New York Herald, September 30, 1872, p. 5
Dispatch dated Little Rock, September 22, 1872
Attributed to George Alfred Townsend (“Gath”)
The following is a transcription of the original New York Herald article. Spelling, terminology, and historical language have been retained. Obvious typographical or scan ambiguities are noted where necessary.
Content caution: This 1872 article contains historical language and terminology that may be considered offensive or obscene today. Such wording is reproduced verbatim to accurately represent the original historical record and does not reflect the views of this site.
ARKANSAS’ ILIAD.
The Reign of Blood and Anarchy
in Pope County.—Legacies of Internecine Hate Left by the War.—CARPET-BAGGERS VS. EX-REBELS.—The Mountain Feds and the Brindle Tails.—STATE OF CIVIL WAR.—Sheriff Dodson and the Militia Camped Out.—The Natives Prowling Round Them in Armed Bands.—WHO ARE THE OUTLAWS?—What Dover Village Has Seen of Murder.—Two Sheriffs, One Deputy and Two County Clerks Murdered.—Hickox and His Iron Rule and Leaden Ending.—A Specimen of Executions in Arkansas.—The Law of the Trigger and the Ethics of the Bowie Knife.—Terrible Recital of Border Ruffianism, Private Feuds and Every Day Assassination.
LITTLE ROCK, Sept. 22, 1872.
At this wide distance from New York city I find myself saturated with the theme of the hour—the war in Pope county. It is the theme of everybody, and is at the same time a new theme and an old one, for some new occurrence happens daily to swell the bloody account of that most demoralized neighborhood, where now the commander of the State militia holds the county seat, with a part of the Governor’s guard. The region of Illinois Bayou, the chief stream of the county, is commanded by the shifting encampments of the outlawed Sheriff, Dodson, and his 240 militia; the young men of Dover haunt the mountain spurs and the dens and bottoms of the north and west of the county, armed to the teeth, and sworn to kill Dodson, the Sheriff, and Stuart, the Superintendent of Public Instruction; and, finally, all the old and stable people of the community are hungry and apprehensive; little business of any sort is done; the mails still go and come, but people go and do not return; it is martial law without the name and outlawry in fact. Such is the condition of an old and well known county of Arkansas, whose county seat is less than eighty miles from Little Rock, the State capital.
As I shall recite at considerable detail the late startling incidents in that county the present letter will aim to do no more than to recapitulate the successive crimes which make this dire condition of things.
HOW TO REACH POPE COUNTY.
Passing from the relatively imposing county of Pulaski, which Little Rock’s 18,000 people swell up to 40,000 inhabitants of the county, the traveller by rail must cross one interesting county, Conway, to reach Pope county. Conway county is even of less consequence than Pope, though larger, possessing only about eight thousand one hundred people. Lewisburg, the only settlement of any note, has ceased to be the county seat, and that woeful honor belongs to a spot called Springfield, on the southern side of the Arkansas River. Opposite Lewisburg is Perry county, with only 2,700 people, and next above and west of Perry is Yell county, which faces across stream the county of Pope on the northern bank. Yell county has, perhaps, 8,000 residents, and its chief river town of Dardanelle is right opposite Norristown, which is the river base of supplies, news, groceries and canards for the present warfare against the misbegotten pagans of Pope.
If one should go still further up stream, on one of the slow and oft-grounding steamers, he would see little to interest him except bluffs and distant mountains for all the remaining 100 miles toward the Indian Territory. It is said that very many settlers are encamped and waiting along the line of the Indian Territory to cross into that red man’s reserve when the law or war breaks the barriers down; but this may merely show a commendable spirit to get out of Arkansas.
THOUGHTS BY THE WAY.
On every side, as the traveller goes toward Pope, is the unexpungable nomenclature of the old French occupation, which leads the traveller’s mind back only seventy years to the century and more of French occupation of these waste premises, and the resonance and quaintness of the French names of streams and ponds are the only poetical features of this wild, hard region. It is the Illinois Bayou which is the main entry to Pope county; but Fourche la Fave and Petite Jean are neighboring streams.
Fifty years ago, when we had occupied this province of France as our purchase, all Arkansas possessed only 14,000 souls; in twenty years more Arkansas had 100,000 of the offscourings of the Gulf States, the Carolinas, Georgia and Tennessee, and between 1840 and 1860 it more than doubled these figures. No State had a pioneer period more ruffianly than this, and none have fallen so supinely into the hands of the most indifferent type of carpet-baggers. Its literature is the Arkansas Traveller’s lazy banjo pick and its Iliad, a hundred cowardly affrays and duels. Nearly the size of England, settled since 1670, and made a State of the Union as long ago as 1836, the United States still owns more than thirty millions of acres here—a testimony to the indifference of the immigrant upon the subject of the “Arkansas toothpick.” When Colonel Bowie invented his knife he gave Arkansas something effectual to defend itself against occupation.
Boasting that she possesses 12,000 square miles of coal, the State is without manufactures or even mines worthy of the name, and cotton and politics are the staples of thought and subsistence here.
In these days few passengers go by river to Pope county, but the majority take the Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad, which passes half a dozen stations in the woods and stops at Perry’s, a store and water tank right out in the wilderness sixty miles from Little Rock. Here there is a mail and passenger hack waiting to start for Russellville, sixteen miles westward, the chief village of Pope county, and perhaps a few teams and saddle mules are hitched around the station to bear individuals off to more distant points. It is a ride of the best of the afternoon to Russellville, over a rutty clay road which passes the site of several features in the pending war, and if the driver or your fellow passengers feel inclined they will amuse you with a hundred recitations of
BLOODY COMMEMORATIONS.
You will hear of John A. Murrell’s band, of Cullen Baker’s midnight assassinations, of Dodson’s guerilla robberies and the bloody massacre of prisoners at Shiloh Church; of Hickox shot from his saddle and of General Upham’s dire inflictions upon the people of Woodruff, Crittenden and Mississippi counties.
One old chap by the name of Tobey, who is postmaster, miller and merchant at Norristown, brought the hair up on my head by relating the first and also the latest crime committed at his hamlet. He said that he remembered seeing, when a boy, the bloody clawmarks of a murdered gambler named John Hill, alias Nixon Kerr, who, having killed his score of men, finally felt the agony of the murdered himself in the year 1840.
“He tried to climb up that counter and draw his knife,” said Mr. Tobey, “but he couldn’t do it, and the prints of his hands were there for years. The man that stabbed him went off to Texas and became a Baptist preacher.”
The last crime happened but a few weeks or months ago, near Norristown, when two negroes named Riall and Archie Embury killed, respectively, a man by the name of Champion and another white fellow named Tucker. Archie Embury killed Champion in a quarrel about cotton picking, and soon afterward Archie’s brother was murdered; Tucker, the ferryman at Valley Rock, sought to raise up the dead body, when the bereaved negro father rushed out with a stick of wood and beat out Tucker’s brains.
“A happy society you have there, Mr. Tobey,” said I; “do they ever hang anybody?”
“Not in these days. They wouldn’t let old Colonel Embury, who used to own these niggers, testify because he was disfranchised, and Archie Embury rode Hickox’s horse all over the county after Hickox’s death. He’s in the militia.”
Indeed, the history of Arkansas is a history of murder, family vendetta, lynchings and duels.
“I well remember,” said an old man of Galley Rock, “seeing the loaded steamboats go by to Fort Smith, where the big politicians and planters repaired to fight, across the line in the Indian Territory. The last, it seems to me, was Albert Pike and John E. Roane—the latter General Yell’s lieutenant colonel. Pike had a company in the regiment in the Mexican war; they quarrelled, and, after they came home, fought. About three thousand people saw the fight. Bob Johnson, now Pike’s partner at Washington, seconded Roane, and Nathan Chase seconded Pike. After the second fire, when Pike had lost a lock of his hair by a ball, old Dr. Burton, a fire-eater, pitched in and said, ‘If there’s any more firing I’ll do a little shooting myself.’ He stopped it, amid general disappointment.”
In this way you are entertained until you find that the business of life in Arkansas is to kill.
There was General F. C. Hindman—the ablest man of the old slavery school in the State, as Bob Johnson was the most successful politician—shot dead at his fireside, and, they say, by his relative. Even in the State House at Little Rock the spot is pointed out where the Speaker, “Horse Ears” Smith, cut the bowels out of Representative Anthony as he stood at his desk, leaving the presiding chair for that purpose.
“And, strange as it may seem to you,” said an editor at Little Rock to me, “the man that did that was a very respectable and good man. It was all done in a fit of passion. He lived many years respected and bore a good reputation.”
This was the usual character given to anybody fond of killing people. Parson Hickerson, of Dover, Pope county, who was a Methodist presiding elder, and twenty-five years an itinerant, published a card in the Little Rock papers last week saying that he was proud to call “friends of his” Mr. Poynter, who had killed half a dozen people; Mr. Haile, who shot an old sexagenarian at his gate, and Mr. Perry, or “Kinch” West, who is sworn to be one of Cullen Baker’s band of murderers.
Religion and bloodshed are near neighbors and nearly commutable terms in some parts of Arkansas. The Calvinistic type of mind—probably derived from the Scotch Calvinists of North Carolina, who emigrated on this parallel to Tennessee and Arkansas, and gave the prevailing complexion and tone to all the society, so that even a Methodist here looks like a son of John Knox, while the Baptists are Calvinists by profession—this style of men and character is remarked throughout Arkansas. The light and humorous side of life is not to be found here, and the Gaelic and fateful qualities and temperament prevail. Obstinacy, revenge, no horror of blood, persevering malignity, vanity and treachery may be said to have examples in every community, and as none can afford the reputation of cowardice the timorous villain murders the quickest and on every hip the six-shooter lies ready to the hand.
And this is the matter in Pope county to-day—the old social phenomenon of arms-bearing and killing, aggravated by a government foreign to the people.
POPE COUNTY
has 8,400 population. Its county seat is Dover, and the other settlements are Norristown, Galley Rock and Georgetown. It is said to possess coal and it produces a measurable quantity of corn and cotton in the broad river bottoms. There is much hilly land and a variety of timber; some wheat is produced, and in places the land raises fifty bushels of corn to the acre and above one bale of cotton.
The census of 1870 shows that it gave that year 3,070 bales of cotton, 1,015 pounds of tobacco, and 718 pounds of wool; that it gave 42,000 pounds of butter and only nine tons of hay, and that it gave a little wax and honey and some peas and potatoes, and no more. Here are figures of poverty, indeed, in all but cotton. As early in the annals of the State as 1830 it had 1,483 people, and in 1860, before the breaking out of the war, 7,883. It is, however, above the average of the counties of Arkansas in population. It had 978 slaves in it in 1860, or one to every eight white souls, and was relatively a large slaveholding county.
More than one-half the people are born in the State, and as many as 1,167 of the people of Pope county emigrated from Tennessee and 647 from North Carolina, Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi furnishing together above 600. There were in all only 56 foreigners in Pope county, all but nine natives of the British Islands. There are, indeed, in all Arkansas only about 6,000 people of foreign birth to above 479,000 native Americans. Pope county has about 3,700 acres of improved land, equal, say, to 37 good-sizable Northern farms, the whole valued officially at $123,000, and its live stock is set down as worth only $32,000.
HOW THE WAR BEGAN.
Pope county was settled, before the United States possessed it, by a few French and afterwards by some civilized Cherokees, who finally moved on to the Indian Territory. During the war it was neutral ground, and successively overrun by federals from Dardanelle and Lewisburg, and by rangers and jayhawkers of both armies and of neither. Horses and stock were stolen, houses burned and wayside murders committed.
The people, observing old political lines, fell into both armies, according to their traditions; but they seem not to have divided by any geographical line. Between rival families recriminations ensued after the peace, and in time old grudges began to be avenged, and bushwhacking was not uncommon. The period of military government was followed by the mild but inefficient administration of Governor Murphy—a native Unionist. In this period several county officials were killed, although the citizens disavow the acts, and say that they were private assassinations arising from personal causes.
After the new and disfranchising constitution went into operation a lull ensued, and for some time everything was quiet; but the county officials of Pope, who were all republicans and secret leaguers, grew more and more obnoxious to the people and both sides were surly, muttering and threatening. The native republicans, who go by the name of “Mountain Feds,” took sides with their Sheriff and County Clerk, and as the time of another election drew near the county authorities claimed that the insecurity of the times demanded martial law in Pope county.
This made the people spiteful, and the young men and boys, who are the people of violence in all border communities, swore that the declaration of martial law should never avail to let Hickes and Dodson usurp their offices anew. Last June and July the radical party, the common oppressor, split in half and the Brindle Tail faction declared for Greeley and took away from the regular radicals the only newspaper in Pope county, the Russellville National Tribune.
The county officials now used every energy and provocation to compel martial law, but the State Governor, O. A. Hadley, of Minnesota, being no candidate for re-election, was loath to proceed to this extremity. Meantime, the Deputy Sheriff professed to have been the object of an attempted assassination, and forthwith the County Clerk, the Sheriff and the School Superintendent raised a posse of their political supporters, arrested several leading citizens, took them away from Dover, the county seat, and two of these men were killed in the darkness of that night at a woody and lonesome place in the road.
Here began the Pope county war and none but the Almighty and the actors in the tragedy know whether those prisoners were murdered by the county officials or whether they were shot in an attempt to rescue them by their friends.
THE BLOODY RIDDLE.
The county and State officials for the most part express the latter opinion; the people of the county and the State almost universally believe that the act was an official murder, not disconnected with political motives and private revenge. The rural politicians, to whom blood is of no more account on the road to power than perjury or lying, rush in to make the best use of it at the polls.
I am forced to admit that all the probabilities are on the popular side, and that the previous character of Sheriff Dodson, as an alleged guerilla, and the persevering attempts of Clerk Hickox to have martial law replace civil process, and the frequent threats, otherwise of no consequence, of Deputy Williams to burn down and paralyze violence by violence, lead the mind up by logical and easy sequence to realize that this roadside massacre might have been an official crime, intended either to strike terror to dangerous and influential rebels or to compel the State government to suspend the civil law.
Both Hickox and Williams had been shot at, and Dodson was probably a murderer already. His avocation before the war had been that of a horse trader and gambler, and he had deserted the Confederate service and been dismissed from the federal.
Nevertheless, the waylaying and vindictive habits of many of the people of Pope county show in scarcely less sanguine relief. The murder of Justice of the Peace Brown, in Dover village, was a cowardly act and the deed of a young man of respectable family and superior education. The killing of Hickox might be described as assassination by a whole community. And if Arkansas escapes a war on a considerable scale, perhaps involving a whole county or several counties, it will be because the Governor, Hadley, leans to mild and pacific measures, and is obeyed to the letter by his vigorous and not very plastic Captain General, D. P. Upham, late of Boston, Massachusetts.
THE SCENE OF THE TROUBLES ETCHED.
Pope county runs back from the Arkansas River perhaps forty miles into the rough mountain country of the Ozark range; from the Ozark spurs, which go here by the name of the Boston Mountain, a running creek of considerable importance flows southward into the Arkansas River, called by the name of Illinois Bayou. This stream has bluff and ridge banks, almost invariably set opposite chaparral, “bottom” and undergrowth, and in places it is deep and dark.
The main road from Perry’s Station to Clarksville, Van Buren and the Indian Territory crosses the Illinois Bayou near the new and pretty village of Russellville, which is the most flourishing and important town in the county, built up in anticipation of the extension of the Fort Smith Railway, which is already graded to the village. At Russellville, the chief artery of the county, the main common road comes down on the east side of the bayou, and stops at Norristown, on the Arkansas River, whence there is a paddle ferry to the old and important town of Dardanelle. Norristown is on this road, three and a half miles from Russellville. Dover, the present county seat, is eleven miles north of Russellville, on the same road.
A few miles north of Dover the Boston Mountain spurs stand up, clear, blue and gray, against the sky, and eight miles north of Dover, among these spurs, lived the family of W. J. Haile, an influential old citizen and rebel, aged about seventy years. Between this family and the family of John Williams, Deputy Sheriff, who lived a few miles further on toward the mountains, evil feelings had long existed, and here the first arrests were made which led to the general outbreak.
The natural features of the country are not without interest. The land back from the Arkansas on both sides of the river runs up into acclivities, and opposite Norristown the Great Magazine Mountain, which is in plain view in the distance, 500 feet high, terminates in a headland at the river’s brink, called Dardanelle Rock, a mass of oxydized sandstone. It is 280 feet high, and forms a profile of the human face as distinctly and vividly marked as the profile in the Franconian Mountains. From this rock there is a view of which any State might be proud—of the blue and brown mountain bars of the Petite Jean and the Fourche la Fave ranges.
The lower part of the county around Russellville and the Galley Rock is comparatively level, the soil red and shale like, the cotton fields at this season of the year looking like a blackberry field in blossom, and much undergrowth, piney woods, young oak forest and what are called “slashes” exist, interspersed with occasional farms and small log or frame houses. A high ridgy bluff flanks the road on the side nearest Illinois Bayou, and the soil, steadily rising, grows pebbly and conglomerate, and at Dover the Carrion Crow Mountain, as it is called, is exposed in the prospect, while, by ascending some of the bold spurs north of Dover, the visitor can behold the round top peak of the Judah Mountain, conical as a sugar loaf, and more than a thousand feet above the general drainage of the country.
RUIN ON THE COUNTY.
Thus, in Pope county, the cottonfield and mountain poverty meet the wild sceneries of the Ozark and the gloomy bottoms of the sluggish Arkansas.
In all the county there is but one brick structure, and that is the County Court House at Dover, which cost $23,000, and for which the county is sued by the scrip holders, while the people claim that twice the true cost of the edifice has been sunk in it, and its construction was one of the sources of contention. The county is next to bankrupt, and the sullen and embittered people charge this to the radical administration. Their county scrip is worth no more than six cents on the dollar.
The liquor consumed here is generally sold by the glass in groceries or doggeries, and the revenue laws have stopped the distillation of liquor from the native peach and apple orchards, another subject of complaint, while meantime the mean spirits current demoralize young and old. There are few men of means in the county, the richest being Shinn, a merchant of Russellville, who is now a fugitive at Little Rock, with his large stock of goods partly at the mercy of the militia.
“It’s a discouraging thing, I declare,” said Shinn to me. “Dr. Russell started our place about twenty-five years ago, but I put most of the life into it within the past three years, having had the good fortune to make some money, the whole of which I planted right on the spot. We were thriving more than any country town in Arkansas, and the newspaper published by my brother-in-law, Battenfield, had a larger circulation than any paper outside of Little Rock. It is the only paper published up in our part of the State except the Dardanelle Transcript, democratic. Now the newspaper office, type, press and all is burned, and I am afraid to stay with my goods, and have put them in charge of my little son. Yet, Mr. Correspondent, I have spent $2,000 of my money to build a school house there, and paid the teachers’ salaries, excepting a few hundred dollars we got this year from the Peabody fund. We had the prettiest little place in the State, neat and white, and now the militia is eating us up. The whole of these expenses must come out of the county; they take our stores and pay us in our own scrip, turn their horses and mules into our fields, and it’s all because the Governor will not take the responsibility of removing that man Dodson, the Sheriff.”
THE FIRST MURDERS AFTER THE WAR.
“And now,” said I, to a citizen of Dover, “be pleased to tell me who was the first man killed in this county after the war.”
“Well, there were several. We lost nearly all our town in the war. Our own boys burned it to keep the federals from occupying it, after they had driven out the women and children. Let me see: I believe John Tinker was killed about that time.”
“Who was he?”
“The Kansas troops killed him. He was an industrious Dutchman, born of old Dutch stock in North Carolina. The troops took his mules, which were his subsistence, for he hauled cotton for a living. He followed the troops up to beg them to give him the mules back, and they got mad and shot him dead. There’s old Shiloh church—a good many’s been killed there. During the war there was a cavalry scout meeting there, and three or four were killed.”
“This hardly answers my question,” I said. “I wish to ask you who were first killed after the war was over. To be plain with you, the State officials charge that after the peace, when your confederates had lost their arms, nobody was killed in Pope county, but that after your boys recovered or repurchased arms, killings began, and that four of the county officials (republicans) were shot during their terms of office. Now, please tell me the names of those men.”
“Their assassination had nothing to do with the present troubles. There is no connection between the series.”
“I see,” said I, in despair, “that I must go elsewhere to get my information.”
“Well, the first official killed was
SHERIFF NAPIER,
who had been elected to the office under the Murphy administration. He was killed, I think, in 1865. He was a native of the county and had been a Captain in the federal army. It was in the Fall of the year. He was riding along with Block, his deputy, east of Dover, when they were both shot from the bush. Napier was about forty years old. He was a bad man and had been a jayhawker.”
“How came he to be elected, then, if he was so unpopular?”
“I can’t tell, sir!”
“Was anybody arrested for the act?”
“It was not known who did it, sir.”
THE MURDER OF COUNTY CLERK WILLIAM STOUT.
“Who was the next man killed in Pope county?”
“I can’t tell you the next man, as we had perhaps twenty murders there since the war. The next official killed was the County Clerk, under the Murphy government, William Stout, an old citizen and a native of Alabama. He was originally a rebel and a member of the seceding Convention, and he disliked to see his sons enter the Confederate army because that would compel him to stay home to watch the property. After the federals came in he got to be a very ardent Yankee. The federals came into Pope for good in September, 1863. Stout, who was a Methodist preacher, joined the radical party, repaired to Dardanelle and was believed to be among the raiding parties that dashed across and through our county. He became very obnoxious. He was shot down in the house he lived in at Dover by somebody who put a gun at a knot hole from outside. It was in 1865. He was about fifty years of age.”
“Is it known who did it?”
“It was never known. He was quite obnoxious.”
“Yet, was he not elected under the fair conditions of the Murphy government?”
“I believe he was.”
“Well, now, did anybody else, holding office here under the radicals, get hurt or killed?”
“Yes. Morris Williams.”
“How was that?”
THE FOURTH MAN MURDERED.
“Williams was the elder brother of John Williams, Dodson’s present deputy, who now lies in a bad way at his farm. Morris Williams appointed Johnny Butler in the mounted infantry. Morris had worn a Confederate cockade earliest in the war, and led a rebel charge at Helena in 1863, but he got dissatisfied to stay a Confederate lieutenant, and he came home and lay out in the woods, like hundreds of people, to avoid arrest. In that wild way many of our folks got vagabond habits. I tell you, sir, war demoralizes.
“Morris Williams, after the federals got in, joined them, and they made him a captain. He was a good officer, and after the war he was elected Sheriff to fill the unexpired term of Napier, who had been killed. All the young fellows now outlaws from Dover for killing Brown and Hickox liked Morris Williams very much. He had a fine, open countenance, and was tall, intelligent and manly. He was shot in his own yard, near the house where he was born, about twelve miles north of Dover. He was about twenty-five years old when he died. This was in the summer of 1866.”
“Was he elected?”
“Yes.”
“Did the government under which he was elected disfranchise anybody?”
“I believe not.”
“Is it known who killed Morris Williams?”
“Yes, a Missourian named Glover. John Williams has always had a grudge against our people, and the Haile family particularly, suspecting them of killing his brother. But only about two weeks ago, Glover, the Missourian, was executed for doing the deed. He did it in revenge for the robbery of a woman near Morris’s house during the war.”
“How did they execute him?”
“The Sheriff’s officers shot him in the road.”
“Is that the way you execute up here?”
“That’s the way we executed him.”
“How long had Morris Williams held his office?”
“Six months.”
“Was Glover ever arrested?”
“Yes. He burned our jail down and got out.”
“It is certainly an unhealthy place for county officers,” said I.
THE COURT HOUSE AT DOVER.
The little town of Dover—partly ruins, chiefly plain frame houses, some whitewashed, some weather-beaten blue or gray—contains at the best about five hundred people, and it became the county seat in 1843. In the middle of the village, upon a square, stands the naked brick Court House, perfectly unenclosed by any railing, as if it stood in a sandy lot. It is fifty feet square, two stories high, and the roof rises from the four sides to the centre. In each side is a door, and from each of those doors the spectator can see four streets of the village, coming into the square at the corners. Several groceries, mechanics’ shops, &c., surround the square, and upon a ledge or hill near by is what is called the college.
Roads go out from the Court House southward to Russellville, east to Scottsville and Marshall, and north to the Barks. A small stream, tributary to the bayou, flows up to the edge of the town, and the Illinois Bayou is one mile to the westward.
The Court House is said to be one of the best, if not the best, in the State. The lower floor is divided into four rooms which are separated by two halls, running through the middle of the building transversely. The County Clerk, Hickox, occupied up to the day of his death the two rooms on the east side for offices; one of the remaining rooms was used by the Sheriff, and the fourth was rented out to lawyers for office purposes.
The stairs went up at the west side and came into the court room, which occupied the whole of the second floor, just facing the Judge’s seat. Under the Judge’s eye was the desk of the County Clerk, and to his left, removed some way, the Deputy Clerk. The jury sat to the Judge’s right, the attorneys in a semicircle around the Clerk, and the people sat on benches and plank seats without backs on both sides of the stairway. The prisoner’s box was between the jury and the bench.
Such was the celebrated Court House at Dover, Pope county, Ark.—very plain, sufficient and uninspiring. Twelve windows put on each of the equal sides gave an excess of light. The Clerk’s room and furniture showed good taste and the sensibility of comfort. In this edifice, according to the usages of justice, General Court was held twice a year, and County and Probate Court four times a year. The mails came and went only thrice a week by horseback carrier; there was no newspaper, and, what is very singular, there are very few negroes in that part of the county, so that Sambo has had very little to do with this war.
The two houses of entertainment, neither of which strictly is a hotel, are kept by Henry Kirchoff, a German, and Captain Scott. The state of society is crude and commercial life dull since the days of soldiering. Some of the young men are fairly educated, but the majority have little or nothing to do, and all carry arms perpetually and are good horsemen and self-reliant hunters. The names of some of the principal residents may indicate the prevailing extraction—Judge Davis, Dr. MacFadden, W. James, Benjamin Young, John Haile, Johnson and McMurray.
Such was Dover after the war—a retired little place, pretty enough, but in a wild country, and the boys, loiterers and village sentiment around its listless streets make one side of the hostile elements now held in suspense after the first violence and bloodshed.
THE CARPET-BAGGERS INSTALLED.
After the assassination of Sheriff Morris Williams, described above, a Mr. Petty was chosen to fill out his term. At the adoption of the constitution in 1868, the son of the murdered County Clerk, Stout, was elected Sheriff. He was to serve four years, but proved to be a defaulter to the county very soon, and one J. T. Clear undertook to fill out his unexpired term. Stout, meantime, was pardoned by Governor Hadley before they could get him to the penitentiary, and this is another subject of complaint at Dover, as his defalcation amounted to $16,000.
Clear was speedily stricken with disease, and while he was lying ill his deputy, one Hollinger, performed the duties of the office. The Minstrel party did not trust Hollinger, and by Hickox, the new Clerk’s influence, Governor Hadley, acting for Senator Clayton, had Hollinger ousted and Elisha W. Dodson made deputy in his place. Clear, his end approaching, speedily resigned the Sheriff’s office absolutely, and Hickox and the Clayton influence had Dodson made Sheriff of Pope county. Dodson has now been Sheriff a year and some months.
Meantime the new constitution had gone into operation; disfranchisement on a large scale was enacted, and the new board of county officials were strictly native and imported radicals, who cared very little for their popularity in the county, but leaned upon the paternal State government at Little Rock, as that in turn leaned upon the paternal government at Washington. Thus the proper order of republican government was reversed: government proceeded to the people instead of from them, and the right of suffrage was manipulated to suit the interests of a State ring, which really governed through the secret leagues which were plentifully distributed in the Arkansas country. At the head of these leagues stood Powell Clayton, and he had added to the regular oath of a Union League a clause pledging all to support “the present administration of the State of Arkansas.”
Here were two bad influences and organizations inevitably foreordained to meet each other and shed blood: an insidious politics operating unequally against an arms-bearing populace not above the propensity to assassination.
THE STATE GOVERNMENT
meantime behaved with the spirit and menace of brute force. The debates upon the constitution were conducted with bluster and defiance, as in the palmy days of the Arkansas Legislature, when Smith and Anthony drew bowie knives in the State Capitol. The manner of putting the constitution itself to the ballot was an insult to a self-governing people. They were to vote at opposite sides or windows, yea or nay, for the constitution or against it, and those who voted for it only had the right to vote for State and county officers. The precious document itself ordained as follows:—
No person disqualified from voting or registering under this constitution shall vote for candidates for any office, nor shall be permitted to vote for the ratification or rejection of this constitution at the polls herein authorized. The Governor and all other officers elected under this constitution shall enter upon the duties of their offices when they shall have been declared duly elected by said Board of Commissioners, and shall have duly qualified. All officers shall qualify and enter upon the discharge of the duties of their offices within fifteen days after they have been duly notified of their election or appointment.
It came to pass, therefore, that the Union Leagues—secretly and ubiquitously organized, and possessing all the machinery of nomination—prepared full tickets and voted them, while those voting against the constitution had no right to a choice of officers; and also that democrats who might vote for the constitution had no ticket in the field, lacking instrumentalities and obliged to encounter military and militia opposition. In the name of freedom tyranny and fraud were done in every county of Arkansas, and Minstrel and Brindle Tail are equally responsible for it.
“We were in a tight place,” said Governor Clayton’s most intimate friend to me. “By God! It was rule or go under. The reconstruction laws of Congress are a mess any way, and history ought to treat the authors of them with the contempt due the feeble-minded. A conquered people must be held down by the laws of conquest. In five years from this time the rebel society will govern every Commonwealth in the country.”
Such were the words of the President of the Constitutional Convention, Thomas M. Bowen, of Kansas, said twenty hours from the date of this letter.
The attitude of the new State government was that of defiance and force. The Governor, Powell Clayton, has audacity and “gameness” for his chief intellectual and moral quality.
“We don’t run,” said the President of the Convention.
“We will never leave the State till we are carried out,” cried the warring clerical orator, Joseph Brooks.
Armed like the natives of Arkansas, the new political dynasty invited and confronted death with death and made “pluck” the measure of manhood and the foundation of authority. A State thus revived and a sentiment of desperation thus made the fashion could not but be met half way by the born dare-devils of pro-slavery Arkansas. And the men elected to take charge of Pope county in the interests of the Clayton faction behaved like Conquerors and have left an impression not unlike that which the Spanish conquistadores left upon the Peruvians and Mexicans.
Pope county passed into the hands of the following persons under the constitution:—
County Clerk—Wallace H. Hickox, of Illinois.
Sheriff—Elisha W. Dodson, of Arkansas.
Circuit Superintendent of Public Instruction—W. A. Stuart, imported Puritan.
Deputy Sheriff—John H. Williams, native.
County and Probate Judge—W. T. Brown.
County Assessor—John H. Martin.
Assistant Judges and Justices—Allen Brown, of Dover, and two more.
The head centre in this combination was the federal officer, Hickox, a native of Oneida county, New York. He had will, intelligence and a secret force which speedily put the whole county into his hands.
CONQUISTADORE HICKOX.
Hickox was the typical carpet-bagger. Said a citizen to me:—“He has carried Pope county in the hollow of his hand since 1868.” He was about thirty-four years old, good looking, cool, bold, reticent and surly. He made no efforts to conciliate anybody, seemed to the crude people there propelled and supported by an unseen force, and over every other county officer he obtained that sort of mental influence which came from pertinacity, will and depth of character which supply resources and make control. Rebels and subordinates felt it alike; he expressed the conquest of the South in his mode and form—that expected thing which had been apprehended without reason of the central authority, but in which a thousand adventurers have voluntarily supplanted it, and have gone forth like the devils out of the man into the swine, to root and wallow with all the coolness of divine and natural right and preordination.
Hickox had a fine stature, a ruddy complexion and brown hair, and his eyes were cold and wary, and never invited confidence nor acquaintanceship. He wore a full brown beard and moustache; from his waist up he had one of the most perfect bodies, physically, ever seen in that remote country, as was remarked when he was stripped after death. His head was shapely and large, and there was the firmness of command and resolution ever present upon his countenance. He weighed nearly two hundred pounds. He was without social inclinations, although well fitted to be popular, and he was what is called in Arkansas a war Mason—that is, a mercenary Mason, trading in social treason on his grips.
Hickox’s name appears in the careful and accurate report of the State Adjutant General, Albert W. Bishop, as follows:—
“Wallace H. Hickox, Second Lieutenant Fourth regiment Arkansas cavalry; appointed from quartermaster’s; sergeant of Fifteenth Illinois cavalry; mustered out at Little Rock, Ark., October 5, 1864.”
The same report shows that Hickox’s new regiment was engaged in fighting a good deal with bushwhackers and rebel regulars in Pope county and in the battle at Dardanelle.
He was a brave and self-contained man, who seemed to heartily despise and dislike the Confederate people from the date of his coming among them. As a clerk he was neat, orderly and satisfactory, but in his private habits he was irregular, [word indistinct; appears to read “bibibillious”], and sometimes got drunk.
The Dover people contend that he left a wife and several children in Illinois, and state that his mother, who came to look into his estate after his murder, was astonished to find that he had married again. But this is not uncommon among the Arkansas carpet-baggers, who hold that one of the advantages of owning a State is to own a divorce court within it.
Hickox married a woman of pretty face and common family in the southern part of Pope county, between Russellville and Galley Rock. Although he had two children by this wife he never took her to Dover after he was made Sheriff; but, as is universally alleged in that village, he took up with a boarding house keeper and lived upon scandalously intimate terms with her. This woman and his wife afterward wept together at his grave, whither he was laid in his blanket without a coffin—a touching and impressive picture of military adventure and semi-outlawry under the auspices of modern carpet-bag authority.
The military vices of Hickox led to his death. He was forever mentally upbraiding the better people of Pope county that they had ostracized him when he had socially ostracized himself, and he took no part in religious, Masonic or general society, looking sturdily away from the usual processes of political success, and showing by his intrepid bearing that, as he ruled without other right than force, force should be his chief constituency. He was always mad at the opposition party, never said anything to reconcile it, and sought to make his deputy, a supernumerary Methodist preacher named Hickerson, cease all relations with the leading citizens.
He was quick to apprehend who did not like him, but indifferent as to who did. Indeed, he was a brave, disagreeable, commanding and cruel type of man, with capacity for office, but not under a representative system. At first his mental and physical force and authoritative bearing bore back all resistance and made a certain kind of awe, which protected and strengthened him. Time and familiarity wore this off at last, and thick gathering destiny brought him to his violent end.
He was a young man, probably about thirty-six or thirty-eight. He moved to Dover from the region where he had planted a little cotton and pulled the political wires in the leagues, with nothing but his wearing apparel, which was the sum of his substantial possessions. He had been made one of the three registers of the county by the Clayton party, and Battenfield, the subsequent Brindle Tail editor, claims to have introduced him to Clayton. In one of his sprees he received a flogging at the hands of Lieutenant Wilson, of the regular army, who commanded in Pope for a few months after the constitution went into operation.
However, Hickox had served out nearly the whole of his four years’ term when the events precipitated his death. He will be remembered in that county for years to come as the creation of a period of force and the ablest of all the local carpet-baggers. He was probably the superior of Powell Clayton intellectually and his equal in intrepid courage.
DEPUTY CLERK REV. HICKERSON.
The old supernumerary preacher, Hickerson, whom Hickox employed, was the link between him and the community. This worldly-eyed and plausible old man had roved around Tennessee, been transferred to the Arkansas Conference, and about 1870 he switched off to the Methodist Protestant or Lay Delegation church. He is now President of the North Arkansas Conference of this denomination.
Last January Hickox employed him at $100 a month salary and discharged him August 30, 1872, for duplicity and insubordination. The next day Hickox was shot dead off his horse, at a daylight hour, within 200 yards of the Court House. The coincidence appears that preachers in politics are insincere and dangerous nuisances and strike the mean between God and Mammon not far from hypocrisy.
Hickerson is a tall old man, with a slender, clerical body; a subtle and subdued expression of countenance, which wears at times a furtive look; gray hair and beard, and he moves around with a walking stick. All the Northern men distrust him, and I found him an intelligent but not always reliable authority. There are some points, however, where his word is the only evidence, and I have applied to these the usual rules of inquiry and criticism.
SHERIFF DODSON.
Elisha W. Dodson, or Captain Dodson, as he is generally called, is a native of Tennessee and is now above fifty years of age and has a married daughter. He is a man of the medium size, dark, evasive and down-looking, and he always bore a questionable character, living before the war by trading horses and sometimes stealing them, and by common gambling with the villagers, young planters and river people.
He hung around Pope county before the war, between Dover and Norristown, and joined the Confederate army at the beginning of hostilities. Not being promoted he deserted, took to horse stealing and bushwhacking, and played fast and loose between the rebel populace and the federal lines of occupation. The spurs of Boston Mountain, in Northern Pope county, were frequently the advanced posts of the Northern soldiery, and a good many of the people there went by the name of the “Mountain Feds.” Dodson had held surreptitious communication with the party of invasion before he formed a guerilla band, known by the name of “Independent Federals.” At one time he was apprehensive that his name had been discovered on some captured rolls and that he might be shot as a spy. Few men came out of the army with a record so indifferent for good service.
He took a little farm above Norristown, and the first step he made was to cut down the bush timber in and around it to prevent enemies approaching under cover. For a while he removed to Washington county, in the northwestern part of the State, near the battle fields of Pea Ridge and Prairie Grove. His present abode is at Russellville.
In Bishop’s report he is written down as follows:—
“Elisha W. Dodson, Captain. Appointed from private to first lieutenant, October 18, 1863; dismissed Feb. 13, 1864.”
He therefore left the army in as bad odor as he entered it.
The Third Arkansas Cavalry, to which he was attached, was organized at Little Rock and disbanded at Lewisburg, in the immediate region of Pope county, June 30, 1865. The Adjutant General’s historical memorandum says of the Third regiment:—
“Two battalions were sent up the Arkansas River to hold a large scope of territory infested by numerous guerilla bands, who were robbing and murdering Union families in the most barbarous manner that human depravity could invent. Territory held by these marauders was soon wrested from their hands. The regiment has been generally engaged in ridding the country of the numerous predatory bands which have cursed this district with their infamous operations since the inception of the rebellion. It was long stationed at Lewisburg on the Arkansas River, and detachments were constantly alert scouring the country and breaking up the lesser haunts of the enemy.”
This description accounts both for the predatory and assassinating youth of Pope county and for Dodson. He is a fellow of inferior intellectual capacity, but of a sinister and manifest brutality and ferocity. His head is large and destructive looking, with enormous ears, heavy jaws, a large blackish-gray mustache and beard dropping straight upon his breast; he is wiry, strong and uneasy, and he wears heavy arms and bespeaks the desperado.
This man is the surviving ally and confederate of Hickox and the master and associate of Williams. He lives but in fear of his life, yet he says that he will die in Pope county and will not fly beyond it. He is almost universally believed to have massacred Tucker and Haile, his prisoners, on the night of the 8th of July, and the bullet which passed through Hickox’s brain was, perhaps, aimed at Dodson.
Since Hickox’s death Dodson’s mental reliance is
STUART, THE PIOUS SUPERINTENDENT,
a man of a practical turn, but of positive opinions and great activity, of whom I shall say more hereafter.
DEPUTY SHERIFF WILLIAMS.
John Williams lived at the foot of Boston Mountain, some two miles above the Haile family. He was twenty-four years of age at the time of his death, and possessed a commonplace character, neither good nor bad. He was not thought to be very shrewd nor self-reliant, and the people generally said that he had “the big head”—meaning that he thought much more of himself than his capacity justified.
The Hailes, who never liked the Williams folks, started a story that during the war, when provisions were scarce, young Williams and others had gone to Haile’s house, and, in the absence of the males, helped himself to lard. That gave him the name of “Greasy Williams” or “Fat Gourd Williams”—the latter because the lard is kept in gourds.
Beyond this general expression of contempt the Hailes and other Confederate families entertained no ill will to Williams until Dodson appointed the boy his deputy. This deepened the ill will and increased Williams’ self-importance. He became quite imperious and offensive, and it was thought laid to the door of the Hailes and others the murder of his brother, Morris Williams, ex-lieutenant in the federal army, who had been shot dead in his yard in a cowardly way by parties till of late unknown.
Mr. Williams’ greatness has cost him a ball through the throat and jaw and few probabilities of leading an uninterrupted and secure domestic life. It was for an alleged attempt to assassinate him that the citizens had been arrested who were slain near Shiloh church by the Sheriff’s posse. That measure cost Hickox and Brown their lives, plunged Pope county into civil war, and gives it up to outlawry and the perilous protection of the militia to-day.
