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Reconstruction and the New South · 1866–1899
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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.
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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.
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Black men from Orange who rode in disguise to retaliate are sent to the penitentiary
Some Black men in Orange County who disguised themselves and went out, as they said, to retaliate against men they accused of punishing them were caught, tried and sent to the state penitentiary, according to the testimony of James M. Justice before the Joint Select Committee in July 1871. Justice said they were the only disguised night riders in the central counties he knew to have been convicted, and that Conservative speakers cited them to claim the only Ku Klux were Black.
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Disguised men shave the heads of white women in Orange County
Before March 1870, disguised men in Orange County shaved the heads of some white women and otherwise mistreated them, according to the testimony of Dr. Pride Jones before the Joint Select Committee on June 5, 1871. Jones gave no names or places and said he knew of no white men attacked.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Orange County votes 1,740 to 970 for the Conservative congressional candidate Rogers
In the 1870 congressional election Orange County gave Rogers, the Conservative candidate, 1,740 votes to 970 for the Republican Harris, figures the committee chairman read from Greeley's almanac during Pride Jones's testimony on June 5, 1871. In 1868 the county had given Rogers 1,897 and the Republican Deweese 1,446, a fall in the Republican vote that the chairman put at 496; Jones agreed and said the Conservative vote had fallen too.
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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.
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Orange County Klansmen agree to disband after Pride Jones carries the governor's offer
Starting on March 8, 1870, when he rode eight miles into the country, Captain Pride Jones went to men he suspected of leading the Klan in Orange and told them, on Governor Holden's word passed through John W. Norwood, that past offenses would be overlooked if they disbanded. By his sworn account in June 1871, several said they were tired of it, the klans disbanded within about four weeks, and after four to six weeks he wrote Holden that the county was quiet.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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U.S. Senate committee hears Orange County testimony on Klan violence
A Senate select committee created on January 19, 1871 took testimony in Washington on Klan violence in North Carolina. Orange County witnesses, including Hillsborough constable W. G. Turrentine, court clerk George Laws and editor Josiah Turner Jr., described the 1869 jail raid, hangings and whippings in the county. The committee reported on March 10, 1871.
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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.
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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.
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Dr. Pride Jones of Hillsborough testifies before Congress on the Orange County Klan
Dr. Pride Jones of Hillsborough, the militia captain Governor Holden had sent against the Klan in Orange, testified before the Joint Select Committee in Washington on June 5, 1871. He said four or five Black men had been hanged and several people whipped by disguised men in the county before his commission, that no one had been tried for it, and that the Klansmen were mostly Democrats who had disbanded in the spring of 1870.
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The congressional committee splits over making Pride Jones name Orange Klansmen
Asked on June 5, 1871 to name the Orange County men he had approached as leaders of the Klan, Dr. Pride Jones refused, saying he had dealt with them in confidence as Governor Holden's agent. The Joint Select Committee divided 3 to 3 on a motion to excuse him and postponed the question, and no names appear in the rest of his testimony.
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A federal commissioner tells Congress the Klan is still at work in southern Orange
A. Webster Shaffer, the U.S. commissioner at Raleigh who heard Ku Klux cases, testified before the Joint Select Committee in mid-1871 that disguised night riding continued in the lower part of Orange County, one of eight or ten counties from which complaints still reached him. He said the order had been campaigning in Orange since 1868 and that William A. Graham of Hillsborough could stop it there but tolerated it by saying nothing, though he did not think Graham a member. His account differs from Pride Jones's statement that the Orange Klan disbanded in the spring of 1870.
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The congressional Ku Klux committee reports F. N. Strudwick for failing to appear
F. N. Strudwick of Hillsborough was summoned in June 1871 to appear in Washington before the congressional committee investigating the Ku Klux. The joint congressional committee on the Ku Klux, meeting in Washington, reported F. N. Strudwick of Hillsborough and others who had been summoned but did not appear, asking the Senate to issue warrants for them as in contempt of Congress.
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William L. Saunders of Chapel Hill refuses to answer the congressional Klan committee
Called before the joint committee on affairs in the insurrectionary states, Saunders, whom the book names as head of the Invisible Empire in North Carolina, declined to answer 53 questions about the Ku Klux.
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