Published by The History Press
Charleston, SC 29403
www.historypress.net
Copyright 2010 by Jim Wise
All rights reserved
Front cover images: William Woods Holden as a young man. Courtesy North Carolina State Archives.
Caswell County Courthouse, where John W. Stephens was murdered. Authors photo.
First published 2010
e-book edition 2011
ISBN 978.1.61423.228.5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wise, James E., 1949
Murder in the courthouse : Reconstruction and redemption in the North Carolina
Piedmont / Jim Wise.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
print edition ISBN 978-1-59629-755-5
1. North Carolina--History--1865- 2. North Carolina--Politics and government-
1865-1950. 3. Reconstruction (U.S. history, 1865-1877)--North Carolina. 4. Martial
law--North Carolina--History--19th century. 5. Holden, W. W. (William Woods), 1818
1892. 6. Stephens, John Walter, 1834-1870. 7. Murder--North Carolina--Yanceyville.
I. Title.
F259.W65 2010
975.604--dc22
2009050440
Notice: The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our
knowledge. It is offered without guarantee on the part of the author or The History
Press. The author and The History Press disclaim all liability in connection with the
use of this book.
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brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
For Joe Huber
A teacher and a good man
CONTENTS
AUTHORS NOTE
Ill credit, or blame, two people for inspiring me to write this book. First, my friend Jack Schrader, who several years ago asked me to speak to our local Civil War Roundtable on Reconstruction in our areathat being Durham County, North Carolina. I didnt find much to go on, just some general treatments about the whole state in the early postCivil War period and a newspaper clip about the adventures of two local men in the Reconstruction Ku Klux Klan. But the period had brought Durhams foundation as a tobacco-manufacturing hubpart of an industrializing trend in North Carolina begun before the war and accelerating afterward. So with that story to fill some time, the talk went off okay.
The second individual is my cousin Mike Martinez, whose excellent and pleasantly readable Carpetbaggers, Cavalry and the Ku Klux Klan, about the Reconstruction Klan in South Carolina and the U.S. officer who was largely responsible for breaking it, piqued my curiosity about the period in North Carolina again. Reading Mikes book brought to mind a vague memory about some incident up in Caswell Countysomething about somebody shot (so I remembered it) in the courthouse and somebody called Chicken. So motivated, I looked up the incident and realized there was a story to be told.
In preparing myself to tell it, I was immensely aided by the good folks of the Caswell County Historical Association, who maintain a marvelously stocked museum just off the square in Yanceyville and one of the richest local history web presences Ive ever come across. Rick Frederick was generous with information and advice and graciously gave permission to reproduce images from the associations excellent collection.
I am also indebted to Kim Cumber, of the North Carolina State Archives, for assistance in locating images from its collection and for expedited processing of my request for copies.
Many other peoples aid over the years went into the foundation upon which Murder in the Courthouse is built. My particular appreciation goes to the Durham County Public Library for its wealth of printed resources, and to the University of North Carolina for its rich repository of the states history and the elegant reading room in which a researcher may use it.
And, as always, gratitude and love to my wife, Babs, for her support and patience.
MAY 21, 1870
T HE V ICTIM
Whatever were they thinking?
What was going through your mind, Chicken Stephens, when you were facing your last moments in the presence of your enemies? Anger? Fear? Regret? All your precautions, all your arms, undone by one little, inexplicable lapse of judgment. Do you, just for one instant, question the rightness of what you did, who you were? Just an instantas you felt the rope around your neck, the knife across your throat?
John Walter, aka Chicken, Stephens really should have known better.
Radical Republican, known spy for the scalawag governor, suspected of barn burning and murder, widely considered to have stolen his seat in the North Carolina Senate from a duly elected local herohe brazenly walked into the Democrats convention at the Caswell County Courthouse, brashly sat down in the front row and blithely went about taking notes.
It was Saturday, chilly for so late in the spring, but in the Caswell County seat of Yanceyville it was a busy day. Country folk in town to shop and hang around, teamsters hauling tobacco stopping off at the public well, property owners at the courthouse to declare their taxes and three hundred Democratsor Conservatives, as the party was also known at the timecome to plan for the state elections in August.
That meant at least three hundred men who had no use for John Walter Stephens.
Being a state official of the ruling Republican Party, and an agent for the governor, Stephens was a powerful man in Caswell County, but his power was matched by his unpopularity. His fellow Methodists had even kicked him out of their congregation for his activities with the Union Leaguea secretive society that organized former slaves into a Republican political bloc and conducted other, fiery and violent, maneuvers under cover of night.
Freed African Americans were the Republicans base in North Carolina, which was itself, thus, a base of support for the Republicans in Washington who had forced Congressional Reconstruction down former Confederate throats. As such, freedmen and their white handlers and allies were targets for Conservatives in the legislature, at the ballot box and through other, fiery and violent, maneuvers under cover of night by that other secretive society: the Ku Klux Klan.
As targets go, Chicken Stephensso called from a violent episode over a neighbors fowlwould be a Kluxer prize.
Indications are that he knew it. He had heard threats, and his wife, Martha, had seen strange men loitering outside their house for several nights. Earlier that year, Stephens had bought a $10,000 life-insurance policy, written his will and fortified the house, and he now slept inside an iron cage with a veritable arsenal of firearms near to hand. When he went out, he carried two derringers and a Colt revolver.
