Wicked Greensboro

By Alice Sink

In a town where ladies of the evening walked the streets (but were legally bound to hide their ankles) and trouble rolled through town on the famous railways, this Piedmont city has seen its fair share of iniquity. From Frank Lucas, the drug lord whose childhood in Greensboro served as the catalyst for a life of crime, to the teacher who ruled his students with a switch and a pocketknife, the tales in Wicked Greensboro capture the shady side of the Gate City's past. Travel with local author Alice Sink down the streets of old-time Greensboro to view a city riddled with prostitution, bootlegging and all manner of unsavory and mischievous depravity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Apr 29, 2011
• ISBN: 9781614234401

Alice Sink

Alice E. Sink is the published author of books and numerous short stories, articles and essays in anthologies and in trade and literary magazines. She earned her MFA in creative writing from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. For thirty years, she taught writing courses at High Point University in High Point, North Carolina, where she received the Meredith Clark Slane Distinguished Teaching/Service Award in 2002. The North Carolina Arts Council and the partnering arts councils of the Central Piedmont Regional Artists Hub Program awarded Sink a 2007 grant to promote her writing.

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wrongs."

PART I

Public Wrath

DANIEL WORTH: IMPRISONED FOR INCENDIARY DOCTRINES

In November 1859, Daniel Worth, an abolition emissary, was accused of inculcating, publicly and privately, his incendiary doctrines and the time has come when he should be compelled to abandon his work…We are authorized by a prominent member of the large and highly respectable family which bears the same name and to which he is distantly related to announce that they have no sympathy with the man and sternly discountenance his proceedings. This is what happened:

Daniel Worth was a Wesleyan Methodist preacher in Greensboro. When the Presbyterian called for his arrest in November, 1859, a warrant was sworn out against him on the specific charge of circulating Helper’s Impending Crisis. On December 22, he gave himself up and the sheriff committed him to the Guilford County jail where he remained four months awaiting trial, denied, as all prisoners in the State were at this time, the ordinary comforts of life so that, during the severely inclement winter, his feet froze and his health became very feeble. Later, five of his converts were also arrested. Crowds surrounded the jail in Greensboro where Worth was imprisoned, and it was sometimes feared that he might be lynched. In January, 1860, charges were preferred against him in Randolph County, and in March he was tried in Asheboro, found guilty, and sentenced to imprisonment for a year, the mildest punishment possible under the incendiary publications act. Late in April his trial came up in Greensboro, where he was again found guilty and sentenced to imprisonment. Later the Supreme Court upheld the decision, and Worth, rather than submit to imprisonment which would have endangered his life, left the State.

A pillory.

At the next session of the legislature, anyone circulating incendiary documents or exciting a Negro to a spirit of insurrection was declared guilty of a felony, and anyone using inflammatory language was made guilty of a misdemeanor.

Although laws against mayhem had been passed in 1754 and in 1791, a more stringent measure was enacted in 1831. Punishment for the first offense of malicious maiming was a sentence of two hours in the pillory and thirty-nine lashes on the bare back, while for the second it was death without benefit of clergy, explained here:

Although the term without the benefit of clergy is used colloquially today to describe a couple living together outside a legal marriage, originally members of the clergy were exempted from capital punishment upon conviction of particular crimes based on this privilege, but it did not encompass crimes of either high treason or misdemeanors. Furthermore, benefit of clergy existed to alleviate the severity of criminal laws as applied to the clergy. It was, however, found to promote such extensive abuses that it was ultimately eliminated. Interestingly, clergy were not the only ones to benefit, but the exemption was extended to all persons for all crimes, except high treason.

Maiming without malice was punishable by fine and six months’ imprisonment. Throughout the period, indictments for assault and battery far outnumbered all other offenses tried in the county counts. In antebellum days, dueling was the most honorable method of settling a quarrel.

Camp meetings.

Camp meetings were popular religious events. Bodily contortions occurred: clinched fists, limbs thrown into almost every imaginable position, and the hair of women would crack like a whip. Not everyone, however, was religiously moved: On the contrary, there was scoffing, ridicule, and open defiance of the meetings by some. There were liquor peddling, drunkenness, and other abuses. And there were those who chose to look upon the camp gatherings as a sort of entertainment—‘tares among the wheat.’

ADAM CROOKS: DRAGGED FROM THE PULPIT AND JAILED

A great many in North Carolina were rankling over the terms of the Compromise of 1850. In May, the antislavery associations met in New York to review the accomplishments of the year. The North Carolina Standard ran a report declaring that a Wesleyan Methodist missionary had been laboring with much success for a year in Guilford County. The Standard recommended that the missionary be found and that the people take him in hand, in open day, and compel him to leave the country:

The missionary was Adam Crooks, who, in response to a request from a group of Guilford County Methodists who were dissatisfied with the stand taken on slavery by the Methodist Episcopal South. Two years later Jesse McBride joined him, and together they ministered unto the growing number of Wesleyan Methodist congregations and openly preached the strange doctrines of the abolitionists in the land of the bleeding slave. Both were young men, gentle and mild-mannered, preaching against slavery in a section which had long heard anti-slavery sentiment expressed. They had come to win converts to the Wesleyan Methodist faith and to preach the whole doctrine of their creed which also included strictures against the use of spirituous liquor and membership in secret organizations. They preached nearly every day and won a convert at nearly every sermon. Soon their activities came under the suspicion of religious denominations which disapproved of proselytizing, slaveholders who feared that their laborers would be disturbed, farmers who habitually distilled their crops, and lodge members who resented the implication that a fraternal order was ungodly.

Southern ideas of liberty.

In May, 1850, when the North Carolina Standard ordered the men to run out of the State, there were many willing to lend a hand. At the time, McBride probably had already been arrested, and Crooks’ arrest soon followed. Their trial came up at the October term of the Superior Count. Before a large crowd of anxious spectators, the court found the evidence against McBride to be that he had handed the small daughter of a certain Washington Kennedy an incendiary pamphlet, The Ten Commandments. Despite the cry on the street for hanging, the jury acquitted Crooks, but found McBride guilty, and the court ordered that he receive twenty lashes on the bare back, stand an hour in the pillory, and be imprisoned in the county jail for a year. Good—very good! exclaimed the Standard. We wish the law could take hold of their necks, instead of their backs. The Register thought that nothing but that high sense of loyalty to the law saved McBride from summary punishment. The missionaries were also indicted in Guilford County, but the grand jury failed to find a true bill against them.

The public wrath now focused on Crooks. In June, he was dragged from the pulpit and taken to jail, where he remained for three days until he agreed as the price of his release not to preach again. Many thought that his agreement was to leave the state, and when he continued preaching, his enemies were determined to be rid of him. Finally Crooks realized that his own life and the lives of his converts were endangered. He left; all was still not calm:

For a while, after the McBride and Crooks episode, the papers let abolition and the free Negroes alone. It was not until November, 1859, the Presbyterian again gave news of the abolition missionary in the State. Without disclosing the name of the man, the editor declared that an agent of the Boston Tract Society was at work in North Carolina. Society must be protected against cut-throats and assassins, the Presbyterian declared, and the sword of the civil magistrate is the instrument which God has appointed for their punishment. The agent of the Boston Tract Society is an abolition emissary…The mildest treatment which can be administered to him is to remove him from the State, and this is what we advised. A cry immediately went up for the name of the agent, and a month later the Presbyterian gave out the name of Daniel Worth. "For a year or two past, it is notorious that he has been inculcating, publicly and privately, his incendiary doctrines in Randolph and Guilford counties, and the time has come when he should be compelled to abandon his work…We are authorized by a prominent member of the large and highly respectable family which bears the same name and to which he is distantly related…to announce that they have no sympathy with the man and sternly discountenance his