Local Matters: Race, Crime and Justice in the Nineteenth-Century South

Title

Source Type

History Book

Publisher

Document Pub

Publication Place

Greensboro, Alabama

Publication Date

N/A

Transcript

It was only the advent of Military Reconstruction and the tumultuous events of 1867 that set the stage for the emergence of large-scale violence. The implementation of black suffrage destabilized the plantation system throughout the South, but locally the murder of a prominent black political leader in June brought turmoil. Alex Webb was appointed voter registrar by the military authorities, in part for his involvement in the Union League movement, a clandestine Republican club. He was gunned down on the streets of Greensboro by a small merchant, John Orrick, regarded as dissolute by local whites. After the shooting, armed freedmen descended on the county seat, demanding Orrick’s arrest along with those they thought implicated in the escape. The streets were reportedly ﬁlled with “Negroes swearing furiously, threatening to sack & burn the town, destroy the white race.” 6 Informal posses of freedmen searched the countryside for several days, eventually bearing one half-dressed suspect to Greensboro in triumph. “Our people had become exasperated up to a good healthy ﬁghting point,” one planter observed, adding that it was not easy to prevent the suspect’s friends “from making war on the Negroes at once.” 7 A local plantation manager agreed that “So much excitement prevailed last Saturday the whites secretly armed themselves for the ﬁght if it did begin.” 8 One white described an organized militia, complete with ofﬁcers and alarm signals.9 Local planters along with other whites were alarmed by the turn of events. Greensboro was the social and economic center of the county, and many planters maintained residences there. The disturbances rippled through the countryside for weeks after the assassination, and secret meetings and martial drilling by the freedmen continued. A salute ﬁred by a Union League militia inspired a rumor that a race war had broken out, and armed freedmen again descended on the town in force. Though that incident ended without bloodshed, fearful forebodings became evident in planter correspondence.

Sources for

065-18670613-001