Freedom's Detective by Charles Lane

Author:Charles Lane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Published: 2019-01-22T17:20:26+00:00

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The Secret Service’s Klan hunt forced Hiram C. Whitley to split his time between the long-distance supervision of that mission and direct management of his undercover operations in New York against counterfeiting kingpin Joshua D. Miner. His meetings with Attorney General Akerman and Joseph G. Hester in June and July, followed by the recruitment of detectives for the anti-Klan mission, and Whitley’s perusal of their reports in August and September, probably accounted at least partly for the fact that the Secret Service’s sting operation on Miner could not take place until late October 1871.

As he studied the messages flowing in from Hester, Del’Omo, Carter, and others across the South, what most impressed the Secret Service chief was how greatly the federal government had underestimated the Ku Klux Klan, and might still be doing so. Whitley, who had dealt with the Klan in its early days, was amazed at its metastasis since then.

On September 29, 1871, the Secret Service chief distilled his analysis into his first update—seventy-three handwritten legal pages—for the attorney general.63 There was no question, he wrote, that the federal government faced a widespread conspiracy “inimical to the laws of the United States, formidable in numbers, in many instances well armed, and determined to accomplish its illegal purposes even to the sacrifice of life.” The conspiracy enjoyed overwhelming support from the white population, of all social classes, in every state where the Secret Service had operated. It was sophisticated, using hand signals and whistles to “guide and direct the movements of the members without the aid of the human voice.”

All of these factors made Whitley’s detectives’ work “of the most arduous and hazardous nature,” but, for all that, doubly necessary. Where the general public supports law and order, the Secret Service chief wrote, investigating crime “is a comparatively easy task...but in localities where the masses are defective, where the local police are governed by the popular prejudice, and where every stranger is looked upon with suspicion, all routine methods of detection become useless and must be superseded by entirely new and original modes of procedure.”

Whitley’s account of his German-born detective Michael G. Bauer’s ingenious operations in York County, South Carolina, illustrated his point.64 The Klan’s strength in the South Carolina Piedmont had prompted President Grant to deploy the United States Army’s 7th Cavalry in March 1871, and with that unit still camped in white tents on the edge of Yorkville, the York County seat, the Congressional Ku Klux Klan Committee dispatched a subcommittee to the area in mid-July, to take testimony from witnesses unable or unwilling to come to Washington.

Unbeknownst either to the committee or to the commander of the cavalry unit, Major Lewis Merrill, Bauer had also come to York County, posing as the representative of a German emigration agency in the market for homesteads. Bauer found that Klan violence had indeed decreased since federal troops arrived—but that this was a tactical retreat. The Klan planned to exploit the lull by sending witnesses to tell the Ku Klux subcommittee that the peace proved the Klan had been a myth all along.

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