, the Democratic Congress abandoned any effort to abolish the Secret Service, while the Republicans accepted continued cuts in the detective force’s funding, as well as the statutory language restricting its mission to fighting counterfeiting and “no other purpose whatever.”
The trade-off was finalized on the Senate floor in June 1880, when Senator Beck of Kentucky and a fellow Democrat, Senator Wilkinson Call of Florida (a former Confederate officer), rose to speak in favor of it. Any national police force, Senator Call said, “is a dangerous power and one subject to great abuse,” which could be acceptable only in the limited context of counterfeiting. “I think it has not been the history of this Government that secret service money or money for the detection of crime should be used by the Government, except in that class of cases,” he concluded.37