This letter was sent from Albion Tourgee to Gen. Joseph Abott reporting a killing of a Republican legislator in North Carolina in the Spring of 1870. State Senator John Stephens of Yanceyville, North Carolina was a former Confederate who became a Freedmen’s Bureau agent. Beloved in the local Black community, Stephens was denounced as an opportunist and traitor by whites in the area during Reconstruction. The letter was written by Albion Tourgee, a lawyer, civil rights activist, union veteran, and novelist.
Greensboro, May 24, 1870.
My Dear General,
It is my mournful duty to inform you that our friend John W. Stephens, State Senator from Caswell, is dead. He was foully murdered by the Ku-Klux in the Grand Jury room of the Court House on Saturday or Saturday night last. The circumstances attending his murder have not yet fully come to light there. So far as I can learn, I judge these to have been the circumstances: He was one of the Justices of the Peace in that township, and was accustomed to hold court in that room on Saturdays. It is evident that he was set upon by someone while holding this court, or immediately after its close, and disabled by a sudden attack, otherwise there would have been a very sharp resistance, as he was a man, and always went armed to the teeth.
He was stabbed five or six times, and then hanged on a hook in the Grand Jury room, where he was found on Sunday morning. Another brave, honest Republican citizen has met his fate at the hands of these fiends. Warned of his danger, and fully cognizant of the terrible risk which surrounded him, he still manfully refused to quit the field. Against the advice of his friends, against the entreaties of his family, he constantly refused to leave those who had stood by him in the day of his disgrace and peril. He was accustomed to say that 3,000 poor, ignorant, colored Republican voters in that county had stood by him and elected him, at the risk of persecution and starvation, and that he had no idea of abandoning them to the Ku-Klux. He was determined to stay with them, and either put an end to these outrages, or die with the other victims of Rebel hate and national apathy. Nearly six months ago I declared my belief that before the election in August next the Ku-Klux would have killed more men in the State than there would be members to be elected to the Legislature. A good beginning has been made toward the fulfillment of this prophecy.
…
Yours respectfully, A. W. Tourgee
Source: Reconstruction: Voices from America’s First Great Struggle for Racial Equality (LOA #303) (The Library of America) . Library of America. Kindle Edition.
Follow Reconstruction Blog on Social Media:
In the course of research for a forthcoming book, in November I visited the courthouse in Yanceyville where Stephens was murdered. The interior configuration of that floor has been changed somewhat, but otherwise the building — a quite handsome one — is now as it was then. Staff in the courthouse are well aware of the murder; a clerk helpfully explained to me how the room had been changed during modernization. Stephens’s grave lies in a small cemetery on the edge of town. Ironically, the memorial stone identifies him as a Confederate veteran, which he was, sort of. He served very briefly and reluctantly in the Confederate army, and saw no combat. The stone ignores his role during Reconstruction.
Does the book have a title?