Violation: Justice, Race and Serial Murder in the Deep South. David Rose
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societies function than any number of broader surveys.
Before I left Georgia on that first visit I drove out to DeKalb County, at the foot of Stone Mountain, the great, bald dome of granite where giant sculptures of Confederate leaders have been carved into the rock face. I was there to see Gary Parker, an African-American attorney and former state Senator who’d spent most of his career doing criminal defence work in Columbus. Parker, a tall, slim man of forty-six whose hazel eyes seemed to brim with energy, had fought some famous legal battles, both civil and criminal, against tough odds. ‘In Columbus,’ he said, ‘usually there’s only two blacks in the courtroom. Me and the defendant.’
We talked about the city and his work there long into the evening. I was about to leave when he took a pull on his menthol cigarette and paused, as if debating whether to say what was on his mind. Outside the windows of his spacious, homely den, thickets of trees cast dusky shadows. Recently, he told me, he had left Columbus for good, unable to bear an atmosphere that he had begun to find intolerably oppressive.
‘Sometimes I think something really bad happened in Columbus,’ he said quietly. ‘That there’s some terrible secret from the past. Like a massacre or something. I keep on expecting someone to go digging foundations at a construction site and find a mass grave. Raised as I was in the South, images of lynching come to mind all the time, and there have been times when I’ve sat in court there and felt as if I was witnessing a lynching in my lifetime. I don’t know what it was, but something happened there. It’s like a curse.’
I got up to go. I knew I had come nowhere near to understanding Columbus’s paradoxes and mysteries. I suspected that their solutions must lie deep in the city’s history, and in the way it had been remembered and set down, and had thus helped form contemporary outlooks and mentalities. I also knew I’d be back.
Most of the remains of antebellum Columbus are to be found in Wynnton, the neighbourhood Doug Pullen had mentioned at the end of our evening. It was once known as the ‘millionaires’ colony’, and its placid exclusivity dates back to the time when Columbus was first laid out in 1828, and its richer citizens began to construct their homes there, on the slopes of Wynn’s Hill, a safe distance from the downtown stews and factories springing up by the side of the Chattahoochee. They were joined by cotton planters from the surrounding countryside, who saw in Wynnton the ideal location for an urban retreat. Their Palladian temples and mansions decked with Louisiana-style wrought-iron tracery were once at the heart of a social whirl that is said to have rivalled more famous centres of Old South, slave-holding glamour, such as Charleston, Richmond and New Orleans. There were lavish picnics, barbecues, marching bands and orchestras, full-dress hunts and glittering balls.
As late as the 1970s, Wynnton remained a kind of Arcadia, writes the Columbus journalist and author William Winn. His nostalgic description carries more than a whiff of Gone with the Wind: ‘Nearly every house, however modest, has a lawn, and every spring Wynnton is ablaze with pink and white azaleas, the neighbourhood’s particular glory.’ Later, the district was to become synonymous not with colourful flowers, but with rape and murder. But until then ‘it had always been a calm, peaceful neighbourhood, almost entirely free of crime except for an occasional cat burglar. Generations of black nurses rolled perambulators containing generations of white children down the shady sidewalks, and every June the air became so redolent with the fragrance of magnolias and fading gardenias it almost made one dizzy.’
The economic strength of Columbus has long enabled it to wield disproportionate political influence in Georgia, and the torrid months that preceded the South’s secession from the United States were no exception. By 1859, just thirty-one years after the time when it lay on the ragged American frontier, the city is said to have contained eleven churches, four cotton factories, fourteen bars, forty-five grocery stores, four hotels, thirty-two lawyers, three daily newspapers and a magnetic telegraph office. Cotton spun in Columbus could be taken by paddle steamer down the Chattahoochee all the way to Apalachicola on the Florida Gulf Coast, a distance by river of almost five hundred miles. In May 1853, the closing of a last ten-mile gap saw the completion of the Muscogee-Southwestern railroad. ‘It was then that a great railroad jubilee was held in Columbus,’ writes the local historian Etta Blanchard Worsley. ‘Mayor J.L. Morton mingled water from the Atlantic Ocean with the waters of the Chattahoochee, typifying the union of Savannah and Columbus.’ In the whole of what was about to become the Confederate States of America, the industrial production of Columbus was second only to that of Richmond, Virginia.
In the 1860 census, the population of Muscogee County (including Columbus, its suburbs such as Wynnton and the surrounding rural districts) was made up of 9,143 whites, 165 free blacks and 7,921 slaves. It was on this human property that the city’s wealth depended, as its civic leaders recognised. As the abolitionist movement gathered strength in the North and Midwest, the lawyer Raphael J. Moses argued as early as 1849 in favour of leaving the Union in order to protect the right to own slaves. Five years later, America’s first secessionist journal, the Corner Stone, began publication in Columbus. Another early supporter of secession was the local attorney Henry Lewis Benning, later to become the Confederate General whose name is still borne by the military fort. In 1859 he warned that if Lincoln were elected President, all who resisted the end of slavery would be summarily hanged by the ‘Black Republican Party’. Immediate secession was the only way to escape the ‘horrors’ of abolition. ‘Why hesitate?’ Benning asked. ‘The question is between life and death.’
As the political temperature rose, individuals suspected of abolitionist sympathies faced violent retribution. In December 1859, William Scott, the representative of a New York textile company, was run out of Columbus by a vigilante committee, which claimed he displayed ‘more interest in the nigger question than in the real object of his visit’. Like the French aristocracy before the Revolution, Georgia’s whites had been seized by a grande peur. Their terror of a slave insurrection was fuelled by the distant memory of Nat Turner’s bloody revolt in Virginia in 1831, and the recent raid by the Christian radical John Brown on the federal armoury at Harpers Ferry in the same state, planned as a means of arming a putative slave rebellion. In the wake of the raid, which had been crushed by the future Confederate general Robert E. Lee, the 1859–60 session of the Georgia Assembly enacted harsh new measures against free blacks, who were seen as potential focuses for discord. Blacks from outside the state were forbidden to enter it on pain of being sold into slavery, and any current free black resident found ‘wandering or strolling about, or leading an immoral, profligate course of life’ could be charged with vagrancy and also sold. It was thenceforth forbidden for a master to free his slaves posthumously in his will, making slavery in Georgia somewhat less escapable than in ancient Rome.
From this febrile milieu sprang the Columbusite US Senator Alfred Iverson. ‘Slavery, it must and shall be preserved,’ he proclaimed in a speech in 1859, going on to argue that the only way to achieve this end was to form an independent confederacy. By the end of 1860, after Lincoln’s victory in the presidential election, the second Georgia Senator, Robert Toombs, who owned a plantation south of Columbus and later became the Confederacy’s Secretary of State, had also backed secession. On 23 December, the night South Carolina became the first state to leave the Union, Columbus celebrated with a torchlight procession, bonfires and fireworks. The city had already spawned several companies of a paramilitary ‘Southern Guard’, which joined the march in their freshly designed uniforms, rifles at their shoulders. J. Harris Chappell, aged eleven, a future President of Georgia College, wrote to his mother: ‘I think nearly all the people of Columbus is for secession as they are wearing the cockade. There are several small military companies one of which I belong to … the uniform is red coats and black pants. Lenard [sic] Jones is captain. I’m a private. Tommy’s first lieutenant. Sammy Fogle has got the measles.’
Georgia’s Ordinance of Secession passed the State Constitutional Convention on 21 January 1861, to be greeted in Columbus with a mass meeting of citizens, another torchlight procession, and the firing of cannon salutes. The common people shared the zeal of the small, slave-owning elite. The State Governor, Joe Brown, was warning them that if Lincoln were to free the slaves, blacks would compete for jobs with poor whites, ‘associate with them and their children as equals, be allowed to testify in court against them, sit on juries with them, march to the