The Confederate monument standing where the Klan killed Wyatt Outlaw
An open letter regarding Alamance County, North Carolina’s Confederate monument
*Please note that this letter contains descriptions of Klan violence.
Dear Commissioners of Alamance County.¹
One hundred and fifty years ago this February, the Ku Klux Klan paraded Wyatt Outlaw shoeless and shirtless down Graham’s North Main Street to his death. Seventy to one hundred hooded Klansmen surrounded Outlaw, a black Town Commissioner and police officer, as they hanged him from an elm tree thirty yards from the County Courthouse. A sign pinned to his back threatened everyone who supported the rights of black citizens. Graham’s residents could read the message the next morning on their way to church and back. People were afraid to remove Outlaw’s body.
Alamance County’s Confederate monument now stands at the unmarked site of Outlaw’s lynching. It was unveiled in 1914 by violent white supremacists in celebration of their “own race and blood.” Those are the words of the day’s master of ceremonies Jacob Long, who founded the Klan in Alamance County and was arrested for ordering Outlaw’s lynching, a crime for which no one was punished.
The Klan nullified grand juries investigating its members and bragged about getting away with murder. When several Klansmen ultimately were indicted for killing Outlaw, Long and other Klan leaders ensured that none of them cooperated with prosecutors by drafting and securing passage of a law pardoning Klan violence statewide.² Long went on to serve in North Carolina’s legislature.
So did the featured speaker for the monument’s dedication, Henry London, the publisher of a newspaper that “did its utmost for Anglo Saxon supremacy.” London and his wife established monuments across the state, including two that have been removed in counties adjacent to you. London also toured North Carolina promoting a literacy test that decimated the black vote while arguing to defund black schools that Long hadn’t already burned to the ground.
Long and London were attorneys and legislators who used terror and the law to subjugate black people and kill them with impunity. When they stood where Outlaw hung in front of the County Courthouse and introduced the monument to their “own race and blood,” it was clear they meant white people. This is for us.
Whatever the Commissioners think of Confederate memorials generally, this monument should not stand in this location.³
1. Wyatt Outlaw
Wyatt Outlaw was the child of a slave and a slave owner.⁴ In the five years between his Union Army service and his murder, he became a small business owner, founding church trustee, school builder, community leader, police officer, and Commissioner for the Town of Graham who “stood at the head of a political organization of hundreds of assertive and well-organized [black] men with resources [who] stood poised to directly influence municipal and county politics in Alamance County.”⁵ A Klansman testified that “Outlaw was hung because he was a politician. He had been appointed commissioner by Gov. Holden. He had been a leader of the negroes, and had been elected once. There was no other crime alleged.”⁶
Outlaw was a widower and lived with his mother and sons on the ground floor of his woodworking shop just north of Courthouse Square, where the First Baptist Church of Graham stands today.⁷ He was asleep in his home on a Saturday night, February 26, 1870, when twenty Klansmen broke down his door carrying pistols, swords, and torches.⁸ They gave Outlaw only enough time to put on pants before forcing him outside, his young boys screaming, men stomping the head and breast of his 73-year-old mother while threatening to shoot her, decapitate her, and burn down the house.⁹ As many as a hundred men in hoods surrounded Outlaw in the street.¹⁰ His mother later testified that they were shouting “like geese” and carrying so many torches that “it was all bright” at midnight.¹¹
The Klan marched Outlaw 400 yards from his home to an elm tree next to the old County Courthouse, where they tied a bed cord to a branch pointing to the Courthouse door.¹² Some claim the men sliced Outlaw’s mouth at the corners.¹³ They pinned a sign to his body for those who would pass it Sunday morning: “Beware ye guilty, both white and black.”¹⁴ Outlaw’s corpse was still hanging two and a half feet from the ground at 11:00 a.m.¹⁵ People feared the Klan’s punishment if they cut it down.¹⁶
More than a dozen Klansmen were eventually arrested for Outlaw’s murder, but none were prosecuted before passage of the Klan’s Amnesty Act, at which point those who dragged Outlaw out of bed in front of his crying children and left his desecrated body hanging in the center of Graham were, legally speaking, forgiven.¹⁷
2. Henry London
Shortly before unveiling Alamance County’s monument, Confederate veterans Jacob Long and Henry London led a parade down Graham’s North Main Street before taking the speakers’ stand in front of the County Courthouse.¹⁸
Henry London and his wife Bettie Jackson London led the movement to erect Confederate monuments across North Carolina in the early 20th century, particularly in the region. Bettie London was President of North Carolina’s United Daughters of the Confederacy (“UDC”) and chaired its monument committee when the UDC secured the General Assembly’s permission for local governments to contribute public funds toward monuments in Alamance County and many others.¹⁹ Henry London was Adjutant General and Chief of Staff for North Carolina’s United Confederate Veterans (“UCV”) and chaired or served on committees to erect memorials to North Carolina’s Confederate dead on battlefields in other states and the Confederate Women monument in Raleigh.²⁰
Bettie London’s name — “Mrs. H. A. London” — is carved on the monument that stood just south of you in Chatham County before its removal last November.²¹ The Londons’ Pittsboro home was a stop on the parade before the monument’s dedication, for which Henry London was master of ceremonies.²² Bettie led the UDC’s effort to erect Silent Sam, the monument removed from the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill two years ago.²³ Henry, a university trustee, approved the UDC’s request to place the monument on school property.²⁴
Known as “Major” London, Henry London was not a Major in the Confederate army or any other — he received that rank from the UCV, his veterans organization.²⁵ London avoided all but the last six months of the war as a student in Chapel Hill.²⁶ As he explained at the time, “when an exemption is proffered a man, he can scarcely be blamed for taking it.”²⁷ While taking advantage of that exemption, London boasted of having joined a “posse” to “break up a camp of runaway Negroes…taking 7 prisoners and wounding one.”²⁸ “[W]e enjoyed it very much,” he wrote.²⁹ When the draft caught up to him, Private London was detailed “on account of his health” as a messenger, which he remained until he carried an order to cease fire at Appomattox following Lee’s surrender.³⁰
“Major” London’s misrepresentation — that he was an officer in the Confederate Army — was surely deliberate. He was a fraud generally, and when President Roosevelt visited Raleigh in 1905, London met him dressed in a Confederate uniform and claimed to have worn it for four years, three and a half years longer than he served.³¹ London, who told the Graham crowd “I never say anything in a speech about the war that I cannot prove,” regularly perverted the war’s history while promoting Lost Cause mythology throughout North Carolina, including as President of the State Literary and Historical Association.³²
Nine months before the dedication in Graham, London delivered the “Address of an ‘Old Master’ to Ex-Slaves” in Rockingham.³³ After claiming that “the best friend of the colored man in the South is the Southern white man,” London said to the audience of former slaves
“Every one of you, no doubt, thinks that President Abraham Lincoln freed you all…They got Congress to prepare an amendment to the constitution of the United States, known as the thirteenth amendment, prohibiting slavery in the United States. In order for that amendment to become a part of the constitution, it had to be ratified by three-fourths of the States, just as any amendment is required to be ratified. And bless your soul the ten Southern States that had been fighting them to keep you in slavery, were the ones to vote for that amendment and have it adopted.”³⁴
That is, the states of the Confederacy — not Lincoln — deserved credit for their emancipation despite fighting a war specifically “to keep [them] in slavery.”
“Again the Southern people are not responsible for your having been slaves and I want you to remember that they never brought your ancestors to this country…but when you were brought here by our Yankee brother, and sold to us, we did the best we could for you…[N]o other people in any other country in the world emerged so quickly from barbarism to civilization, as did the colored people brought from the jungles of Africa and made slaves to the South…The white people in North Carolina have done what they could for you…[T]hey have established schools all over North Carolina for the education of the colored, as well as the white children.”³⁵
That is, Southern slave owners were not responsible for slavery because they purchased slaves from Northern slave traders, and they deserved credit for civilizing the black men and women they purchased.
When London wasn’t lying to former slaves he championed white supremacy in the pages of his newspaper, The Chatham Record, and in frequent speaking engagements like the May 26, 1900, “Grand White Man’s Rally” in Chatham County or the “Grand Gathering of White People” in Bertie County four days later.³⁶ Both were stops on London’s campaign for the 1900 Amendment to the North Carolina Constitution, which required voters to pay a poll tax and pass a literacy test if they were not lineal descendants of voters who were registered before 1867 and necessarily white.³⁷ He told a Greensboro audience
“Now it is determined that white supremacy shall be made permanent by ridding the state of the ignorant negro vote…The whole situation is embraced in the single question: Can North Carolina be governed better with or without the ignorant negro voters? There should be no hesitation on the part of any man, with pure white blood in his veins, in answering that question… [black voters] were as unfit to exercise the right of suffrage as their savage brother, who naked roamed the wilds of Africa.”³⁸
After all, London asked, “[i]s it right, after you have paid taxes to educate a buck negro’s children, to have him come along and vote without paying any tax at all?”³⁹ He made this argument repeatedly to white audiences: “white men are tired of paying taxes to educate negro children.”⁴⁰ With a literacy test and fewer black schools, London and his audiences could “secure white supremacy forever.”
London spelled it out for his paper’s readers.
“Every negro’s vote kills the vote of some white man…Remember that the amendment will diminish the negro vote by about eighty thousand. And this means that the votes of 80,000 white men which are now killed by negro voters, will then count to swell the majority for white supremacy…How can any unprejudiced white man think that North Carolina can be governed better with the votes of ignorant negroes than without them?…With honest elections the negro will control thirteen counties, and with desertion of one hundred and fifty white men from the white race they can control twelve more counties. There are at least ten more in danger of negro domination with a division of the white vote. This makes thirty-three counties in the State sadly in need of the Amendment. [Populist support] does not prevent the gentlemen who have heretofore acted with that party from realizing that they are white men, and that their first duty is to their own race in the great fight now being waged against negro domination.”⁴¹
White supremacy was the guiding principle and purpose of Henry London’s life. He would have told anyone who asked that Alamance County’s Confederate monument celebrated the white race. But there was no need to ask — that was the first thing Jacob Long said when he introduced London to the crowd.
“It is well for us now and then to turn aside from the duties of everyday life, and together celebrate some great event in which we all have a common interest; to recall the achievements of the great and good of our own race and blood, and speak some word or perform some act, or direct some memorial which will keep fresh in our memories services, sacrifices, and events that ought not to be forgotten.”⁴²
A monument to the achievements of “our own race and blood.” White people.⁴³
3. Jacob Long
Jacob Long was a prominent local attorney, deputy clerk of Alamance County’s Superior Court, acting district attorney, and member of the North Carolina House of Representatives.⁴⁴ He served with London on the committee for the Confederate Women monument in Raleigh and campaigned for Alamance County’s monument at least as early as July 1910, when he asked readers of The Alamance Gleaner and The State Dispatch — “You and each of you” — to mail their contributions to the UDC.⁴⁵ Long’s son and law partner, State Representative Jacob Elmer Long, introduced the bill allowing Alamance County to contribute public funds for the DOC’s monument fund and, one year later, appeared on behalf of the DOC to request those funds from this Board.⁴⁶ The County requisitioned $1,000 toward the monument’s $2,500 cost. The Town of Graham contributed another $300.⁴⁷
Like Major Henry London, “Colonel” Jacob Long was a Colonel only in the UCV — he was a Corporal when the war ended.⁴⁸ But Long was the undisputed and official Chief of the Alamance County Klan, which he founded and organized into ten cells (“camps”) that reported to him.⁴⁹ Long’s 500-man force included the sheriff, every deputy sheriff, court officials, the County’s representative in the North Carolina’s House, and other powerful or recently-powerful men.⁵⁰
When new members were initiated, often by Long himself, they were frightened as much as possible before being forced to swear, sometimes with a rope around their necks, “to not reveal the name of the person who initiated [them],…not to reveal the secrets of the organization on pain of death,”⁵¹ to “obey the orders of the officers of the organization, and to resist by force, if necessary, the efforts to elevate the negroes to the civil and political equality of the white man in this country.”⁵²
Long testified that as “commander-in-chief of the county” he was responsible “[t]o no one at all,” and obedience to his orders “was part of the obligation” Klansmen secured with their lives.⁵³ Like Henry London, he specifically targeted the education of black students. Long’s men burned a schoolhouse when he ordered them “to put a stop to the n — — — school,”⁵⁴ and a dozen hooded men severely beat a disabled white teacher of black students, disfigured his face with knives, painted him black with tar, and left him in deep woods without his crutches.⁵⁵
Years later, shortly after the dedication of Alamance County’s Confederate monument, Long asked that the Klan not be judged too harshly.⁵⁶
“War is a fearful thing and these are many things that then seemed to the actors right and proper that to us now appear to be cruel and unjustifiable…[Y]ou must remember that the war just then closed placed the negroes in such a situation that it was natural for them to indulge their propensities to vice and becoming idle and shiftless.”
The acts that seemed right and proper to Long at the time included murder, infanticide, sexual assault, and mutilation of victims’ faces and genitals. A U.S. Senate report on Klan violence listed numerous “Outrages committed by persons in disguise in the county of Alamance” under Long’s leadership, including:
“William Duryear, a half simple colored man, was taken from his family in the night by eight or ten persons in disguise and drowned in [a] mill-pond.
….
An infant child of Joseph Harvey (colored) was knocked from the arms of its mother by a party of disguised persons who went to Harvey’s house for the purpose of whipping him; the child died shortly afterward from the effects of the fall.
….
Nathan Trolinger, (colored,) taken from his house by men in disguise, severely whipped, and afterwards made to mutilate his own private parts with his pocket-knife.
….
A Mrs. Foy and her daughter, (white,) thrown out of her house, and both of them badly beaten and maltreated.
….
Sally Hall and her two daughters thrown out of their house and whipped, and one of them made to exhibit her person, while the fiends proceeded to inflict blows upon her private parts.”⁵⁷
A second infant was killed when Klansmen broke into the home of Jacob Murray, knocked the child out of his wife’s arms, and stepped on it.⁵⁸ Long’s Klan attacked more than fifty other victims.⁵⁹ His law partner estimated that Klan members administered 100 to 150 whippings, but “[s]ome have been whipped two or three times.”⁶⁰
Long fled the state after Outlaw’s murder and was arrested when he returned six months later,⁶¹ but attempts to secure his indictment were unsuccessful.⁶² As his partner testified, in Alamance County it was difficult to empanel a grand jury that contained no Klan members, “especially when the sheriff and all his deputies were members.”⁶³ The foreman of a grand jury that refused to indict Long for Outlaw’s murder was a suspected Klansman.⁶⁴ An exasperated judge “learned that the Klan provided its own amnesty” as grand juries failed to indict Klan members despite “the positive testimony both of accomplices and victims.”⁶⁵ A Klan member charged with murder in neighboring Orange County “exult[ed] in the confidence that he could never be indicted.”⁶⁶
Long remained functionally untouchable for killing Outlaw until North Carolina’s Amnesty Act made it official.⁶⁷ The law was promoted by Alamance County’s representative in the state House, attorney Jesse Gant — the grand jury foreman who spared Long⁶⁸ — and was reportedly “concocted and determined upon by leaders and advisors of the ku klux klan” in Alamance County to silence a Klansman expected to confess to Outlaw’s murder and name “a great number of his fellow ku-klux, who were equally guilty with himself.”⁶⁹ As Chief of the Klan and a prominent member of the bar, Long almost certainly helped draft the law that let him get away with Outlaw’s murder.
When Jacob Long led the parade down North Main Street to dedicate Alamance County’s Confederate monument, he knew they were following in Wyatt Outlaw’s last steps. And when Long stood beneath the monument and told the crowd it “is well” to celebrate the white race, he knew they stood on the unmarked site of Outlaw’s murder. If you have any doubt that Long valued that obscenity, consider a pseudonymous 1877 article describing the Caswell County Courthouse, including the room in which the Klan killed State Senator John W. Stephens three weeks after killing Outlaw. “This noted south room is now occupied as an office by Mr. Jacob A. Long, a very worthy and talented young lawyer, who quietly sits within two feet of the spot where Stephens’ dead body was found…in as unconcerned a manner as though he had never heard of a ghost, or Stephens either.”⁷⁰
And Jacob Long and Henry London, both lawyers, would have understood the warning inherent in placing the monument in front of the County Courthouse, an armed soldier staring north and permanently standing guard over the law shaped by men like them — this is emphatically our province and the law is whatever we say. We’ll kill and die for it.
I’ll end with a message for you, Chair Galey, as you campaign for the North Carolina Senate. I studied the career of our relative Kerr Scott⁷¹ after he was mentioned in a Constitutional History course in law school. I’d always considered him a relatively progressive politician for his era, as you noted while discussing the County’s monument after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. So I was surprised and saddened to learn that Scott signed the Southern Manifesto opposing desegregation of public schools and the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education.⁷² Many years later, his aide Bill Cochrane claimed that Scott tried and failed to remove his name from the Manifesto at the last minute.⁷³ According to Cochrane, “Senator Scott never had any problem with black people and he never went in for that kind of strong stuff.”⁷⁴
Like almost everything I’ve cited here, Cochrane’s claim is now available online, but I first read it somewhere in the stacks of Alderman library at the University of Virginia. Alderman is one of the buildings in the background of videos showing white men parading with torches and chanting hate the night before one of them drove into a crowd and murdered Heather Heyer. Today’s Klan rallied and killed to preserve Confederate monuments because they remain declarations of white supremacy just as Jacob Long and Henry London intended.
This is the strong stuff. I hope you won’t let your service to the County end with your name on it.
Sincerely.
Mike Scott
¹ Board Chair Amy Scott Galey and and I are relatives. We do not know each other well but we’ve discussed the subject of this letter. My family has lived in Alamance County for many generations but I am not a resident.
² Please note that this letter contains descriptions of that violence.
³ The men represented anonymously by the Confederate monument are named on the Alamance County War Memorial two blocks away. Removing the monument will do nothing to dishonor them.
⁴ Scott Reynolds Nelson, Iron Confederacies: Southern Railways, Klan Violence and Reconstruction (University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 100.
⁵ Nelson, Iron Confederacies, 100; see also Trial of William W. Holden, Governor of North Carolina, before the Senate of North Carolina, on Impeachment by the House of Representatives for High Crimes and Misdemeanors (“Sentinel” Printing Office, 1871), 1333 (“Outlaw was an industrious mechanic, well to do and prospering. No crime can be alleged against him except that he is a colored man, a republican, and has presumed to hold the office of town commissioner for two terms, once by [the Governor’s] appointment and the second by an election of the people.”). Outlaw’s life is explored in greatest detail by Carole Watterson Troxler in “To Look More Closely at the Man: Wyatt Outlaw, a Nexus of National, Local, and Personal History,” The North Carolina Historical Review, Vol. 77, №4 (October 2000).
⁶ Troxler, “To Look More Closely at the Man,” 417.
⁷ Nelson, Iron Confederacies, 100; Troxler, “To Look More Closely at the Man,” 417; Report on the Alleged Outrages in the Southern States by the Select Committee of the Senate (Government Printing Office, 1871), 32, 259.
⁸ Trial of William W. Holden, 1363–69.
⁹ Id.
¹⁰ Id. at 1333.
¹¹ Id. at 1363–69.
¹² Id. at 1187.
¹³ Nelson, Iron Confederacies, 113.
¹⁴ Trial of William W. Holden, 1133; Report on Alleged Outrages, 6, 32.
¹⁵ Report on Alleged Outrages, 32; Trial of William W. Holden, 1187.
¹⁶ Report on Alleged Outrages, 32. Army Lt. Paul Hambrick reported that “the morning after [Outlaw’s] murder (Sunday) his body was cut down by Sheriff Murray, taken to the court-house for inquest, and while there, in presence of this officer, indignities were offered the dead man by parties proffering the dead body a cigar.” Id. at CXII. Sherriff Murray was a member of the Klan and made no attempt to find Outlaw’s killers. See Mark L. Bradley, Bluecoats and Tar Heels: Soldiers and Civilians in Reconstruction North Carolina (University of Kentucky Press, 2009), Chapter 9.
¹⁷ “Bill of Indictment for Murder which the Ku Klux of this Legislature are endeavoring to quash!,” The Daily Era, February 27, 1873; North Carolina Public Laws 1872–1873, Chapter 181 (granting amnesty for most Klan crimes); North Carolina Public Laws 1874–1875, Chapter 20 (eliminating an exemption to amnesty for murder, arson, and burglary).
¹⁸ “Confederate Monument,” The Twice-a-Week Dispatch, May 19, 1914; “Major London’s Address,” The Alamance Gleaner, May 28, 2914.
¹⁹ See Tom Vincent, “Evidence of Womans Loyalty, Perseverance, and Fidelity: Confederate Soldiers Monuments in North Carolina,” The North Carolina Historical Review, Vol. 83, №1 (January 2006), 1865–1914; Bettie London, Dedication of Monument, The North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
²⁰ See, e.g., “At Appomattox: Unveiling First Southern Memorial on Famous Battlefield,” The New Bern Weekly Journal, April 11, 1905; “Model Chosen for Monument that Colonel Horne Will Erect to Women of Confederacy: Committee Acted,” The Raleigh Times, July 25, 1912 (listing seven committee members, including London and Jacob Long); “Talk Pensions and Monuments: Ex-Confederates in Conference with Legislature Committee,” The News and Observer, February 19, 1909 (London requests funding for the Confederate Women monument from the General Assembly).
²¹ “Confederate monument at center of protests in Chatham County taken down,” The News and Observer, November 19, 2019.
²² “Friday at Pittsboro,” The News and Observer, August 20, 1907.
²³ See Affidavit of Cecelia Moore, Sons of Confederate Veterans. v. University of North Carolina, N.C. Superior Court for Orange County, Case №19-CVS-1579 (January 27, 2020).
²⁴ University of North Carolina Trustees Minutes, Volume 11, June 1, 1908, 175–177.
²⁵ See, e.g., “General Order №26, Theo. F. Davidson Inspector General, N.C. Division, U.C.V.,” The Asheville Daily Citizen, November 4, 1897 (granting London the “rank of major”); “Thirty-Second Regiment by Henry A. London, Private Company I,” Histories of the Several Regiments and Battalions from North Carolina in the Great War 1861-’65, 521.
²⁶ Adam H. Domby, The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory (University of Virginia Press, 2020) (“London avoided service until he could no longer put it off, being conscripted near the end of 1864.”).
²⁷ Henry London to Lilla London, February 16, 1864, in the Henry Armand London Papers, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Southern Historical Collection.
²⁸ Id.
²⁹ Id.
³⁰ “Major H. A. London, Tar Heel Veteran Dies at Pittsboro,” The News and Observer, January 21, 1918.
³¹ “Roosevelt Day: North Carolina’s Splendid Greeting to the Nation’s Chief Executive,” New Bern Weekly Journal, October 20, 1905.
³² “Major London’s Address”; “Major H. A. London, Tar Heel Veteran.”
³³ “The Address of an ‘Old Master’ to Ex-slaves,” The News and Observer, August 31, 1913.
³⁴ Id.
³⁵ Id.
³⁶ “Local Records,” The Chatham Record, November 10, 1898 (asking subscribers to renew to London’s paper, which “did its utmost for Anglo Saxon supremacy”); “Politics in Chatham: Great Preparations for the White Man’s Rally on the 26th Inst.,” The Morning Post, May 10, 1900; “The Grand Gathering of White People,” The Windsor Ledger, May 17, 1900 (“Remember the cause — White Supremacy”); see also “Maj. London Speaks,” The Anglo-Saxon, May 17, 1900 (“In every campaign since the war [London’s] voice has been heard in support of white man’s party.”).
³⁷ The North Carolina Qualifications for Suffrage and Office Amendment created Article VI of the North Carolina Constitution.
³⁸ “Civilization Shall Govern: Major London’s Speech on the Amendment,” The Greensboro Telegram, April 2, 1900.
³⁹ Id.
⁴⁰ The Chatham Record, July 5, 1900.
⁴¹ Id.
⁴² “Confederate Monument”; “Major London’s Address.”
⁴³ Not, for example, Union soldiers from Alamance County who escaped slavery and died fighting it. More than 130 black men from Alamance County served in the Union Army. See Carole Watterson Troxler and William Murray Vincent, Shuttle & Plow: A History of Alamance County, North Carolina (Alamance County Historical Association, 1999), Appendix 15.
⁴⁴ See, e.g., “In Years Gone By: Col. Jacob A. Long Conducted Law Practice Nearly 50 Years,” The Daily Times-News, June 18, 1959; “250 Bales of Cotton Burned,” The Charlotte Daily Observer, April 19, 1903 (referring to Long as “active prosecutor”); Biographical History of North Carolina Volume VIII, (Samuel Ashe, Stephen Weeks, and Charles Van Noppen, 1917), 301.
⁴⁵ “Model Chosen”; “A Monument to the Confederate Soldiers of Alamance County,” The Alamance Gleaner, July 21, 1910; “An Appeal for the Confederate Monument,” The Twice-a-Week Dispatch, July 6, 1910. [NOTE: After sending this letter to the Board of Commissioners, I learned that the Graham chapter of the UDC was founded on October 2, 1905 in the home of Jacob and Esta Long. Mrs. Long served as the chapter’s second president. See Alamance County Centennial Committee, Confederate Memoirs: Alamance County troops of the War Between the States, 1861–1865 (1965), Chapter III.]
⁴⁶ “The Legislature: New Bills Introduced,” The Charlotte News, February 11, 1913; “Monument to Alamance Confederate Soldiers Assured,” The Alamance Gleaner, January 8, 1914.
⁴⁷ The Twice-a-Week Dispatch, January 6, 1913.
⁴⁸ “In Years Gone By” (“If Jacob Long had been old enough to enlist in 1861, he might have been promoted to captain or major. He did, however, get the title of colonel after the war…[b]ut that was a title conferred on him by a Confederate veterans organization.”); Biographical History of North Carolina, 301. The UCV “had been tied to the original Klan since their founding,” with multiple UCV commanders also serving as Klan leaders. Domby, False Cause.
⁴⁹ Biographical History of North Carolina, 302 (“Colonel Long played an important part in the subduing of the negroes at the close of the War between the States…and was made chief of the ‘Klan’ in Alamance County. He organized ten camps in the county having some four hundred or five hundred of the best men in the county as members, and was instrumental in having the White Brotherhood organized in Orange and Caswell counties.”).
⁵⁰ Id.; Shuttle and Plow, 326.
⁵¹ Third Annual Message of W. W. Holden, Governor of North Carolina (1870), 206–207.
⁵² Trial of William W. Holden, 1581.
⁵³ Report on Alleged Outrages, 257.
⁵⁴ See Third Annual Message, 182–83; Shuttle & Plow, 327.
⁵⁵ Report on Alleged Outrages, LXV.
⁵⁶ Recollections of Jacob Alson Long, Alamance County North Carolina, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Southern Historical Collection.
⁵⁷ Report on Alleged Outrages, LXV.
⁵⁸ Trial of William W. Holden, 1376. It’s not clear from Murray’s testimony if his four-month-old child was a boy or a girl.
⁵⁹ Report on Alleged Outrages, XIX.
⁶⁰ Report on Alleged Outrages, IX, XI, 22.
⁶¹ Biographical History of North Carolina, 302.
⁶² See “Bill of Indictment for Murder,” (grand jury finding true bill of indictment for suspects in Outlaw’s murder but no true bill as to Long, charged as an accessory). In an otherwise excellent article, Professor Troxler writes that “if one can see past the glare of the pine torches” when reading testimony regarding Outlaw’s lynching, “there is the outline of a lone rider” — Jacob Long — trying to stop it. Troxler, “To Look More Closely at the Man,” 404. That’s fiction apparently based on Long’s veto of a different Klan murder. Jacob Long testified that he made no efforts to stop Outlaw’s killing. See Report on Alleged Outrages, 260 (“Question. Did you go among them and endeavor to dissuade them from hanging him? Answer. No, sir.”).
⁶³ Report on Alleged Outrages, X.
⁶⁴ “The Ku Klux Amnesty Bill — Startling State of Facts!,” The Daily Era, February 11, 1873; Trial of William Holden, 2538.
⁶⁵ “Card from Judge Tourgee,” The Daily Era, March 1, 1873.
⁶⁶ Id.
⁶⁷ North Carolina Public Laws 1872–1873, Chapter 181; North Carolina Public Laws 1874–1875, Chapter 20.
⁶⁸ “The Ku Klux Amnesty Bill — Startling State of Facts!”
⁶⁹ The Greensboro North State, February 12, 1873.
⁷⁰ “Letter from Caswell County,” The Observer, March 24, 1877.
⁷¹ Scott was North Carolina’s Governor from 1949 to 1953 and U.S. Senator from 1954 until his death in 1958.
⁷² The Southern Manifesto was titled “Declaration of Constitutional Principles.” See Congressional Record, 84th Congress Second Session. Vol. 102, part 4 (March 12, 1956), 4459–4460. Senator Scott also opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and President Eisenhower’s decision to send troops to escort black students to Little Rock Central High School. See Julian Pleasants, The Political Career of W. Kerr Scott: The Squire from Haw River (University Press of Kentucky, 2014), Chapter 11.
⁷³ James P. Hughes, “North Carolina’s Man on the Hill,” Carolina Alumni Review (Spring 1984), 13–14.
⁷⁴ Id.
