RALEIGH -- Even after 140 years, the scars of Reconstruction, of night-riding Klansmen, and the first American governor ever impeached and driven from office have not entirely healed.
"There is no telling what ghosts are flying around the Capitol," said state Sen. Tom Apodaca of Hendersonville.
Today, the state legislature will seek to lay to rest some of those ghosts when it votes on a resolution pardoning Republican Gov. William Holden, who was impeached in 1871 for trying to suppress Klan violence.
When state Sen. Neal Hunt, a Republican from Raleigh, introduced a resolution last month, he thought it was "a no-brainer." He was doing it as a favor for a friend, attorney Arch Allen, a former Wake County Republican chairman, whose late wife was a descendant of Holden.
It seemed a simple story line: Now that the Republicans had regained control of the state legislature for the first time since the 1800s, a historical wrong would be righted, and a governor driven from office for cracking down on the Klan would be pardoned.
But Hunt had not counted on long family memories, passed down from generation to generation. And in those stories, Holden was not a brave governor who stood up to the Klan but an opportunistic scalawag.
The first sign of trouble was the literature that showed up mysteriously - and illegally - on the desk of each of the 50 senators in the Senate chambers. The copied pages from early Jim Crow-era historians - dated histories that had not been in use for decades - portrayed Holden in an unflattering light.
Then Senate leader Phil Berger of Eden pulled the bill and sent it back to committee at the request of Sen. Rick Gunn, a freshman legislator and real estate agent from Burlington. Gunn represents Alamance County, where many families retain hard feelings toward Holden.
Last week, Carlton Huffman, a 27-year-old House aide and history buff, admitted he was responsible for the literature passed out to senators and resigned his position. And over the weekend, Gunn said that he no longer wants to talk about the Holden pardon.
A controversial figure
That Holden would still have enemies today is hardly surprising. He was a man who courted controversy as both a newspaperman and as a politician.
He was a Democrat before he turned Republican, who first opposed secession, then supported the war, and then led a peace movement, which prompted a Georgia regiment passing through Raleigh to wreck his newspaper office. He was elected governor in 1868, with the backing of many recently freed black slaves and mountain Republicans while there were still Union troops in the state.Many whites saw his election as illegitimate, and his predecessor, Jonathan Worth, at first declined to give up his office.
White Conservatives/Democrats were determined to retake control of the legislature in 1870, and a major political tool was a campaign of terror led by the Ku Klux Klan, which sought to intimidate black voters. The Klan was most active in the Piedmont, where the vote was most closely divided between Republicans and Conservatives/Democrats.
On Feb. 16, 1870, Wyatt Outlaw, a black town commissioner and magistrate, was killed and his body was hung outside the Graham courthouse with the message, "Beware you guilty both white and black."
In April, 21 people were whipped, writes historian Gregory Downs in his new book, "Declarations of Dependence." On May 13, an African-American named Robin Jacobs was murdered near Leasburg. On May 14, an African-American man in Lincoln was tied to a tree while 15 Klansman "in succession committed a rape on his wife," Downs wrote. Around the same time, a band of white men raped an African-American woman at dusk "and afterwards stuck their knives in various parts of her body."
On May 21, Republican state Sen. John W. Stephens, acting as agent of the governor, showed up at a Conservative/Democratic meeting at the Caswell County courthouse in Yanceyville and began taking notes. He was lured into another room in the courthouse, where his throat was cut; his body was thrown into a woodpile in the basement.
Holden would later write that he believed that the Klan had committed 25 murders and hundreds of cases of whipping with "very few, if any, convictions."
"A crippled white man, a native of Vermont, was cruelly whipped because he was teaching a colored school," Holden later wrote. "No bill was found in this case. The sheriff of a county was waylaid, shot and killed on a public highway. ... A county jail was broken open, and five men taken out and their throats cut. Another jail was broken open, and five men taken out and shot, one of them died of his wound. Another jail was broken open and a United States prisoner released. No punishments followed in these cases."
Holden estimated that the Klan had 40,000 members in North Carolina at the time.
Holden takes charge
Holden declared Caswell and Alamance counties to be in a state of insurrection. Because most local law enforcement was controlled by Conservatives/Democrats, Holden recruited a special 670-member militia from the pro-union western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee area headed by Col. George W. Kirk, who during the war led a band of Federal raiders with a fierce reputation.
Kirk's men arrested 19 men in Caswell County and 82 men in Alamance County. Holden suspended habeas corpus, which allows prisoners the right to petition the court for release from unlawful imprisonment, because he thought the prisoners would just be released by sympathetic local courts. The dragnet rounded up a number of prominent political leaders.
The Klan campaign helped the Conservatives/Democrats win control of the legislature in 1870. One of their first acts was to impeach Holden on eight charges, including declaring martial law; unlawfully raising troops; illegally declaring counties to be in a state of insurrection; unlawfully arresting 18 citizens; seizing, detaining, imprisoning and depriving those citizens of their liberty and privileges as freemen; and refusing to obey the writ of habeas corpus.
The impeachment measure was introduced by a former Klansman, and the trial lasted 44 days. The Senate voted 36-13 to remove Holden from office.
Different view emerges
For years, Holden was portrayed in history books as part of a corrupt Reconstruction government that was saved by the Democratic redeemers with the help of the Klan.
In the background paper distributed to members of the state Senate last month, the late historian J.G. de Roulhac Hamilton is quoted as saying that Holden presided over "a highly partisan administration which was characterized by the most brazen corruption, extravagance and incompetency in state history."
Hamilton, founder of the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, had a view rooted in an earlier time and defended Klan involvement as helping return government "into the hands of the class best fitted to administer government, and the supremacy of the white race and the Anglo-Saxon institutions."
But in recent decades, a more balanced view of Holden has emerged.
William Harris, a professor emeritus at N.C. State University and a Holden biographer, said most of the corruption during that time revolved around the legislature's approval of $28 million in railroad bonds - a move that was done without approval of the voters and allegedly involved considerable vote buying in the legislature.
But Harris noted that there was strong support for expanding railroads after the war. And corruption was widespread in state capitals across the country.
In Harris' view, Holden had few options but to move against the Klan. And because local law enforcement was often in cahoots with the Klan, there would likely have been no punishment if he had not suspended habeas corpus.
"The Klan was put down without a shot being fired," said Harris, 78, the author of 10 history books.
"What else could he have done?" Harris said. "If the Klan was going to be suppressed and law and order was to be restored, Holden had no other choice."
As for the impeachment, Harris has no doubt.
"I think it was an injustice," Harris said, "and it should be corrected."
