Daniel W. Jolley

The University of North Carolina--Chapel Hill

Resistance to tyranny is the first principle of nature.---

Randolph Abbott Shotwell

[The Klan] was the spontaneous movement of a race,

not of any one man or leader . . .---

Thomas Dixon, Jr.

The lights dim, the curtain rises, and the orchestra begins to play--its first note "a low cry of the anguished South being put to torture"--carrying the audience through some of the most poignant scenes ever projected onto a moving picture screen. The plot builds slowly but powerfully. A bloody war is fought; a President is murdered; a hero returns to a devastated homeland. The action builds as a young white girl, fleeing a "fate worse than death," is pursued by a rapacious, lustful Negro over a cliff, into "the opal gates of death." On the brink of complete social collapse, the spectral figures of the white knights of the Ku Klux Klan appear to "Redeem" the South from Negro domination and Republican misrule. This climactic action sees the audience spontaneously stand and raucously cheer the "saviors" of civilization.

It is quite fitting that the traditional story of Reconstruction was brought to life in a moving picture, namely D. W. Griffith's 1915 classic The Birth of a Nation. The extraordinary nature of the events relating to the life of the original Klan suggests fiction more than fact. The events described, though, were indeed based on fact, as witnessed and interpreted by an extraordinary man from western North Carolina, namely Thomas Dixon, Jr. It is indeed ironic that historians have largely overlooked the Klan episode in and around Rutherford and Cleveland counties, North Carolina, for millions have seen the events in cinematic form.

The Ku Klux Klan was slow to develop in North Carolina, appearing in late 1867 or early 1868. Only during the 1868 election campaigns did it become an active agent in society. The Klan was generally a phenomenon of the Piedmont, for it could not survive where there was a large Negro population. It appeared in only a few North Carolina black-belt counties--Caswell, Lenoir, Franklin, Jones, and Wayne. The first major Klan activity centered around Orange, Alamance, and Caswell counties in the central Piedmont. Klan historiography has concentrated on this episode, which escalated into the Kirk-Holden War in mid-1870. The episode in western North Carolina, which came after the Democratic electoral success of 1870, has been overlooked. This neglect is hard to account for--the events influenced President Grant's decision in 1871 to begin an investigation into conditions in the South. Furthermore, the trial of newspaper editor Randolph Abbott Shotwell and compatriots was the first trial conducted under the authority of the Ku Klux Act of 1871.

On March 2, 1867, Congress passed the radical Reconstruction Act, and the Carolinas became Military District Number Two. Citizens, who had readily cooperated with Johnson's plan, felt betrayed. By October 18, 106,721 whites and 72,932 Negroes were registered to vote; Republicans won 107 of 120 seats to the constitutional convention in November. The "Canby Constitution" was ratified in April 1868 and the state was readmitted to the Union on July 20. Holden and the Republicans had won with a majority of 19,000 votes, easily ascribed by Democrats to the new voice of the freedmen in politics.

Social unrest grew considerably leading up to the Presidential election of 1868; both the Union League and the Ku Klux Klan took an active part in the campaign. Reacting to the passage of Thad Stevens' bill, Lincoln County attorney David Schenck, a future Klansman, gave a glimpse of the fertile soil on which Klan ideology would take root:

The effect of this will be to create a deadly feud between the races, and give rise to scenes of violence and disorder which will make society miserable: for the white race will not suffer this outrage without bloody resentment and if it cannot be done by force it will be done by assassinations and secret meetings of revenge.

The Ku Klux Klan cannot be understood in and of itself. The same questions asked of the Klan must also be asked of the Union League, for the two secret orders reflected and indeed fed off of each other. The League was created during the War to rally support for the Union. In 1865, its energies were redirected toward the propagation of Republican principles in the South. At the local level, to appeal to Negroes, the League evidenced itself as a "club" with secret signs--Liberty, Lincoln, Loyal, and League. League organizers came to rally Negro support and to instruct the freedmen on how (and for whom) to vote. Although "the stated ideals of the Union League were in line with the highest idealism of the Declaration of Independence,"Ph. D. thesis, University of North Carolina--Chapel Hill, 1956), 41. according to one League researcher, pragmatism often necessitated the sacrifice of principles to political expediency and opportunism.

It is my contention that in western North Carolina, centering around Rutherford County, an ongoing conflict between rival political parties and interest groups deteriorated to the base level of interpersonal rivalry. Evidence indicates that the local Klan was not "racially" motivated. League organizers rather than Negroes were the main victims of attack. To evaluate my argument, we must examine the number and nature of atrocities; only then can we ascertain who the true "criminals" were. One thing cannot be disputed: as the Union League and Klan denigrated and attacked one another, there emerged in society a serious threat to all individuals--namely, that of widespread criminality and blind terrorism.

Traditional thought glorified the Klan for "upholding the law, punishing criminals, discouraging crime, and protecting property, white women and racial purity." A "regulatory" Klan could lay claim to an adherence to traditional American values. Conservatives rationalized the Klan as a loosely-organized, defensive organization designed to "combat the Union League and other Northern organizations, . . . `put the Negro in his place,' . . . regain control of the government, and . . . `protect Southern womanhood.'" This "law and order" defense was essentially an extension of the Southern argument for secession. If Southern society were a stable organism in 1867, then Radical Reconstruction was arbitrary, counter-productive--and unconstitutional.

Undeniably, the Union League preceded the Klan in North Carolina. By 1867 it had evolved into the most effective political instrument of the Radicals. In that year the League began to form Negro militia units; whites saw the arming of Negroes as an attempt to establish Negro domination. According to historian William Dunning, "the deep dread of negro domination under the auspices of invincible national power impelled thousands of serious and respectable whites to look for some means of mitigation, if not complete salvation [italics mine], in the methods of the secret societies." Dunning's student J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton brought this interpretation specifically to North Carolina history. Hamilton equated "Negro equality" with "Negro domination." "It is clear," he wrote, "that the [Klan] movement was primarily designed for protection and its influence upon politics was purely incidental." White paranoia extended to the Freedmen's Bureau, as well. Some Bureau agents were accused of sending exaggerated reports of Southern atrocities to their superiors in Washington. Southern whites could not help but fear that the secret societies were plotting insurrection, with the goal of procuring the land for themselves.

Chanting "white supremacy," revisionist historians have ignored the complex nature of Klan motivation. The "new" history of Reconstruction that emerged in the 1950s was essentially the aggregate voice of a new breed of non-aristocratic historians. Otto Olsen and others named many positive accomplishments of the Union League, particularly the instruction of Negroes in their new political roles. At the same time, historians began to denounce the role of the Klan. A helpful viewpoint was expressed by J. C. A. Stagg in a study of the Klan in up-country South Carolina. While conceding that it was formed partly for political reasons, he dismissed this view as "meaningless, not only because it begs the more important questions concerning the patterns of violence, but because it invariably fails to investigate the local issues [italics mine] which shaped political conflict between whites and blacks." Stagg rejected any interpretation centered on the issue of "racial determinism."

An investigation of the Klan episode in western North Carolina provides a unique opportunity to explore these various themes. Despite their geographic contiguity, Rutherford and Cleveland counties differed in terms of geography and demography. There is evidence that class superseded race in the motives of the Klan in Rutherford; the Klan's late formation and lack of central organization are the most obvious supporting factors for such a conclusion. Rutherford was exceptional, for in surrounding counties the Klan was formed under upper-class auspices. Cleveland County had strong Democratic leaders throughout Reconstruction, most of them lawyers. Rutherford, in contrast, had no visible Democratic leaders; here, more so than elsewhere, the Klan was largely a "redneck" phenomenon.

The area of the western foothills of the Appalachians was largely rural and isolated. Rutherfordton, the largest town in the region, had a population of five hundred. Rutherford County's population was 13,550 in 1850; in 1870, it was only 13,440. Most of the people were small farmers--predominantly white--struggling to provide for their families on hilly, unproductive land. There were comparatively few Negroes there. In Cleveland County, there were 12,384 people in 1860, 2,131 of them slaves. 383 men owned slaves, averaging five to ten each. County farms averaged two to three hundred acres, the land being much more fertile than the red clay of Rutherford County. Large-scale production was practically nonexistent because there was no close market. Trade was carried out almost wholly through South Carolina. Geography and trade behavior did much to distinguish Klan activity here from the earlier episode in the central Piedmont.

While Unionists dominated Rutherford County before and during the War, secession was greeted anxiously in Cleveland County. A secession meeting took place in Shelby as early as November 12, 1860. Democrats retained their hegemony in Cleveland County even after the War. Drawing directly from the source of this Democratic hegemony, the Klan was organized in Cleveland County by prominent men. Foremost among the organizers were four lawyers--LeRoy McAfee, H. D. Lee, H. D. Cabiness, and Plato Durham. Durham was one of the scant thirteen Conservatives to serve in the 1868 constitutional convention. In 1871, he led the fight against the unconstitutional arrests of accused "Klansmen" such as Shotwell. Durham was comfortable but not rich--he held $9,000 in real wealth and $1000 in personal wealth in 1870. H. D. Lee, however, was a member of the economic elite, holding $25,000 in real estate. In 1860, McAfee, at the age of 23, held over $10,000 in total wealth; in 1870, he had $13,000 in real wealth and $3000 in personal wealth. The sheriff, B. F. Logan, was himself a Klansman.

Although the Whig party went into decline statewide in the 1850s, it thrived in Rutherford County. As Southern politicians began to engross themselves in national issues, local matters continued to hold precedence in Rutherford politics (e.g., the ad valorem tax). In 1860, John Pool won a substantial majority in the county. In the wake of the siege on Fort Sumter, Rutherford's conditional Unionists vehemently endorsed secession and war. On February 28, 1861, citizens voted 1332 to 431 for the calling of a secession convention. This war fervor would quickly dissipate, though.

One cannot understand the events of 1870-1871 in western North Carolina without studying the central role played by Judge George W. Logan. Just as W. W. Holden was the foremost League organizer in the state, Logan held centre-stage in the western counties. Both men proved quite flexible politically as the events of Reconstruction unfolded. Unquestionably, Logan benefited politically through his role in the Union League. Randolph Shotwell, who became a personal enemy of "Loyal League Logan," did nothing to hide his utter contempt for him:

Nowhere in the State was the League so powerful and aggressive as in Rutherford . . . George W. Logan, a lawyer of some experience, but small native, or theoretical, knowledge, and no general information, had early secured a guiding influence in the organization, which he resolved should be conducted with an eye single to his own political aggrandizement.

Born in Chimney Rock on February 22, 1815, Logan was a product of Rutherford County. He was a Unionist Whig until the secession crisis erupted into a military conflict, a position typical of many Tarheel citizens. Like Holden, Logan was of lowly class origins. Despite his humble beginnings, Logan managed to acquire a prominent place in the community. At twenty-one, he became clerk of court; soon he began to study law. He began to acquire property and, reportedly, a number of slaves. By 1860, Logan possessed $14,000 in real property and $9000 in personal wealth. Shotwell attributed Logan's success to a strong will, ambition, acquisitiveness, but especially his envy of and utter disdain for the "stuckup aristocracy." By 1870, by way of several key political shifts at fortuitous times, Logan possessed $35,000 in property.North Carolina History (Forest City, NC: The Forest City Courier, 1951), 106, 226; Davis, 23; 1860 and 1870 Census of Rutherford County; Shotwell Papers, II, 293. Shotwell claimed that not only did Logan have slaves, he brutally exploited their labor and tried to murder one of them. Given the fact that Logan emerged from such a lower-class background, his motivations can best be understood in terms of class.

On May 20, 1861, at the secession convention of North Carolina, Rutherford delegates voted unanimously for secession. Out of a population of 11,573, Rutherford contributed 1,734 Rebel soldiers, as well as some five hundred men in the Home Guard. Secession was met with even greater zeal in Cleveland County. On the night of May 20, Shelby men fired three kegs of powder from an old cannon used at the Battle of Cowpens--one keg was for the Confederacy, one for North Carolina, and one for secession. Furthermore, several men have claimed that "more men went into service from Cleveland [County] in proportion to voting population than any other county in the state."

Quickly, war fervor deteriorated into disaffection. Logan quickly reverted to his Unionist sentiment. In 1861, the Heroes of America formed to oppose the Confederacy. Paul Escott says that the Heroes of America "aided deserters, recruited soldiers for the North, encouraged `mutual cooperation and support' in resisting Confederate demands, and lent its support to the independent and more broadly based peace movement." In Rutherford, Logan guided the Heroes, in the process catapulting himself to a place in the 1863 Confederate Congress. Logan was elected as a delegate to the constitutional convention of October 2, 1865, as well. While state voters rejected the new constitution, Rutherford voters overwhelmingly favored ratification, by a margin of 806 to 46.

During Reconstruction, Logan was the leader of the Union League in the western region of the state. The significant number of Heroes of America there was easily incorporated into the League. Shotwell denounced all Leaguers as deserters and cowards who exploited the Negro for their own purposes. Although the Rutherford League was made up mostly by lower-class whites, Shotwell damned it as "the blackest Radical county in the South." When he arrived there in 1867, the Red Strings were the only viable political group. Shotwell felt that there were some one thousand Conservatives in the county, but the two-thirds Republican majority made any effort on their part seem futile. Shotwell, intent on awakening the Democratic element, ran alone as a Democrat for Congress. He received seventy-six out of three thousand votes. Shotwell succeeded only in angering the "Loganites."County Convention that year, which Shotwell advertised for two weeks prior in the Western Vindicator, only five men attended. In Cleveland County, the Red Strings and Union League made a concerted effort to secure "the election of Republican candidates and to strengthen the Republican party." Be that as it may, J. R. Davis estimated that there were only two hundred Leaguers in the county.

The rule of the "Loganites" was cemented in Rutherford County by Republican success in the 1868 election. James Justice, who was elected to the state House, told investigators that there no League meetings in the county after 1868, and that there were none in Cleveland County after the ratification of the state constitution in April. The passage of the 14th Amendment helped give Republicans a majority of 1,297 to 688. Logan was at that time elected Superior Court Judge of the Ninth District, while Holden was for the first time elected Governor. Holden carried Rutherford 1332 to 467 over Thomas Ashe.

Conservatives saw the Union League as a conspiracy from the outside, using the Negro as a mere pawn. Chiding Union soldiers for teaching Negroes that "freedom" meant idleness, David Schenck expressed fears of a race war, "fostered and encouraged by the vile class of men, who exercise offices under the Freedmen's Bureau; and whose cowardly insolence is mistaken for courage by the negroes." He insisted that the Negro had been maneuvered into his present condition. Shotwell said that Negroes were held in:

utter mental bondage to their unscrupulous white leaders, by whom they were incited to nightly deeds of murder, arson, rape, rapine, and outrage, against which the honest conservative citizens could find neither protection, nor redress, because those same Mongrel White wire-pullers of the "Leagues" also held every Executive office of the laws, both Federal and State, and allowed perfect immunity to their secret agents in crime, rendering the laws a nullity, and the pretended administration of the laws a bitter farce.

In 1868, Republican domination seemed unassailable at every level of government, forcing all men to take a firm stand on the race issue. For Schenck--and like-minded men in western North Carolina--the choice was a simple one: "For myself, I prefer to be buried with the white man, than to sleep on the grave with the negro." Thus, a political battle became a race war in 1868; within two years, it degenerated into a series of personal acts of revenge on old enemies.

The main Republican weapon throughout the conflict continued to be the Union League. Conservatives felt that the League was purely a means by which to coordinate a covert war, to be waged by the Negro. It is certainly true that some Negroes who voted the Conservative ticket--or who simply did not vote--were threatened by League men. Exploiting their economic domination over the freedmen, League leaders could threaten any "uncooperative" Negro with the loss of his job or land. Where membership was virtually mandatory for Negroes, social ostracism was an effective force of mobilization. Naturally, there were also "incentives" for Negroes to join. Beyond the false promise of "forty acres and mule," there was the right to bear arms in Negro militia units. Some blacks felt that membership would bring them immunity from punishment. In some areas, there was a black women's auxiliary, whose members could associate only with League members. Finally, simple self-protection was a prime motivating force, for black Leaguers as well as white Klansmen posed a threat to any Negro.

Without question, some League organizers acted out of humanitarian concerns; yet for each of them there were scores of men who acted purely out of self-interest. Shotwell asserted that "the real object of the League was to bring together the blacks at regular intervals, and under the protection of the Oath of Silence, to poison their minds and stir up their excitable natures, making them pliable as melted wax for the purposes of the villains using them." For these reasons, Klansmen in western North Carolina targeted not the Negro but the white League organizers.

Nothing was more effective at galvanizing Negroes than an incendiary speech decrying antebellum aristocrats. George W. Logan was selected to be the prime League spokesman in the area at a Republican meeting in Rutherfordton on November 5, 1867. Shotwell specifically refers to a speech Logan gave on the grounds of a Baptist church to a large gathering of Negroes--and several white men. In the midst of his fiery denunciation of the slaveholding class, Logan spotted a puppy. Pointing to it, he screamed: "I say we had better enfranchise yon lousy bitch, than those same lousy stinking Rebels who now try to lord it over us better men than ever they dare be!" At this point, several Conservatives protested. Pointing now to the cemetery, Logan told his detractors: "Some of your Rebel Democratic `Blue Blood' and bones is a rotting [sic] up yonder on the hill, and I tell you the devil will never get his dues till more of the same sort has been shed out of this region!" Thus it becomes easy to see how the Conservatives were forced to respond in some fashion.

Conservatives to the man blamed the origin and escalation of Klan activity on Judge Logan's partiality on the bench. As a boy, Thomas Dixon, Jr., often watched the Judge "by the hour dispensing hatreds and injustice." Dixon characterized Logan as "an ignoramus of unbridled passions no more fit for his position on the bench than a donkey. Because of this ignorance, selfishness and blind stubbornness he was, in fact, universally dubbed, `Donkey Logan.'" In speaking of the "High-Priest of Republicanism," Shotwell insisted that "it is not of the ignorant Judge, but the partisan, partial and embittered tool of a corrupt Party that we must behold him." H. W. Guion, a Klansman, testified in 1871 that Logan's partiality on the bench necessitated the institution of a law-enforcement body. To take no such action was to sanction an epidemic of criminality by Negroes; this was the Conservative viewpoint. Thus, as a local historian of the region said, "the crimes attributed to [italics mine] the League gave rise to the Ku Klux Klan as a corrective of the evils of the former."

There are many examples of Logan's partiality as a Superior Court Judge. Wade Price, a Negro Leaguer, was convicted for habitually selling liquor without a license; Logan freed him upon the payment of court costs. Soon afterward, a one-legged Rebel veteran named Hendricks was found guilty of selling a half-pint of corn whiskey without a license. Although it was his first offense, Logan sentenced him to thirty days in jail and fined him thirty dollars. Only the effort of Plato Durham to point out such unequal treatment saved Hendricks from a miscarriage of "justice." Judge Logan's typical punishment for League members brought to court before him was: "A penny and cost, Mr. Clerk!" By 1870, reports of outrages, incendiarism, and assaults upon white women by Negro men were widespread; even the most restrained Conservatives now pushed for the revival of the famed White Brotherhood.

Undeniably, there were racial influences behind the birth of the Klan in western North Carolina, as well. Thomas Dixon, Jr., wrote of a Northern female school-teacher who first appeared in Shelby escorted by a Negro in "a narrow seated buggy." Within two hours, she was placed on an outgoing train; her Negro escort was tied to a tree, given fifty lashes, and run out of town. This incident fits with William Randel's contention that many Klansmen responded "not to Freedmen's Bureau activity but to the behavior of idealistic young Northern teachers who accepted Negroes as equals and thus flouted all that Southern whites held dear." Dixon stressed the significant local effect that the 1870 law permitting intermarriage in South Carolina had. The rape of a white teen-aged girl by a Negro felon was the incident that "fused the people into a single whitehot purpose." Dixon in fact carried messages between his uncle LeRoy McAfee--the county "Chief"--and Plato Durham at the time. That night, Dixon watched the lynching of the Negro in the court square.

J. R. Davis, in evaluating the rise of the Klan in Cleveland County, stressed primarily the incompetence of Republican officials, particularly Logan. There was also heavy resentment of Negro suffrage. Beyond this, the Klan "was resorted to in order to protect the white people from the negro militia." Overall, "partial courts, bad government, inefficient officials, together with a political desire to defeat the Republican party" led to the birth of the Klan. There were twenty-five reported outrages and one burning of a Negro schoolhouse in Cleveland County, as well as a couple of deaths at the hand of "Klan justice." Hamilton's data shows that thirteen whites were whipped, compared to only four Negroes The best men of society led the secret order in Cleveland County. According to Paul Escott, "In Cleveland County, a Democratic candidate for the legislature organized the Klan [Plato Durham, presumably], a state legislator belonged to it [LeRoy McAfee], and the sheriff [B. F. Logan] participated in the raids." Klan membership was larger in Cleveland County, with six hundred to one thousand members, than in Rutherford, with three hundred to five hundred. The county did not witness the kinds of violence seen in Rutherford in 1871 for one simple reason--the Conservatives were victorious in the 1870 election only in Cleveland.

The Klan appeared late in Rutherford due largely to the strong Republican majority there. It formed from the bottom up, with no centralized authority. The lack of organization led to excesses. Paul Escott found one to two hundred whippings in the county from 1869 through 1871. Individual Dens acted on their own initiative. Almost all assaults were beatings, and no murders were committed. The victims were generally not Negroes, nor were they always even Radicals. They included women of "easy virtue" and white men accused of wife-beating or concubinage. Shotwell believed that many irregular Klan raids in the county were undertaken "to avenge local feuds or personal malice." Additionally, illegal distilling played a large role in events. Shotwell conjectured that many moonshiners belonged to the Union League, where they had an ally on the bench in Judge Logan. Clearly, the true linchpin of conflict in Rutherford County was class. Allen Trelease has rightly pointed out the presence there of a strong aristocrat-poor white antipathy.

The Rutherford Klan contained elements from every socioeconomic group, although small farmers. Paul Escott attempted to disprove the lower-class orientation of the Rutherford Klan, but his facts are misleading. Escott failed to mention that League leaders were a wealthy minority in and of themselves. Certainly, some wealthy men joined the Klan, but they were accompanied by the county's "best citizens of all social grades and professions." Democratic success in Rutherford necessarily depended on uniting white men. Thus, Klansmen wanted to bridge class division by incorporating small farmers into their order.

While the Democrats achieved victory throughout most of the state in the 1870 elections, Republicans still held power in Rutherford. Since state power lay with the Democrats, culminating with the impeachment of Governor Holden, Klansmen felt they could now be more daring. With their power over the South crumbling, Radical Republicans sought to further centralize power in Washington. Central to their plans was the federal Ku Klux Act, which became law on April 20, 1871. In conjunction with this bill, the [Senator John] Scott Committee investigated the Ku Klux "conspiracy" in the South. The investigation was over-extended and under-financed. Most accused Klansmen never came to trial--but Shotwell and other outspoken Democrats did. The nature of Shotwell's trial shows that the goal of investigators was never the punishment of rank-and-file Klansmen but only the political assassination of prominent Democrats.

According to Dixon, by 1871 "the youngsters in the Klan now began the dangerous experiment of regulating the private morals of the community, an almost inevitable step due to the power suddenly developed in their hands and the still disgraceful condition of the Courts." During the trials of 1871-1872, many defendants argued that youngsters had raided "upon their own hook"--for amusement. In early spring 1870, some thirty-five men raided Ben Maize, a Negro, because "his daughter had a fight with a white man." There was a raid on "a little nigger girl" who lived with a Mr. Sweazey, a white man. A man who constantly abused his wife was whipped by a party of "preachers." McAfee enforced Nathan B. Forrest's "General Order No. 1," which ordered an end to all raiding and forbade the use of the Klan for private purposes. According to Dixon, "the order was not a dissolution of the Klan but a reaffirmation of its high patriotic purpose. Demonstrations were forbidden. The whipping of Negroes or white men was banned. Interference with family life, or any use of the Klan for personal ends, was strictly prohibited." In Rutherford County, though, there was no "Chief" to enforce the General Order.

Area Klan leaders were troubled by excesses in Rutherford County. They especially feared that the nature of events would discredit the Democratic party. In late March 1871, Plato Durham and twelve leading citizens of Cleveland, Rutherford, and Polk counties asked Randolph Shotwell to try to establish some order among the scattered Dens. Shotwell had won recognition through his editorship of a Conservative newspaper, but he lacked the means to succeed as a Klan "Chief." He was still new to the area (having settled there only in 1867), he was unfamiliar with most of the people outside Rutherfordton, and he did not have a horse. Most importantly, he simply lacked time, for just two weeks after he reluctantly agreed to be "Chief," the "Home Raid" on Aaron Biggerstaff set in motion a conflict of major proportions.

The Biggerstaff drama is the centerpiece of the entire Klan episode in Rutherford County. I contend that at the root of this conflict was a family feud dating back to the years of the Civil War. Aaron Biggerstaff was a League member and a friend of Judge Logan; Republican leaders exploited events by attaching to them political implications designed to neutralize the Democratic party. They knew that the deployment of federal troops there would sustain their political monopoly. Biggerstaff himself was an old, "overly loud" Unionist. During the War, he not only aided Union prisoners of war but stole horses from his neighbors and sold them to Yankee soldiers. Shotwell described him as an ignorant small farmer, but he had a total wealth of $1,250 in 1860; by 1870, the figure was slightly greater. Unquestionably, many men carried grudges against Aaron Biggerstaff, including his own half-brother Samuel.

The opening event in this drama actually came on the night of February 23, 1870, when a group of men converged on the home of a McGahey man. They harassed McGahey's wife--albeit not physically--who was alone in the house. McGahey organized a party and followed the men's tracks in the snow to the home of Samuel Biggerstaff. He and Aaron Biggerstaff then fired into the house, although no one was injured. William McIntire, not Samuel Biggerstaff, had led the band of men to McGahey's residence. After leaving there, McIntire's men went and whipped a Negro named Owens "because he talked too much and worked too little," despite the fact that he was thought to have voted the Conservative ticket. Owens' mistake seems to have been his reporting of some illegal distilling to authorities. McGahey was also a Conservative who had reported some moonshining. McIntire himself was one such "moonshiner," as was made clear at his trial in Raleigh in 1872. There are no evident political motives behind the raid on McGahey. Aaron Biggerstaff pleaded guilty and was convicted of the attempted murder of his own half-brother--Judge Logan fined him twenty five dollars.

Outraged citizens were determined to give Biggerstaff a proper punishment. In 1871, he was also suspected of burning his neighbor's barn. On the night of April 8, 1871, some thirty to forty Klansmen attacked Biggerstaff's home. They dragged him into the road and beat him "until he could neither sit, stand nor lie." Democrats insisted that Biggerstaff:

owed his whipping to his offences [sic], not his politics. . . . It was clearly a neighborhood squabble, wherein the opposite or Anti-`Pukey' side, after suffering from his malice during a long term of years finally called into service the instrumentality of the Klan to teach him a lesson.

Plato Durham insisted that the raid on Aaron Biggerstaff was not politically motivated, for "there were hundreds of other republicans in the county more prominent than Biggerstaff." Shotwell spoke of six years of obnoxious behavior by the victim. Conservatives blamed Judge Logan for having given Biggerstaff such an outrageously easy sentence for his crime.

After the "Home Raid," General Joseph G. Hester arrested more than thirty men and called Biggerstaff to testify against them. The Biggerstaff family began their journey on the afternoon of May 12, 1871. That night, they camped at "Grassy Branch," some ten miles north of Shelby. Biggerstaff, still sore from his beating, slept in the wagon while his family took shelter in a roadside cabin. In the night, a party of Klansmen assailed Biggerstaff once again, ordering him not to testify. They pulled him from the wagon, breaking his left arm; struck him with guns; then dragged him into the woods by a rope tied around his neck. Biggerstaff claimed that they told him they were going to kill Judge Logan and J. B. Carpenter, as well as him.

Logan heard of the attack the next morning, as he headed to Shelby to hold court. He immediately returned to Rutherfordton, claiming his life was in great danger. Besides dozens of arrest warrants, he wrote a letter to Governor Todd R. Caldwell, asking for federal aid. This letter was passed on to Washington, where it was read before the Senate during debate over the Ku Klux Act. When Lincolnton attorney David Schenck saw a copy of Logan's letter in the New York Tribune, he indignantly wrote a letter of his own to Senator Blair, denouncing Logan as incompetent. To Schenck's dismay, his letter was published in the Washington Patriot. Logan reacted by disbarring Schenck; the supreme court over-ruled the disbarment but did retain a charge against Schenck of contempt of court. At this time, thirty-two lawyers petitioned the legislature to remove Logan from his position.

The Rutherford Star, which was edited by J. B. Carpenter and Logan's son Robert, denounced the "numerous slanders that the Ku Klux are daily publishing against Judge L. and all other honest Republicans, for political effect." Republicans made Schenck a target for personal attack. They "look[ed] upon schenck, individually [italics mine], as too depraved, corrupt and devoid of principle or common decency, to be noticed by any person having self-respect." They denounced Schenck's letter as "a base, malicious and willful slander of Judge Logan" and denounced the author as an unmitigated liar, a paltron, and a coward." The newspaper now referred to "little dave schenck" as "little dave skunk."

James Justice now emerged as a great enemy to the Klan. He was a determined prosecutor, who was elected to the state house in 1870. While most Conservatives saw Justice as a mere puppet of Logan's, Shotwell offered a particularly strong denouncement of Justice:

It now became the turn of Jim Justice to attract public odium in the highest degree--if the term highest can have any application to one so infamously low. Low born, low bred, low lived, low married, low mannered, low moraled [sic], low in all the attributes of manhood!--this fellow was the very man--a typical man--to play the leader . . . of a party composed of one-third negroes, and two-thirds rude, ignorant, uncultivated, poor mountaineers.

Shotwell could not control the Klan Dens, for virtually all members felt that some action had to be taken. Klansmen wanted to call once more on "old Pukey" Biggerstaff. Jeff Downey, a Republican infiltrator, needed to be punished for betraying his Klan oath. Many men had designs on Justice, Logan, and Carpenter. In early June, Democrats learned that Carpenter and Justice reportedly had a list of two hundred men to be arrested. Shotwell still refused to sanction any raid, for fear of the political--and military--consequences such action could produce.

Throughout May 1871, Rutherford Republicans expected a Klan invasion. After a month of posting sentries about the town, they stopped watching for a raid. Two weeks later, on July 11, a force of one hundred Klansmen raided Rutherfordton. Shotwell insisted that he tried to stop the raid, adding that the action had no political significance. Downey deserved death for having betrayed his solemn oath to the Klan; the Biggerstaff affair was a neighborhood squabble; James Justice had actually dared the Klan to attack him. These motives were "purely personal [italics mine], and received their subsequent political coloring from the peculiar circumstances of the case . . ." Shotwell met the men on the outskirts of town to try and prevent them from raiding, but he was unsuccessful; he knew none of the men, the majority of whom were intoxicated.

The raiders came from Cherry Mountain in the north and from upstate South Carolina. They stopped first at the home of James Justice. Several disguised men broke his door open and burst into his second-story bedroom, firing a volley of shots. They dragged Justice, in his nightshirt, out into the lane. When he testified in Washington, Justice said one man told him, "You damned rascal [italics mine], come out," but at the Shotwell trial in Raleigh he quoted the man as saying, "O, you damned radical [italics mine], we have you at last." Justice was struck with a pistol when he screamed for help; momentarily unconscious, he was dragged several hundred yards to the edge of town. There the men told him his death had been decreed by the Klan. Justice commenced groveling for his life. He was allowed to sit when he felt faint from the wound on his head; whereupon, one man told him, "It will do you good to let a little of your negro-equality blood out of you."

The Klansmen asked Justice where Logan and Biggerstaff were, threatening to kill them, too. Judge Logan was out of town at the time, so Justice thought they meant Robert Logan. Thus, he told the men that Logan was probably in the Star office. A dozen men stayed with Justice while the others broke into the office of the newspaper; finding no one, they ransacked the place. The men also failed to apprehend Biggerstaff. In drunken fury, they had shot their guns and made so much noise upon taking Justice that Biggerstaff had heard the commotion and fled. Frustrated, the Klansmen argued about what to do with Justice. The leader, who was from a South Carolina Den, let Justice go free, exacting a promise of silence from him. All in all, the infamous Rutherfordton raid accomplished nothing but the downfall of the Klan in western North Carolina.

No one can disagree that the raid was poorly planned and poorly executed. Shotwell ascribed the great failure of the Rutherfordton raid to the lack of an individual leader:

I have no idea that the men who `paroled' him [let Justice go free that night] had any confidence in his keeping his pledges; but they were without a leader . . . ; they had never received orders what should be done with him [Justice]: they had failed in catching Biggerstaff, for whom most of them had come; they learned that Judge Logan was absent from town ...

Justice did not long delay in intensifying his efforts to defeat the Klan. He immediately had a dozen men arrested, including Randolph Shotwell. Some defendants claimed that Shotwell organized and led the Rutherfordton raid, but the veracity of these statements is questionable--Republicans were not above paying for perjured testimony. President Grant gave Logan quasi-despotic power to make arrests. Within a week of the raid, almost one hundred men had been bound over for trial. Their trial in Raleigh was the first mass trial carried out under the proviso of the Ku Klux Act. Arrests were made as late as February 1872. Locally, a great rift arose among Klansmen when some members "puked" to officials. All in all, only the "leaders" and prominent Democrats were punished severely.

Unlike many, Shotwell refused to flee in the face of prosecution. Whatever his true involvement in events, he knew that Judge Logan and the Republicans would make an example out of him. He was arrested on July 5, 1871, without a warrant. For two months, he was subjected to inhumane treatment in the Rutherford County jailhouse. He was put in a small, filthy cage--of eight square feet--with three white murderers, three Negro felons, and one "citizen" like himself. Trelease, though, insists that no Klan prisoner was ever mistreated. Republicans now feared that a Klan raid would be made to free Shotwell and his fellow prisoners. Such a raid had already occurred in nearby Marion. As indicated by Thomas Dixon, though, McAfee and Durham knew that such a raid could cause a national uproar and result in the reinstitution of martial law throughout the South. In a letter dated July 24, 1871, Shotwell wrote his father that he soon expected to either escape or be found innocent, with the help of some friends he had in Raleigh. In an undated letter, written from either the Marion or Rutherford jailhouse, he again mentions an escape plan, going so far as to request from his father a carpetbag filled with a change of clothes, soap, and other necessities. "We may never reach Raleigh," he wrote, for "if we are not hand cuffed, it is certain there will be an attempt to escape and very likely a successful one." Shotwell had little hope of being found innocent. Personal enemies boasted to him that no power on earth could save him from the penitentiary. He always blamed his personal enemies:

The infamous wretches, who have done all the mischief which has been done conspired to make a scapegoat--of me, and have sworn more lies than there are letters in the alphabet . . . They fear punishment should I get off, and will do all they can to convict me. Harrel [?] swears that I gave orders to kill Downey, and all swear that I was the chief of the Klan in the county, and as such responsible for the outrages committed, & &. Governor Caldwell, . . . Harris, Logan, Lusk, Jim Justice, and all that ilk are my enemies and will howl to have me made an example of . . .

Shotwell's words are lent support by John H. Tillinghast of Rutherfordton, who wrote to David Moreau Barringer, a Raleigh lawyer, in Shotwell's behalf. Shotwell was then (September 1, 1871) in Raleigh awaiting trial. Tillinghast had "no doubt that Logan and his creatures, among whom are to be considered the U. S. marshalls [sic], and all those in authority here, except the military--have been doing all in their power to persecute . . . the people, and acting too often in the most arbitrary and irregular manner." He wrote that Shotwell well knew that such a raid was "a thing which would do the good people of the state no possible good, and furnish to the Radicals here the very thing, they were itching for, viz a pretext to bring down upon the political opponents the Federal arm-- . . ."It was common knowledge, he reiterated, that the "Loganites" held "a most vindictive spite" at Shotwell for being so outspoken a Democratic editor.

Nothing--not even innocence--could save Shotwell from conviction and humiliation. From the Rutherfordton jail, he was handcuffed with six other men and forced to march to Marion, thirty miles away. At his trial in Raleigh, he was sentenced to six years of hard labor in the federal penitentiary in Albany, New York, and fined $5,000. From the courtroom, Shotwell was bound with ropes and led to the jailhouse. Every effort was made to humiliate him. Almost immediately, Shotwell was offered leniency if he would implicate other men; the Republicans especially wanted to link Zebulon Vance with the Klan. Not only did Shotwell refuse all such bribes, he declared that he would not accept any pardon. In 1872, he waited ten days to accept a pardon from President Grant.

All in all, the Klan in western North Carolina was a reactive force to Republican aggression. However grim a visage it came to wear as the conjuration of the White Beast, it was animated by the brute forces of oppression. The Klan became exactly what the Republicans claimed it was, for they, in essence, created it. Most of the 763 men indicted in the state under the Ku Klux Act of 1871 were from Rutherford County; these indictments "nearly all originated in a personal feud between members of a family known as Biggerstaff--a feud which was fanned into a flame that involved nearly the whole county of Rutherford by the misconduct of an ignorant, incompetent, and corrupt radical judge, named George W. Logan," according to the Minority Report of the Congressional Ku Klux investigation. Events reached anarchic proportions in the county only after the Democratic electoral success of 1870. Rutherford at that time became an island of Republicanism in a sea of Conservatism. Men of both parties knew that the end of Radical rule was in sight. Absolutely no political purpose was served by the acceleration of Klan activity; thus, men like Shotwell, Durham, and McAfee worked to enforce "General Order No. 1." The "Loganites" clearly understood that their only hope for continued political authority lay in compelling federal intervention in the area. This goal was accomplished in the wake of the Rutherfordton raid, which men like James Justice brought about by challenging reckless white elements to a fight. Virtually all men who differed in politics with Judge Logan were arrested, but only the prominent Democratic leaders were tried and punished. In the process, they were subjected to undue humiliation and inhumane treatment. Just like the Kirk-Holden War in 1870, the climax of anti-Klan activity in Rutherford County in 1871 came with an election pending. Both courses of Republican action had the selfsame goal--namely, to carry the election for the Radical party.