40 “Yale Commencement,” Boston Daily Journal, July 24, 1868, p. 4.
41 Ibid.; Twining, Class of ’Fifty-Three, p. 33.
42 “Yale Commencement”; Twining, Class of ’Fifty-Three, p. 33.
CHAPTER TEN: WALL: WASHINGTON, D.C., JUNE 14, 1871
1 “Shooting of Justice Wall,” New National Era, June 15, 1871, p. 3.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Congressional Globe, 41st Cong., 3d sess. (January 23, 1871), p. 687; William Tindall, “A Sketch of Alexander Robey Shepherd,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society 14 (1911), pp. 49, 56; John Burroughs, Wake-Robin (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1871), p. 144. See also Wilhelmus Bogart Bryan, A History of the National Capital (New York: Macmillan, 1916), pp. 2:496-506.
5 See Special Report of the Commissioner of Education on the Improvement of Colored Schools in the District of Columbia (1871), reprinted as History of Schools for the Colored Population (New York: Arno Press, 1969), p. 242.
6 Affairs in the District of Columbia, H. Rep. 42-72 (1872), pp. 89, 90.
7 Henry Latham, Black and White: A Journal of Three Months’ Tour of the United States (Carlisle, Mass.: Applewood Books, 1867), p. 87; Gath, “Washington: Kasson on Things; The Rough Side of Washington Society,” Chicago Tribune, November 17, 1873, p. 7.
8 On Reyburn and Glennan, see Daniel Smith Lamb, ed., Howard University Medical Department: A Historical, Biographical and Statistical Souvenir (Washington, D.C.: R. Beresford, 1900), pp. 109-10, 114. On the treatment of abdominal wounds at this time, see George A. Otis, The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1876), p. 2:2.
9 “Shooting of Justice Wall,” New National Era, June 15, 1871, p. 3.
10 Lt. A. F. Higgs to Maj. Gen. J. M. Schofield, February 28, 1867, “Reports of Operations Received, Assistant Commissioner, Virginia, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands,” quoted in James Edmund Stealey III, “The Freedmen’s Bureau in West Virginia,” West Virginia History 39 (1978), pp. 99, 106.
11 O.S.B. Wall to C. H. Howard, April 20, 1867, National Archives, Washington, D.C., Record Group 105, Records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, Office of the Assistant Commissioner for the District of Columbia, Letters Received (ser. 456), #1801, Document A-9838, photocopied from the Freedmen and Southern Society Project, University of Maryland.
12 Higgs quoted in Stealey, “Freedmen’s Bureau”; Wall to Howard, April 20, 1867.
13 John Mercer Langston, From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capitol (Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing Co., 1894), p. 260.
14 John Mercer Langston, A Speech on Equality Before the Law (St. Louis, Mo.: Democrat Book and Job Printing House, 1866), p. 9.
15 Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Vintage, 1979), pp. 297, 316-18, 323; Evening Critic, July 20, 1881, p. 2.
16 Rayford W. Logan, Howard University: The First Hundred Years, 1867-1967 (Washington, D.C.: Howard University, 1968), p. 38; Amanda Wall to Oliver Otis Howard, September 4, 1895, Howard Papers.
17 “On the Road: The Trotters of the District,” Daily Critic, July 16, 1873, p. 1; “Congregationalist Church, Washington,” Christian Recorder, July 13, 1867; “Editorial Items,” Christian Recorder, February 9, 1867; Everett O. Alldredge, Centennial History of the First Congregational United Church of Christ, Washington, D.C., 1865-1965 (Pikesville, Md.: Port City Press, 1965), pp. 23-26.
18 O.S.B. Wall to C. H. Howard, April 13, 1867, National Archives, Washington, D.C., Record Group 105, Records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, Office of the Assistant Commissioner for the District of Columbia, Letters Received (ser. 456), #1629, Document A-9835, photocopied from Freedmen and Southern Society Project, University of Maryland; Amanda Wall to Edward P. Smith, May 31, 1870, American Missionary Association Archives.
19 See Letters Received by Employment Agents, Records Relating to Employment of Freedmen, Records of the Field Offices for the District of Columbia, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, 1865-1870, Roll 18, M 1902, National Archives, Washington, D.C.; F. A. James to O.S.B. Wall, February 4, 1867, Letters Received by Employment Agents, Roll 18, M 1902, National Archives. See generally Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
20 1870 U.S. Census, Washington, D.C.; Lamb, Howard Medical Department.
21 “Washington News: Justice Wall Given Over by his Doctors,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 17, 1871, p. 1; 1870 U.S. Census, Washington, D.C.
22 “A Fox-Chase Extraordinary, and Almost a Riot,” Daily National Intelligencer, September 25, 1869, p. 3.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid.
25 Daily Patriot, September 26, 1872, quoted in Thomas R. Johnson, “Reconstruction Politics in Washington: ‘An Experimental Garden for Radical Plants,’ ” Records of the Columbia Historical Society 50 (1980), p. 180.
26 “City News: National Equal Rights League of Colored Men,” Daily National Intelligencer, January 11, 1867; U.S. Senate Journal, 39th Cong., 2nd sess. (January 18, 1867), pp. 112- 13; O.S.B. Wall to J. W. Alvord, January 24, 1866, National Archives, Washington, D.C., Record Group 105, Records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, Records of the Commissioner, Education Division, 1865-71, Unregistered Letters Received and Miscellaneous Documents Relating to the Freedmen’s Bank (ser. 157), Document A-10521, photocopied from Freedmen and Southern Society Project, University of Maryland (discussing a bill that eventually passed over President Johnson’s veto); Kate Masur, An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle Over Equality in Washington, D.C. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), pp. 185-87; Elizabeth Cady Stanton et al., eds., History of Woman Suffrage (Rochester, N.Y.: Charles Mann, 1887), p. 3:813 and n; see also Ellen Carol DuBois, Woman Suffrage and Women’s Rights (New York: New York University Press, 1998), pp. 99-100.
27 Katherine Masur, “Reconstructing the Nation’s Capital: The Politics of Race and Citizenship in the District of Columbia, 1862-1878” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2001), pp. 207-9, 217. “At least two thirds of the colored men in the District had been slaves only three or four years before,” according to Constance McLaughlin Green, in The Secret City: A History of Race Relations in the Nation’s Capital (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 80. On Bowen, see generally William Tindall, “A Sketch of Mayor Sayles J. Bowen,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society 18 (1915), pp. 25, 28.
28 Affairs in the District of Columbia, H. Rep. 42-72 (1872), p. 473.
29 A. G. Riddle, Law Students and Lawyers (Washington, D.C.: W. H. and O. H. Morrison, 1873), pp. 13, 30, 41. Wall had been acquainted with his professor for more than a decade. Riddle, a former Ohio congressman, had served as one of the defense attorneys in the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue trials.
30 “A Disorderly Character,” Daily National Intelligencer, October 6, 1869, p. 4; “Disorderly,” Daily National Intelligencer, October 27, 1869, p. 4; “Assault and Battery With Intent to Kill,” Daily National Intelligencer, October 8, 1869, p. 4; “Police Items,” Daily National Intelligencer, December 30, 1869, p. 2; “Petit Larceny,” Daily National Intelligencer, November 2, 1869, p. 4; “Items,” Daily National Intelligencer, December 24, 1869, p. 2; “Police Items,” Daily National Intelligencer, December 11, 1869, p. 2; “Police Items,” Daily National Intelligencer, December 14, 1869, p. 2. On the climate of race relations in the District at this time, see Masur, “Reconstructing,” pp. 125-29; see also Masur, Example for All the Land, p. 123.
31 Evening Critic, July 20, 1881, p. 2; Bryan, History of National Capital, p. 558.
32 Green, Secret City, p. 94.
33 James H. Whyte, The Uncivil War: Washington During Reconstruction, 1865-1878 (New York: Twayne, 1958), p. 128.
34 Tindall, “Sketch of Shephe
rd,” pp. 54-55.
35 Ibid., p. 55; Affairs in the District of Columbia, H. Rep. 42-72 (1872), pp. 176, 184.
36 Whyte, Uncivil War, pp. 111-12.
37 “District Matters,” New National Era, June 22, 1871, p. 3. “The colored Justice of the Peace, O.S.B. Wall, is somewhat better to-day, and his surgeons have slight hopes of his final recovery,” reported “Jottings About Town,” Critic, June 20, 1871, p. 3. See also “Capt. O.S.B. Wall,” New National Era, June 29, 1871, p. 3; “By Telegraph: Domestic News,” Leavenworth Bulletin, July 1, 1871, p. 1; “Jottings About Town,” Critic, August 25, 1871, p. 3.
38 Affairs in the District of Columbia, H. Rep. 42-72 (1872), pp. 93-94.
39 Ibid., pp. 460-61, 474.
40 Ibid., pp. 462, 466.
41 Ibid., pp. 460, 461, 474.
42 Ibid., p. 474.
43 See generally Matthew Pinsker, Lincoln’s Sanctuary: Abraham Lincoln and the Soldiers’ Home (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 25, 63, 65-66.
44 Affairs in the District of Columbia, H. Rep. 42-72 (1872), p. 474.
45 Ibid., p. 467.
CHAPTER ELEVEN: SPENCER: JORDAN GAP, JOHNSON COUNTY, KENTUCKY, 1870S
1 This account is drawn primarily from John David Preston’s deposition testimony that he played poker with Jordan Spencer, in Spencer v. Looney (Va. 1912), No. 2012, Virginia State Law Library, Richmond, trial transcript, pp. 115-16; Johnson County historian Edward Hazelett’s account of a regular game of poker in the Jordan Gap after the Civil War, Edward Hazelett, interview by author, August 29, 2005, Paintsville, Ky.; and other accounts in court testimony and interviews of Jordan Spencer’s habits and personality.
2 Spencer v. Looney, trial transcript, pp. 115-16; 1880 U.S. Census, Johnson County, Ky.; Magoffin County Historical Society, The Conley/Connelley Clan of Eastern Kentucky: The Descendants of Captain Henry Connelly and Related Conley Families (Saylersville, Ky.: Magoffin County Historical Society, 1984), pp. 326-27.
3 Spencer v. Looney, trial transcript, p. 80; Harry K. Schwarzweller et al., Mountain Families in Transition: A Case Study of Appalachian Migration (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1971), pp. 26-27; 1880 U.S. Census, Johnson County, Ky.
4 See John David Preston, The Civil War in the Big Sandy Valley of Kentucky, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Gateway Press, 2008), pp. 289-90, 338, 351.
5 Papers in the Case of Samuel McKee Against John D. Young, Ninth Congressional District of Kentucky, H. Misc. Doc. No. 40-13 (1868), pp. 80-81; Preston, Civil War in Big Sandy Valley, pp. 243, 246-47; Carolyn Clay Turner and Carolyn Hay Traum, John C. C. Mayo: Cumberland Capitalist (Pikeville, Ky.: Pikeville College Press, 1983), pp. 9-10.
6 Preston, Civil War in Big Sandy Valley, pp. 232, 239, 288; see also Gordon B. McKinney, Southern Mountain Republicans, 1865-1900: Politics and the Appalachian Community (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), pp. 52-55; and Edward R. Hazelett’s account in Magoffin County Historical Society, Conley/Connelley Clan, pp. 326-27.
7 Robert C. Schenck, Draw: Rules for Playing Poker (Brooklyn, N.Y., 1880), p. 6.
8 J. K. Wells, A Short History of Paintsville and Johnson County (Paintsville Herald for the Johnson County Historical Society, 1962), p. 22. “I went up the Sandy river into Johnson county that day, and laid that night in a house. It was warm—in July. I came to Paintsville, in Johnson county, that day. For the first time I saw a derrick. They were drilling for oil there”: George W. Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds (Hazel Green, Ky.: Spencer Cooper, 1912), p. 74. See also C. Mitchel Hall, Johnson County: The Heart of Eastern Kentucky (self-published, 1928), pp. 357-58, 361.
9 This is the origin of the phrase “passing the buck.” Dictionary of American Regional English, ed. Frederic G. Cassidy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 1:407.
10 Spencer v. Looney, trial transcript, p. 116.
11 Ibid. “A ‘buck nigger’ is a term often vulgarly applied to a negro man ... During the discussion preceding the Presidential election, in 1860, one argument against the Republican ticket was, ‘Should you like to have your sister marry a big buck nigger?’ ”: Bartlett’s Dictionary of Americanisms, 4th ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1877), p. 71.
12 Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (1988; reprint, New York: Perennial Classics, 2002), pp. 37-38; Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Knopf, 1979), pp. 261-67, 274-82, 517; E. Merton Coulter, The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1926), pp. 360-61.
13 Marion B. Lucas, A History of Blacks in Kentucky (Frankfort: Kentucky Historical Society, 1992), pp. 1:292-93; Bowlin v. Commonwealth, 65 Ky. 5 (1867). On violence and rigid racial ideology in the post-Civil War South, see generally Litwack, Been in the Storm.
14 Lucas, Blacks in Kentucky, pp. 187-88; see also George C. Wright, Racial Violence in Kentucky, 1865-1940: Lynchings, Mob Rule, and “Legal Lynchings” (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996); 1865-66 Laws, Public Statutes of the State of Tennessee Since the Year 1858, 2nd ed. (1872), ch. 40, sec. 1, p. 177; Ariela J. Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 116; 1870 U.S. Census, Johnson County, Ky.; 1880 U.S. Census, Johnson County.
15 John W. Keller, The Game of Draw Poker (New York: Frederick Stokes & Brother, 1889), p. 56. Keller warns of the player who “loses all patience, becomes enraged at the dire misfortune that so steadily besets him, strives to change affairs by bluffing and playing recklessly otherwise, and finally rushes on headlong to destruction. Cultivate patience if you would succeed at Poker.”
16 “He claimed he strayed from Clay County,” Horn said: Spencer v. Looney, trial transcript, p. 64.
17 Manuel Ray Spencer, who is related to Davis, has compiled extensive information about Davis’s criminal record and reputation, based on criminal court records in Clay County, Kentucky, and local newspaper accounts. These materials are on file with the author.
18 See generally Altina L. Waller, Feud: Hatfields, McCoys, and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Noble, Behold He Cometh.
19 Hambleton Tapp and James C. Klotter, Kentucky: Decades of Discord, 1865-1900 (Frankfort: Kentucky Historical Society, 1977), p. 400. One cabin was full of “guns and guns—the deadly Winchesters and shotguns of the vendetta—on the wall and standing in the corners”: Dwight B. Billings and Kathleen M. Blee, The Road to Poverty: The Making of Wealth and Hardship in Appalachia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 282-85. See also John Ed Pearce, Days of Darkness: The Feuds of Eastern Kentucky (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994), pp. 32-40.
20 Manuel Ray Spencer materials. Letcher Davis was involved in a 1905 shoot-out when “Hades broke loose in Wolfe County”: Interior Journal (Stanford, Ky.), June 9, 1905, p. 2. Years earlier, Davis brawled in the aftermath of a school trustee election: see Hazel Green (Ky.) Herald, June 9, 1886, p. 3.
21 Manuel Ray Spencer materials.
22 Spencer v. Looney, trial transcript, p. 70.
23 Ibid., p. 65. “Some things about the relations between the races had been established quickly after emancipation. Schools, poor houses, orphanages, and hospitals, founded to help people who had once been slaves, were usually separated by race at their inception”: see Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 136. “Even the Radical legislatures in which blacks played a prominent role made no concerted effort to force integration on unwilling and resisting whites, especially in the public schools; constitutional or legislative provisions mandating integration were almost impossible to enforce”: see Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Knopf, 1998), pp. 229-30.
24 Spencer v. Looney, trial transcript, p. 63.
25 William Roscoe Thomas, Life Among the Hills an
d Mountains of Kentucky (Louisa, Ky.: Big Sandy Valley Historical Society, 1926, 1983), p. 165; Hall, Johnson County, pp. 131-32, 135.
26 Wilma A. Dunaway, Women, Work, and Family in the Antebellum Mountain South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 204; Jesse Stuart, Men of the Mountains (New York: Dutton, 1941), pp. 106-7; James Watt Raine, The Land of Saddle-Bags (1924; reprint, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), p. 83; Thomas, Life Among Hills, pp. 165-66; Hall, Johnson County.
27 Spencer v. Looney, trial transcript, p. 151.
28 Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the 19th-Century South (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 147, 174; George C. Wright, “By the Book: The Legal Execution of Kentucky Blacks,” in Under Sentence of Death, ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), p. 250. Wright notes that while there were 117 documented lynchings, many bodies were buried or burned. He distinguishes these numbers from “legal lynchings,” in which death sentences were foregone conclusions for blacks tried for serious crimes, regardless of the strength of the evidence against them (p. 251).
29 Hodes, White Women, Black Men, p. 149.
30 1880 U.S. Census, Johnson County, Ky.; Spencer v. Looney, trial transcript, p. 151.
31 1880 U.S. Census, Johnson County.
32 Schwarzweller, in Mountain Families, describes the power of “family and kin” in the Beech Creek neighborhood of Clay County (pp. 43-44). On hog killing in eastern Kentucky as an annual winter rite, see Lynwood Montell, “Hog-Killing in the Kentucky Hill Country: The Initial Phases,” Kentucky Folklore Record 18 (1972), pp. 61-67.
CHAPTER TWELVE: GIBSON: WASHINGTON, D.C., 1878
1 Benjamin P. Thomas and Harold M. Hyman, Stanton: The Life and Times of Lincoln’s Secretary of War (New York: Knopf, 1962), p. 392; Frank A. Flower, Edwin McMasters Stanton: The Autocrat of Rebellion, Emancipation, and Reconstruction (Akron, Ohio: Saalfield, 1905), p. 79.
The Invisible Line Page 44