Freedmen, Crime and the Courts in the Summer of 1866

Jackson County during the Reconstruction era
The railroad was merely projected at that time.

Continuing with my discussion of the Reconstruction era in Jackson County, the summer of 1866 was a time of growing discontent among the people of all classes.
The old establishment, still embittered from the war, reacted with resentment to the arbitrary decisions of Bureau Agent Charles M. Hamilton, particularly his invalidation of all labor contracts in the county. In striking down all existing contracts, Hamilton overruled not just the local courts, but the legislature and governor of Florida. Then by requiring both landowners and freedmen to pay him for document stamps he further infuriated them and speculation grew that he was lining his pockets at the expense of the people.

The middle class and poor whites were desperate. Hard currency had all but disappeared and the number of civil suits filed in the local court soared. Financing for agriculture and small business had dried up. Many of the women of this class were war widows and many of the surviving men had come home from the war either sick or disabled or both. The terrifying spectre of hunger stalked across the land.


Col W.D. Barnes
19th century lawyer

Among the freedmen, there was a mixture of sentiments. Some had continued to believe they would be given land by the government. They had been warned against these beliefs by the governor himself, but the dream had continued. As a result, many had not entered into labor contracts and now were hungry and destitute. Others wanted nothing to do with further labor and retreated into the pine woods where they established homes for themselves and barely survived.

These tensions, along with the increasingly heavy hand of the Federal government and the all but total inability to understand what the future might hold, led to increasing violence. The local courts, then still operating as they had during and before the war, tried to deal with the situation.

Anderson Baker (left)
A freedman still living in Jackson County in the 1900s

On June 19th, a freedman named Philip Boggs assaulted Mary J. Coley with "force & arms." Initially charged with Assault & Battery, he entered a guilty plea to simple assault and was fined $100. He was found carrying a pistol and pocket knife at the time of his arrest and additionally was charged with secretly carrying weapons. He entered a guilty plea to those crimes as well and was sentenced to spend one hour in the pillory.

Despite the fact that he entered guilty pleas to both crimes, Boggs would be pardoned by the state's Reconstruction governor the next year.

The most brutal crime of the summer, however, came on July 8th.

Two young girls were walking along a road not far from where today's town of Cottondale stands. The oldest was 14 and the youngest was nine. Two freedmen named Henderson White and Lewis White approached from the other direction.

Dr. Theophilus West
Jury member during Reconstruction

According to what the girls told their father when they finally made it home, the two men grabbed the older of the two and dragged her off the road into an adjacent field. Then they took turns raping her as the younger girl watched in fear nearby. By the time the girls made it home, the 9 year old was badly frightened and the 14 year old was badly injured.

Their father went immediately to the proper authorities and swore out a complaint against Henderson and Lewis White. Before they could be arrested, however, Henderson was accused of raping another girl, this one 16 years of age.

The two eventually did stand trial and Henderson White was convicted. On October 17th he was sentenced to hang for his crimes, but the governor intervened and gave him a temporary reprieve.

(Note: I will take a closer look at the case against Henderson and Lewis White in my next post).

Many claims have been made about how freedmen were treated while the courts were still in the hands of the local people. Some have asserted that the former slaves could not obtain justice. A case that developed in July of 1866 provides interesting perspective on the matter.

Benjamin Harrison Neel
Justice of the Peace, 1866

A freedmen identified only as "Robin" was arrested on a warrant issued by Benjamin Harrison Neel, a Justice of the Peace in eastern Jackson County. The alleged crime involved default of bail in another case and Sheriff W.H. Kimbell placed Robin in the Jackson County Jail. On August 11th, however, the freedman petitioned Circuit Judge Allen H. Bush for a writ of habeas corpus.

A former member of the Marianna Home Guard, Judge Bush had been taken prisoner during the Battle of Marianna and carried away to a prison camp in Elmira, New York. He was part of the Confederate leadership of Jackson County and returned from Elmira particularly embittered against Northerners and the North in general.

Robin's petition was prepared and witnessed by Justice of the Peace Jno. F. Hughes:

The petition of Robin a freedman respectfully showith that your petitioner is confined by W.H. Kimbell unjustly (as he apprehends) in the jail of the County of Jackson in the State of Florida for some criminal or supposed criminal matter, which confinement is illegal & wrong.

Judge Bush agreed and on August 14th ruled that "said Robin [is] retained without any charge against him." The freedman was ordered to be released without delay.

The case is interesting in that it proves that freedmen such as Robin could receive fair treatment and beneficial rulings in the courts of Jackson County, where the sitting circuit judge was widely recognized for his pro-Confederate sympathies.

Emanuel Fortune
Freedman and State Representative from Jackson County

This ability by the freedmen to obtain justice in the local courts was demonstrated by other cases that summer. A freedman named William Beedy, for example, was indicted on charges of Assault & Battery and Carrying Secret Arms. Two of the men sitting on the grand jury that returned the indictment against him were not citizens of Jackson County and the case against Beedy was dismissed.

Boxes of newly discovered case files from the Reconstruction era also show that African American women began receiving justice through the courts during the time when the judicial system in Jackson County was still under local control. For the first time ever, cases were made against suspects on charges of assault, battery, rape and theft in which the victims were women who had once been held in slavery.

Freedmen were not yet allowed to serve on juries, but their testimony regularly was heard in court. In addition, the newly discovered records show that both judges and juries tried to be fair and honorable in their application of the law. Freedman convicted of Assault & Battery, for example, generally were fined between $50 and $100. White men convicted of Assault & Battery were fined the same. There were occasional exceptions, but fines, fees and jail terms were remarkably consistent.

The newly discovered files show that the courts of Jackson County made remarkable progress in the short time that former Confederates were in control during the first two years after the end of the War Between the States. A dark cloud, however, was looming on the horizon.

In my next post, I'll discuss in more detail the case that led to the hanging of Henderson White.

The First Signs of Violence in the Jackson County Reconstruction War

Marianna before 1900

There had been occasional incidents of violence in Jackson County following the 1865 end of the War Between the States, but none really rose to the level of "outbreak." In early 1866, however, things began to change.

The spark, as was noted in my last post, was the arrival of Charles M. Hamilton in the county (see His name that sat on him was Death...). A Union military officer, Hamilton was sent to Marianna as the agent of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, or as it was commonly called, "The Bureau."

Charles M. Hamilton
Library of Congress

Hamilton's decision to vacate all of the labor contracts reached between local farmers and the former slaves or Freedmen living in the county and the mandate that all such agreements be approved by him was in violation of Florida law and created tension in Jackson County. That tension soon led to problems.

On February 22, 1866, for example, James and Eldridge Bates (father and son) became involved in a confrontation with a freed woman named Elizabeth Dozier. The said that she had used abusive language to James Bates' wife and when they told her to leave their property, she refused. This led to a violent confrontation and both men were charged with Assault and Battery.

Jackson County had no courthouse at the time. The most recent one had burned in January of 1865 when fire swept through downtown Marianna, so local stores doubled as offices and courtrooms. In one of these, separate trials were held for the two Bates men.

One of the juries, uniquely, included Samuel Fleishman, a local merchant and Unionist who had left Jackson County during the recent war. He had returned after the conflict ended and resumed his place in the local business community. He later would lose his life in the Jackson County Reconstruction War, but in early 1866 was accepted as just another member of the community and there is no indication of trouble of any kind between him and his neighbors.

After deliberating, the juries in both cases found the men not guilty.

During the confrontation at the Bates farm, a freedman named John Dozier had gone to the assistance of Elizabeth Dozier. Eldridge Bates faced an additional charge of Assault and Battery for attacking him. Based on the testimony of a witness named Bob Blackshear, also a freedman, Eldridge was found guilty and was fined $75, a fairly standard fine in assault and battery cases of the time.

The trial proved several points that have been questioned by some writers. First, it showed that in 1866, when the judicial system was still in the hands of local residents, the freed people of Jackson County could get justice in the courts. The newly discovered records of the Eldridge Bates trial also show that former slaves were accepted as witnesses in court and that their words were given due consideration by local juries.

In the case involving Elizabeth Dozier, a not guilty verdict was returned, but in the case involving John Dozier, the testimony provided by Blackshear was considered conclusive and Eldridge Bates was found guilty.

While the Bates case was making its way through the local courts, a more direct attack on the occupation authorities themselves took place. Jack Myrick and James Finlayson became involved in a physical altercation with a soldier from the 7th U.S. Infantry.

The regiment then maintained a small garrison in Marianna to enforce the edicts of Bureau agent Charles Hamilton and the sight of blue-coated soldiers walking the streets was a difficult one for some of the former Confederates, particularly those who had suffered greatly during the war.

St. Luke's Episcopal Church
This structure replaced the one burned during the Battle of Marianna but
was of similar design and construction.

Jack Myrick (John T. Myrick, Jr.) was one of those who had suffered enormously at the hands of Union soldiers during the war. On September 27, 1864, he had turned out with the local home guard to fight in the Battle of Marianna. Jack, his brother Littleton and their friend Woody Nickels all had taken up stations in St. Luke's Episcopal Church during the battle. When Federal troops set fire to the structure to dislodge the Confederates inside, they tried to come out and surrender.

Of the three, only Jack survived. Littleton Myrick was shot down in the church door and allowed to fall back into the flames and burned to death. Woody made it out, but was shot by a Union soldier. As he tried to crawl away from the intense heat of the burning church, he was killed when a Union soldier bashed in his head with a musket butt. Jack nearly suffered the same fate, but was taken prisoner instead.

Even though he was only 15 years old, he was sent north to spend a brutal winter in the icy hell of the Elmira Prison Camp in Elmira, New York. Elmira was a deadly place and more than half of the Marianna prisoners sent there never came back. Those who did survive had suffered from a winter of disease, cold, malnutrition and abuse.

Jack Myrick came home a year older and a lifetime more embittered. With no prospects for any kind of future, he began to associate with a group of friends, most of whom were of the same age: Billy Coker, Pete Alderman, James Finlayson and others.

Capt. Richard Comba
7th U.S. Infantry

Captain Richard Comba, the officer in charge of the detachment of soldiers at Marianna, took Jack and James into custody following their alleged attack on the soldier from his unit. He wanted both tried before a military tribunal, but higher ranking officers decided instead to let the local courts deal with the two. They remained in the system for some time, but ultimately never were brought to trial.

Other incidents took place as well. The number of assault and battery cases in the county started to grow, a local school teacher was threatened, but the real violence was yet to come.

I will continue to post on Jackson County's Reconstruction War over coming weeks, so be sure to check back often.

"...His name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him."

Charles M. Hamilton

And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth. - Revelation 6:8.

The Reconstruction era in Jackson County took an ominous turn early in 1866 when a Union officer named Charles M. Hamilton arrived in Marianna. To quote the verse from the Book of Revelation, "Hell followed with him."

Hamilton came to Marianna to head up the local office of the Bureau of Freedmen, Refugees and Abandoned Lands (commonly called the Freedman's Bureau). This was the organization tasked by the U.S. Government with overseeing the transition of the former slaves into their new roles as citizens of the country. In most areas of the South, the Bureau's work without violence. In Jackson County, that would not be the case and Hamilton himself was the cause of much of what followed.

When he first arrived in Jackson County, Hamilton was surprised to find that the local whites were "pretty well disposed to the freedmen" and that no significant problems were taking place. This was because the people of both races, after hearing from the governor the previous fall, had moved forward with making arrangements to get the county's farms back into operation.

Gov. William Marvin

Governor William Marvin, the appointed military governor of Florida, had addressed public meetings in Marianna on September 16 and 17, 1865, explaining to the freed people what it meant to be free:
 

…You must be contented with having your freedom, and what else you have you will have to get by work. And when you shall have made it by hard work, you will know how many days of hard toll it cause you to get it, and then you will rightly value it, and take care of it. You now are at liberty to go to work for yourselves; you have none other to work for. You belong now to no man; you have ceased to be property; you never will be sold again; and if you will struggle hard and do right, live as good men and women, and you will prosper, if not, you will suffer.- Gov. William Marvin, September 17, 1865.

The governor had urged all of the county's citizens, both white and white, to cooperate and do what they could to begin producing badly needed food as quickly as possible. And the citizens had responded. Per the governor's instructions, they entered into hundreds of contracts.

These contracts basically were sharecropping agreements. Few of Jackson County's landowners had any real money left after the war, so they offered a share of the crop plus housing, food and other supplies to the freedmen in exchange for them helping to return the farms to production. Surviving examples of these contracts show that they were well done and that the landowners tried to be fair.

Charles M. Hamilton

When Charles Hamilton arrived in early 1866, before even the first post-war crop could be planted, he immediately and illegally invalidated these contracts.

Under Florida law, the labor contracts were under the regulation of the county judge and nothing in either state or federal law gave the Freedman's Bureau any control over existing agreements. Hamilton, however, overruled the law and assumed responsibility for the contracts himself.

Not only did he require that all agreements be made using a printed form he prepared himself, he also required that both landowners and freedmen pay him fees for stamps to be placed on the documents. It was the first step in an assumption of power by the Bureau that far surpassed anything attempted anywhere else in Florida.

The consolidation of power by Hamilton and the Bureau was the spark that soon led to the first outbreaks of violence in Jackson County. The agent's arrival in Marianna, in fact, reasonably could be called the first "shot" in Jackson County's Reconstruction War.

This was the opinion of John Wallace, himself a freedman, who had served in the Second U.S. Colored Troops and fought on the Union side at the Battle of Natural Bridge during the Civil War. He went on to become a teacher and legislator in Florida after the war and summed up his opinion of the cause of the violence in Jackson County as follows:

...The two races became arrayed against each other in deadly hostility, which led to frequent occurrences of violence and bloodshed. This state of things was not due to the enmity of the whites to the blacks, nor their opposition to the new law enfranchising the latter - though they were opposed to it, of course - nor was it due to any natural bad temper or hatred of the whites on the part of the colored people, for under ordinary circumstances there are no more peaceable people in the world than the inhabitants of Jackson County, of both colors, and they would have passed through the ordeal of reconstruction without a jar or disturbance, had it not been for the evil influence of the very men who were delegated to preserve peace, to administer justice, and to promote good fellowship and kindly relations between the freedmen and their former owners. - John Wallace, Freedman and State Legislator.

It did not take long after Hamilton's arrival for things to begin to change in Jackson County.  I'll continue to post on the Reconstruction War in coming days and weeks, so be sure to check back often. 

 

Reconstruction #2 - Sanders and his Raiders

Battle of Newton Monument

This is the second part of a continuing series on the Reconstruction War in Jackson County, Florida. To read part one first, please visit:

While the planned attack on Campbellton by Pittman's raiders was turned back, Jackson County's problems with such groups were far from over. In fact, a second such group took up a position in the swamps of Forks of the Creek between Campbellton and the modern town of Malone.

The outlaws were led by Joseph Sanders, a lieutenant in the First Florida Cavalry (U.S.) who had gone out on a minor raid and then failed to return to Pensacola as ordered. Before the end of the war he and his men attempted a raid on Newton in Dale County, Alabama, but were driven off in a bloody repulse remembered today as the Battle of Newton. Sanders by then was facing an arrest order from General Asboth and finally decided to return to headquarters. He was then dismissed from the army for the "good of the service."

Now out of the military, he came back to Jackson County, raised a party of raiders and once again took up a position in the swamps of the Forks of the Creek, from which he raided homes, farms and communities:

…Sanders, it will be recollected, is an old deserter, and commanded a large squad of “Bush-whackers,” and has now a considerable number of thieves, cut-throats and robbers following him, who commit all kinds of depredations. Where are the authorities, that the fiend of hell isn’t taken up and dealt with? No such a consummate scoundrel should longer be allowed to breathe the balmy air of Florida, or “drink of the waters thereof.”

Major Nathan Cutler

The truth was that the people of Jackson County really had no one other than themselves to depend on in dealing with such outlaws. Federal troops did finally reach Marianna in the early summer of 1865, but they were few in number and rarely seemed to have ventured outside of Marianna. Among the commanders of these units was Major Nathan Cutler, the now 21-year-old Harvard educated lawyer who had been seriously wounded at the Battle of Marianna on September 27, 1864. He had remained under medical care at the home of Mayor Thomas M. White for months after his wounding and was generally held in high regard by the people of the community. Cutler, however, could do little more than advise them on what course of action he thought the U.S. Government might take regarding them. Even he did not know for sure.

Cutler did sign off on pardon applications for some of the local men, among them Colonel James F. McClellan, and advised both freedmen and whites to maintain the peace as well as possible. All the local people could do was continue to wait and hope for the best.

 

It was not until June 25, 1865, that the War Department finally began to implement a plan for the military governance of the former Confederate states. Major General J.G. Foster, a well-known pre-war resident of Florida, was named to the command of the state on that day. He was directed to establish his headquarters in Tallahassee.

Marianna in the late 1800s

In Marianna, meanwhile, a meeting convened to discuss what might be done to restore Florida’s allegiance to the Union as quickly as possible. What took place at this meeting and who was involved remains a mystery. So far as is known, no delegates were appointed to meet with Federal authorities on the topic. A newspaper report on the session did not that corn crops were abundant in Jackson County, but that not much cotton was being grown.

It took until August 7^th for General Foster to take up his command in Tallahassee and begin the process of organizing affairs in Florida. He issued orders from the capital city on that date assigning General Asboth to the command of the part of the state that included Jackson County:

…The District of West Florida to be commanded by Brig. Gen. A. Asboth, U.S.V., Headquarters at Barrancas; to include all that part of Florida lying West of the Chattahoochie River, excepting ten (10) miles around Apalachicola. The troops in this District will constitute the 31 Separate Brigade.

It was now becoming clear that military law would be the order of the day, at least for the foreseeable future. For the time being county officials continued to see to their responsibilities as well as they could, but they had no idea whether their actions were legal or, in fact, whether they even still held their posts.

I will continue to post on the Reconstruction War over coming days, so be sure to check back regularly.