TL;DR–Overlapping geography and ideology (and potentially personnel) bridge the gap between John Mosby’s wartime operations and the post-war KKK in Fairfax County, Virginia
Any discussion of the Ku Klux Klan, or the fault lines of race, class, and modernity that aided its formation, should be undertaken carefully. Emotional charge brings inaccuracy. This favors the creation of paper cut outs when a nuanced topographical map would be of more help, as is the case when navigating a landmark as treacherous as the KKK.
By mapping what little details we have about the lengthy history of the klan in Fairfax County, we can construct a geographic timeline that depicts a highway of thought and deed running from the antebellum era through today. John Mosby and his men appear at important intersections on this path.
As a successful marauder in Confederate service, John Mosby assembled fighting men with southern loyalties, independent dispositions, a propensity for violence, and pro-slavery beliefs into a martial force that used familiar farms and known paths to wage war against the Yankee invaders.
When the war ended, Federal armies dispersed and were replaced by a Freedmen’s Bureau that pursued the interests of former slaves at a perceived cost to war-ravaged locals. Crucially, these efforts on the part of the Federal government were transposed on lines and sites almost identical to the disposition of Federal forces during the war.
These place-rooted conflicts set the stage for patterns of social thinking premised on intimidation, violence, and the elevation of certain categories of people over others.
It is useful to understand the ways in which this southern status quo was rationalized and defended in post-war Fairfax County, if only to better comprehend a long history of conflict premised on ethnicity, religion, social position, and the all important choice between an embrace of the past and a hope for the future.
Three Klans
There is no single Ku Klux Klan, no uniform fabric woven from the spun threads of systemic racism and calculated violence that stretches back and blankets Fairfax history from the end of the Civil War onwards.
Instead, it’s useful to think of the KKK as a mask, a symbolic face that has been worn by multiple groups at different times to signal adherence to an undercurrent of white supremacy knit with an entitlement to physical force that runs rampant throughout American history.
Sociologist Richard T. Schaefer structures the cyclical embrace of klan regalia, terminology, and direct action around three periods.1 These triple phases conform well to historical evidence about the klan in Fairfax County.
The third and most recent instantiation of the Ku Klux Klan began in the post-WWII era and accelerated through the 1950s and 60s as a response to court decisions and legislation that challenged racial hegemony in the United States. Desegregation under the auspices of the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, resulting “mass resistance,” and the Civil Rights and Votings Rights Act heralded a response from many who found meaning and comfort in the familiar hierarchies of a social order premised on ethnic category.
Not strictly a southern phenomenon, this incarnation of the klan has stretched across the United States over the course of many decades. This third klan sprouted forth from a culture of surreptitiousness and subtle behind the scenes power jockeying to embrace a certain brazenness. From the high profile publicity-seeking of former grand wizard David Duke to recent events that have found the klan merging with other white-identity groups, this version of the KKK has sought quiet institutional power marbled with publicity-hungry provocation.
Little is known of this klan in Fairfax County except in the odd moments where privately-held sentiment has breached the public sphere. A spurt of anonymous klan literature that appeared around the Sully District in 2021 is an excellent example.
This latter-day klan was a far cry from the “Second Klan,” which held great sway over American sub-urban life in the 1920s. Mainstream-adjacent, this KKK was the genesis point of much that we associate with klan culture. Its formal ranks, costuming, rituals, and messaging refined in this period as a deliberate means to achieve political and ideological legitimacy.
In Fairfax County, the Second Klan was an accepted part of local society that operated with great comfort in broad daylight. Hooded klan members paraded together and staged public funerals for deceased members. They operated a KKK-sponsored newspaper, the Fairfax County Independent, from their official headquarters in the former Fairfax Elementary School.2
Though controversial on a national level, the Second Klan’s appeals to traditional values, isolationism, anti-catholicism, and both de facto and de juris racism rang true for many in a Fairfax that was still predominantly white and rural. The Jazz Age had begun. Industrial society had produced untold changes in transportation and communication. Cultural forms were becoming less hidebound and more free-wheeling, with increasingly progressive mores about sex, dress, and conduct revolutionizing personal identity.
In a retrospectively-inclined Fairfax, these changes were greeted with some amount of scorn. Wherever the agrarian lifestyles still predominated, the klan was no great secret. It was an open and legitimate organization that grafted together similarly concerned individuals, many of whom operated in the agricultural sphere.
Throughout the 1920s, this klan had its own day at the craft and livestock-oriented Fairfax Fair. A 1926 report about a Dranesville farmers picnic in September of 1926 noted “the County Chamber of Commerce and the 4-H Clubs frolicked on the third day while the visible & invisible empire [of the KKK] held sway on the last day.”3
Public and popular though it may have been, the Second Klan was still a subject of controversy. It existed in a paradoxical space where tacit approval and public disavowals kept it both out of the mainstream, but alive and well.
In 1974, eminent Fairfax historians Patrick Reed and Nan Netherton conducted an interview with Joseph Beard, the former Agricultural Extension Agent for Fairfax County who operated out of Frying Pan—a popular site for John Mosby during the Civil War that became a hub for Fairfax farm life from Appomattox through the modern period.
When questioned about the Klan during the 1920’s, Beard’s responses are at once hesitant and familiar. His words betray a calculation, by which he attempts to renounce the Klan’s darker aspects without indicting (or identifying) friends who operated within the organization.
NARR: Do you know anything about the Ku Klux Klan in the County or its activities?
BEARD: Well, the Ku Klux Klan: I knew of it, I knew there was such a thing. Of course, I never was a member, but I did attend one or two political rallies in 1927 on what is now the parking lot of the George Mason Annex here, which was formerly the old Fairfax City High School. There must have been fifteen-hundred Ku Klux people there that night in support of some issue one way or the other, one of the political organizations.
NARR: Would you say then there was much racial animosity in the County? Was this the direction of the Klan’s activities at that time?
BEARD: I never saw or heard locally anything that had to do specifically with special racial problems. Of course, you know what they stood for: they were prejudiced in racial situations. It seems to me that the rallies that I attended…they didn’t even have on hoods or anything. They had on uniforms, white uniforms, but their faces were not covered. I knew who some of them were, because I saw some friends there, and it was more of a political rally at the time as far as I understood.4
In a draft of a separate monograph detailing the history of Frying Pan Park during this same period, a grease pen note counsels the author to write out the Ku Klux Klan.5
Despite after-the-fact attempts to sterilize its history, Fairfax County’s 1920’s-era klan and its mission to gain legitimate footing in local politics left a tantalizing trail of sources. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the original KKK in Fairfax County, whose silence and shadowy conduct has flummoxed all historians that have sought to understand the place of race-oriented violence and Confederate memory in the post-Civil War period.
Look Away, Frying Pan
Patrick Reed and Nan Netherton, the same twentieth century historians that sought to tease out an anecdote of the Second Klan from James Beard, were similarly frustrated in their attempts to flesh out the original klan’s role in Fairfax during the 1860s.
In the County’s official history, a simple reference to this first invisible empire offers simply that the KKK had formed in Fairfax by late 1867 or early 1868.6 We are left, as is often the case, to read between the lines.
Properly contextualized, the KKK’s earliest formation in Fairfax County was a nexus at the point where heightened freedom, enfranchisement, and government support focused on recently freed African-American slaves at a perceived cost to former Confederates and the white patrician order they unsuccessfully fought to preserve.
At war’s end, there were 2,941 free African-Americans living in Fairfax County.7 Almost immediately following the cessation of fighting, the Freedman’s Bureau arrived in Fairfax. There, amidst the desolation that had destroyed the fortunes of so many native white citizens of Fairfax, recovery efforts focused on the elevation of former slaves. Upon passage of the 15th Amendment in February of 1869, this population was empowered to vote on an equal basis with their former masters.
This was an earth-shattering psychic wound for many Fairfax residents who had gleefully supported a bloody war that was premised on forestalling the very subversion of traditional white society they were now witnessing.
Patricia Hickin described the fallout:
“The difficulty most Fairfax natives faced in accepting black suffrage can scarcely be overestimated, especially after it became clear that the blacks were thoroughly radical in their politics and had not the slightest intention of voting as their former masters wished. Probably nothing that happened in the course of the war was more traumatic to the whites after the war than sharing the ballot with former slaves whom they could not, at least in this respect, dominate.”8
Two facts feel obvious: not everyone who felt or expressed these sentiments in post-Civil War Fairfax County was a member of the KKK, but everyone who was a member of the KKK in Fairfax County at this time surely felt this same way.
An item that appeared in 1868 in the local paper of record—the Alexandria Gazette—shines light on the way righteous indignation factored in to the formation of the KKK as a load-bearing pillar. “The Ku Klux Klan unites in a secret order,” says the story, “to defend itself against oppression and wrong.”9
The language used to bulwark the first klan’s supposed moral high ground echoes calls to enlist in Confederate service eight years prior. These appeals resonated. Self-defense against oppression conjured familiar images of honor warfare conducted to prevent defilement at the hands of a Yankee horde. Though the Union Army was long gone, its successor, the Freedmen’s Bureau, was an appropriate stand in for northern interference and its hallmark encouragement of African-American “usupers.”
The Freedmen’s Bureau did itself few favors when it arrived in Fairfax in the summer of 1865 and promptly took possession of every structure the Union Army had built in Fairfax County during the war.10
Wartime Federal infrastructure was inextricably linked with efforts to neutralize John Mosby. As was the case, the disposition of these structures invariably concentrated along Federal picket lines that were established after Mosby’s emergence in early 1863. Fairfax Court House, Flint Hill, and Vienna—three communities that sat just above Difficult Run and were premier targets of Mosby’s Rangers during the war—became focal points in the constellation of Freedmen’s Bureau holdings after the war. Additionally, a “colored school” at Frying Pan sat at a junction where a road accessing the Little River Turnpike and the Ox Road joined Horsepen Run. Both Federal cavalry and Mosby Rangers occupied this intersection frequently during the war.
Gracious acceptance was not the mode in which these installations were received. Rather than the resigned acquiescence of a defeated people, locals embraced an offensive posture that utilized tactics which had been perfected in the area during the recent war.
In 1866, areas once rich in Confederate sympathy across the southern and border states began to experience a rash of clandestine violence. Gone were the days of direct confrontation against Federal troops. Instead, anonymous night riders began targeting institutions that benefited African-Americans. Locally available papers ran an abundance of coverage documenting the rash of arson affecting colored schools throughout the nation. On March 16, 1866, the Evening Star published an account of a colored school burning in Centerville, Maryland.11 In June, DC’s National Republican published accounts of mass arson that leveled numerous African-American institutions in Memphis, Tennessee.12 Six weeks before the colored school at Frying Pan was torched, the Evening Star offered a snippet about the newly completed colored school in Stephenson, Alabama burning to the ground before it could even open.13
With repetition comes normalization, which creates the opportunity for mimicry. Fairfax was no exception.
The year prior to the formal foundation of the KKK in Fairfax County found early night riders executing a guerrilla campaign against the Freedmen’s Bureau. Targeted arson destroyed a school and church at Lewinsville and torched the Vienna quarters of the Freedmen’s Bureau’s agent, Captain Ross.14 So too, the colored school near Frying Pan fell to arson in December of 1866.15
Given that Vienna was a known redoubt of Quakers and Unionists during the war, the fact that a piece of Federal property supporting the education and empowerment of freed slaves was burned in that area suggests that someone travelled there to do the deed. At that point, there was no shortage of former Mosby men living not far from Vienna in the folds of Difficult Run or on the eastern limit of the Culpeper Basin. This same body of men demonstrated previous inclinations for this kind of work and harbored a unique body of knowledge regarding less travelled avenues in and out of Vienna.
More intriguing is the case of the colored school at Frying Pan. In 1866, the site at Frying Pan was auspiciously located a stone’s throw away from the home of Richard Turley, a Mosby Ranger.
Fellow Rangers Curg Hutchison, Phillip DC Lee, Albert Wrenn, and George Turberville lived within a couple miles, but the mere presence of Richard Turley near a colored school that burned to the ground is enough to raise eyebrows.
Prior to the war, Richard and his father CW owned one of the largest plantations in Fairfax. In 1860, they owned twenty slaves.16 These twenty humans were emancipated by war’s end and became the likely constituents of the colored school that burned.
The Turleys were in tumult in the years after the war. Loss of labor and diminished agricultural returns appear to have sent Richard and his father, CW, into a behavioral tailspin that found the father/son tandem engaging in risky and violent behavior.
Both Turleys earned “assault with intent to kill” charges after an incident on a nearby roadway on October 12, 1867. Richard Turley fired a pistol three times at William Trammell, himself a former Mosby Ranger. Charles Turley, Richard’s father, then grabbed William Trammell and instructed his son to “shoot him, damn him, kill him.”
CW Turley was found guilty of having unlawfully “shot, beat, wound and ill treat” William Trammell. This came hot on the heels of an unsuccessful defense against a debt charge brought by Amos Fox to satisfy an obligation of $40 upon which Charles Turley had reneged in June of 1867. It was a long fall from grace for a man who posted a $100 reward for the return of an escaped slave in march of 1855.17
The details of Turley’s 1855 advertisement for the return of his escaped slave add possible nuance to the depths of his post-war ego death and enrich a possible motivation for his involvement in the arson of the colored school in 1866.
Offering as much as $100 for the immediate remedy of a slave escape demonstrates a certain paternalism and a willingness to leverage whatever means possible to secure order in Turley’s household. So too, the description of the escaped person, “Arch,” is intriguing. “He is nearly six feet high,” the posting reads, “a very bright mulatto, straight flax colored hair, black eyes, and a down look when spoken to—had on when he left a suit of white fulled cloth box cloth and a lead colored wool hat.”
This description and the desperation with which his return was sought match a slave of value. It also describes a slave of mixed extraction who potentially sprang forth from the very loins of the Turley family itself. Fine clothing, flax colored hair, and an almost proud characterization of apparent intellect betray genetic proximity, possibly even an offspring relationship with CW Turley. Is it conceivable that the colored school at Pleasant Valley represented the severance of CW Turley from not just valuable property, but a piece of his own family?
We will never know if the Turleys were either Klan affiliated or the culprits to the school burning that occurred adjacent to their home. It hardly matters, because this kinship unit was but one of many that belonged to a Frying Pan community which was steeped in a rugged brand of protectionism and paternalism.
Most, if not all, of the prominent pre-war land owners thereabouts were members of the Baptist Church at Frying Pan. This church was renowned for integrating slaves into the congregation on a socially-subservient, but equal-before-god basis. The limits of faith were tested in 1859 when this seemingly progressive church was one of the first to organize a slave patrol, which combed through the fields around Pleasant Valley and Frying Pan at night, ensuring that violence against whites was not afoot.18
This organization was a cultural precedent to the night riding of the Ku Klux Klan. Before the KKK was even a glimmer in local consciousness and years before John Mosby ever set foot in the area, the local planter elite sponsored and participated in an institution designed to operate after sunset as a means to mete out justice against imagined enemies.
Interestingly, the slave patrols in Virginia grew in prominence after watershed moments like the John Brown Raid in 1859, the Nat Turner revolt in 1831 and the Gabriel uprising in 1800. However, the slave patrol as an institution dated to 1726.19 The pre-war night patrol empowered some of the most secessionist inclined and hot-headed members of Fairfax society to conduct armed operations in geographies that coincided with both guerrilla activity during the war and post-war racially-oriented violence. Not coincidentally, an 1860 court order designed CW Turley as captain over nine privates in a Frying Pan neighborhood night patrol that played as a rehearsal for later night riders.20
In this same Frying Pan neighborhood which hosted some of the most lucrative, large, and closely held agricultural lands in Fairfax County, a strong desire to control any possible vector of challenge to the planter elite would have been a target before and after the Civil War. This was also foundational mentality for the establishment of the KKK.
Modes of defensive thinking rooting in class, property ownership, and insular cohesion against perceived invasion dominated at Frying Pan. The church and its well-spring of independent-oriented social thinking stemmed forth from the mind of Jeremiah Moore, a local Primitive Baptist preacher whose early arrest for challenging religious establishment in Virginia caused him to see the shadow of the heel of big government around every corner. In his teachings and correspondence, Moore couched independence in the language of a material prosperity set in the terms of human slavery.
In a letter he sent to Thomas Jefferson on July 12, 1800, Moore wrote “of course to be born poor in Virginia is to be born a Slave.”21 Stalwart defense against either literal or economic subjugation became something of a cultural birthright in the Frying Pan community he shepherded.
Decades after Moore’s death and years after the Civil War, former Mosby Ranger and neighbor to the torched colored school, Phillip DC Lee, was asked to opine on a proposal to move the Frying Pan Church to conform to road improvements. In talking about the church, he spoke of his home and the attitudes with which it was regarded. Lee’s response parroted rhetoric that echoed Jeremiah Moore, harmonized with neo-confederate thinking, and amplified a mode of self-determination reminiscent of familiar klan ideology.
“The church is a sacred place to them, I believe. I have no evidence but what they met there and enjoyed themselves undisturbed until this question of boundary arose. From what I know they love the place and would not give it up for any consideration. Nothing could induce them to give it up as a place of worship. They are endeared to that place as you or I are endeared to home. It is unnatural or unreasonable that they should protect it—loving it as I have described I believe they do?”22
There is a continuity of community between these events. One that stretches into the pre-war slave patrols and the knights tournaments that found future Mosby Rangers riding and competing with one another to gain and retain status in communal and spatial relationships premised on love. Lee begs to know what is unreasonable about people protecting a thing that they have loved dearly. Though he is not discussing the Klan in this context, he is expressing a long-held local sentiment that challenges attempts to access and alter familiar landmarks and mores to suit modern standards.
This “love” is indistinguishable from camaraderie, which would have certainly been apparent between locals who fought together on these same lands during the war. The physical community that draped itself in a morally ambiguous “love” is the very same agricultural redoubt which James Beard described two decades later as being saturated with KKK membership.
In general, mapping sites where formal Klan activity or shadowy racial violence occurred between 1865 and 1930 nets an interesting configuration. Known concentrations in Fairfax City and Herndon coincide with familiar wartime landmarks. Arson at Frying Pan and Vienna reads geographically like wartime reports of a Mosby raid. 1920s era Klan days at the Fairfax Fair and contemporaneous rallies at the same site (once Paul V High School) put white hoods in areas where Mosby was known to sulk and prey upon Union cavalry. So too, a mass initiation of 103 KKK members in a formal cross burning ceremony at Five Oaks (across from today’s Oakton High School) in 1923 pins Klan activity at yet another location on the fringe of Difficult Run.
In many ways, the battle lines and social fractures that developed during Mosby’s tenure in Fairfax County during the war endured in a long-tailing conflict over the very same issues and land that brought the first conflict. John Mosby was no advocate of racial violence, but it’s impossible to separate the patterning he left on the land.
By channeling practiced views about place, social order, and mutual defense into an organized network of partisans who battled federal forces with impunity and great success, John Mosby unwittingly facilitated the earliest evolutions of racially-oriented violence which became the KKK.
This connection goes deeper than abstract principles and happenstance place arrangements.
A Dead Rebellion Not Soon Forgotten
In the scope of the larger, ongoing Civil War, the subtle capitulation by Federal authorities during the Reconstruction Period remains one of the least understood and most consequential battles.
Adopted in 1869 and implemented in 1870, Virginia’s new post-war constitution enshrined the right to vote for all male citizens above the age of twenty-one. In short order, the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments abolished slavery, established citizenship, and provided suffrage for adult males who had once been held in bondage. In Fairfax, that was the long and short of the good news for freed slaves.
1870 also marked the point when funding for Freedmen’s Schools dried up and the doors closed. Largely the product of private benevolence, these schools depended on money sent from the Friends Association of Philadelphia for the Aid and Elevation of the Freedmen. Enthusiastic fundraising and generous donations to educational efforts south of the Mason/Dixon line withered in proportion to one another as the first half decade after Appomattox closed.
Two years later, Congress pulled the plug on the Freedmen’s Bureau in general. Any formal support for the education, economic advancement, and voting rights of the newly freed slaves lost its institutional backbone overnight.23
Simultaneously, former Confederates who had operated in the shadows in the years after the war began to emerge into formal positions of power that were in keeping with their pre-war standing.
In 1870, James M. Love, brother of Mosby Ranger Tom Love and himself a veteran of the Black Horse Cavalry that raided so often in Fairfax County during the war, was elected Commonwealth Attorney. Thus began an illustrious career that culminated with a lengthy career on the bench as a prominent judge in the County legal system.24
One year after the Freedmen’s Bureau dissolved, former Mosby Ranger Richard Farr Broadwater was elected sheriff of the county.25 The old guard of former slaveowners and enthusiastic secessionists regained control of the local legal apparatus with the added benefit of four years worth of combat experience and personal relationships cemented therein.
If there were night rides and intimidation campaigns during this time, we do not know about it. Either it didn’t happen or it went wisely unreported. We do know that the interlocking martial traditions of horsemanship and mock combat were still cherished and practiced in Fairfax, as evidenced by the continuance of pre-war Knights Tournaments.
Before the war, men who figured prominently into the Mosby command like Jack Barnes, Frank Fox, Charles Albert Fox, and Albert Wrenn promenaded through Fairfax Court House before competing against one another in feats of hand-to-hand combat and mounted maneuvering. Flamboyant names like “Knight of the Valley” and “Ingomar” gave the event a feel reminiscent of a Sir Walter Scott neo-romanticist field day. Virginal maidens and a customary feast completed the trappings of pageantry.26
Despite a notion that the Civil War effectively murdered romantic leanings in the American South, the Knights Tournaments continued after the war with an important twist. Reminiscences of fallen comrades and land consecrated by battle added an impetus for grafting the chivalric competition on to the substance of the lost Confederate cause.
Though coded in the trappings of the Middle Ages, the Knights Tournament that occurred on July 22, 1868 on the site of the Battle of First Manassas was perhaps the first Civil War re-enactment. Historic dress, semi-scripted combat, and doting crowds all presage the formal re-enacting movement that would emerge a century later. More importantly, the event mythologized the Confederate cause and framed the rebel dead as heroic knights who died in honorable battle.
James F. Clarke, esq., of Luray, Virginia, delivered an opening invocation that unmistakably laid claim to both Confederate moral and spiritual superiority while paving the way for an athletic tradition of active resistance rooted in formal memorialization.
The Alexandria Gazette described Clarke’s speech: “He spoke to the Knights of the days in which, under the Southern Cross, they had upon that very field, joined in a contest where every thought was but of victory or death; and of the result of their trials and dangers; then of that flag under which they now lived, and of the noble men who had supported it, and the various celebrated battle fields over which it had waved; and, lastly, he charged them as men of Southern chivalry to do their upmost in the coming contest to display the respect which they had for those ladies who were sacrificing time and money to erect a suitable monument for their former brothers in arms.”27
Indeed, the entire contest and its air of Lost Cause aggrandizement were held under the auspices of erecting a memorial for two thousand Confederate dead still buried on the field.
This pattern repeats itself in Fairfax, where the substance of what the klan symbolized—a retrospective longing for a utopian past torn asunder by the usurpations of the Yankee and his agent, the slave, at the cost of noble Southern men who laid their lives down so that their country may live—expressed itself in the formation of a recalcitrant Southern identity that demanded recognition with monuments to its vaunted Confederate dead.
The power of rebel memory was such that a late 19th-century drive to fund and install a monument to Confederate dead in the Fairfax Cemetery became a bi-partisan effort. The Confederate Monument Association of Fairfax County featured donations from a who’s who of locals power brokers including former Confederate and then Commonwealth Attorney James Love, judges HW Thomas and DM Chichester, and a generous offering of twenty dollars from General Jubal Early.
Interestingly, another source of revenue sprang forth from the sale of relics harvested from the Chantilly battlefield, giving the monument the unique distinction of being funded by the looting of hallowed ground. More intriguing still are the names of prominent local Yankees who were targeted by rebel forces during the war, but contributed to the monument nonetheless.
Dairy baron JB Bowman and much maligned Civil War-era loyalist Job Hawxhurst both donated to the fund. No champions of the Confederate cause themselves, there is reason to believe that both men contributed in deference to the abundance of Confederate sentiment remaining in Fairfax. It’s not unreasonable to believe that the prevalence and power of unreformed Confederates in western Fairfax County was sufficient for men of extreme influence and wealth to sue for peace in the form of a generous donation to a memorial fund.28
This movement towards memorialization and the potent groundswell of support it garnered bookend the violence against Freedmen’s facilities two decades prior. Confederate memory became the symbolic foundation for a return to racial hierarchies and social stability. This paradigm was thoroughly established in Fairfax by 1900.
As the South attempted to stabilize itself in the decades after the war, violence against African-Americans and Confederate memorialization were two sides to the same coin. Order was bestowed by the twin normalization of domineering attacks on racial others and the elevation of Confederate dead to the status of mythic heroes.
An item from the earlier school burning era that appeared in the Evening Star collated news stories from across the country in an intriguing and apparently normal sequence. A graph detailed arson against colored schools in Memphis bled immediately into a rosy item about a community effort to spruce up the graves of fallen Confederates in Richmond.
A study in contrasts from the June 1, 1866 Evening Star is perhaps more ordinary than we would like to admit.
The reader was guided through an apparently harmonious transition that segued between mob violence and the “extensive preparations” leading up to the suspension of business in Richmond that enabled “the entire white population to repair” to Hollywood Cemetery to witness the floral decoration of Confederate graves.29
By 1902, support for the education and empowerment of African-Americans had long since dwindled while unbridled enthusiasm for Confederate mythology accelerated. Between these two complimentary phenomenon, a lethal space emerged.
It is perhaps a testament to the efficacy of a local legal apparatus that was itself steeped in the force dichotomies of pre-war racial hierarchies that lynchings did not occur in Fairfax. Local print media primed the citizenship for the application of Lynch law.
An 1883 “special dispatch” printed for the Fairfax readership by the D.C.-based Evening Critic reported the story of “a negro boy, of 18 years, named Jim Ball” of Fairfax who purportedly dragged the 11-year-old daughter of a local blacksmith into the woods and attempted to rape her. Jim Ball was detained by local workmen who prevented the girls’d father from killing the youth “on the spot.” The title of the news item was “HE DESERVED LYNCHING.”30
Sensational and dubious stories were known fodder for the local press whose readership apparently savored the thought of violent remedies to perceived racial problems. An 1877 story in the Alexandria Gazette detailed a fanciful story that never appeared in ink again. It was so unbelievable that the editors themselves saw fit to temper the narrative with a shrugging admission that it might not be true.
“NEWS FROM HOME—A Washington paper says:—‘A white fifteen year old girl married a negro in Fairfax, Va., No clergyman or magistrate could be found who would perform the ceremony, and so the couple simply swore on the Bible, in the presence of witnesses, that they would be faithful as husband and wife. The girls’ father, on hearing of the marriage, killed the negro.’ If the above is true, it is not known in this city or the parts of Fairfax adjacent thereto.”31
The editors seem to have known that the story was false and saw fit to print it anyway, likely because it was an outrageous item that was not terribly dissonant from the beliefs and values of its readership.
These mores formed a climate around a heritage of night riding that extended back from before the war to embrace a subsequent movement towards Confederate memorialization. Charles Craven unwittingly detonated this cultural minefield when he initiated a crime spree in Herndon, Virginia.
The Equal Justice Initiative records no lynchings in Fairfax County from 1877 to 1950, but they document three in adjacent Loudoun County.32 However, a refined map published on Plain Talk History credits one of Loudoun’s three to Fairfax County, which was the geographic source of the men who lynched Craven in July of 1902.33
At around 2 p.m. on July 31, 1902, a mob of one hundred and fifty men from Fairfax and Loudoun Counties overpowered the guard at the Leesburg jail. An ironworker from Frederick, Maryland named Harry Nipple used a sledgehammer to batter through the iron bars separating Charles Craven from the mob.34 A gang of women encouraged the men as they removed him from the jail. Though the mob intended to remand Craven back within the legal limits of Fairfax County before dispatching him to the great beyond, the impetus to kill made for impatience. Craven was strung up within a mile of the jail along the Leesburg Pike.
The lynching was the culmination of a multi-day chase, during which a crowd of enraged white locals hunted Craven over hill and dale. Previously convicted for arson, Craven’s death occurred as a direct result of his accused involvement in the murder of Herndon farmer, William H. Wilson.
The issue of race was an unavoidable component of Craven’s demise. Newspapers reported that he had fled to his mother’s house after slaying Wilson, where he was heard to say he would kill “every white —— .”35 Indeed, he had killed a white man. Further complicating the moral equation was the salient fact that Charles Craven made the mistake of murdering a former Mosby Ranger.36
Confederate affiliation quickly became a prominent, if confusing, undercurrent in the Craven lynching. Not only was Craven’s victim a Mosby Ranger, but Scott Bradley, the man who was charged with literally pulling the rope that ended Craven’s life, apparently executed Craven while prominently wearing a badge from a Mosby Ranger Reunion.37
The badge was a curious choice given that Bradley was not himself a Mosby Ranger. Instead, the accessory was likely symbolic, serving a semantic role in identifying the assailant as a man who counted himself a member of the post-Confederate world. Scott Bradley was not alone, apparently. He was acquitted a few short weeks later when dozens of witnesses who had previously boasted of seeing Bradley do the deed suddenly recanted. The Craven case became a vast whodunit as state’s witnesses recalled seeing many men wearing Confederate badges while the lynching occurred.38 Who could be sure the culprit was Bradley?
The fact that a lynch mob would festoon itself in Confederate iconography in Northern Virginia is less interesting than the fact that a bona fide Confederate guerrilla, Elijah White, was on hand for the event and actively admonished the crowd to spare Craven’s life. White’s credentials as a Mosby colleague and the commander of his own successful independent partisan company were apparently insufficiently impressive.39 The mob was not buying what Elijah White was selling.
If White felt marginalized in that moment, he was not alone. John Mosby’s inordinately pragmatic approach to reasonable post-war politics had by then earned him the ire of his fellow Virginians. The mob that lynched Charles Craven was emblematic of a larger shift. It embraced Confederate symbolism and conveyed Neo-Confederate common law in an alignment with mythic Confederate identity that scorned the moderating influence of actual Confederates.
When a judge opened proceedings against a select few who were known to have participated in the lynching two weeks after the fact, he commented, “Saddest of all is to consider the character of the men who did this deed. The mob was composed only, I am told, in a small degree of the base and degraded among us. It consisted largely of men from whom we had the right to expect better things; men of standing and education in the community; men whom we should expect to find upholding and maintaining, ready to fight for, even to die for, the laws and rights and government so dear to their ancestors, and these men were the leaders in heedless violence, in rank lawlessness.”40
What Judge Tebbs apparently had not considered is that the upstanding men of western Fairfax County and eastern Loudoun County were compelled by their culture, their education, and their standing in the community to fight and die for informal laws and rights that had diverged from formal legal considerations.
In twenty years time, the KKK held rallies not far from where William Wilson died. Rallies where membership did not feel beholden to hide behind robe and hood. It was a secret in plain sight, a secret that assembled ideas and practices that were popular in this district because they represented the status quo. This status quo existed before the war and helped stabilize Fairfax County after the shocks of the war.
They did not need masks nor the formal governance of an organized klan. Violence, typically race-oriented, was by then an established facet of a successful underground conspiracy to reinstitute the pre-war status quo.
It could be argued that the formal KKK with its symbolism and pageantry was less potent in late 19th-century Fairfax County than its informal corollary: white, patrician, racially-configured, unreconstructed Confederate identity. In the same way we can compare the real estate holdings of pro-secession men in Mosby service to determine avenues with which the gray ghost operated during the war, these same corridors seem to have hosted an unusual amount of KKK activity and informal, racially-motivated violence.