Violation: Justice, Race and Serial Murder in the Deep South. David Rose
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protested in his dispatch for the Tribune that the claim that Ashburn’s friends were to blame for his murder was merely an attempt ‘to cover up and confuse the whole affair … everyone in Columbus knows for what purpose these vile insinuations are put out. See how The Sun abuses and traduces the character of poor Ashburn, even while his mangled corpse lies before the very eyes of the editor. Ye people of America, do ye not understand all this?’ In Caldwell’s view, the Sun’s pro-Klan coverage before the killing suggested that its editor ‘knew beforehand what was going to happen’. Now, he went on, Columbus’s advocates of racial equality were overcome with understandable terror. ‘The sudden, horrible, cowardly and brutal murder of Colonel Ashburn, by this infamous band, shows that their purpose is murder. They are bent on midnight assassinations of the darkest, bloodiest and most diabolical character. Union men all over the city now feel that their lives are at every moment in danger. They do not know at what hour of the night they may be massacred in their bed.’
Few other white people saw things quite that way. The Ashburn murder is a perfect example of what the contemporary historian of Southern violence W. Fitzhugh Brundage terms ‘flashpoints of contested memory’, events whose competing accounts have as much to do with ‘power, authority, cultural norms and social interaction as with the act of conserving and recalling information’. In Ashburn’s case, old Dixie, the Klan and the Democrats were soon trouncing their opponents in the propaganda battle. By the time the Congressional Committee heard testimony in the summer and autumn of 1871, Ashburn’s characterisation as an evil-doer largely responsible for his own, richly merited, demise was much more advanced. Some of the witnesses took their cue from Radical Rule, a virulently hostile pamphlet that is thought to have been written by William Chipley, one of the men accused of murdering Ashburn. Its claims and phraseology surfaced repeatedly in their evidence. According to Radical Rule, Ashburn had been remarkable as an overseer ‘only for his cruelty to the slaves’. None other than Henry Lewis Benning, the Columbus attorney and former Confederate General, told the committee that Ashburn ‘was reputed to be a very severe overseer – brutal’. Benning admitted he had never met Ashburn, but happily added further slanders. Again, the influence of Radical Rule, which claimed that Ashburn died ‘in a negro brothel of the lowest order’, is clear. Benning told the committee: ‘After the war was over he joined in with the freedmen, and made himself their especial friend – he was ahead of almost every other white man in showing devotion to their interests. He quit his wife and took up with a negro woman in Columbus, lived with her as his wife (so said reputation) and at a public house at that; I mean a house of prostitution.’
Hannah Flournoy, the black woman who owned Ashburn’s last residence, and who witnessed his murder, also testified. After the shooting, she said, ‘They run me out of Columbus.’ Too frightened to return, she ‘lost everything I had there’. Shortly before Ashburn’s death, she added, she had been given a letter addressed to Ashburn. He opened it in her presence, so that she could see it was ‘a letter by the Ku Klux, with his coffin all drawed on it’.
Trying to rescue Ashburn’s reputation for posterity, Caldwell told the committee that he had known Ashburn for years before the war, ‘and I never heard anything against him’. Far from having been a cruel slave overseer, ‘He was a very clever, kind man, and I never heard anything against him personally.’ In Caldwell’s view, Ashburn fell ‘a martyr to liberty’, having been ‘among the very few men in Georgia who openly resisted the secession mania all through the war’. The experience of serving in the Georgia Convention had tempered his radical views, and he had done his utmost to negotiate political compromise ‘in a subdued and conciliatory spirit to the moment of his death’. Other independent witnesses supported his account.
Caldwell’s efforts were to no avail. In the Columbus histories by Telfair and Worsley, it is the Ashburn depicted in Radical Rule, the divisive, adulterous, former ‘brutal overseer’, whose death is memorialised, not the principled would-be statesman. As late as 1975, in an article on the case for the Georgia Historical Quarterly, Elizabeth Otto Daniell cites the pamphlet produced by Ashburn’s enemies as her source for the statement that he had once been a ‘cruel overseer of slaves’.
Historical events do not become flashpoints of contested memory without good reasons. One of the explanations for the posthumous vilification of G.W. Ashburn is the political struggle of which his murder formed a significant part: the largely successful terrorist campaign to limit or remove the rights of Georgia’s African-Americans. This ‘required’ their most important white Columbus advocate to be demonised, and at the same time to be seen as having acted over many years against their real interests. In Telfair’s phrase, the purpose of Ashburn’s assassination was ‘merely to remove a public menace’. Generations after his death, the guardians of white Southern memory found that the bleakest assessments of his life and character still fitted with their overall view of Reconstruction as a time of Northern cruelty and injustice.
Behind Ashburn’s death was also another agenda, which concerned the matter of his killers. His murder was a scandal of national significance, and the ensuing investigation and eventual trial were widely reported. General William Meade, the former federal commander at Gettysburg who was now in charge of Georgia’s military occupation, appointed two famous detectives to bring the assassins to justice – H.C. Whitley, who had investigated the plot to kill Abraham Lincoln, and William Reed, a veteran of the failed impeachment of Lincoln’s far from radical successor, President Andrew Johnson. During the spring of 1868 they arrested at least twenty-two persons, most of them whites from Columbus, who were said to be men of the utmost respectability. Twelve were eventually charged with the murder, and their trial began at the McPherson barracks in Atlanta on 29 June – not by an ordinary civilian court, but by a military commission, a panel of federal military officers, because Georgia had not yet been readmitted to the Union.
According to contemporary reports in Northern newspapers, the prosecution presented a formidable case. The Cincinnati paper the Commercial claimed, ‘The testimony of the prosecution was crushing – overwhelming, and the cross examination, in the hands of eight illustrations of the Georgia bar … did not in the least damage it.’ The only evidence presented by the defence had been alibis which did not stand scrutiny.
However, by the time this assessment was published at the beginning of August, it was too late. The defendants’ guilt or innocence was no longer at issue. That spring, elections had been held for a new Georgia Assembly, which until now had resisted the Fourteenth ‘equal rights’ Amendment, so prolonging the military occupation. On 21 July, its Democrat diehards abruptly changed their minds and ratified the amendment. The fate of Ashburn’s alleged killers had been settled by an extraordinary deal between Southern white leaders and the federal government, in which the prisoners’ freedom, as Worsley puts it, was ‘Georgia’s reward’. On 24 July, General Meade issued orders to dissolve the military commission. Next morning, the prisoners returned to Columbus, to be met at the railroad station by a large, exultant crowd. In theory they had been released on bail, pending future prosecution by the restored civilian authorities. In practice, there would be no further effort to put them or anyone else on trial.
For the former defendants’ many Southern supporters, it was not enough that they were free: they had to be seen as utterly innocent, as almost-martyred victims of their enemies’ radical zeal. Hence, at one level, the need for the claim that Ashburn might have been killed by African-Americans or white members of his own party: if the Columbus prisoners were innocent, there had to be alternative suspects. Meanwhile, there was another battle for future historical memory to be fought. Upon their release, nine of the prisoners issued a statement, printed next day by the Columbus Sun. It said that the prosecution witnesses had been suborned by ‘torture, bribery and threats’, including the use of the ‘sweatbox’. Meanwhile, the defendants had been held at Fort Pulaski in conditions of inhuman cruelty:
The cells were dark, dangerous, without ventilation, and but four feet by seven. No bed or blankets were furnished. The rations consisted of a slice of pork fat [original italics] three times each week. A piece of bread for each meal, soup for dinner and coffee for breakfast, finished the bill of fare. An old oyster can was given each prisoner, and in this vessel both coffee and soup were served … Refused all