Blood at the Root by Patrick Phillips

Author:Patrick Phillips
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

13

DRIVEN TO THE COOK STOVES

Many whites in Forsyth spent the days after the hangings defending Bill Reid against criticism in the Atlanta papers and congratulating him on a job well done. He had presided over an execution with all the excitement of a country fair and had gone out of his way to ensure that Ernest Knox and Oscar Daniel died not behind a fifteen-foot blind but in full view of the people. Having filled the arena and sprung the trap with one swift blow of his hatchet, Reid was now one of the county’s most celebrated heroes.

Some Atlanta editors, however, railed against the sheriff for having arranged the spectacle in the first place, and against Major Catron for having allowed it to continue. “After going all the way to Cumming,” the Constitution said, “at an expense to the state . . . to guarantee [against] just this thing . . . the execution took place before the gaze of a multitude of about 5,000 people specially gathered for the event.” General William Obear, head of the Georgia National Guard, criticized Catron for not delaying the execution until the fence could be rebuilt. When Governor Brown got wind of what had taken place, he blasted both the military commanders and Reid himself—calling the Forsyth lawman one of Georgia’s “jellyfish sheriffs,” too busy pandering for votes to ever stand up to a mob.

Such indignation is ironic coming from Brown, given that in only three years he would join Newt Morris’s gang of kidnappers and help to lynch Leo Frank in the woods outside Marietta. Clearly when Brown called on sheriffs like Reid to stop lynch mobs, he did not mean they should stand up to men like himself and Morris. Instead, what seems to have really offended Brown was Reid’s lack of subtlety. After all, Knox and Daniel would have died that day whether or not their hangings were witnessed by thousands of cheering whites, and whether or not Reid turned the event into a three-ring circus. At the heart of the controversy was not justice so much as decorum. The Constitution agreed that Reid’s primary sin was his overt “coquetting with the mob.” Such buffoonery, the editors implied, was bad for Georgia’s reputation, and bad for its national aspirations. “An official may compromise with his own conscience when he stultifies himself,” one critic concluded, but “he has no right to indict the whole state.”

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