Not long after the hanging, somewhere in Georgia an amateur photographer lifted a negative out of its fixing bath, held it up to the light, and peered at the only known photograph taken on the day of the executions. The photographer had scrambled to high ground, unfolded the bellows of a camera, and taken a shot looking back over the jumble of buggies lined up on Tolbert Street, as thousands of people spilled out of Ansel Strickland’s pasture and headed back toward Cumming. Two men in the foreground stare directly into the lens, with an expression common to so many lynching photographs of the Jim Crow era: somber but self-assured, earnest yet openly content.
But the most startling thing about the image is that in the bottom right corner, three young black men can be seen standing among the crowd. On a day when the overwhelming majority of Forsyth’s African American residents had already fled across the county line, these men were part of the small group of holdouts in Cumming, who still hoped they might weather the season of violence and hold on to whatever it was that had kept them in Forsyth, despite the obvious risks.
One of the men sits in the driver’s seat of a buggy, having unhitched his mule and allowed it to graze by the roadside. The other two are caught in conversation. The man on the left wears a rumpled hat, a white shirt, and a simple coat, but the other, in the center of the group, is dressed like a man of means—with his crisp bowler, long topcoat and bow tie, and a gold watch chain looping down from the buttonhole of his vest.
With his elegant attire and air of wealth, this figure belies the stereotypical image of the 1,098 banished people of Forsyth. A great many of them were indeed poor, illiterate field hands and hired men, like Rob Edwards, Ernest Knox, and Oscar Daniel. Still, there were others who had managed—through skill, patience, luck, and decades of hard work—to not only survive in post-emancipation Forsyth but thrive there. These successful black residents, like the dapper gentleman in the photograph, were among the very last African Americans to leave the county—not because wealth and property were any protection from the mobs but because they had more than anyone else to lose.
A crowd near the gallows where Knox and Daniel were hung, with Sawnee Mountain in the distance, October 25th, 1912
Three witnesses to the Knox and Daniel hangings, October 25th, 1912
ONE SUCH MAN was Joseph Kellogg, the largest black property owner in the county. When emancipation finally reached Georgia, in 1865, Joseph’s parents, Edmund and Hannah, had begun building a new life, as free citizens of Forsyth. They were more fortunate than most former slaves, given that they had eight adult children, including six strong young sons, and had been staked to a small parcel of land by their former owner, a white merchant named George Kellogg, who had moved to Georgia from Hartford, Connecticut. By 1870, only five years after the South’s surrender at Appomattox, the sixty-two-year-old Edmund could report to the tax collector that his “total estate” was $125—an impressive sum for a man who had been enslaved for more than sixty years. Four years later, he owned multiple lots near Sawnee Mountain, north of Cumming, totaling eighty acres, with a reported value of $345.
Edmund’s oldest son, Joseph, had also been the legal property of a white man when he was born. But he was just twenty-three when freed, and so the early years of Joseph’s adulthood were marked not by the hopelessness of slavery but by one new milestone after another. There was the day—July 2nd, 1867—when Joseph and his younger brother Lewis stood in line at the Forsyth County Courthouse, shoulder to shoulder with white men who two years earlier might have bought and sold them like livestock. When they signed oaths of allegiance to the United States government, scratching small X’s above their names, they became for the first time in their lives “Qualified Voters.” There was also the day—July 21st, 1868—when they learned that Georgia had ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, granting in theory, if seldom in practice, “equal protection of the laws,” regardless of color or “previous conditions of slavery or involuntary servitude.” And then there was the day in 1870 when they celebrated news that the right of black men to vote had been enshrined in the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
It would take more than a century of struggle to even begin to realize the promises that federal lawmakers made to the Kelloggs during these early years of Reconstruction. But as Edmund, Joseph, and the rest of the Kelloggs harvested one successful crop after another in the 1870s, and as they reinvested their earnings in acquiring more and better land in Forsyth, they had good reason to hope that going forward the protections of law and government might actually be available to them. Looking out over their farm at the base of Sawnee Mountain, they surely believed that Forsyth would always be their home.
Filled with that hope, on a crisp fall morning in September of 1871, a twenty-nine-year-old Joseph Kellogg asked eighteen-year-old Eliza Thompson to be his wife. When she said yes, rather than “jumping the broom,” as blacks had done to consecrate marriages in the days of slavery, they walked together toward Cumming, accompanied by a local minister named Silas Smith. As it happens, Reverend Smith was the father of Grant Smith, the man who would be horsewhipped on that same town square four decades later. But the expulsions of 1912 were still far in the future on the day of Joseph and Eliza’s wedding, and when Reverend Smith signed their marriage license and dated it September 7th, 1871, they must have all had great expectations for this new America—in which black people had the right to receive fair wages for their labor, own land, vote, and even hold elected office.
It’s true that the majority of African Americans in Forsyth still worked on the same farms where they had been enslaved, and that like black people all over the South, they were widely exploited and cheated by whites under the new contract labor system. But for the first time in their lives, people like Joseph and Eliza Kellogg had the right to protest the injustices whites committed against them, and at least the possibility of legal remedy. The face of the law in Forsyth, which had always been the local sheriff, now included the county’s own representative of the United States government, who had an office located right on the Cumming square. Over its door hung a sign that read “BRFAL.” The acronym stood for the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands—though everyone in town, whether in bitterness or gratitude, called it simply “the Bureau.”
ABRAHAM LINCOLN HAD established the Freedmen’s Bureau as part of the Department of War, intending it to operate for one year after the Confederate surrender, with the express mission of helping protect the rights of people like Joseph and Eliza Kellogg as they made the difficult transition from slavery to freedom. The bill Lincoln signed into law on March 3rd, 1865—just a month before his assassination—gave the Bureau power to rule on disputes between blacks and whites “in all places where . . . local courts . . . disregard the negro’s right to justice before the laws.”
Federal officials quickly recognized that Forsyth County, Georgia, was just such a place. The Freedmen’s Bureau office at Cumming opened in March of 1867, headed by a man named Alexander Burruss Nuckolls. The thirty-seven-year-old Nuckolls, a local Baptist minister, was typical of the first group of Freedmen’s Bureau agents in Georgia, who were appointed by Brigadier General Davis Tillson. Tillson is best known as the man who reversed Sherman’s Field Order 15, which had given freed slaves a share in the vast abandoned plantations along the Georgia coast. Having reneged on the promise of “forty acres and a mule,” Tillson went on to appoint a whole class of Freedmen’s Bureau agents like Reverend Nuckolls, who were ill-suited to the job of imposing federal law on resentful local whites. These were local men with strong connections to former slaveholders and a deep personal investment in the status quo.
To make matters worse, under the original arrangements of the Freedmen’s Bureau, agents were not given government pay; they were compensated by the white landowners for whom they certified labor contracts. The system was abused all across the South, and when Tillson was replaced as commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Georgia, his successor, Colonel Caleb Sibley, realized just how corrupt the Bureau had become—and just how woefully it had failed to protect vulnerable African American communities. As Sibley put it, the “power delegated to these resident white appointees [was] shamefully abused. . . . And [t]hey occasionally inflicted cruel and unusual punishment.”
Sibley fired most of the original Bureau agents in 1867 and replaced them with northern military men, in the hope of establishing impartial legal tribunals that would give freed slaves their first taste of real justice. On April 1st, 1867, Nuckolls was relieved of command of the Cumming Freedmen’s Bureau office and replaced by Major William J. Bryan, who hailed from North Carolina, and who owed his $1,200 annual salary—and his allegiance—not to local white property owners but to the United States government.
As a small cog in the great machine of the Bureau, Agent Bryan focused his efforts in Forsyth on disputes brought by black workers whose employers refused to honor verbal and signed labor agreements. Like former slave owners all over the South, the white planters of Forsyth were frequently ordered to appear before the Freedmen’s Bureau court for withholding crop shares and payments to black field hands, who for the first time in the history of the state had to be paid a fair wage.
Records of the cases heard by Major Bryan are peppered with the names of the same white men who feature most prominently in the lists of Forsyth slave owners in the 1850s and ’60s. Tolbert Strickland, scion of the Hardy Strickland family, which had owned more than a hundred slaves in 1860, appeared before Bryan six times in a single week in October of 1867, charged by his employees with refusing to pay wages owed and refusing to give tenants a share of crops they had spent the entire year planting, tending, and harvesting.
In case after case, Bryan found in favor of black plaintiffs. Most of his judgments ordered white employers to honor prior agreements, usually after black laborers produced documents detailing what they were owed “according to contract.” It is also clear that, absent court orders, many whites would do everything possible to avoid paying. When one man, Newton Harrell, was sued by a black employee listed only as John, Harrell presented a document in which the man seemed to agree to work for nothing but room, board, and clothing. Upon closer inspection, it became clear that Harrell had forged the agreement, and Bryan ruled that “the contract was a fraud.”
On days when black workers did prevail in court, they frequently suffered for the victory after dark. When one group of white planters was forced to pay black workers, the Bureau’s judgment was followed by a night of terrorism. The whites who lost the case, Bryan said, retaliated by “breaking into the house [of one man] and shooting at the complainant in the night. . . . Another [black family was] burnt out. . . . All this in Forsyth County.”
Bryan also had the power to review and reverse civil court judgments involving freed people, and many of these cases involved the practice of legally “binding” minor children to white masters. In theory these agreements were a kind of social welfare, meant to provide shelter, food, and clothing to black children orphaned and left destitute by the war. Many former slave owners in Forsyth offered to take in such children as “apprentices” and teach them a trade, in exchange for years of labor. But in reality the apprentice system was highly corrupt, and Bryan found in case after case that such contracts were a thinly veiled form of reenslavement, with black children “bound out” to the white masters who had owned their families before emancipation, and for whom they now worked for little or no pay. The youngest “apprentice” in Forsyth was John A. Armstrong, who was not yet five years old when he was bound to M. C. Chastain until the age of twenty-one.
Historian Eric Foner has written that all over the South “ideas inherited from slavery displayed remarkable resilience” during Reconstruction, noting that “for those accustomed to the power of command, the normal give-and-take of employer and employee was difficult to accept.” Such was undoubtedly the case among the former slave owners of Forsyth, as they fought to preserve the pre-emancipation social order even long after the war. In March of 1866, for example, Hardy Strickland went to the Freedmen’s Bureau office in order to “bind” a sixteen-year-old named Thomas Strickland. After laying out the terms under which Thomas would continue to live in a slave cabin on the Strickland plantation, the document stipulated that Thomas had to faithfully obey Hardy Strickland’s command and keep his master’s counsel:
Thomas . . . binds himself to live with [and] continue to serve . . . until he arrives at the age of twenty-one years . . . obeying the commands of the said H. W. Strickland . . . behaving himself faithfully, neither revealing his secrets nor at any time leaving or neglecting the business of the said Strickland.
Most of the children “bound out” in this way were not orphans at all but prisoners to their former owners, still enslaved long after emancipation. A black mother named Jenny complained to the Freedmen’s Bureau about John Hockenhull Sr. (the father of Dr. John Hockenhull Jr., who would dress Mae Crow’s wounds and testify against Ernest Knox and Oscar Daniel). After speaking with Jenny, Agent Bryan wrote that Hockenhull “now holds without consent her two sons . . . and refuses to let her have or see them.” Charity Ramsey reported that her three children were being held by their former owner “without consent and without compensation.” Thomas Riley put it even more bluntly when he begged the Bureau for help retrieving his “stolen child.”
After hearing and ruling on such cases for nearly a year, an exhausted and frustrated William Bryan appended a personal note to his monthly report for October 1867. At the bottom of a page filled with cases of white masters holding black children prisoner, of employers mistreating and defrauding black workers, and of vigilantes threatening to burn down “a school for colored children,” Bryan acknowledged the desperate situation of the freed people of Forsyth. It was a place where powerful whites rejected black citizenship on principle and resented the very idea of paying for black labor. “I am fully satisfied from observation,” he wrote, “that if the Freedmen’s Bureau did not exist [then] in my district colored people would stand no chance of getting any more for their labor than when they were slaves.”
Bryan was alarmed not just at the hostile environment African Americans faced in Forsyth but by what he saw as a downward spiral of violence, made all the worse by the Bureau’s contraction in the face of opposition from southern Democrats in Congress. A year later, he wrote another letter to Bureau officials, this time warning that
affairs are in a worse condition than at any time in the last 20 mos. There appear to be . . . robbers, murderers, and house thieves at large in Cherokee and Forsyth Counties, who are a terror to good citizens both white and black. . . . Complaints are frequent of persons refusing to divide crops with freedmen who have been working on joint account. I fear things are growing worse very fast.
If Bryan sounds anxious about what would happen in Forsyth if his office closed, he seems, in hindsight, to have been sadly prophetic. For these are among the last written records of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Cumming. After that burst of activity between 1867 and 1868, when black laborers could use the power of the federal government to receive what was owed to them—and when distraught mothers could come to Major Bryan for help rescuing their “stolen children”—in January of 1868, the Cumming Freedmen’s Bureau office closed for good.
That month Cumming saw the last of Major Bryan, who was a despised figure to many whites for having used his position exactly as Lincoln had intended. “Until the freedmen are protected by Government officials,” Bryan said in one of his last letters to superiors in Atlanta, “their freedom is only a name, without its benefits.” Bryan was reassigned to Marietta as the Bureau, underfunded and losing support in Washington, struggled to continue its work with fewer agents and fewer offices. In late 1869, the Marietta office closed as well, and by 1872 the entire federal Freedmen’s Bureau had ceased all operations, as legal authority fell back into the hands of local sheriffs all over the South.
IN 1906, THE Gainesville News interviewed an old white man named George Harris Bell, who reminisced about his childhood in Forsyth in the 1870s and ’80s. Bell’s recollections leave little doubt that Major Bryan was right to have worried about what would happen to black residents once he was gone. As Bell strolled around Oscarville, he told a reporter about the “Taylor boys” and how they had
terrorized [Forsyth] just after the War and in the 1870s. Woe be unto the man who gained their enmity, for he was certain to be paid a visit. It was their favorite pastime to go at night to the home of someone they disliked and shoot into the house, throw rails and rocks into the well, tear down fences and outbuildings, cut open feather beds, and sometimes carry away guns, pistols and other things they took a fancy to. Living, as we did, only a short distance from their home, often have we seen them returning on Sunday morning, tired and worn out after making a raid on Saturday night.
Bell remembered groups of white night riders expelling black people from the county long before 1912, such as the time “a number of citizens . . . whipped a Negro and treated him to a free ride upon a rail to the Chattahoochee River at Williams’ Ferry, set him across the river, and told him never to return.”
Against the odds, and without legal protection once the Bureau was disbanded, Joseph and Hannah Kellogg slowly built a prosperous life for themselves during those first decades of freedom. By the 1890s, nearly all the advances of congressional Reconstruction had been reversed by the oppressive codes of Jim Crow, and yet the Kelloggs were busy heeding the advice Booker T. Washington and his Tuskegee Institute gave to southern blacks at the end of the nineteenth century. Intellectuals like W. E. B. Du Bois viewed the South as a wasteland for black people and saw the industrial North as the only hope of safety and equal treatment under the law. But in his famous “Atlanta Compromise” speech of 1895, Washington declared that the corn rows and tobacco fields of the South would always be home to African Americans. “One-third of the population of the South is of the Negro race,” Washington said, and
to those who underestimate the importance of preservating friendly relations with the Southern white man who is their next door neighbor, I would say: “Cast down your bucket where you are.” Cast it down, making friends in every manly way of the people of all races, by whom you are surrounded.
The road to betterment, Washington argued, was paved with hard work, savings, and thrift, and African American farmers, laborers, and tradesmen would be truly safe only when they became highly productive members of the community, deeply interconnected with white prosperity. Washington might as well have been describing Forsyth’s black Kellogg family when he wrote that
the Negro . . . should make himself, through skill, intelligence, and character, of such undeniable value to the community in which he live[s] that the community could not dispense with his presence. . . . In proportion as the Negro learn[s] to produce what other people want and must have, in the same proportion [will] he be respected.
Joseph Kellogg had inherited the family land when his father, Edmund, died in 1874, and he was exactly the kind of tireless and productive black farmer Booker T. Washington idealized. Joseph improved the family property such that, including machinery, buildings, and livestock, it had a total value of close to $600 in 1880. Records show that by 1890 Joseph had purchased an additional fifty acres, and by the 1900 census, the Kelloggs were themselves landlords—renting to other black families and using the proceeds to accumulate more and more land each year.
So when, in April of 1910, census taker Ed Johnson walked north out of Cumming, he found the white-bearded sixty-eight-year-old Joseph Kellogg, who had been born into slavery in 1842, presiding over a two-hundred-acre farm. Such a spread, stretching out over rolling hills in the shadow of Sawnee Mountain, was the envy of people all over the county, and especially the poor and propertyless white men who sometimes stopped and admired it from the road—shaking their heads and narrowing their eyes at the luck of old Joe Kellogg.