DISORDERS IN NORTH CAROLINA.

457 senate, named J. W. Stevens, was murdered, and two men (one white and one colored) were whipped. In Catawba County, twenty-two men were whipped, and one shot, but not killed. In other counties there was a like record of whipping and assassination. An internal revenue agent related that, one day, while traveling in Orange County (in which six or more men. were hung and five or six whipped), he came upon the bodies of two colored men hanging on a tree. Some women and children, near by, were crying, and begged him to read the paper that was attached to these bodies. With some apprehensions lest he might be suspected of sympathy with these people, he climbed the tree and read the paper. The words written on it were: "Barn-burners and Women-insulters.-K. K. K."

This reference to barn-burners is explained by testimony given on the other side of the question. It referred to the fact, as alleged, that the negroes, acting under the evil instigation of some of their white leaders, had also resorted, on their part, to acts of violence and intimidation, in the form, particularly, of setting fire to the barns of their white neighbors. One witness testified to seeing five barns thus on fire at the same time in Wake County, and also to the fact that negroes were stationed in ambush to shoot down men who should attempt to extinguish these fires. Insults and outrages by black men against white men were also put forward as a justification of Ku-Klux proceedings; but such charges were more easily made than proved. Negroes who had voted with the Democrats were in turn whipped and maltreated by men of their own race. These mutual acts of violence and crime indicate the terribly excited and lawless condition of society in these states during this unhappy transition period.

He was at

Governor Holden was then governor of North Carolina. the same time president of the Loyal League of the state. His administration was marked by extreme partisanship, and by undue leanings toward the colored people and against the whites. For these unnatural partialities he has since atoned, by a reformation of his political opinions and a change of his partisan ties. Numerous instances were given of negroes being whipped by negro mobs for voting the Democratic ticket. In one case, where the perpetrators were indicted, tried, and sentenced to imprisonment for one and two months, they were pardoned in a few days by Governor Holden; and it was said that the governor, in his report to the legislature, reported pardons, almost exclusively of negroes convicted of outrages, in one hundred and twenty-five cases. In fact, one of the chief causes of complaint on the part of the whites in the State of North Carolina was that the negro perpetrators of crime, even if they were arrested, always escaped punishment, either by the connivance of the courts, or by the clemency of the governor.

The disorders in the state became so flagrant that Governor Holden issued proclamations in March and July, 1870. In them he declared the counties of Alamance and Caswell in a state of insurrection. He author

ized two citizens of Tennessee-George W. Kirk and George B. Bergen -to raise a regiment of militia for the suppression of the insurrectionary proceedings. Both these men are said to have been of notoriously bad character; and, as they were not citizens of North Carolina, but were temporarily residing in Washington City, their appointment as colonel and lieutenant-colonel of the state militia was at once unconstitutional and im

politic. They raised a force of about six hundred men. With them they operated in the two counties named. They arrested a large number of prominent citizens. These arrests caused great excitement throughout the state. An address was issued by the Democratic leaders, charging that this armed movement had been set on foot by Governor Holden in order, by intimidation of voters, to control the pending election.

The persons so deprived of their liberty were subjected to the grossest indignities, brutalities, and deprivations, in cells of common jails. Writs of habeas corpus in their behalf were issued by Chief Justice Pearson, of the state supreme court; but Colonel Kirk refused to obey them. Thereupon the chief justice addressed a communication on the subject to the governor.

Governor Holden, however, took the responsibility of violating that clause of the Federal Constitution which declares that,-"The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended." Colonel Kirk, on his part, treated the action of the judiciary with brutal contempt. He declared to the deputymarshal that he had nothing to do with those papers; that they were "played out," and that he obeyed the orders of the governor. Finally Judge Pearson, shrinking from what he regarded as a futile and dangerous attempt to enforce obedience to the writ, contented himself with directing the writ and a copy of his opinion to be exhibited to the governor, remarking that if the governor obeyed the writ, well, if not, he (the judge) had discharged his duty; that the power of the judiciary was exhausted; and that the responsibility rested on the executive. In this course, he said that he was following the example of Chief Justice Taney in Merriman's case, in 1861. There, under somewhat similar circumstances, General George Cadwalader, then in command of Fort McHenry, refused to obey a writ of habeas corpus issued by the chief justice for the production of a prisoner, then confined in the fort, on a charge of treason. In that case Judge Taney ruled that Congress alone-and not the President-could suspend the privilege of the writ, but he also declared that he had exercised all the power conferred upon him by the Constitution and the laws; that that power had been resisted by a force too strong for him to overcome; and that the responsibility rested with the President of the United States, who was to be furnished with a copy of the opinion of the Court.

In this North Carolina case, however, in which the governor refused to obey the mandate of the supreme court of his own state, he did not carry his recusancy and contempt of the judiciary so far as to refuse obedience to