Republicans in Congress became impatient with Southern attempts to perpetuate Antebellum conditions, and passed the first Reconstruction Act in March 1867. It imposed military rule, and placed General John Pope in charge of Alabama. [1]
On April 16, Pope ordered judges revoke the forced apprenticeships mentioned in the post for 6 September 2020. [2] In June 1867, he replaced the county sheriff [3] and circuit judge. [4] The Freedmen’s Bureau organized the Union League to educate African Americans on their rights and to register them to vote. [5]
As the presidential election of 1868 drew near, whites began to inflate routine domestic conflicts into examples of Republican activity. On October 9, Enoch Townsend attacked Bryant Richardson with a knife in the dusk, then fled. Instead of looking for causes, people assumed the Freedman had been influenced by Gerard Choutteau. [6]
Choutteau was neither a Republican carpetbagger from the north nor a Southern scalawag. He was one of those men who bought plantations after the war in hopes they could manage them without slaves better than Southerners had before the war. [7]
He apparently came from New Orleans to make a down payment on a plantation with several slave cabins owned by Lemuel Ormond. [8] This placed him in the center of community around Sumterville knit together by marriage. The first settlers included John Evander Brown, [9] Bryant Richardson Sr, [10] and Thomas Ormond. [11]
As the map shows, they claimed land in a productive bands along a waterway marked "2." To the east was the stony watershed with the Tombigbee marked "1." Nelle Jenkins said they "built their homes on the hill tops and tilled the lower ground." After they cleared the land, the springs stopped flowing. The Ormonds were among those who had problems. [12]
When Townsend fled, neighbors obtained a warrant and headed for Choutteau’s place. [13] They obviously had been watching it, and knew Townsend sometimes visited. [14] They descended in the dark, and searched every Freedman’s cabin. They broke down the one door that was barred. When one man escaped up the chimney, they followed and shot. It wasn’t Townsend they killed, but Yankee Ben, a protégé of the Republicans. [15]
They returned other nights and shot into Choutteau’s home, until he moved to Livingston. Then they burned the house. Alexander Richardson and Stepen Renfroe were indicted. [16] Although no one admitted a formal Ku Klux Klan organization existed in the area, Renfroe was widely seen as the leader of mobs that attacked Republicans and Freedmen. [17]
He was born in Georgia, but raised in Butler County’s red clay area south of Montgomery. [18] He enlisted in a unit of Alabama’s Ninth Infantry regiment, [19] and was wounded on 30 June 1862 at Gain’s Mill, Virginia. Renfroe returned to his company in December for the Battle of Fredricksburg, then disappeared from the record. [20] He officially was listed as a deserter on 30 January 1864. [21]
Renfroe returned to Butler County, where he murdered his wife’s sister’s husband on 9 July 1867. [22] He fled to Lowndes County and then moved into the Flatwoods in southwestern Sumter County. [23] In the late 1930s, General Greenlee told Ruby Pickens Tartt he had known Renfroe.
"Heap of times Mr. Bobbie let me go along with them to Livingston to hold the horses. I be scared sometimes, but nobody never hurt me. Lot of it started down here in Moscow. That was the startin place for the devilment in them days—that and Belmont—and then they all rid up to Livingston." [24]
In 1869, Renfroe and Alexander Richardson stopped Oliver Bell’s father and plied him with questions.
"Then he rode on cross Horn’s Bridge and he met old man Enoch Sledge and Frank Sledge, they was darkies what belonged to Marse Simmy Sledge’s father, old Dr. Sledge. Their marsa rented them land and they was makin money. (But Mr. Renfroe, he didn’t allow the niggers to have nothin.) So Uncle Enoch and Uncle Frank was in town tradin some and when they left, they pass the Ku Kluxes right down there by the bridge. Mr. Renfroe ask him for a piece of string to fix his saddle with, and he give it to him; then he shot Enoch and Uncle Frank ran to the river, but the Ku Klux got him and killed him too. Then they rode off and left them." [25]
Enoch survived and later talked with George Houston, a Black activist who was run out of the county soon after this event. Houston recalled that the Sledges and a third man, [26] had attended a Republican meeting while there were in town. According to him:
"They were returning from this convention home, when three white men rode up to them. One of them was young Mr. Sledge and one was Mr. Renfro. Enoch knew him. The other two he didn’t know at all. Mr. Sledge stopped back and they rode ahead of them, and when they came to them again they were walking. They had got far enough to get down and hitch their horses, and one of them asked Frank, ‘You’ll report me, will you?’ with an oath; I am not certain what the word was, but an oath. I think he said, ‘You ll report me, God damn you,’ and he raised a double-barreled gun and shot Frank, who was a young preacher, right off of his horse." [27]
Whites in Sumter County made more distinctions than did Renfroe. It was acceptable to harass Choutteau, Ben, and Houston because they had made public comments. Jenkins, who documented the history of Sumterville in 1961, voiced popular opinion when she concluded they:
"incited the Freemen against the whites; the situation became so acute until the white people under the leadership of Dr. Browning, Mr. Sledge, the Richardson brothers and many more attempted to stop their dastardly, insidious acts of depredation on the whites." [28]
An attack on the Sledge brothers was another matter. They had been owned Millicent Farmer who bequeathed them to her grandchildren in 1849. Her son-in-law, Albert Sledge was the trustee. [29]
The intendant, Edward Smith, wrote to the Republican governor demanding justice. [30] Reuben Chapman’s son, Reuben Jr, claimed they were "‘the most malignant murders ever committed in this state,’ and asserted. ‘It is time an example should be made of some of these desperadoes’." [31]
Bell remembered "The niggers went down there that night and got them, and they buried up there in the old Travis graveyard right there on the place." [32] Ganville Bennett, one of the oldest Freedmen in the county, recalled Enoch stayed with Dr. Sledge until he recovered. [33]
Meantime, Townsend languished in jail. He had been caught a few days after Ben was killed. [34] Then when a mob descended on the jail to release a white man who had murdered another Freedman, Townsend slipped away. [35] He was apprehended and returned to jail. [36]
Although most Freedmen who assaulted whites were severely punished, he was left alone. Jenkins’ comments about the Richardson brothers would suggest people in the county suspected more had occurred between Townsend and Richardson than was admitted in public, and thought no greater punishment was merited.
Renfroe didn’t need to attack him. He had achieved his goal. Bell told Tart: "Them was scary times, ’cause that man had no mercy for nobody." [37] Greenlee told her:
"Them was awful times; right down in this neighborhood some scan’lous things happened, and the niggers was scared to death. But I wan’t, not much. I knowed what side to get on, and that’s the side I stayed on, the white folks." [38]
Graphics
Base map from G. A. Swenson, et alia. Soil Survey of Sumter County, Alabama. Washington: United States Department of Agriculture, May 1941. 3, "Sketch map showing topographic divisions of Sumter County." Locations approximate.
End Notes
1. Michael W. Fitzgerald. "Congressional Reconstruction in Alabama." Encyclopedia of Alabama website. 11 August 2008; last updated 24 October 2017.
2. Peter Kolchin. First Freedom. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1972. 67.
3. Jud K. Arrington, from estate of J. K. Arrington. "Sumter County Sheriffs." 115 in The Heritage of Sumter County, Alabama. Edited by Charles Walker. Clayton, Alabama: Heritage Publishing Consultants, 2005.
4. Robert D. Spratt. A History of the Town of Livingston, Alabama. Edited by Nathaniel Reed. Livingston: University of West Alabama, 1997. 85.
5. Fitzgerald.
6. Item. The Livingston [Alabama] Journal. 9 October 1868. 3. Posted by gblount59 on 10 January 2019.
Benjamin Franklin Herr. Testimony, Livingston, Alabama. 31 October 1871. United States Congress. Joint Select Committee. The Condition of Affairs in Late Insurrectionary States. Alabama. Volume III. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1872. 1670.
Herr edited The Livingston Journal. Choutteau’s name was spelled a number of ways. Allen Trelease said the newspaper was "part and parcel of the Ku Klux conspiracy until it achieved its political objective in November 1870." [39]
7. Walter L. Fleming. Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1905. 717–718.
8. Herr, 31 October 1871. 1669. The transcript had L. D. Ormond. Lemuel Thomas Ormond was the nephew of Thomas Ormond. Thomas came from Greene County, North Carolina, to buy land in January 1835. [40] The land purchased by Choutteau may have belong to Thomas. He died 31 August 1868, [41] and his will was recorded 14 October 1868. [42] Thomas never married, [43] and left some land to his nieces and nephews in Sumter County. He instructed Lemuel to sell the rest and send the proceeds to his "legal heirs in the state of North Carolina." [43] Depending on Thomas’ situation, Lemuel already may have been selling assets before the beginning of the 1868 planting season, or it may have been his own land.
Charles Neal found Thomas owned 66 slaves in 1860 who lived in 16 cabins. Thirty-two remained in the census of 1866. [44]
9. John’s connections were through his wife, Asenath. Her father Simon’s brother William [46] married Edith Horn. She was the sister of Isaac Wood Horn’s father, Thomas. [47] Edith’s granddaughter married Bryant Richardson Jr. [48] John is the one who built the bridge. [49]
10. Bryan and Uney Richardson migrated from Johnson County, North Carolina. Their sons included Bryant Jr, and Furney. One of Furney’s sons was Alexander. [50] Bryant Jr’s son was Arch T. [51]
11. Nelle Morris Jenkins. Pioneer Families of Sumter County, Alabama. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: Willo Publishing Company, 1961. Reprinted by Bloutsville, Alabama: The Yarbrough National Genealogical and Historical Association, 14 June 2015. 16.
12. Jenkins. 16.
13. Noone identified who issued the warrant or who headed the posse. Alabama altered its law on 24 December 1868, after this incident, to allow "any justice of the peace to issue warrants running in any part of the state, and authorizing any sheriff or constable to go into any county to execute such process." [52] I suspect this was an expansion of already existing law regarding warrants, but don’t know.
14. Herr, 9 October 1868. "As soon as a warrant could be procured, a party of citizens went in pursuit of the assassin; and, as it was known that he was in the habit of frequently the place of the notorious Dr. Chatteau, they went there in quest of him." He identified the "freedman in his employ" as "Enoch Brown, alias Townsend" as if changing a name after Emancipation were a crime.
15. Herr, 9 October 1968, and Herr, 31 October 1871. Trelease researched primary sources, and wrote: "On October 2 a party of twenty-five to thirty men went to the home of Ben Brown, the Negro president of a Grant and Colfax Club, and killed him after he had ignored warnings to discontinue meetings. Brown lived on the plantation of Dr. Gerard Choutteau, another white Republican." [53] He described Choutteau as "the Republican planter who had organized a Negro Grant and Colfax Club." [54]
16. William Warren Rogers and Ruth Pruitt. Stephen S. Renfroe. Tallahassee, Florida: Sentry Press, 1972. 31.
Reuben Chapman, Jr. Testimony, Livingston, Alabama. 4 November 1871. Alabama. Volume III. 1953. On indictment only.
Chautteau claimed to have lost everything, but Lemuel Ormond said the loss really was his, because Chautteau had not paid for the plantation. [55] Herr added "there were three bales of cotton on the place at the time the house was burned. They had been removed into one of the rooms of the dwelling-house. The balance of his crop had been shipped. There were two versions with reference to those three bales. Some told me they were the share belonging to the negroes that put in the crop; some others told me they were three bales that were to go to the parties from whom he purchased the property." [56]
17. The Congressional committee investigating the activities of the Ku Klux Klan could never get answers: people either professed ignorance or couldn’t remember. When they asked the sheriff if white men were "afraid to follow these disguised bands" he answered:
"Answer. Let me ask you a question: would you go into a den of lions that you didn’t know anything about?
"Question. Your impression is that there was a disinclination on the part of the community from fear.
"Answer. From fear; nothing else in the world. They were as true and brave men as ever made a track in the dirt, and when they see an open enemy they will try as long as anybody in the world to meet him; but when they are liable to be bushwhacked at any hour of the night they are not going. That’s the fact. It’s no use to disguise the matter; I speak plainly; it’s no use to call a pot by any other name, is it?" [57]
18. Rogers. 4.
19. Rogers. 5.
20. Rogers. 5.
21. Rogers. 5.
22. Rogers. 6.
23. Rogers. 8.
24. General Greenlee. "On the White Folks Side." Transcribed by Ruby Pickens Tartt. 83–87 in Virginia Pounds Brown and Laurella Owens. Toting the Lead Row. University: The University of Alabama Press, 1981. 85. Owens modernized Tartt’s transcriptions to make them easier to read. [58] Bobby was Robert Hart. Belmont, as shown in the map on the post for 6 September 2020, was located in the bend of the Tombigbee River. A ferry existed between Moscow and Marengo County in the southeastern part of the county. [59]
25. Oliver Bell. "That Tree Was My Nurse." Transcribed by Tartt for the WPA’s Slave Narratives collection from Alabama. [60] 134–137 in Brown. 135. Simmy Sledge was E. S. Sledge. [61]
26. According to William Warren Rogers and Ruth Pruitt, the three white men were Renfroe, Alexander Richardson, and Robert Clay. They killed Caesar Davis and Frank Sledge. Enoch Sledge survived. [62]
27. George W. Houston. Testimony, Montgomery, Alabama. 17 October 1871. Alabama. Volume II. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1872. 999.
28. Jenkins 181. Joshua Sledge had two sons, Albert and William H. Albert’s son Mark [63] was listed with Renfroe for another murder. [64] William was the physician who cared for Enoch Sledge. His daughter Mary married Refroe on 20 November 1869, [65] after the Richardson incident. E. S., mentioned in #25 above, was William’s son.
John Bailey Browning was killed 12 August 1869 when he was part of a group who broke into Chautteau’s home in Livingston. [66] The others were never identified. The trail of blood led to the ferry at Moscow, which crossed into Marengo County. [67]
29. Millicent Farmer. Will, recorded 19 November 1849 by J. H. Gaines. 114–115 in Gwendolyn Lynette Hester. Sumter County Alabama Wills. Dallas: Southern Roots, 1998. This entry is confusing. John Horn’s wife was Anaseth; both died in 1842. [68] Their daughter Millicent married Wade R. Thomas, [69] and was counted in the 1850 census. [70] Horn’s daughter Eliza married Sledge. [71] Farmer’s will stipulated "Doc. William H. Sledge" would become trustee of Frank and Enoch if Albert Sledge couldn’t serve.
30. E. W. Smith. Letter to William H. Smith, governor of Alabama. 4 June 1869. Quoted by Rogers. 35. Edward W. Smith was intendant of Livingston for three years before being elected to the state House of Representatives in 1870 as a Democrat. [72]
31. Reuben Chapman Jr. Letter to William H. Smith. 6 June 1869. Quoted by Rogers. 35.
32. Bell. 135.
33. Granville Bennett. Testimony, Livingston, Alabama. 1 November 1871. Alabama. Volume III. 1734.
34. Herr, 31 October 1871. 1670. "After the killing of this negro the man Townsend was arrested the following Friday by two freedmen, Robert Brownrigg and Bob Thomas, and on Saturday committed to jail."
35. Moore. 1576. W. J. Prater was the one the mob liberated.
36. Item. The [Selma, Alabama] Times-Argus. 1 September 1869. 3. Posted by gblount59 on 10 January 2019.
37. Bell. 136.
38. Greenlee. 85.
39. Allen W. Trelease. White Terror. New York: Harper and Row, 1971; reissued by Louisiana State University Press of Baton Rouge in 1995. 307.
40. Charles Neal. "The Ormond Family." 238-239 in Heritage. 238.
41. Jenkins. 36.
42. Thomas Ormond. Will recorded 14 October 1868 by James A. Abrahams. 236–237 in Hester.
43. Neal. 238.
44. Hester. 236–237.
45. Neal. 238.
46. Angus Wood-Salomon. "Simon Simms." Geni website. 13 March 2015.
47. Robert Gordon Horn. "William Horn of Nansemond and his Heirs." Genealogy website. Last updated 13 April, 2003. Edith was numbered 96.
48. Jenkins. 49.
49. Jenkins. 85.
50. Jenkins. 64–65.
51. Jenkins. 49.
52. Fleming. 695.
53. Trelease. 121.
54. Trelease. 247.
55. Herr, 31 October 1871. 1669.
56. Herr, 31 October 1871. 1669.
57. Allen E. Moore. Testimony, Livingston, Alabama. 30 October 1871. Alabama. Volume III. 1577.
58. Laurella Owens. "Introduction." 59–60 in Brown and Owens. 60.
59. Rogers. 32.
60. For more information on Tartt and the WPA Slave Narratives project, see the post for 23 January 2019.
61. Jenkins, 114, and Spratt, 35.
62. Rogers. 24.
63. Spratt. 35.
64. Rogers. 54–55.
65. Rogers. 12.
66. Jenkins. 129.
67. Rogers. 32.
68. Robert Gordon Horn. He was numbered 91.
69. Spratt. 7.
70. Jenkins. 66.
71. Spratt. 7.
72. Edward W. Smith. Testimony, Livingston, Alabama. 3 November 1871. Alabama. Volume III. 1955.
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