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Who Killed John M. Clayton? Political Violence in Conway County, Arkansas, in the 1880sAuthor(s): Kenneth C. BarnesSource: The Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Vol. 52, No. 4 (Winter, 1993), pp. 371-404Published by: Arkansas Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40038215 .

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Who Killed John M. Clayton? Political Violence in Conway

County, Arkansas, in the 1880s

KENNETH C. BARNES

At about half past eight on the night of January 29, 1889, John Middleton Clayton, the brother of Reconstruction governor and Republican leader Powell Clayton, was assassinated as he sat writing at a table in a boarding house at Plumerville. He had come to the hamlet in Conway County to investigate election irregularities which he believed had cost him the congressional seat for Arkansas's second district. County, state, and national politicians investigated and condemned the crime. However, no assassin was ever found. Arkansas history books henceforth treated Clayton's killing, one of the most famous political murders in the state's history, as an unsolved mystery.

In Conway County the murder appeared much less mysterious. It climaxed a cycle of local political violence which had been brewing in the county since the Civil War. Political strife culminated in the late 1880s with the threatening alliance of African Americans, white Republicans, and poor white farmers mobilized by Arkansas's native- born populist movement, the Agricultural Wheel. In response to this threat, white Democratic elites in Conway County preserved their hold on power through electoral fraud, racial violence, and political murder. Only this background of local political conflict can explain why Clayton

Kenneth C. Barnes is associate professor of history at the University of Central Arkansas. This article won the Arkansas Historical Association's 1993 Violet B. Gingles Award in Arkansas History.

THE ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY VOL. LH, NO. 4, WINTER 1993



372 ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

was killed, who killed him, and why the guilty parties were never prosecuted for this crime.

Conway County displays in miniature the geographic characteristics that so divided Arkansas politically in the nineteenth century. The southern reaches of the county bordered on the Arkansas River, with rich river bottomland supporting cotton plantations and before 1861, a slave economy. This part of the country provided the largest number of Rebel soldiers during the Civil War and became the hub of Democratic politics in the county thereafter. In the northern two-thirds of the county, rolling hills formed the southern fringe of the rugged Boston Mountains. There, many poor subsistence farmers, like other hill folk of the Ozarks, sided with the Union in 1861 and kept voting Republican for generations after the war.

During the Civil War Confederates raised at least five companies of troops from Conway County, while three Union companies were largely drawn from the county. By 1863 civil government had disappeared in north central Arkansas and was replaced by a vicious local war between Rebel and Union sympathizers. The area was so lawless that Union authorities placed a Federal garrison at Lewisburg to curb the attacks of guerrillas and marauders. Union control, however, dissolved on the edge of the camp. The guerrilla fighting continued through the last two years of the war. Bushwhacker and jayhawker stories abound even now among the residents of the county. Personal and family grudges that resulted from the Civil War kept Conway County divided for years thereafter.1

The years of Congressional Reconstruction only embittered existing animosities between the former Rebels and Unionists. When Powell Clayton became governor in 1868 and the Ironclad Oath removed former Confederates from the voting rolls, Union veterans took over county government and organized Republican militia companies to keep order. Rebel sympathizers responded that autumn by organizing themselves into an armed band wearing the white robes of the Ku Klux Klan. From

historical Reminiscenses and Biographical Memoirs of Conway County (Little Rock: Arkansas Historical Publishing Company, 1890), 15-16. For a discussion of the Civil War in Conway County, see Kenneth C. Barnes, "The Williams Clan: Mountain Farmers and Union Fighters in North Central Arkansas,** Arkansas Historical Quarterly 52 (Autumn 1993): 286-317.



POLITICAL VIOLENCE IN CONWAY COUNTY 373

Map of Conway County in 1888, published by the Conway County Immigration Bureau. Courtesy Arkansas History Commission.




August through December Conway County was in a state of virtual civil war between these white conservatives and the coalition of freed slaves and white Republicans. Hie Klan terrorized blacks, on one occasion lynching two brothers who lived with two white women. A black Republican militia company retaliated by terrorizing white residents suspected of Klan activity. The conflict came to a climax in December when either the Republican militia, the Klan, or both, set fire to Lewisburg and burned it nearly to the ground. Governor Clayton declared martial law in the county, and eventually order was restored.2

Democrats regained control of county government in 1872, just before Reconstruction ended in Arkansas as a whole. The Civil War and Reconstruction had provided a vivid and acrimonious background for the political battles of the 1880s. Determined to keep Republicans out of power, Democrats in Conway County, like those elsewhere in the South, carefully fostered the powerful public memory of Reconstruction as the "bad old days." The image would have lasting power for years to come. In 1873 the county seat was moved from Springfield to the Democratic stronghold of Lewisburg. The white Unionists in the northern hills of the county and the blacks on the plantations became isolated minorities while Democrats ran the county for the next twelve years.

This favorable situation for Democrats changed, however, by the end of the decade. A general exodus of African Americans moving west of the Mississippi River in the 1870s brought especially large numbers of black settlers to Conway County. The addition of several thousand African Americans upset the electoral basis of white Democratic control by 1878 and 1879. The percentage of blacks in the county's population grew from 7.8 in 1870 to 25.1 in 1880. Moreover, the growth continued in the 1880s when the black population in the county doubled. By the 1890 census 39.4 percent of the county's population was black, with most of the blacks living in Howard Township around the communities

ôr the Democratic version of these events read John Harrell, The Brooks and Baxter War: A History of the Reconstruction Period in Arkansas (St. Louis: Slawson Company, 1893), 72-78; Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, September 1, 2, 8, December 10> 20, 22, 1868. For the Republican version see Powell Clayton, The Aftermath of the Civil War in Arkansas (New York: Neale Publishing Company, 1915), 144-151; Little Rock Evening Republican, September 2, December 30, 1868.




of Menifee and Plumerville. With this kind of growth, the impact on voting and race relations was profound.3

Racial conflict erupted in the early 1880s in Morrilton, the town just north of Lewisburg that had rapidly grown up on the new train line. In August 1881 a black man was accused by a prominent Morrilton citizen of "abusing" his children.4 A few days later the white citizen gave the black man a severe thrashing. The incident became a brawl as blacks and whites took sides in the fight. On one day alone, August 13th, the newspapers reported ten fights with whites and blacks throwing bricks and rocks at each other in the streets of Morrilton. The county sheriff responded by swearing in large numbers of extra policemen to protect whites, "the colored people having threatened to burn down the town." One white citizen from Morrilton even travelled to Little Rock to ask the governor for authority to raise a militia, although the county sheriff, George W. Griffin, assured the public that he and his men could preserve the peace.5

By 1884 the enlarged black vote combined with that of white Unionists in the northern townships to bring the Republicans back to power in Conway County. Republicans also benefited from Arkansas's homegrown agrarian movements called the Agricultural Wheel and the Brothers of Freedom. Founded near Des Arc in 1882, the Agricultural Wheel had over five thousand members in Arkansas by 1884. The movement mushroomed in the 1880s by mobilizing resentment of poor white farmers against mortgages, tenancy, high interest rates, and excessive freight charges for shipping agricultural products on the state-

*U.S. Bureau of the Census, Ninth Census of the United States: 1870 (Washington D.C.: GPO, 1872); Tenth Census of the United States: 1880 (Washington D.C.: GPO, 1882); Eleventh Census of the United States: 1890 (Washington D.C.: GPO, 1895); Arkansas Gazette, February 20, 1879; December 12, 1878. See also the discussion of black immigration in John William Graves, Town and Country: Race Relations in an Urban-Rural Context, Arkansas, 1865-1905 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1990), 59-61, 91-96; and Robert B. Walz, "Migration into Arkansas, 1834-1880" (Ph.D. Diss., University of Texas, 1958).

4In 1880s* usage "abused" probably meant talked back to or cursed, not physical abuse.

5Little Rock Arkansas Democrat, August 19, 1881; Arkansas Gazette, August 20, 24, 1881.




subsidized railroads. The Brothers of Freedom, organized also in 1882 in west central Arkansas, had an almost identical platform and clientele. Representatives of the two groups met in late 1884 in Conway County at Springfield to discuss a merger which was accomplished the following year, keeping the name of the Agricultural Wheel.6

The farmers put forth a ticket in the September 1884 election in

Conway County as they did in neighboring counties. Democrats tried to convince voters that a vote for the agrarians meant a vote for the Republican party and reminded voters of the county's Reconstruction agony. With the highest voter turnout ever seen in Conway County, it was apparently the farmers who took away enough Democratic votes to allow Republicans to win every county office. The Republicans won despite the "disappearance" of the ballots and poll books in Washington Township, which was expected to provide an easy Republican majority.7

Republican control of the county brought an immediate backlash of violence. In October Morrilton Democrats organized a military company, and by early in the next year the Klan was riding again in Conway County. The Klan raids were both politically and racially motivated. In

February 1885 a Ku Klux posse of about one hundred men arrived in the night at the farm of the new Republican county sheriff, Pleasant H. Spears, in the northwestern part of the county. Spears employed several black laborers, and their families lived on his estate. The Klan announced that all blacks in Conway County must relocate south of the railroad tracks, so Spears was told to send his laborers and their families away. When Sheriff Spears refused, the men destroyed the fence on his estate and vowed that it would not be rebuilt until "every nigger left the premises.

" Sheriff Spears armed his black employees and prepared to resist the Klan should they return.8

6SeeF. Clark Elkins, "Arkansas Farmers Organize for Action 1882-1884, "Arkansas Historical Quarterly 13 (Autumn 1954): 231-248; F. Clark Elkins, "The Agricultural Wheel: County Politics and Consolidation, 1884-1885," Arkansas Historical Quarterly (Summer 1970): 152-175; and Theodore Saloutos, Farmer Movements in the South 1865-1933 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), 60-68.

7Eflrins, "The Agricultural Wheel," 160-165; Arkansas Gazette, September 3,4, 6, 1884.

*Fort Smith Elevator, October 17, 1884; New York Times, February 25, 1885; Arkansas Gazette, February 24, 1885.




Klan raids in the area continued through the month of March. One black family found a written notice posted near their house ordering them to leave the area or meet certain violence. Night after night the Klan terrorized the homes of African Americans with gunshots. Finally, in the wee hours of Sunday morning April 12, the Klan returned to the cabin of J. W. Hawthorn, a black laborer on Sheriff Spears's farm. They poured coal oil on the house and tried to set it ablaze. Failing in this endeavor, they called Hawthorn out and shot him dead.9

The white Republican county officials did little to help the terrorized blacks. Sheriff Spears apologized that he could get no warrants to arrest the criminals; darkness, he said, prevented him from establishing their identities. The county circuit court impaneled a special grand jury to investigate the Hawthorn killing but brought no one to justice. The Klan made sure no would testify against them. On the evening of August 17, when the members of Zion Hill Church dismissed their evening service and started for home, they were startled by a party of over twenty-five heavily armed men "in full dress and regalia of the mystic KKK." The posse went to a neighboring house where they called out a black man who had witnessed the Hawthorn killing. The Klan took the man down the road where they "gave him some advice" and ordered him to leave the county by the end of the week. That summer black citizens organized their own military company in order to defend themselves.10

In die following year, Democrats concentrated their efforts on taking back county government. They faced formidable opposition. The Agricultural Wheel had grown to several chapters in Conway County. By the end of 1886, the Wheel ran a flour mill, a corn mill, and a cotton gin in Springfield, which put up five hundred bales of cotton. On May 14, 1886, the Conway County Wheel met in Springfield and nominated a full ticket for county offices for the September election. Meanwhile, the Republican party, too, had become better organized. In the fall of 1885, A. F. Livingston, formerly of Conway, began publishing a Republican newspaper in Morrilton called the Star to provide an alternative to the Democratic organ, the Morrilton Headlight. Republicans held their

'Arkansas Gazette, March 13, 17, April 2, 18, 1885. Ârkansas Gazette, April 2, 22, August 22, 1885; Fort Smith Elevator, July 25,

1885.




u Jumbo Day" on July 10 with a largely black crowd and lots of oration. Presiding over the meeting was a black man named Brazelton, who Democrats charged had been indicted in the previous year for stealing hogs. The assembly nominated a full slate of white Republicans for

county offices but chose the Reverend Mr. G. E. Trower, a black Methodist preacher, for the county's representative to the state legislature,11

County Democrats ran a vigorous campaign for their ticket. Over three hundred Morrilton men, led by a clique of prominent businessmen and lawyers, organized a Democratic club in August, which dominated the county party. While they charged that Republicans were fanning racial passions and prejudices in bloody-shirt electioneering, they certainly did the same. Just before the vote local Democrats informed the Arkansas Gazette that one Conway County black had uttered: "'All the white people's got belongs to us. We made it for them and we have right to ask 'em for anything they've got-even for their daughters.'"12

Even these fearmongering tactics by white Democrats failed, and Republicans carried the county again. The black Republican candidate for state representative, G. E. Trower, won by the narrow margin of thirty votes. The election on September 1 had not been without incident. A row occurred while officials were counting the votes at Plumerville, the voting place for Howard Township, where blacks outnumbered whites two to one. While votes were being counted at the Plumerville polls, three local Democrats, Bob Pate, Thomas C. Hervey, and Dr. Benjamin White, pretended to get into a scuffle. In so doing they extinguished the lights, knocked over the ballot box, and scattered the tickets all over the room. When order was restored and the tickets gathered and counted, election judges found that they had a hundred more votes than the poll books showed. The Republican judges refused to certify the ballot and sent it on to the Secretary of State in irregular shape. This apparent

n Arkansas Gazette, May 16, July 11, December 21, 1886; Fort Smith Elevator, November 13, 1885.

nFort Smith Elevator, September 3, 1886; Arkansas Gazette, August 27, 1886.




attempt to stuff the ballot box failed, for Republicans carried the county for another two-year term.13

It must have been especially galling to white Democratic leaders to see a black Republican represent Conway County in the state legislature. They began harassing Trower almost immediately after the election. Democrats asked for a grand jury to investigate the Reverend Mr. Trower for performing marriages in the county for over a year without having the official authority to do so.14 Trower nonetheless served in the twenty-sixth session of the General Assembly in 1887. But afterward, according to John Mason, the grandson of a Plumerville Democrat, two disgruntled Democrats boarded the Little Rock-Fort Smith train which carried the black legislator. While one man kept the train stopped with his pistol pointed at the engineer, the other removed the black man. As Mason put it, Representative Trower ended up "feeding the catfish at the bottom of the Arkansas River. " Mason identified the murderers as two white Democrats, Tom Hervey and a man named White.15

l*Fort Smith Elevator, September 17, 1886; Arkansas Gazette, September 2, 1886; United States House of Representatives, Digest of Contested Election Cases in the Fifty- first Congress Compiled under Resolution of the House, by Chester H. Rowell, Clerk to the Committee on Elections (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1891), 682, hereafter cited as Digest of Contested Election Cases.

lAFort Smith Elevator, September 24, 1886, from reports in the Morrilton Headlight. i5John Mason to Arkansas History Commissioner Dallas T. Herndon, April 2, 1941,

Individual File: John Madison [sic] Clayton, Arkansas History Commission, Little Rock; John Mason, audiotaped interview with Polly Church, Augusta, Arkansas, April 29, 1978. Although only circumstantial evidence corroborates this story, John Mason is a

very credible oral source. He was born in Plumerville in 1899; his grandfather, Cyrus McCullough, a witness to these events in the 1880s, died in 1915. Mason was a high school history teacher and school superintendent for many years and had a masters' degree in history. He paid special attention to these stories he heard as a young man and tried to preserve them. One of the men who, Mason says, killed Trower, Thomas C.

Hervey, was the Plumerville man who had tried to stuff the ballot box in the previous election and would later be convicted in federal court for election fraud in another incident. The Reverend Mr. Trower disappeared from the record after his stint in the state legislature. Assessed for taxes in the spring of 1887, he does not show up thereafter in the county tax records. Although he was a Methodist preacher in Morrilton, by July 1887 an Arkansas Gazette article on Morrilton lists two other men, a Mr. Daniels and Mr. A. W. Taw, as the pastors of the two black Methodist congregations in town. Tax Assessments, 1887, 1889, 1890, Conway County Courthouse, Morrilton. Morrilton




Although no other extant sources corroborate Mason's account, in the next year Conway County Democrats demonstrated their willingness to use violence and even murder to wrest control of county government from Republican hands. They campaigned vigorously for the 1888 election, setting up Democratic clubs in each county township. They held

gala rallies and brought in as speechmakers distinguished politicians such as Governor Simon P. Hughes, James P. Eagle, Democratic candidate for governor, and I. H. Harrod, chairman of the state Democratic party. Just before the election, the Gazette reported five thousand people gathered in Morrilton for a festive rally. Two thousand men marched in line in a torchlight procession headed by a brass band.16

Normal election methods, however, would not suffice to win this election for the Democrats. The black population in the county had only increased, augmented by a new migration of African Americans from

Georgia to the Republican community of Center Ridge in the northern part of the county. The Wheel, which had continued to expand, had its own county newspaper, the Conway County Tribune, by late 1887 and more than 75,000 members statewide by 1888.17

because Conway County Democrats did not have the votes to carry the election, they prepared to use violence and fraud to do the job. By election time the Democratic Club in Morrilton had become an armed militia. Just weeks before, Governor Hughes sent two boxes of guns and two thousand rounds of ammunition to Morrilton by train from the State House in Little Rock.18 Led by a Morrilton banker, W. J. Stowers, who had recently moved from Mississippi, the seventy-five member militia

clergy are listed in Arkansas Gazette t July 21, 1887. l6Arkansas Gazette, July 31, August 25, 26, September 2, 1888. 17Curtis Barnes, "A History of the Hopewell Community," (M.S.E. thesis,

University of Central Arkansas, 1956), 1-2. Barnes suggests the black settlers were

brought to Center Ridge by E. D. Bush, a white Union veteran from Georgia who had served with residents of the community in the Civil War and knew they would be welcomed in the area. See also Clifton Paisley, "The Political Wheelers and Arkansas' Election of 1888," Arkansas Historical Quarterly 25 (Spring 1966): 3-21.

"Governor James P. Eagle testimony, 820-822, Contested Election: Clayton vs.

Breckinridge, Committee on Elections, 51st Congress, 1889-1890, National Archives, Washington, D.C., four volumes of manuscript testimony , hereafter cited as CvB; S. R. Allen testimony, CvB, 1220.




company paraded almost daily in the streets of Morrilton in the period preceding the election. Republicans charged that the armed display aimed to intimidate Republican and Wheel voters. Democrats insisted that they had formed the militia to protect the property of citizens against black threats to burn down the town should they lose the election. On election day in September, the militia deposited the guns in the very building which housed the Morrilton polls.

As the Republican election judge, George W. Baker, made his way to the polls in Morrilton early on the morning of the election, he was accosted by his neighbor, Jesse Winburn, a local paperhanger, who appeared uproariously drunk. A Democratic constable, who just happened to be on the scene, carted both men off to jail. As soon as they were behind bars, Winburn sobered up dramatically. With the Republi- can judge absent from the polls, Stowers's militia insisted on a voice vote to choose a new judge, and the crowd replaced the jailed Republican with a Democrat. When a Republican leader tried nonetheless to distribute his party's ballots in front of the polling place, members of the Democratic militia beat him severely. Not surprisingly, when the votes were counted, the township went to the Democrats by a six-to-one margin as compared with their slight majority only two years before.19

Meanwhile, similar shenanigans occurred in Plumerville, where black voters outnumbered whites by a two-to-one margin. Democrats gathered early at the polling place and voted to oust two black election judges who had lawfully been appointed earlier in the summer by the Republican county judge, G. H. Taylor. When the judges arrived at the polls at eight that morning, they found that the election had already commenced, and they had been replaced by two local Democrats. Now with three Democratic judges, Tom Hervey, Ben White and Bob Pate, counting the votes-the same three men, in fact, who had tried to stuff the Plumerville ballot in the 1886 election- the Democrats were sure to win. They carried the overwhelmingly black township by seventy-six votes. It had gone to the Republicans two years earlier by a five-hundred-vote

19W. J. Stowers testimony, CvB, 2080-2086. Republican charges appeared in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat , September 4, 1888. Democrats answered in the Arkansas Gazette, September 6, 1888. See also Mrs. Eleanor Wood Moose's account in Bits of Conway County Heritage (Morrilton: n.p., 1976), 43.




can assume the 1886 elections were counted fairly, for the Republican county judge had appointed for each precinct a Democratic judge recommended by the chairman of the county Democratic party, Carroll Armstrong. The Democrats did not return the favor.20

The Democratic victory in the September election came through fraud and intimidation, or so declared Republicans on the state and local level. The Wheel candidate for governor, Charles M. Norwood, even filed a contest after the election saying he had been counted out of votes in Conway County and elsewhere. The Democrat-controlled state legislature agreed to hear Norwood's case if he would put up a $40,000 bond to cover the cost of the investigation. He withdrew his contest.21

In Conway County Democrats wildly celebrated their return to control of local government by firing hundreds of guns, singing songs such as "Good-bye Republicans, Good-bye,

" and listening to speeches by Captain Stowers of the militia and party chairman Armstrong. They held an even more elaborate rally the following evening at which they ceremoniously "buried" the Republican party. In a grand torchlight procession in Morrilton, several hundred celebrants marched to the

cemetery in the east end of town, where they interred a mock corpse face down. White Democrats had even sent out invitations to the funeral in true mourning style with a heavy black band around the paper containing the following words:

Funeral notice. The public is requested to attend the burial of the Republican party at 9 o'clock this evening. The procession will start from the corner of Railroad Avenue and Moose Street. Pall Bearers- Col. Downem Quick, Major Hardworker, Capt. Ed Got There, Gen. Give'm Thunder, Prof. Big Luck and Brother Solid Black. Chief mourners- Polly Ann Hindtit, Mary Jane Muchlabor, Much Midnight Caucus, Isaac Griefstat, Lum

^noch Armstead testimony, CvB, 537-541; Judge G. H. Taylor testimony, CvB, 1288; returns for September 1886 and 1888 election, CvB, 970-972.

2lDigest of Contested Elections, 682, 767; Paisley, "The Political Wheelers and Arkansas' Election of 1888," 18.




Hawkspit, Nath Saymuch, and a long procession of distant relatives and sorrowing friends.22

Despite such levity, the campaign for the federal election in November became even more vicious. In the second congressional district in central Arkansas, the Wheel-Republican candidate for governor, Charles Norwood, had actually polled three thousand more votes than Eagle, the Democratic candidate. Thus Democrats feared that the Democratic incumbent in Congress, Clifton R. Breckinridge, might lose his seat to his Republican opponent, John M. Clayton. Clayton was a hated name for the Democrats of Conway County because of their experiences under the Reconstruction rule of Governor Powell Clayton. Both Democrats and Republicans saw Conway County as a key battleground. Throughout die month of October, Democrats held rallies, complete with torchlight processions, music, speechmaking, and bandana drapery decorating buggies, horses, and houses. Both Breckinridge and Clayton arrived on October 30 to address a large partisan crowd. Events culminated in a grand evening on October 31, when hundreds of men from the Democratic clubs of several communities marched to Morrilton carrying torches. They gathered outside of town and paraded through the streets to the shouts of a rowdy home audience.23

Republicans campaigned vigorously as well. Hie Gazette charged that the national Republican League had spent several thousand dollars in Conway County to defeat Breckinridge. In the last days before the election, black Republicans made the rounds through the county to get out the Clayton vote. A circular passed around the area charged that Democrats had stolen the September election and that Wheelers should vote for Clayton.

The day before the election, M. W. Benjamin, a prominent Republi- can lawyer from Little Rock, arrived in Morrilton to confer with local

Republican leaders and to mobilize the black vote. Word that he was coming preceded him, and he was met at the train station by an angry Democratic mob armed with clubs. They hooted at him, jostled him,

Ârkansas Gazette, September 5, 6, 1888. ^Digest of Contested Elections, 681; Arkansas Gazette, October 13, 20, 31,

November 2, 3, 1888.




County Judge Oliver T. Bentley, who was deputy sheriff at the time of the Clayton murder. Courtesy Robert Cruce.




pulled out handfiils of his beard, and knocked him to the ground. Finally a lead ball flung from a bean shooter struck him above the eye. Although the new Democratic sheriff, M. D. Shelby, and his deputy, Oliver T. Bentley, were in the crowd, no arrests were made. The Morrilton Headlight justified the attack, arguing that when Benjamin stepped off the train, "it seemed that memories of 1868-1874 fired the people and they were hardly responsible for what they did. "

Badly shaken, Benjamin had the pellet removed by a local physician and took the next train back to Little Rock. When Benjamin died of heart failure two weeks later, Republicans called it murder, charging that his death was brought on by the nervous shock from the mob attack in Morrilton.24

When the federal election day arrived on November 6, 1888, it quickly became a fiasco. Because there had been charges of fraud during the September state election, a Republican federal judge in Little Rock chose a local white Republican, Charles Wahl, as a federal supervisor to watch the Plumerville election. To counter this move, the county sheriff swore in over a dozen Democrats from Morrilton and Plumerville as deputies to ensure "a fair election and an honest count." These deputies and a crowd of white Democrats appeared on the scene when the polls at Plumerville opened at eight that morning. The two lawful black Republican judges, Ransom Hays and Enoch Armstead, who had been removed in September for being late, arrived early this time. Nonetheless the white Democratic judge, Thomas Hervey, who John Mason claims had killed the black legislator the year before, demanded a voice vote of the Democratic crowd to remove the black judges. He called for the affirmative but not the negative and declared the black Republicans ousted from the election.25

The deposed judges, Hays and Armstead, naturally objected to these proceedings as unlawful. When they insisted on taking part in the

^Digest of Contested Election Cases, 684, 717, 767; M. D. Shelby testimony, CvB, 2049; Morrilton Headlight article of November 8, 1888, copied in CvB, 2126; Arkansas Gazette, November 6, 7, 1888.

Ênoch Armstead testimony, CvB, 537-540; Charles Reid testimony, CvB, 815; Digest of Contested Elections, 681-683; United States v. Thomas C. Hervey, William T. Hobbs, and William Palmer, Eastern District of Arkansas, Federal Court Case File CCR986, National Archives, Southwest Region, Fort Worth, Texas.




election, the armed deputies prevented them from doing so. Accompa- nied by Wahl, the federal supervisor, the ejected judges went down the street and opened a second voting place at a black barber shop. Three

deputies, Charles C. Reid Jr., James Lucas, and John O. Blakeney, followed the black judges and told them to desist in their actions or they would be put in the "calaboose." These deputies, it might be noted, were not Democratic thugs but the finest citizens of Morrilton. Reid was a

young lawyer, who had recently graduated from Vanderbilt University. Blakeney edited the local Democratic paper, the Headlight, while Lucas was a prominent businessman. Intimidating the black men through force, show of arms, and rough language, they wrested from them the second ballot box they had prepared. Elijah Chism, the owner of the barber shop, said Lucas came at him with a hatchet. The black judges finally closed their polling place but stayed outside the other one all day passing out Republican ballots. Charles Wahl, the federal supervisor, returned to perform his duties at the house where the Democrats were running the election.26

For the rest of the day Wahl watched the Democrats closely. The Democratic deputies loitered around the polls intimidating black voters until the polls closed that afternoon. The judges took their dinner at the local hotel, Simms's boarding house, and returned to count the votes around seven. Tom Hervey excused himself to get paper and additional light with which to commence the counting of votes. As he left he told Wahl, "If anything happens to it [the ballot box], I will give you to understand, I am not responsible for it." Hervey went to Smith's drugstore, where some of the deputy sheriffs and other local Democrats had gathered. After Hervey had been absent about a half hour, someone called at the door of the polling place, asking if the vote count had begun. Wahl answered no. Moments later four white men toting pistols and wearing handkerchiefs over their faces burst into the room. They forced Hobbs and Wahl to turn to the wall as they seized the ballot box and poll books and carried them away. As the men grabbed the box, one

Ênoch Armstcad testimony, CvB, 541-545; Digest of Contested Elections, 683; Arkansas Gazette, April 19, 28, 1889; United States v. Charles C. Reed, James Lucas, and John O. Blakeney, Eastern District of Arkansas, Federal Court Case File CCR989, National Archives, Southwest Region, Fort Worth, Texas.




uttered, "God damn you, turn it loose or I will blow your brains out. We will show you how Conway County goes."27

Just before the box was stolen, on what was a miserably rainy night, a posse of eighteen Morrilton Democrats rode the six miles to Plumer- ville. Some of them were deputies who had already been to Plumerville earlier in the day. One member of the group, Warren Taylor, later testified in federal court that just before seven that night thirteen members of the posse stopped a hundred yards short of the railway depot in Plumerville. Five of the group- George Bentley, his brother Oliver Bentley, Walter P. Wells, William T. Wood, and Charles Reid- rode on into town. Witnesses saw them at the drug store where local Democrats were gathered. About thirty minutes later, the five men returned to their comrades, and the entire group rode back to Morrilton. According to Taylor, word circulated among the posse that the ballot box was in the possession of the group. When they arrived back in Morrilton, Taylor said, Oliver Bentley and Walter Wells took the box to Wells's store where they burned its contents in a wood stove. Other posse members denied in court any knowledge about the ballot box, although they confirmed the abrupt and mysterious ride through the rain and mud to Plumerville on the night of November 6.28

The theft of the Plumerville votes secured the desired effect. John Middleton Clayton, the Republican candidate for congress, lost the election by a mere 846 votes. Governor Hughes certified the results, ignoring the estimated six hundred black votes stolen from Howard Township as well as election irregularities in several other counties. Predictably, Clayton cried foul and made clear his intentions to contest the election. The Republican party of Arkansas issued a one-thousand- dollar reward for information about the ballot box theft. Conway County Democrats quickly became aware that irregularities in a federal election posed a greater risk than had their manipulation of the state and local

^Digest of Contested Cases, 683; Charles Wahl testimony, CvB, 882-883; W. T. Hobbs testimony, CvB, 1814-1816. See also Hervey's testimony before federal court reported in Arkansas Gazette, February 27 and May 3, 1889.

28Warren Taylor testimony, CvB, 882-883; Charles Reid testimony, CvB, 775-786; see also the testimony of Warren Taylor, Charles Reid, George Washington and others reported in Arkansas Gazette, April 23, 26, 27, November 24, 1889.




election the previous September. On November 12 Enoch Armstead, one of the black election judges, filed an affidavit in federal court in Little Rock against the Democratic election judges who had ousted him and against the three deputy sheriffs who had forcibly taken the ballot box.29

Fearing a federal investigation, Democrats began to do what they could to cover their tracks. Warren Taylor said that Oliver Bentley, Walter Wells, and William Wood together planned the cover story the Democratic posse was to tell about their night ride to Plumerville on November 6. Taylor and Wood were to say that they rode to Plumerville but did not enter town. Bentley and Wells, two of the party who went into Plumerville, were to swear they were playing billiards at the Speer Hotel in Morrilton that night and did not go to Plumerville at all. According to Taylor, Wells and Bentley threatened that any man who dared let out the real story would be killed. The Democratic Club of Conway County facetiously issued a reward for the thieves and put Oliver Bentley on a committee to investigate election fraud in the county. Democrats also began the ludicrous rumor that blacks had taken the box for fear the Democrats would take it first. The black thieves so mutilated the box, said the Democrats, that they destroyed it entirely.30

In a more lethal fashion, Democrats also covered their tracks by removing any hostile witnesses. Deputy Sheriff Oliver T. Bentley appears to have been the mastermind behind the ballot box theft and the coverup of evidence. Charles Wahl identified him as the voice at the door just minutes before the ballot box was stolen. He and his brother, George Bentley, the town marshal of Morrilton, were the leaders of the posse that rode to Plumerville on election night and were thus chief suspects for the ballot box theft. Either George Bentley's resolve weakened or his conscience got the better of him. He opened communi- cations with the Pinkerton Detective Agency and began negotiations to become a government witness. Warren Taylor said the posse pondered among themselves whether George Bentley would actually turn state's evidence. Taylor said he thought he would not. George's brother, Oliver

^Digest of Contested Election Cases, 681; Arkansas Gazette, November 15, December 27, 1888.

30Warren Taylor testimony, CvB, 943-944, 952; Arkansas Gazette, January 6, 13, 1889; Digest of Contested Election Cases, 684.




T. Bentley, apparently concluded otherwise. On the morning of November 27, Oliver shot and killed his brother George in the presence of a single witness, William Wood, another member of the posse. The two men explained that Oliver Bentley was examining a revolver in Wood's saddle shop when the gun accidentally discharged, killing George Bentley. Sheriff Shelby and the coroner ruled the death an accident. But George Bentley's grandson recalls being told how his grandfather was shot "accidentally" five times by his brother.31

Just a week later, on the evening of December 16, someone tried to kill Charles Wahl, the other chief witness in the federal prosecutions, as he played cards in Dr. Adam Bradley's office with some Plumerville Democrats. Republican and Democratic accounts of the evening differ, but all agree that late after an evening of whiskey and poker, gunshots blasted through a glass door, grazing Wahl's neck and head and shooting off part of his ear. When he gathered his senses, Wahl quickly ran away from the house, without letting either of the two physicians present, Dr. Bradley or Dr. Ben White, dress his wound.32 Leaving his family behind, he fled the next day to Little Rock, where he stayed, fearing for his life should he return to his home. Four months later he sent for his family and moved permanently to Jefferson County. Wahl had his poker companions and a few other men he suspected charged in federal court with attempt to assassinate a federal witness. That the county sheriff charged no one for attempted murder demonstrates the state of justice in Conway County. But a grand jury there did indict the Republican victim, Charles Wahl, for gambling on the night of December 16. None of the Democrats with whom he played poker that night, including the town marshal of Plumerville, were charged.

3lWarren Taylor testimony, CvB, 928; Digest of Contested Election Cases, 685-686; Fort Smith Elevator , December 7, 1888; Gordon Earl Bentley, interview with author, Morrilton, Arkansas, October 7, 1992. Eleanor Wood Moose's account in Bits of Conway County Heritage, 44, indicates Bentley was shot five times.

32S. N. Landers testimony, CvB, 1957-1960; B. G. White testimony, CvB, 1928-1931; Charles Wahl testimony, CvB, 885-900; Eliza Mason testimony, CvB, 901; Arkansas Gazette, November 22, 1889, May 2, 1890. One might note that the Gazette did not report either the killing of Bentley or the attempted assassination of Wahl as news items.




John M. Clayton, who was assassinated in Plumerville. From John H. Reynolds and D. Y. Thomas, History of the University of Arkansas (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas, 1910).




Wahl pleaded guilty and paid a ten-dollar fine in absentia rather than risk his life in returning to the county to contest the case.33

Clearly, the Democrats involved with the election fraud on Novem- ber 6 feared they might end up in a federal penitentiary for their crimes. Fear probably turned to panic when the defeated congressional candidate, John Middleton Clayton, announced his intentions to come to Conway County in late January to investigate personally the circumstances of the stolen election. Fearing that Clayton might be killed if he went to Plumerville, the former Republican county judge, G. H. Taylor, travelled to Little Rock to advise him to take his depositions in Morril- ton.34

Clayton, however, would not listen to good warning. He arrived in Plumerville on January 25, 1889, and had his bags taken from the train station to the Simms's boarding house, the two-story hotel in the center of town. The proprietor, John Simms, one of the card players on the night Charles Wahl was shot, refused to give Clayton a room. Simms referred Clayton to a Mrs. McCraven, who took boarders in her one- story home on the outskirts of town. Although Simms turned away Clayton, he provided a room for Carroll Armstrong, the chairman of the Democratic party of Conway County who served as Breckinridge's attorney during Clayton's investigation. Simms later testified that he refused Clayton a room because his wife was ill and that he took in Armstrong because he was already lodged there. However, Armstrong admitted that he did not get to Plumerville until the day after Clayton had arrived. Moreover, Clayton was already in Plumerville by the time Armstrong received the telegram in Morrilton informing him he should go to Plumerville to assist with the depositions.35

Ûnited States v. Benjamin G. White, Cyrus H. McCullough, Russell Watson, William Durham, and William Palmer y Eastern District of Arkansas, Federal Court Case File CCR1022, National Archives Southwest Region, Fort Worth, Texas; Conway County Circuit Court, Criminal Record Book, March 1889-October 1899, 138-139, 383; Arkansas Gazette, February 27, 1889.

^G. H. Taylor testimony, CvB, 1279; statement of John McClure, CvB, supporting documents, 16x.

35John Simms testimony, CvB, 1747-1748; A. M. Middlebrook testimony, CvB, 1261-1263; Carroll Armstrong testimony, CvB, 2013-2014.




Accompanying Clayton were W. D. Allnutt, a lawyer and notary from Morrilton, to assist in taking depositions, and Aaron M. Middle- brook, a black deputy sheriff from Pine Bluff. Sensing hostility, Middlebrook insisted they should not stay for there was great danger, and he himself left Plumerville. Clayton stayed for four days taking depositions from black voters, almost all of whom said they had voted Republican. After Clayton's questions Carroll Armstrong, chairman of the Democratic Committee of Conway County, cross-examined the voters on behalf of Congressman Breckinridge.36

While Clayton took depositions in Plumerville, Oliver T. Bentley began negotiations with Harry Coblentz, the former Republican county sheriff, for a settlement whereby Clayton would receive the stolen votes in exchange for dropping the federal indictments. Coblentz brought this offer to Clayton who referred him to Republican leaders in Little Rock. After two days of talks, Republican leaders agreed to the deal. Coblentz told them, "You have saved Clayton's life." But the Republicans stubbornly refused to withdraw the one-thousand-dollar reward for the ballot-box thieves. When Coblentz brought the terms back to Morrilton, Bentley backed out because the reward had not been rescinded. That night, after the deal fell through, someone assassinated Clayton.37

The plan to kill Clayton was apparently already drawn up and waiting for the word "go." A group of Democratic conspirators, according to their descendants, had held a secret meeting around the coal stove in Malone's store in Plumerville. The men drew straws; the man

Â. M. Middlebrook testimony, CvB, 1261-1263; Digest of Contested Elections, 684-685; Arkansas Gazette, May 9, 1890.

"Oliver T. Bentley testimony, CvB, 762-764; C. C. Reid testimony, CvB, 790-792; statement by John McClure, CvB, supporting documents, 18x; Digest of Contested Elections, 684; Arkansas Gazette, February 17, 1889, May 1, 1890.




who received the short straw was to kill Clayton.38 After dinner on the night of January 29, Clayton and his companion Allnutt retired to Mrs. McCraven's sitting room to discuss the events of the day. In a window in the room hung some thin calico curtains which did not quite meet in the middle. For some time the murderers stood outside the window, apparently observing as Clayton walked back and forth and spoke to Allnutt. Clayton had just sat down to pen a letter to his son when the fatal shot came through the window. The blast of buckshot almost severed his head from his body, splattering blood and brains all over the floor and ceiling. His companion was so badly scared, says John Mason, "that he could not find the knob to the door. This lawyer would jump to the top of the door and slide down hunting for the door knob."39

Mason says a man named Pate had drawn the short straw and that he had his brother with him when he stood outside the window and killed Clayton. If Mason's account is true, the two men were surely Bob and Charles Pate. Powell Clayton testified before members of Congress in 1890 that he believed some twenty-five men in Conway County knew his brother was to be killed, and he singled out as suspects Oliver Bentley and Bob Pate. The Clayton brothers, Powell and William H., John Clayton's twin brother, never had enough evidence, however, to charge either man with the crime. Pate, a Plumerville saloon-keeper, had a history of political treachery. He had attempted to stuff the ballot box in Plumerville in 1886. He was one of the Democratic election judges who managed the improbable Democratic victory in mostly black Howard Township in September 1888. In the November election he was among the Democratic cadre at Smith's drugstore which, it appears, planned and

"John Mason says his grandfather was one of nineteen men who drew straws. His

grandfather drew a long straw, but he knew who drew the short one. John Mason to Ernie Dean, February 26, 1980, Individual File: John Madison Clayton, Arkansas

History Commission. John Mason interview. Other oral sources tell the same story about the drawing of straws although they vary on the number of conspirators. Clarkia

Turney, interview with author, Morrilton, January 6, 1993; Cecil Brown, interview with author, Plumerville, August 18, 1993; Willie Reddig, interview with author, Morrilton, August 18, 1993. See also Eleanor Wood Moose's account in Bits of Conway County Heritage, 44.

^Digest of Contested Election Cases, 685; W.H. Clayton testimony, CvB, 1030; John Mason to Ernie Deane.




Courtesy Randy Everett.




executed the theft of the ballots. He even helped organize the poker game at which Charles Wahl was shot.40

Pate was among the crowd of both white and black residents that gathered at Mrs. McCraven's house after word spread that Clayton had been killed. Carroll Armstrong, the lawyer representing Breckinridge in the depositions, and W. P. Allnutt, Clayton's notary, sat with the body through the night. Armstrong sent dispatches to Clayton's family, the governor, and county authorities in Morrilton. Sheriff Shelby was collecting taxes at Cleveland in the remote northwest corner of the county, and did not get to Plumerville until the next day. By the time the sheriff arrived, Clayton's brother William had already come from Little Rock and removed the body.

The legal officer presiding at the scene was Deputy Sheriff Oliver T. Bentley, the probable ballot box thief who had killed his own brother. Bentley convened a coroner's jury on the morning after the murder to examine the body and the physical evidence on the scene. Reminiscent of the wolf guarding the chicken house, Bentley 's jury included Bob Pate and his bartender Bert Walley. Outside the window of the room where Clayton was killed, they found the tracks of two men wearing rubber overshoes- one pair old, one new. The tracks had frozen overnight in the mud. One wonders if Bob Pate had changed his shoes since the night before. The jury's verdict was death at the hands of unknown persons.41

Clayton's assassination intensified die already growing political tempest. The governor and the state legislature, then in session in Little Rock, condemned the crime, and issued a six-thousand dollar reward for Clayton's murderer, then the largest ever offered for a criminal in Arkansas. More than five thousand mourners turned out for Clayton's funeral in Pine Bluff. With Arkansas's violent politics in national

^John Mason interview; Sheriff M. D. Shelby testimony, CvB, 2048; Arkansas Gazette , May 3, 1890. Interestingly, Cyrus McCullough, the source of the account which names Pate as the murderer, provided the alibi for Pate when he was investigated for the crime. McCullough swore that he was with Bob Pate in Pate's saloon at the time of the assassination. This fact harmonizes Mason's and Turney's accounts. Mrs. Turney said the conspirators did not know who drew the short straw. But McCullough must have known since he provided Pate's alibi.

Ârkansas Gazette, January 31, 1889; see Allnutt's testimony recorded in Digest of Contested Elections, 739-746.




headlines, Democratic leaders tried to convince the public that Clayton's killing was the work of a lone killer addressing a personal grievance, not a political assassination planned by Democrats.

During the remainder of 1889 and 1890, Governor Eagle and Congressman Breckinridge cooperated with Conway County Sheriff

Shelby in working out a bizarre and elaborate theory of the murder as committed by Thomas Hooper Jr. of California. In the summer of 1889, an informant, evidently wishing to claim the reward money, wrote Sheriff Shelby accusing Hooper of the crime. Hooper's father had been killed by Powell Clayton's Republican militia in 1868 in Conway County, and the informant suggested Hooper killed John M. Clayton in retaliation. Hooper died in December 1889 before anyone from Arkansas travelled to California to investigate. Not until May 1890 was Hooper's wife finally summoned to testify and establish that her husband was

actually at home in bed, sick with the dropsy, during the month of January 1889. But for the better part of a year, the Hooper theory of the murder occupied Sheriff Shelby's time and public attention.42

Sheriff Shelby also received two mysterious letters claiming to be from the assassin signed Jack the Ripper. Fitting well with the Hooper theory, the letter writer confessed to killing John M. Clayton by mistake, thinking he was actually his brother, former governor Powell Clayton. The motive, the letters claimed, was to get revenge for crimes committed by Powell Clayton during the Reconstruction days. Rumors of two mysterious strangers seen north of Plumerville the morning of Clayton's murder also circulated to provide support for the theory that the killers came from outside the county.43

With state and county officials dragging their feet, W. H. and Powell Clayton, brothers of the slain Republican, hired the Pinkerton Detective

A2Digest of Contested Elections, 686, 773-778. 43The first letter, received March 4, 1889 read: "I am the man who killed J.M.

Clayton. I went to Plumerville to kill Powell Clayton. Powell Clayton had my father and brother killed when I was a child. I have been west for 19 years, and returned to Fort Smith just after the election expecting to meet Powell Clayton at Plumerville, but did not, but will get him yet before I die- the son of a bitch killed my father and brother. Don't blame any . . . [illegible] and I am a Republican." CvB, 1352. The second letter, postmarked from New Hampshire in June 1889, can be found in CvB, supporting documents.




Agency to investigate the murder. From February to April a Pinkerton detective named Wood gathered evidence. Local residents eventually drove him out of Plumerville, and he took testimonies thereafter at his room at the Capitol Hotel in Little Rock. Wood apparently conducted an interview with Bob Pate during which Pate made some incriminating statements. Pate later testified that detectives had drugged him and gotten him drunk and that he could not recall anything he had said to Detective Wood.44

Before Detective Wood left Conway County, he hired a local black man, Joe Smith, to work for him in the county. On Saturday morning, March 30, Smith sent a message to Wood in Little Rock indicating he had found a man who could reveal the identities of Clayton's murderer and the thieves in the November election. But, Smith concluded, the prospective witness was afraid to talk about what he knew. That same evening three white men on horseback approached the black detective, and one of the three, eighteen-year-old David Richmond, shot him dead in the street.45

As with Clayton's killing, Democrats tried hard to convince people that Smith's murder was not politically motivated. The Democratic papers represented the crime as petty violence by some rowdy teenagers. A Morrilton physician noticed evidence of a bitemark on Richmond's body, leading to a conclusion that Richmond shot Smith after a scuffle. Democrats suggested that Smith was killed because he was an uppity black. According to the Gazette, Joe Smith was "insolent, quarrelsome, overbearing, quick to take offense, and a turbulent and troublesome man

"Robert L. Pate testimony, CvB, 730-731. Detective Wood's report was distributed to the members of the Congressional Committee which examined Pate. Unfortunately, the report has not survived. The partial contents of the report can only be established by the questions posed by the examiners.

45St. Louis Globe-Democrat, April 1, 1889. The Globe-Democrat printed Smith's letter to Wood, with the names of suspected parties and the witness judiciously blanked out. See also Arkansas Gazette, April 2, 7, 30, May 2, 1890; Digest of Contested Election Cases, 685.




in the community." Richmond said he fired on Smith because he was tired of his "slack jaw."46

The town constable of Plumerville, Richard J. Gray, a well-educated mulatto physician, tracked Richmond down, arrested him, and turned him over to the Democratic county sheriff. Sheriff Shelby put Richmond in jail in Morrilton, but told Gray he did not think the murder "amounted to much." Gray thought differently. Joe Smith was his cousin. Three

days after Smith's murder, Gray travelled to Little Rock to speak with Governor Eagle about the case and the situation in Conway County. Gray reported that Richmond's friends had threatened him and that Oliver Bentley had made it clear that death awaited anyone who got on the track of Clayton's killer. The grand jury refused to indict Richmond for killing Smith, calling it instead justifiable homicide. However, in true

Conway County style justice, Constable Gray was indicted for "breach of peace" because he used insulting and abusive language to David Richmond when he arrested him.47

While the investigation of Clayton's killing continued in 1889, the Conway County election cases came before the federal court in Little Rock. About two dozen men from the county were indicted with the various charges ranging from stealing the ballot box, attempting to assassinate a federal election supervisor (Wahl), and removing the legal Republican judges in the November election. During the February, April, and November court terms, the Little Rock hotels were filled with the accused men, dozens of witnesses, and the many locals who rode the train to Little Rock and packed the courtroom as spectators.

The prominent white men of Morrilton- lawyers, bankers, businessmen-one after another took the stand and provided alibis for the accused. The prosecution's witnesses were mostly Plumerville blacks. For example, one black man, John Ford of Plumerville, testified that he

Ârkansas Gazette, April 7, 14, 18, 1889. The Gazette account is probably based on news forwarded by the Morrilton Headlight. Editor John Blakeney interviewed Richmond in his jail cell. J. O. Blakeney testimony, CvB, 2067-2068; Fort Smith Elevator, April 5, 1889.

47R. H. Gray testimony, CvB, 1306; Arkansas Gazette, April 3, 1889; Conway County Indictments Record Book, 1887-October 1890, 401-402, Conway County Courthouse, Morrilton.




saw Oliver T. Bentley in front of Smith's drug store just before the ballot box was stolen. Then a dozen Democratic men testified that they saw him at the courthouse in Morrilton at the time of the theft. While government witnesses said they saw Walter P. Wells in Plumerville when the ballots were stolen, the prominent citizens of Morrilton, one after another, testified he was at that time playing billiards at Morrilton's Speer Hotel. Faced with this kind of contradictory testimony, juries brought forward the "not guilty" verdict. Only Tom Hervey, the man who orchestrated the ousting of the black election judges in Plumerville, was convicted and fined one hundred dollars plus court costs. The federal jury found young Morrilton lawyer, Charles C. Reid Jr., guilty of election fraud for his role in the Plumerville fiasco, but the judge then overturned the verdict48

When news of the acquittals got back to Conway County, the white neighborhoods of Morrilton and Plumerville were ablaze with bonfires and torches and loud with church bells, cowbells, shouts, and cheers in the victory celebrations that followed.49 In the black neighborhoods and Republican townships in the northern part of the county, one can imagine, people felt differently.

By this time Conway County was not a safe place for anyone who had served as a government witness. After telling his story about the theft of the ballot box, young Warren Taylor fled to Eugene, Oregon. He said his life had been threatened by Oliver Bentley and Walter Wells. In 1890 he testified to the United States Congress in Washington that he wished to return to Conway County but feared that if he did Sheriff Shelby would shoot him.50 Harry Coblentz, the county Republican leader, had lent Taylor money so that he could leave. But Coblentz, too, was not safe. Shortly after the second federal trial on May 4, Oliver Bentley reportedly tried to kill Coblentz on the streets of Morrilton. Republican and Democratic leaders visited Coblentz that afternoon and implored him to leave Morrilton on the next train to avoid conflict with Bentley. The mayor even offered him a bodyguard to the train. After

^See Arkansas Gazette accounts of the trials, February 27, March 1, April 23, 26-28, November 21-26, 1889.

"Arkansas Gazette, May 7, 9, 10, November 21-24, 26, 1889. 50Warren Taylor testimony, CvB, 933-934, 948.




first refusing to go, he boarded the train that night and left Morrilton for good. The mayor, fearing threats by African Americans to burn the town, organized a temporary patrol of fifty men to keep order.51

The investigations had not entirely ended, however. In April 1890 a subcommittee of the United States House of Representatives Committee on Elections came to Arkansas to investigate the contested congressional race. For two weeks the committee took depositions in Little Rock concerning Clayton's assassination and the election irregularities at Plumerville and other locations in the second congressional district. Hundreds of people from Conway County were called to Little Rock to

testify. To reconstruct the stolen ballots, the committee asked fee entire voting population of Howard Township to come to Little Rock and declare how they voted in the November election. They even paid citizens two dollars a day and mileage to make the trip.

The hearing took place in the federal court rooms in Little Rock. The chairman of the committee, Republican Congressman John F. Lacey from Iowar said the committee feared for their lives if they took the depositions in Plumerville or Morrilton. But even the United States courthouse could be a violent place. Chairman Lacey suggested that the men from Morrilton and Plumerville brought their pistols into the courtroom inside "little satchels swung over their shoulders." On one day near the end of the proceedings, Carroll Armstrong, the head of the Democratic party in Conway County, approached the committee and accused them of slurring the names of the good people of the county. He specifically referred to Clayton's attorney, Republican stalwart John McClure, as a vile slanderer. McClure jumped from his seat and punched Armstrong in the face. Armstrong grabbed at McClure's long and full beard. For the next two minutes bedlam prevailed. The large crowd of black spectators dashed out of the courtroom rather than risk a reaction by the white Democratic crowd. Finally, marshals restrained Armstrong and McClure and court resumed.52

The Congressional committee returned to Washington on May 9 to prepare its report. The Republican-dominated Committee on Elections

"Arkansas Gazette, May 7, November 19, 1889. S2Digest of Contested Elections, 778-779; Arkansas Gazette, May 4, 13, 1889; Fort

Smith Elevator^ May 9, 16, 1889.




eventually determined that Clayton had actually won the election and recommended that the seat be declared vacant on account of Clayton's death. The House passed the recommendation on September 5, 1890, by a vote of 105 to 62. After serving almost a full term, Breckinridge lost his seat in Congress. He began to campaign almost immediately to regain his seat in the November election.53

The fall 1890 elections were stormy, as might be expected, and the campaign had the usual political sideshows. Democratic rallies employed the music of a German brass band; at a Wheel event in Springfield just before the election a solemn procession of men carried stalks of corn and farm implements.54 But the 1890 election saw the first attempt at a real alliance in Conway County between agrarian populists and white and black Republicans. Republicans and Wheelers met at Solgohachia and nominated a joint ticket under the Union Labor party. The attempt for a coalition failed, however, when blacks became incensed at the Solgoha- chia meeting because the Union Labor ticket included only one black candidate, T. C. Snipes, for state representative. The county's only black newspaper, the Clarion, edited by W. L. Jordan, had called for at least three places for blacks on the ticket. The black Republicans held their own meeting on the following Saturday at which they paid their respects to the "white long-haired radicals in the north end of the county," and then proceeded to select a ticket of three black and four white Republi- cans.55

Although coalition attempts faltered, black and white Republicans appeared ready to use force if necessary to keep Democrats from stealing the election as before. In March 1890 Union Civil War veterans and their sons in the northern part of Conway County established camps of the Grand Army of the Republic and Sons of Veterans in Center Ridge. Democrats charged that these chapters were merely fronts for Republican clubs, which had, among other things, passed resolutions threatening to shed blood if their party did not win. Hie Democratic Morrilton Headlight reported that the Republican clubs had recently received a

53Warren Taylor testimony, CvB, 925; Fort Smith Elevator, May 30, 1890; Digest of Contested Elections, 679.

"Arkansas Gazette, August 5, 26, 30, 1890. "Arkansas Gazette, July 24, August 5, 13, 19, 1890.




shipment from up North of two cases of Winchester rifles and that Menifee blacks had received a hundred firearms. According to the Democratic press, one black leader had declared in a speech at Spring- field that blacks would burn Plumerville and Morrilton if Republicans did not win the election.56

Republicans had no monopoly on violent tactics in the September election. A Center Ridge Republican and organizer of the G.A.R. and Sons of Veterans camps, George Small, had been to Little Rock to get the Union Labor tickets for the election. As his train arrived back in Morrilton on Saturday, August 30, he was met by an angry Democratic mob on both sides of the depot. The men entered his coach, tumbling over the seats to get to Small. They dragged him out of his seat, tore his clothing, and caned him senseless. Leading the assault was Oliver Bentley, still the deputy sheriff, who took Small's valise containing the Union Labor-Republican tickets. Union Labor officials printed new ballots to replace the stolen ones, but the Democrats still won the election by three hundred votes.57

Republicans struck back during the congressional campaign in October when Democratic candidate Breckinridge made a swing through the northern part of the county. At rabidly Republican Center Ridge, his speech was disturbed by heckling and a gunshot. Democrats noted that many in Breckinridge's audience had been members of Powell Clayton's infamous militia in Reconstruction days. Afterward, as Breckinridge made his way back to his hotel in darkness, a blow from a slingshot struck Breckinridge's companion, a local Democrat, and knocked him to

^Historical Reminiscences and Biographical Memoirs of Conway County, 33; Arkansas Gazette, August 29, September 2, 1890.

57St. Louis Globe-Democrat, August 31, 1890. The Arkansas Gazette reported the story on September 2, 1890, only to deny the accuracy of the Globe-Democrat account. Chairman Lacey of the Committee on Elections read a New York Tribune account of Small's beating to the House of Representative just before they voted to unseat Clifton Breckinridge. See also the Gazette report of September 13, 1890 about the New York Tribune account of the incident.




the ground. Democrats called this an assassination attempt against Breckinridge.58

On election day in November, a band of Center Ridge Republicans, armed with their Winchester rifles, marched two-by-two into Plumerville as the polls were closing. They and about a hundred black men remained with their arms at the polling place until the results of the election were called. With guns there to insure that this time the black votes were counted, Breckinridge's Republican opponent, I. P. Langley, carried Conway County by almost one hundred votes, although Breckinridge won a majority in the district and regained his seat in Congress.59

The 1890 elections were the last true multi-racial elections in Conway County until civil rights legislation of the 1960s. The next meeting of the state legislature in 1891 busied itself with measures to curb black voting power and institutionalize racism in Arkansas. Both houses approved a secret ballot bill which prohibited all party designa- tions on ballots. Only election judges could help illiterate blacks and poor whites mark their ballots. This provision would not help black voters much, however. The new election law also made sure Democratic officials kept control of the choice of election judges. The legislature also proposed a poll tax amendment to the state constitution which was approved by voters in 1892, further disfranchising blacks and poor whites.60

Just before the 1892 election, the Morrilton Pilot published a song written by a woman named Sallie Lee from Solgohachia. Entitled "Goodbye Third Party Goodbye," the song began, "The Democrats have come and come to stay."61 So prophetically true were these words. No Republican has ever again been elected to county office in Conway County. The Democrats who planned and executed the political crimes

Ârkansas Gazette, 9, 11, 12, 15, 1890; Morrilton Pilot, November 21, 1890; Conway County Circuit Court, Criminal Record Book, March 1889-October 1899, 138-139, Conway County Courthouse, Morrilton.

"Arkansas Gazette, November 9, 22, 1890. êe the excellent discussion of electoral change in Graves, Town and Country,

164-173, and J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 123-130.

6!Morrilton Pilot, September 2, 1892.




of the 1880s went on to control the county government for the years to come. Thomas Hervey and Dr. Ben White alternated as county sheriff for the next twenty years. Oliver T. Bentley, who killed his brother and who probably stole the ballot box and masterminded Clayton's assassination, served as county judge for the last six years of the century. Carroll Armstrong, who chaired Conway County's Democratic committee through these turbulent years, went on to chair the state Democratic committee in the 1890s. Charles C. Reid Jr., the young lawyer found

guilty by a federal jury of election fraud in 1889, served five consecutive terms as a United States congressman between 1901 and 1911.

White Democrats had regained power in Conway County through fraud, intimidation, and even political murder. And, as elsewhere in the New South, Jim Crow legislation made sure that they would not lose their grasp on power in the county. Although firmly in the control of the Democratic party, the political system was less democratic than it had been since the Civil War.62 In the future, Democrats would not need to stuff ballot boxes or steal them at gunpoint as they had in 1888, for the boxes would no longer contain the large number of black Republican and poor white votes.

62C. Vann Woodward's arguments about the rise of racist ideology and disfranchise- ment of blacks in the New South certainly hold true for Conway County. See his Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), and Origins of the New South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951). This case study of Conway County also supports Lawrence Goodwyn's view of the decline of freedom in late

nineteenth-century America. See his Democratic Promise: The Populist Movement in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).

