Clearing the guv, 140 years later

RALEIGH -- If you think politics is a rough business now - and many of us do - it's worth taking a look at what happened 140 years ago next Tuesday.

On that date North Carolina's Senate convicted the governor on six impeachment charges brought by the House and removed W.W. Holden from office - the first governor in America to be impeached, convicted and removed from office.

His crime? Among other things, trying to stop the violence of the Ku Klux Klan in the wake of the Civil War.

The Senate will take up the Holden matter again - perhaps on March 22, the date of Holden's removal - and possibly grant a legislative pardon for Holden's offenses.

After 140 years, it is about time. This time around, Holden has bipartisan support. The pardon resolution is sponsored by Republican Sen. Neal Hunt of Wake, Democratic Sen. Dan Blue of Wake and Democratic Sen. Doug Berger of Franklin County.

The story is a fascinating one. Holden, born to unmarried parents, worked his way to prominence as a printer's devil, then a leading journalist and as a politician whose views changed sharply and later led to his helping found the N.C. Republican Party in 1867.

As the state's foremost editor and opinion-maker in the pre-Civil War era, William Woods Holden of the North Carolina Standard took strong stances that meshed with the prevailing customs of the time. As a staunch Democrat, he wrote in favor of expanding slavery and supported secession - indeed, voted for it as a delegate to a secession convention.

Yet in a short time his views on these and other subjects came about 180 degrees. He saw that the war would devastate the South, urged an honorable peace and sharply criticized Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Gov. Zeb Vance, whom he had once helped win office.

After the war President Andrew Johnson named Holden provisional governor, a post he served in for eight months before losing it to Jonathan Worth. Over the next few years he helped restore North Carolina to the Union, "spent much time in Washington working with radical leaders," according to the Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, and won the governorship in the 1868 election.

Edgar E. Folk and Bynum Shaw's biography of Holden records how he worked to reopen schools, build a prison, boost railroads, restore orderly government and promote equality.

In his inaugural address, Holden sounded a theme that was to stir up passions: If some people worked to "oppress the poor whites and the colored race on account of their political opinions" then his government would take action. "Prejudices growing out of nativity, or out of rebellion, are not worthy to be cherished. Let us discard such prejudices. We are once more Americans - all."

A legislative act gave the governor the power to declare a state of insurrection and send troops to put down resistance. The challenge came from the KKK, which had hanged a black man in Alamance County and assassinated a state senator in Caswell who was helping the governor. Beatings increased, and Holden took unpopular action - suspending habeas corpus, rounding up and arresting suspected KKK leaders and arousing passions further.

So it was that the state House in late 1870 impeached Holden on eight charges of high crimes and misdemeanors. Though Holden had turned over his duties to another, the Senate convicted him on six charges on March 22 and, one of his biographers has written, "ordered that Holden be removed from his post and denied the right to hold office again in the state."

Holden later returned to newspapering and held appointment as postmaster in Raleigh for 11 years. He declined to participate in attempts to remove the conviction, "insisting that such movement must come voluntarily from the people of the state and without political friction," a historian wrote.

That never came about, but last week Hunt, with cosponsors Blue (the state's first black Speaker of the House) and Berger, filed Senate Joint Resolution 256 to pardon Holden. The resolution notes that Holden "supported political equality for newly emancipated North Carolinians" and sent the state militia "to stop the violence being caused by the Ku Klux Klan." Holden's "steadfast resistance to the Klan led to his being impeached and removed" and observed that "the vote to impeach was along party lines to remove the Republican governor from any other service."

The state constitution, the resolution notes, doesn't give the governor the power to pardon for an impeachment but that power "remains available for exercise by the General Assembly." And so, if the Senate and House agree, Holden will be "pardoned from the judgment upon him" 140 years ago.

North Carolina is still coming to grips with actions of the 19th and 20th centuries against black people. The pardon of W.W. Holden, who tried to prevent violence, is long overdue - but it's never too late to right a wrong.