by Lee Sandlin
The routine business of keeping the peace fell to civilians—to groups of volunteer citizens who formed associations known as committees of safety and committees of vigilance, and to quasi professionals called regulators (some regulators were volunteers; others were mercenaries who traveled from town to town). The committees and the regulators had wide latitude regarding their duties and responsibilities. All strangers could count on being questioned closely by members of the local committee about who they were, what their business was, and where and how long they were expecting to stay. In most towns, they would also be expected to turn over to the committee any firearms they were carrying—despite the cliché of the frontier-town shoot-out, communities did not as a rule permit armed strangers to wander their streets (though there were many exceptions, and local citizens were generally free to do as they pleased). The committees in the lower valley also watched over the slaves. On the plantations, slaves were kept in close confinement by their overseers, or at least were in theory, but in towns they were generally left unsupervised during the day, and they routinely mingled on the streets with the free citizens. Many slaves were allowed out in the evenings as well, and would often hold private gatherings known as darky parties. The committees would typically only stop and detain slaves for gross breaches of the peace. Thievery and public drunkenness were probably the most common offenses, followed closely by insolence. (In the plantation country there was a slightly different system of supervision, called the slave patrol, which searched for runaway slaves and was supposed to keep slaves from having any contact between plantations; service on the patrols was compulsory for white male citizens, but it was despised and widely evaded, and the enforcement of the rules was generally lax.)
Along the Mississippi, the main concern of the committees was the river people. The voyageurs had a bad reputation—partly for their rowdiness when they came onshore, but mostly for their casual, incessant, and universal thievery. The river made theft easy. If the crew of a boat saw something they wanted onshore—some plow or horse or cow, some cotton bale or wagonload of corn that had been left unattended, a stack of barrels on a deserted dock, a flock of sheep without a shepherd, whatever they could carry or push on board before they were noticed—they’d simply help themselves, adding it to the cargo bound for the New Orleans market. Even if they were spotted, there was little that the victim could do. There was no way of catching up with a boat once it was back in the current; there were no roads that would let a victim ride furiously to the next port town, no way of alerting the authorities downriver—when there were authorities downriver. The thieves were safe with their loot, just another anonymous boat in the armada, lost forever down the next bend.
This was one reason the boats congregated before the riverfront districts each night: they weren’t welcome anywhere else. It might seem, given how sparsely settled so much of the river was, that a boat could lay up almost anywhere and be undisturbed, but the banks away from towns were thought of as fantastically risky places for the river people. Farmers and plantation owners took for granted that anybody coming onto their property from the river was a thief. They hired regulators to patrol the banks, or else they armed their own farmhands—and none of them was shy about shooting trespassers. It could happen almost anywhere the voyageurs tried to beach a boat after sundown, in a secluded creek or a pristine wooded cove: they’d suddenly find themselves greeted by a bristle of shotguns. If they weren’t killed there and then, they’d quickly be conveyed to the local branch of the most powerful and most dreaded institution on the river—the courts of Judge Lynch.
The name came from a vigilante court that had been set up in Virginia during the Revolutionary War. The presiding judge had been a local planter named Charles Lynch; the defendants put on trial had been loyalists to the king. In the first few decades of the new Republic, the institution of the lynching court spread throughout the South and into the river valley. The judges were most often prominent local citizens—some of them justices of the peace, some of them at least with a smattering of legal training. The defendants were usually people who had been put on trial already in a government court and been found innocent when everybody knew they had done it, or else had been found guilty but given too light a sentence. Nobody thought of a traditional jury verdict as the last word. In the river valley it was sometimes cynically referred to as an “advisory opinion.”
Today we think the word “lynching” automatically means death by hanging. But that didn’t become the primary meaning till after the Civil War. Before then, it meant any sentence handed down by a lynching court. This might be a beating, or it might be a branding. Some of the lynched were tarred and feathered and rode naked out of town on a rail—a split wooden rail, and they rode the sharp edge: the punishment could leave the genitals permanently damaged. All of these were known as lynching. A sentence of death by lynching—by hanging, or by firing squad—was reserved for the worst criminals: murderers, horse thieves, slave stealers, and counterfeiters.
The typical defendant at a lynching court was poor. Rich people routinely bought their way out of trouble, or else they hired their own regulators and bodyguards to keep the townspeople at bay. The defendant was most often one of the river people, or a stranger in town, or somebody who was a known troublemaker, or somebody who had been seen acting in a suspicious manner, or somebody who was just generally thought of as odd. While we think now that most of the defendants were people of color, that again wasn’t typically true before the Civil War. The courts in the lower valley didn’t ordinarily punish slaves. Slaves detained by the regulators and the vigilance committees were turned over to their owners for punishment. This wasn’t out of any concern for the slaves’ rights—it was because slaves were property, and property rights were regarded as sacred. The lynching court would only intervene and punish the slave when it was suspected that the owner was going to be too lenient.
This system, if it can be called a system, was known for its arbitrary and capricious results. The committees and the regulators often made a great show of legal formality in their arrests, but they weren’t bound to obey any law and were answerable only to the authorities of their local town. The lynching courts weren’t answerable to anybody. A perpetual fog of doubt shrouded the actions of those involved in the dispensation of lynch law. Nobody knew what officer or judge was acting fairly, who was seeking revenge, who was simply a criminal himself. One town’s regulator was likely to be another town’s wanted murderer; a chief justice in a county’s lynching court could be the most infamous highwayman in the state. There were celebrated cases where in the end it never was sorted out just what side everybody had really been on.
During the early years of the frontier, the most notorious of these cases involved a man named James Ford. Ford owned a ferry service on the Ohio just up from its confluence with the Mississippi. From around 1810 to the 1830s, Ford’s Ferry was a local landmark: the crossing of choice for everyone traveling between Kentucky and Illinois. Its prominence wasn’t a fluke of geography or custom. Ford worked very hard to establish its reputation. He practiced an early form of saturation advertising, nailing up signs pointing to his ferry along all the roads on either side of the river. He also had posters made proclaiming the safety of his ferryboats and the professionalism of his crews, and he put them in all the inns and taverns on the Kentucky and Illinois shores.
These ads probably weren’t lies. Ford did try to make his ferry practical and safe—more so than most ferries, anyway (ferrymen were legendary for their indifference to the lives of their passengers). He was also concerned with easy access to his ferry point. He cajoled and bribed the county government to improve the road on the Kentucky side; ultimately they agreed to clear and repair eight miles of roadway leading up to the riverbank. The road on the Illinois side was even worse. It was very old and in poor shape, and it routinely flooded out every time the river rose. It was known by a dismal name that informed everyone under what conditions it was passable:
Low Water Road. But Ford had no luck persuading the Illinois government to fix it. So he paid out of his own pocket for a new twelve-mile stretch of road on the Illinois shore. He had it built on land above the flood crest, and he picked a name that would ensure that everybody knew what it was for, how superior it was to the Low Water Road, and who had provided it: Ford’s Ferry High Water Road.
Ford became a prosperous and respectable citizen. With the ferry fees rolling in, he grew rich enough to buy several large local farms. He became an appraiser of properties and an administrator of estates. He was a justice of the peace for many years. He grew to be so highly regarded that items on the agenda in the county courts were passed immediately so long as they were offered with the magic phrase “on motion of James Ford.” He was, one of the locals said, a man who excelled in having things come out his way.
In a book written many years later, Chronicles of a Kentucky Settlement by William Courtney Watts, Ford is described this way: six feet tall—much taller than the average then—and very powerfully built, “a perfect Hercules” in his youth but by his fifties grown corpulent. He was handsome, with graying brown hair and penetrating steel-gray eyes. He had a florid face, a short and thick nose, a “remarkably long” upper lip, a “full and sensuous” mouth, a deep and sonorous voice. “On the whole,” someone said, “when in repose, he gives one the idea of a good-natured, rather than a surly, bull-dog; but, if aroused, I should say he would be a lion tamer.”
His skill at lion taming came out in his other occupations: he ran the county’s regulators, and he presided over the local court of Judge Lynch. These were heavy jobs. That region along the Ohio was extraordinarily dangerous. There were many bands of pirates working the river; one of their hideouts, Cave-in-Rock, about ten miles downriver from the ferry, was notorious all over the frontier, the successor in evil to the Crow’s Nest. There were also gangs of highwaymen who could be counted on to challenge every lone traveler on the roads all around the junction of the Ohio and the Mississippi. Ford earned a reputation as an implacable foe of these outlaws. He was fiercely protective of the roads on either side of the ferry. Any bandit preying on his ferry passengers who came before his lynching court was certain to be put to death. He often went out patrolling with the regulators himself. Newspaper accounts of robberies along the ferry road routinely concluded, “Jim Ford found the robbers and ran them out of the county.”
And yet, for all his determined crusading, the region never got any safer. By the late 1820s, there was one remarkably persistent outlaw band that seemed to be responsible for most of the robberies, deaths, and disappearances on the Illinois side of the river. They became known, doubtless to Ford’s intense displeasure, as the Ford’s Ferry Gang. They were so successful that people began to say darkly that some other factor had to be involved: surely they must be in league with some apparently upstanding local citizen who was providing them with both information and cover. Suspicion fell particularly on a man named Billy Potts. Potts owned an inn in Illinois just up the road from Ford’s Ferry. The rumor was that he was a spotter for the Ford’s Ferry Gang, alerting them to which of his guests had money, and which didn’t need to be bothered with. It was also said that the big field behind Potts’s inn was where the unlucky travelers ended up buried. The field was excavated, over Potts’s outraged protests. The bodies were indeed there. Potts was immediately arrested and turned over to the government court for trial.
But nobody believed that this was the end of it. Potts was regarded around the area as a simpleton—or at least not somebody clever enough to have come up with this spotting system on his own. That was when people started wondering about Ford himself.
It made perfect sense. If he really was the ringleader of the Ford’s Ferry Gang, it would explain why the gang was never caught. As the presiding judge at the lynching court, he could guarantee that any member of his gang detained by the regulators or the committees could be found innocent and set free. Then, too, as the head of the regulators, he could ensure that all the rival gangs could be killed or driven away, leaving his own gang with a monopoly.
The talk slowly poisoned Ford’s reputation. Nobody had any proof—but nobody could quite dismiss the idea out of hand, either. (In Chronicles of a Kentucky Settlement, even Ford’s daughter isn’t entirely certain of his innocence.) Of particular concern were the men he associated with; while he himself was a distinguished and respectable citizen, his regulators, and even his employees at the ferry, tended to be “vicious and bad men,” as one writer put it, whom he kept in line through insult and intimidation.
Finally, some of the area’s prominent citizens decided to find out for themselves. They hired a new and secret group of regulators to put an end to the Ford’s Ferry Gang. They didn’t tell Ford about it. The regulators immediately began investigating some of the vicious and bad men in his employ. Their interest fell upon a man named Vincent Simpson. Simpson ran the day-to-day operations of Ford’s Ferry. He was also known to be bitterly unhappy with Ford, who had recently humiliated him by winning their nasty lawsuit over the sale of a slave and then crowing over the victory afterward. Simpson was the ideal man to rat Ford out. It wasn’t long before a new rumor was spreading around town: Simpson had confessed to the regulators that he was a member of the gang, and he was going to reveal to a grand jury everything he knew, including the identity of the gang’s leader.
It’s not clear whether Simpson did in fact confess, or for that matter whether he had ever talked to the regulators at all. What is certain is that he never ended up testifying before the grand jury. It so happened that he was involved at that time in another nasty lawsuit with an associate of Ford’s, a man named Henry Shouse. Simpson, evidently a hot-blooded man even by the standards of the river valley, decided to have it out with Shouse before the lawsuit was heard. One afternoon he planted himself in Shouse’s front yard and began yelling for Shouse to come out. Nobody answered. But as Simpson bellowed and taunted and challenged Shouse to show himself, a shot was fired from the upper window, and Simpson fell dead.
Shouse was immediately arrested. He maintained (and went on maintaining through his trial, and all the way to his execution) that he’d had no secret motive; it had simply been an act of self-defense when he saw Simpson trespassing on his property. But nobody believed him. Obviously he’d done it at Ford’s behest, to keep Simpson from testifying before the grand jury. So, after Shouse was in custody, the regulators next went to arrest Ford.
Ford had been away when Simpson had been killed. He’d been visiting one of his farm properties about a day’s ride from the ferry. The regulators found him coming home on a remote country road. They told him what had happened; they said they were going to escort him to the county seat, where he would be expected to appear before the grand jury and tell what he knew about the dispute between Shouse and Simpson.
This was toward sundown. There were several hours of riding ahead of them. Ford declared that he would stay the night at a nearby roadside inn and proceed on with the regulators the next morning. The entire party went to the inn. Ford took a room, while the regulators made as if to camp outside. Sometime after sunset, before Ford retired for the night, somebody asked him for a favor. In one version of the story, it was an associate who had been traveling with him back from the farm; in another, it was one of the regulators. In any case, somebody produced a letter he’d recently received and asked Ford to read it aloud—Ford was known to be one of the few literate men in the county. Ford agreed. He was sitting then in the common room of the inn. A candle was set on the dining table in front of him, and he began reading out the letter. The candle was the only light in the room. This was a moonless night; Ford’s face, shining in the candlelight, was the brightest object not just in the room, but for miles around. The regulators used it as their target. They gathered outside and opened fire through the window, the doorway, and the chinks in the log walls. Ford was hit seventeen times.
Ford’s death marked the end of the
investigation into the Ford’s Ferry Gang. Nobody was ever charged with Ford’s murder, and no further evidence was found about his involvement in the gang. So was Ford in fact guilty? To a modern eye it looks unlikely. At least, if he was, then much of his other behavior is hard to account for. Why, in particular, would he deliberately go out of his way to antagonize Simpson, when Simpson was so well situated to betray him? But this is not an objection that occurred to anyone at the time. People, even prominent and respectable citizens like Ford, routinely acted with near-suicidal recklessness for the sake of absurdly short-term or trivial benefits. Thinking through the consequences of a rash act simply wasn’t a favorite activity on the frontier.
Ford’s funeral proved to be a dire affair. None of his friends, none of his colleagues, nobody from town showed up. Only his wife and children were in attendance at the gravesite. A group of slaves carried the coffin. Just as they were lowering it into the grave, a savage thunderstorm erupted all around them. The slaves, terrified, let go of the coffin and it fell perpendicularly into the hole, where it immediately sank into the mud and stuck. The gravedigger left it where it was and filled in the grave all around it. People said afterward that Ford was the only man on earth to go to hell headfirst.