32 Humphreys to Gibson, November 28, 1892.
33 “Gen. Gibson’s Will,” Daily Picayune, April 5, 1893, p. 3.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid. See also McBride, Gibson of Louisiana, p. 256.
36 “Senator Gibson’s Condition Unchanged,” Wilkes-Barre Times, December 7, 1892, p. 2; Humphreys to Gibson, December 13, 1892; “Randall Lee Gibson,” Daily Picayune, December 16, 1892, p. 1.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: WALL: WASHINGTON, D.C., 1890-91
1 See, e.g., “Life at Washington,” New York Freeman, March 20, 1886; “Ex-Liberian Minister Smythe,” New York Freeman, February 13, 1886; “The National Capital,” New York Freeman, January 30, 1886; “The National Capital,” New York Globe, September 13, 1884; and “The National Capital,” New York Globe, October 20, 1883. See also “The National Capital,” New York Freeman, February 7, 1885; Washington Bee, January 31, 1885, p. 3 (Richard Greener and Robert Terrell blackballed from the District’s Harvard Club); and Willard B. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880-1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 163-64 passim.
2 “The National Capital,” New York Globe, January 12, 1884, p. 1; “Colored Men Engaged in the Profession of the Law,” Daily Evening Bulletin (San Francisco), June 13, 1885, p. 4; Jane Dailey, Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Post-Emancipation Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), p. 158; John Mercer Langston, From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capitol (Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing Co., 1894), pp. 495-503.
3 See, e.g., “Mr. Fortune in the South,” New York Freeman, October 3, 1885; “Mr. Douglass’ Great Speech,” New York Freeman, May 2, 1885; and “A White Wife,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat , January 26, 1884, p. 3.
4 See, e.g., “Mr. Douglass’ Great Speech,” New York Freeman, May 2, 1885.
5 “The National Capital,” New York Globe, January 12, 1884, p. 1.
6 “The National Capital,” New York Freeman, February 7, 1885; “The National Capital,” New York Globe, January 12, 1884, p. 1. The conversation with Susan B. Anthony was likely animated. Among the guests at the party was O.S.B. Wall’s sister Sara Fidler, an outspoken opponent of women’s suffrage, “claiming that woman was not made for the rough conditions of life, in political or professional efforts and struggles, or hard, severe, straining physical labors, as evidenced in her peculiar mental conformation and endowments, and her delicate, unique, physical organism.” John Mercer Langston, “A Representative Woman: Mrs. Sara K. Fidler,” A.M.E. Church Review, July 1887, pp. 461, 471-72. On Henry Wall’s visit, see Anne Wall Thomas, The Walls of Walltown (1969; reprint by author, 2007), p. 33; Thomas quotes a letter from Charles N. Dean that is now among the Dean Papers.
7 Amanda A. Wall to O. O. Howard, August 13, 1890, Howard Papers.
8 “A Deserved Compliment,” Washington Critic, May 16, 1888, p. 1; “Judge Snell Denounces Impudent Questions by Counsel,” Evening Critic, January 13, 1885, p. 4; “No Hearsay Evidence for Snell,” Evening Critic, June 28, 1884, p. 1.
9 “Defending His Reputation,” Washington Post, June 10, 1888, p. 8.
10 “Christmas in Court,” Washington Post, December 26, 1884, p. 4; “Not Much of an Imbecile,” Washington Post, September 29, 1885, p. 4; “A Sensational Story Denied,” Washington Critic, October 17, 1885, p. 4; “An Unfounded Story,” Washington Critic, December 2, 1885, p. 4; and “Bits of Local News,” Washington Post, December 3, 1885, p. 4. Wall’s letter of recommendation survives in Benjamin Rhodes’s personnel file, Record Group 351, Personnel Case Files, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
11 Constance McLaughlin Green, The Secret City: A History of Race Relations in the Nation’s Capital (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 131; Affidavit of A. C. Richards, In re: Estate of O.S.B. Wall, No. 4523 (1891), Washingtoniana Collection; “A Disgusting Exhibition,” Evening Critic, September 2, 1884, p. 1.
12 “A Disgusting Exhibition,” Evening Critic, September 2, 1884, p. 1.
13 “Mr. Douglass’ Great Speech,” New York Freeman, May 2, 1885, p. 3.
14 Ibid.
15 “A Fatal Street Brawl,” Washington Post, March 5, 1884, p. 1.
16 “The National Capital,” New York Globe, March 15, 1884. “On cross-examination Captain Wall admitted doing all that he could to get Langston out of the country, and keeping him there until his father reached home”: “Frank Langston’s Defense,” Evening Critic, May 31, 1884, p. 2. See also “National Capital,” New York Globe, May 10, 1884; “Frank Langston Here,” Evening Critic, May 5, 1884, p. 1; “Langston Acquitted,” Washington Post, June 4, 1884, p. 3; “Ex-Minister Langston’s Son,” Washington Post, April 5, 1887, p. 1; “Frank M. Langston at Liberty,” Washington Post, December 30, 1891, p. 1; O.S.B. Wall to John Mercer Langston, April 12, 1887, box 1, folder 7, Langston Papers.
17 Judge’s notes and testimony of William Colbert, District of Columbia v. Stephen R. Wall, Crim. Case #17014 (1888), Record Group 21, Records of the District Courts of the United States, District of Columbia, Criminal Case Files, 1863-1946, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
18 Ibid., p. 9; “More Liquor Cases Tried,” Washington Post, February 9, 1888, p. 3; “More Barroom Licenses,” Washington Post, November 14, 1888, p. 8; “War on Gambling Dens,” Washington Post, August 27, 1890, p. 2; and “A Blow at Poker Clubs,” Washington Post, August 24, 1890, p. 2.
19 “The Trustees Feel Bold,” Washington Post, December 15, 1886, p. 2; “Teachers for Next Year,” Washington Post, June 25, 1884, p. 2; “Amateur Actors on the Stage,” Washington Post, June 4, 1889, p. 4; “Graduates of Martyn College,” Washington Post, June 5, 1889, p. 7; classified advertisement, Washington Post, June 16, 1889, p. 2 (“Miss Bel Irene Wall will appear in Junior Excelsior’s Ovation, June 19, at the Metropolitan Church”); Edmund Shaftesbury, Lessons in the Mechanics of Personal Magnetism (Washington, D.C.: Martyn College Press, 1888), title page; and classified advertisement, Washington Post, March 5, 1889, p. 15.
20 “Unprofessional Conduct,” Washington Critic, June 22, 1886, p. 4; “A Falling Out,” Washington Critic, April 8, 1889, p. 1; William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (1991), p. 365; “Lawyers at Fisticuffs,” Washington Critic, March 15, 1887, p. 4; and “Two Colored Lawyers Come to Blows,” Washington Post, March 16, 1887, p. 3.
21 O.S.B. Wall to John Mercer Langston, April 4, 1887, and March 8, 1887, both in box 1, folder 7, Langston Papers.
22 “Stricken With Paralysis,” Washington Post, April 13, 1890, p. 1.
23 Ibid.; “The Weather,” Washington Post, April 12, 1890, p. 1; Ronald M. Johnson, “From Romantic Suburb to Racial Enclave: LeDroit Park, Washington, D.C., 1880-1920,” Phylon 45 (1984), pp. 264, 265.
24 William Tindall, “Homes of the Local Government,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society 3 (1900), pp. 279, 295. According to Tindall, the courthouse had previously been used as a church where “Daniel Webster attended divine worship when he wasn’t worshipping the Constitution or himself.”
25 “Stricken with Paralysis,” Washington Post, April 13, 1890, p. 1.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid.
28 Amanda A. Wall to O. O. Howard, August 13, 1890, Howard Papers.
29 Ibid.; O. O. Howard to William Windom, August 15, 1890, Correspondence of O. O. Howard, 1833-1912, Roll 22: June 17, 1890-December 8, 1890, pp. 290-91, Howard Papers.
30 A. A. Wall to O. O. Howard, November 7, 1890, Howard Papers; Stephen Wall Personnel File, National Archives, National Personnel Records Center, St. Louis.
31 “Capt. O.S.B. Wall,” Washington Post, April 28, 1891, p. 7.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: SPENCER: JORDAN GAP, JOHNSON COUNTY, KENTUCKY, CA. 1900
1 On ghosts in the Appalachian fog, see, e.g., Charles Edwin Price, “The Face in the Fog,” in Haints, Witches, and Boogers: Tales from Upper East Tennessee (Winston-Salem, N.C.: John F. Blair, 1992), pp. 75-77.
2 C. Mitchel Hall, Johnson County: Heart of Eastern Kentucky (self-published, 1928
), pp. 381-82; James C. Hower, “Uncertain and Treacherous: The Cannel Coal Industry in Kentucky,” Natural Resources Research 4 (1995), pp. 310, 318.
3 Harry M. Caudill, Theirs Be the Power: The Moguls of Eastern Kentucky (Urbana- Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1983), pp. 71-72; Carolyn Clay Turner and Carolyn Hay Traum, John C. C. Mayo: Cumberland Capitalist (Pikeville, Ky.: Pikeville College Press, 1983), pp. 10-12; Ronald D. Eller, Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880-1930 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982), pp. 65-85, 142, and maps 2, 3, 4, 5, 8.
4 Hall, Johnson County, p. 135; Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of a New South: Life After Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 7, 12-13, 22.
5 Ayers, Promise of New South; Barbara Young Welke, Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law, and the Railroad Revolution, 1865-1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 249-79.
6 See Marion B. Lucas, A History of Blacks in Kentucky (Frankfort: Kentucky Historical Society, 1992), pp. 1:295-98, 384n9; Welke, Recasting American Liberty, pp. 296-97; Kenneth W. Mack, “Law, Society, Identity, and the Making of the Jim Crow South: Travel and Segregation on Tennessee Railroads, 1875-1905,” Law and Social Inquiry 24 (1999), pp. 377, 401; Pauli Murray, comp., States’ Laws on Race and Color (1951; reprint, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), p. 169; Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896); Leon Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Knopf, 1998), pp. 233, 246.
7 See Welke, Recasting American Liberty, pp. 357-58; Daniel J. Sharfstein, “The Secret History of Race in the United States,” Yale Law Journal 112 (2003), pp. 1473, 1498-501; Southern Railway Co. v. Thurman, 90 S.W. 240, 241 (Ky. 1906).
8 Lowell Ed Spencer, interview by author, August 29, 2005, Paintsville, Ky.
9 Ibid.; Tommy Ratliff, interview by author, October 25, 2005, Paintsville, Ky.; Thomas Whitehead, Virginia: A Hand-Book (1893), p. 90.
10 Spencer interview.
11 1900 U.S. Census, Johnson County, Ky.; James S. Brown, Beech Creek: A Study of a Kentucky Mountain Neighborhood (1950; reprint, Berea, Ky.: Berea College Press, 1988), pp. 74-75 (describing how elderly couples lived in an Appalachian hollow); Deed Book 11, p. 510, Johnson County Courthouse, Paintsville, Ky.; Deed Book 20, pp. 340-41; Deed Book 23, pp. 628-29; Deed Book 55, pp. 369-71.
12 1900 U.S. Census, Johnson County, Ky.
13 Edward R. Hazelett, interview by author, August 29, 2005, Paintsville, Ky.
14 1900 U.S. Census, Johnson County, Ky.
15 Freda Spencer Goble, interview by author, August 29, 2005, Paintsville, Ky.
16 S. Monzon et al., “Airborne Occupational Allergic Contact Dermatitis from Coal Dust,” Allergy 62 (2007), p. 1346; Anthony Cavender, Folk Medicine in Southern Appalachia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), pp. 71, 98; Henry C. Sheafer, “Hygiene of Coal-Mines,” in A Treatise on Hygiene and Public Health, ed. Albert H. Buck (New York: W. Wood, 1879), p. 2:229.
17 Miners developed “accidental tattoos” made of coal dust, typically on their shoulders and upper backs, from repeatedly scraping against tunnel walls; see O. Braun Falco et al., Dermatology , 2nd ed. (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2000), p. 1048. See also Alan Derickson, Black Lung: Anatomy of a Public Health Disaster (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), pp. 1-21.
18 Ayers, Promise of New South, p. 119; Eller, Miners, Millhands, pp. 128-29, 140.
19 Turner and Traum, John Mayo, pp. 16, 20; Hower, “Uncertain and Treacherous,” pp. 318- 19; Johnson County Deed Book 55, p. 350, Johnson County Courthouse, Paintsville, Ky.
20 Charles E. Martin, Hollybush: Folk Building and Social Change in an Appalachian Community (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), a study of a community two counties south of Johnson County, cited in Ayers, Promise of New South, p. 118.
21 Ratliff interview; Eller, Miners, Millhands, pp. 176-78; Ayers, Promise of New South, pp. 121-22; Sheafer, “Hygiene of Coal-Mines,” pp. 233-34; E. N. Clopper, “Child Labor in Coal Mines, West Virginia,” Railroad Trainman 27 (1910), pp. 103, 106; and Keith Dix, Work Relations in the Coal Industry: The Hand-Loading Era, 1880-1930 (Morgantown: West Virginia University, Institute for Labor Studies, 1977), pp. 4-12.
22 Eller, Miners, Millhands, pp. 176-78; Ayers, Promise of New South, pp. 121-22; and Dix, Work Relations, pp. 8-12.
23 Eller, Miners, Millhands, p. 178; see also Mike Yarrow, “Capitalism, Patriarchy and ‘Mens Work’: The System of Control of Production in Coal Mining,” in The Impact of Institutions in Appalachia, ed. Jim Lloyd and Anne G. Campbell (Boone, Ky.: Appalachian Consortium Press, 1986), pp. 29, 31-32; Jean Thomas, Big Sandy (New York: Henry Holt, 1940), p. 135; Sheafer, “Hygiene of Coal-Mines,” p. 232.
24 Eller, Miners, Millhands, pp. 161-62; George Korson, Coal Dust on the Fiddle: Songs and Stories of the Bituminous Industry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1943), p. 31.
25 Van Lear, the mining community at Miller’s Creek, was named after Consolidation Coal executive Van Lear Black; see Danny K. Blevins, Van Lear (Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia, 2008), p. 19. See also Eller, Miners, Millhands, p. 70. Rand Dotson, in Roanoke, Virginia, 1882- 1912: Magic City of the New South (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007), p. 4, notes that the town of Big Lick was near the Roanoke River in Roanoke County, making the name change an obvious one.
26 Eller, in Miners, Millhands, pp. 171, 182-98, describes mine personnel policies that created a “judicious mixture” of locals and outsiders, blacks and native whites and foreigners. See also Ronald L. Lewis, Black Coal Miners in America: Race, Class, and Community Conflict, 1780-1980 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987), p. 134.
27 Eller, Miners, Millhands, pp. 169-72; Lewis, Black Coal Miners, pp. 128, 143, 148; and Blevins, Van Lear, p. 87.
28 Spencer v. Looney (Va. 1912), No. 2012, Virginia State Law Library, Richmond, trial transcript, pp. 59ff; 1900 U.S. Census, Buchanan County, Va. On the necessity of horseback travel in the mountains, see Ellen Churchill Semple, “The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains: A Study in Anthropogeography,” Geographical Journal 17 (1901), pp. 588, 590-91.
29 See Turner and Traum, John Mayo, p. 17; and Semple, “Anglo-Saxons,” pp. 590-91. Jasper Spencer lived in Floyd County, just below Johnson County: 1900 U.S. Census, Floyd County, Ky.
30 See 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. 198-99. A Johnson County survey conducted in 1941 found that “small farms and poor land” were cited as frequent reasons for out-migration. Robin M. Williams and Howard W. Beers, “Attitudes Towards Rural Migration and Family Life in Johnson and Robertson Counties, 1941,” Kentucky Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin 452 (June 1943), pp. 35-36. Nevertheless, researchers in the 1940s also found that low mobility rates correlated with high fertility in Johnson County, because of “traditions of fixed residence and of strong family life.” Irving A. Spaulding and Howard W. Beers, “Mobility and Fertility Rates of Rural Families in Robertson and Johnson Counties, Kentucky, 1918-1941,” Kentucky Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin 451 (June 1943), p. 19.
31 W. G. Schwab, The Forests of Buchanan County (Charlottesville, Va., 1918), p. 9; and Alan J. Banks, “Land and Capital in Eastern Kentucky, 1890-1915,” Appalachian Journal 8 (1980), pp. 8-18, cited in Altina L. Waller, Feud: Hatfields, McCoys, and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), p. 152.
32 The wave of Hatfield-McCoy violence in the late 1880s came after years of peace between the families and had, in fact, been sparked by the insistence of local merchants and politicians on bringing Hatfields to justice for earlier crimes. Waller, Feud, pp. 195, 200-201, 233.
33 John Fox Jr., “To the Breaks of the Sandy,” Scribner’s Magazine 28 (1900), pp. 340-41.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: WALL: WASHINGTON, D.C., 1909
&n
bsp; 1 On the rural character of Brookland, see Merrill Lavine and Sarah Lightner, “Establishment of the Brookland Community, 1887-1920,” in Images of Brookland: The History and Architecture of a Washington Suburb, ed. George W. McDaniel (Washington, D.C.: George Washington University, 1979), pp. 9, 24-26.
2 Contemporaneous photographs of compositors at the Government Printing Office—the position Wall held for decades—show everyone wearing three-piece suits. See also Stephen R. Wall Personnel File, National Archives, National Personnel Records Center, St. Louis; Lavine and Lightner, “Establishment of Brookland Community,” p. 27. Regarding the neighborhood’s social status, one early resident said, “For a time we thought we were going to have a nabob neighborhood. We had about 8 families of social prominence. But they discovered their mistake about 1910 and moved elsewhere.” Ibid., p. 26.
3 See Report on Site for Government Printing Office, S. Rep. 51-2494 (1891), pp. 67, 98.
4 Daniel R. MacGilvray, “Age of Electricity,” in A Short History of GPO (1986), online at http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/fdlp/history/macgilvray.html#5.
5 Ibid.
6 “City Bulletins: Printers Must Be Neat,” Washington Post, April 23, 1909, p. 14.
7 Wall Personnel File; “Printers’ Two Camps,” Washington Post, July 17, 1905, p. 2; Public Printer Donnelly in Richmond Reformer, November 11, 1911, quoted in MacGilvray, “Age of Electricity”; see also Booker T. Washington, “The Negro and the Labor Unions” (June 1913), in The Booker T. Washington Papers, ed. Louis R. Harlan and Raymond W. Smock (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1982), p. 12:208.
8 See Daniel J. Sharfstein, “The Secret History of Race in the United States,” Yale Law Journal 112 (2003), pp. 1473, 1486, and nn62-68.
9 Fragment of a letter to the Washington Post, n.d., box 23-1, folder 8, Cooper Papers; “What It Means to Be Colored in the Capital of the United States,” Independent, January 24, 1907, p. 181. The anonymous author was Mary Church Terrell, who reprinted the piece in her 1940 autobiography, A Colored Woman in a White World (1940; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1980). See also “Color Line Drawn,” Washington Post, February 23, 1908, p. 6; “Heflin Shoots Two,” Washington Post, March 28, 1908, p. 1.
The Invisible Line Page 46