Chronology

George Laws carries the Orange magistrates' petition for a jury court to Governor Holden

With no courts open in the county after the Confederate surrender, the magistrates appointed by the provisional governor petitioned for a jury court twice a year. Laws carried the petition to Governor William W. Holden, who refused it.

People: William W. Holden

Forty or fifty masked riders pass through Hillsborough

A large body of disguised riders, perhaps forty or fifty, rode through Hillsborough a year or more before February 1871, according to Josiah Turner Jr.'s testimony before the Senate committee. Turner said he was in Raleigh at the time, heard of it afterward and had no doubt they were masked; he gave it when pressed on whether he had reason to believe the Klan existed before 1870.

Part of The congressional Ku Klux hearings, 1871 · 22 events

Klansmen whip William Husky, one of Governor Holden's detectives

Members of the Klan order whipped William Husky in Orange County, according to Josiah Turner Jr.'s testimony before the Senate committee in February 1871. Husky told Turner he was whipped for his work as one of Governor Holden's paid detectives; Turner, a Conservative opponent of Holden, called him a rogue who had confessed to stealing the year before and said he never learned how severe the whipping was.

Part of The congressional Ku Klux hearings, 1871 · 22 events

An Orange grand jury finds no bill against John A. Thompson in the Squire Alston raid

John A. Thompson of Alamance County, charged with being one of the party that burned Squire Alston's house and shot his son, was bound over by a magistrate under $1,000 bail and went before the grand jury in Orange County, where Alston swore he knew Thompson by his voice and face and that Thompson had shot at him, while a woman of the Alston household swore it was not Thompson, and no bill was found. Hillsborough constable W. G. Turrentine gave the account to the Senate committee on January 31, 1871, as the one trial of a masked man in Orange he knew of; he said none had been convicted there.

Three barns burn on one night after a Black tenant family is evicted in southwestern Orange

After William M. Jones had a Black tenant family turned out by a writ of possession, served by officer James F. Minor with Jesse W. Morrow helping, the barns of all three men, newly filled with wheat, burned within the same ten minutes one night after harvest, according to George Laws, clerk of the superior court, testifying before the Senate committee on February 15, 1871. Laws said evidence in his court showed Jeff Morrow, a Black man, had meant to have satisfaction after harvest, and that the disguised men who took two prisoners from the Hillsborough jail and hanged others acted over these burnings; constable W. G. Turrentine counted two barns, and said the one prisoner tried on the charge was acquitted. Two Alamance men who admitted White Brotherhood membership, W. S. Bradshaw and George S. Rogers, also described barns burned in one night in that neighborhood near the Alamance line, Rogers placing it in 1868, and Josiah Turner Jr. testified that the fires came just after harvest.

Part of Racial-terror lynchings in Orange County · 36 events

People: George Laws

W. G. Turrentine is elected Hillsborough Township constable on the Republican ticket

W. G. Turrentine was elected constable for two years in August 1869 on the Republican ticket, along with all but one of the township's magistrates, according to his testimony before the Senate committee on January 31, 1871. By then he believed he was the only Republican constable left in Orange County; he said he was sometimes cursed as a radical on his rounds but never molested.

Klansmen from Hillsborough ride to kill Senator T. M. Shoffner and turn back

A Klan party coming from Orange County that included Hillsborough legislator Frederick N. Strudwick and A. Hedgepeth of Hillsborough gathered at a Bradshaw home in Alamance County to kill state senator T. M. Shoffner, author of the anti-Klan militia bill. Dr. John A. Moore, sent by James E. Boyd, told them Shoffner had gone to Greensboro, and they turned back.

People: Frederick N. Strudwick

A shot through the window of Josiah Turner Jr.'s Hillsborough house narrowly misses his wife

Someone fired a gun or pistol through a window of Josiah Turner Jr.'s house in Hillsborough while he was away, missing his wife's head by about a foot as she stooped for a cup, according to Turner's testimony before the Senate committee in February 1871. Turner came home on a telegram and found bullet marks on the house and powder in her face; he said he did not know who fired but blamed the Union League, which he said had also fired on him and once gathered as a mob against him.

People: Josiah Turner Jr.

Orange representative Frederick N. Strudwick presses the repeal of the Shoffner Act

In the legislative session of 1870-1871, Frederick N. Strudwick of Orange helped bring forward the bill repealing the Shoffner Act of January 1870, under which Governor Holden had declared counties in insurrection; the repeal passed and took effect at once. Justice Thomas Settle said so before the Senate select committee in February 1871, adding that Strudwick introduced the impeachment resolution against Holden and had been named in testimony as one of the party sent to kill Senator Shoffner.

People: Frederick N. Strudwick

Governor Holden reports fifty state troops posted at Hillsborough

In a letter of July 20, 1870 asking President Grant for federal troops, Governor W. W. Holden counted his state forces and listed fifty white men at Hillsborough, with Kirk's 350 in Alamance and Caswell and others at Raleigh and in Gaston County. The letter survives here as a War Department abstract printed in the appendix of the Senate select committee's report.

People: W. W. Holden

Josiah Turner Jr. tells James E. Boyd at Hillsborough of a planned election-eve Klan ride

At the North Carolina Railroad stockholders' meeting in Hillsborough in July 1870, Josiah Turner Jr. told James E. Boyd, then a Conservative candidate in Alamance, that he had heard the Ku Klux would ride the night before the August election and warn Black voters they would be met on the road home if they voted; Turner advised Boyd neither to back the plan nor speak against it. Boyd swore to the conversation in an affidavit taken by Colonel Kirk on July 19, 1870, and repeated it to the Senate select committee on January 28, 1871. Turner testified to the same committee on February 24, 1871; his reply is not on these pages.

People: Josiah Turner Jr.

An Orange County court indictment is found against Colonel George W. Kirk

An indictment was found in the Orange County court against Colonel George W. Kirk, whose militia had arrested Josiah Turner Jr. at Hillsborough in 1870, according to Turner's testimony before the Senate committee in February 1871. Turner said he gave the capias and a bench warrant to the sheriff of Wake County, but the U.S. marshal, who held Kirk on a federal writ Turner had sued out, would not let them be served, and Kirk slipped out of Raleigh.

People: Josiah Turner Jr.

Black voters keep a committee at the ballot box in the Orange County election

At the August 1870 election in Orange County, which he called quiet and orderly, Black voters kept a committee at the ballot box to guard it and inspect the votes, according to the testimony of George Laws, Conservative clerk of the superior court, before the Senate committee on February 15, 1871. Laws gave it in answer to a question about intimidation among Black voters; he also said two or three Black Conservatives in Hillsborough had been much abused for their votes but held out, and that about twenty Black men there now voted Conservative.

People: George Laws

Josiah Turner Jr. asks Justices Dick and Settle for a bench warrant against Holden, Kirk and Bergen

After Kirk's men arrested him at Hillsborough, Josiah Turner Jr. filed an affidavit and applied to Justices Dick and Settle of the state supreme court for a bench warrant against Governor Holden and Colonels Kirk and Bergen. The justices had counsel argue whether a warrant could issue against the governor and whether the colonels could be taken outside the insurrection counties, with Mr. Bailey on one side and William H. Battle on the other, according to Battle's testimony before the Senate committee on February 13, 1871; he read his argument from the Daily Sentinel of October 7, 1870.

People: Josiah Turner Jr. · W. W. Holden · William Horn Battle

Sheriff Turner and armed men try to take Colonel Kirk off a train at Hillsborough

Soon after his militia regiment was mustered out in late September 1870, George W. Kirk rode the North Carolina Railroad toward Raleigh under a protective arrest arranged with a federal marshal. At Hillsborough, by his account, Sheriff Turner waited with thirty to thirty-five men armed with shotguns and pistols to take him from the train; the marshal refused to give him up, and the men clung to the cars cursing until the train got under way. Kirk told this to the Senate select committee on January 27, 1871, and called the men Ku Klux, which he asserted but did not show.

Hillsborough constable describes Orange County Klan killings to a U.S. Senate committee

W. G. Turrentine, a Hillsborough constable, told the Senate select committee in Washington that five Black men had been killed in Orange County and many people whipped, some for voting Republican. He described how, in August 1869, 75 to 100 disguised men forced the Hillsborough jail and shot a prisoner held on a barn-burning charge, who died.

Part of The congressional Ku Klux hearings, 1871 · 22 events

Subject: Orange County jail, Hillsborough

Disguised men calling themselves Red Birds whip four people near Hillsborough

Disguised men who called themselves Red Birds and dressed in red whipped two women and two young men of about twenty at a house about three miles from Hillsborough, tore off its roof, knocked down the chimney and set it on fire, according to the testimony of Hillsborough constable W. G. Turrentine before the Senate committee on January 31, 1871. Turrentine, who saw the wrecked house when he went to make arrests, said it was thought to have been aimed at a disorderly house. George Laws, testifying on February 15, described what seems to be the same affair five or six miles from town as neighborhood fathers breaking up a disorderly house, with the boys paddled and the roof torn off, and said it was not the Ku Klux. The one man arrested on Turrentine's warrant was discharged by a magistrate after his sister-in-law and a Dr. William Strudwick swore he had been too drunk that evening to sit his horse.

Part of The congressional Ku Klux hearings, 1871 · 22 events

People: George Laws

Clerk of court George Laws testifies on Orange County before the Senate committee

George Laws of Hillsborough, clerk of the Orange superior court and judge of probate, testified before the Senate select committee in Washington on February 15, 1871. A Conservative, he described the jail raid and three hangings of Black men, said no one had been brought to justice for them because no evidence could be had, credited the Ku Klux with checking thefts by freedpeople after the war, and said the county had been quiet for eighteen months and that a Black man could get justice in its courts. The committee majority quoted him as proof that Klan crimes in Orange went unpunished.

Part of The congressional Ku Klux hearings, 1871 · 22 events

People: George Laws

Josiah Turner Jr. of Hillsborough testifies before the Senate committee on Southern outrages

Josiah Turner Jr., Conservative editor of the Raleigh Sentinel, who kept his family home at Hillsborough, testified under oath before the Senate select committee in Washington on February 24, 1871. He said he had known nothing of the White Brotherhood until the habeas corpus hearings at Raleigh in the summer of 1870, put the toll in Orange at four men hanged and one shot, besides five whipped, and called the violence a war between two secret societies, the Klan and the Union League. Asked whether he had told James E. Boyd of Graham to let the Klan ride before an election, he denied it.

Part of The congressional Ku Klux hearings, 1871 · 22 events

People: Josiah Turner Jr.