A Hanging in Nacogdoches: Murder, Race, Politics, and Polemics in Texas's Oldest Town, 1870–1916

By Gary B. Borders

This historical study examines a “legal lynching” in 1902 Texas, shedding light on race relations, political culture, and economic conditions of the time.
 
On October 17, 1902, in Nacogdoches, Texas, a black man named James Buchanan was tried without representation, condemned, and executed for the murder of a white family—all within three hours. Two white men played pivotal roles in these events: the editor of the Nacogdoches Sentinel, Bill Haltom, a prominent Democrat who condemned lynching but defended lynch mobs; and A. J. Spradley, a Populist sheriff who managed to keep the mob from burning Buchanan alive, only to escort him to the gallows. Each man’s story illuminates part of the path toward the terrible parody of justice at the heart of A Hanging in Nacogdoches.
 
The turn of the twentieth century was a time of dramatic change for the people of East Texas. Frightened by the Populist Party's attempts to unite poor blacks and whites in a struggle for economic justice, white Democrats defended their power base by exploiting racial tensions in a battle that ultimately resulted in complete disenfranchisement for the black population. In telling the story of a single lynching, Gary Borders dramatically illustrates the way politics and race combined to bring horrific violence to small southern towns like Nacogdoches.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9780292783164

Book preview

Number Nine

CLIFTON AND SHIRLEY CALDWELL

TEXAS HERITAGE SERIES

GARY B. BORDERS

A Hanging in Nacogdoches

Murder, Race, Politics, and Polemics in Texas’s Oldest Town, 1870–1916

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS

Austin

Publication of this work was made possible in part by support from Clifton and Shirley Caldwell and a challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Copyright © 2006 by the University of Texas Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

First edition, 2006

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to:

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University of Texas Press

P.O. Box 7819

Austin, TX 78713-7819

utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/rp-form

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Library ebook ISBN: 978-0-292-79598-3

Individual ebook ISBN: 9780292795983

DOI: 10.7560/702523

Borders, Gary B.

A hanging in Nacogdoches : murder, race, politics, and polemics in Texas’s oldest town, 1870–1916 / Gary B. Borders.—1st ed.

  p. cm.—(Clifton and Shirley Caldwell Texas heritage series; no. 9)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-292-70252-3 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 0-292-71299-5

(pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Lynching—Texas—Nacogdoches—History—20th century. 2. Buchanan, Jim, d. 1902. 3. Nacogdoches (Tex.)—Race relations—History. 4. Vendetta—Texas—Nacogdoches—History. 5. Populism—Texas—Nacogdoches—History. 6. Populism—Texas, East—History. 7. Texas, East—Race relations—History. I. Title. II. Series.

HV6465.T4B67 2006

364.1'34—dc22

2005024084

To Kass

Acknowledgments

THE GENESIS OF THIS BOOK CAME IN EARLY 1999 WHEN THE staff of the Daily Sentinel in Nacogdoches, Texas, began doing research for its centennial edition. I was editor and publisher of the newspaper at the time, and as we divided up the century among the dozen or so newsroom employees, I volunteered to chronicle the first decade of the newspaper’s existence.

That was when I came across the murder of the Hicks family in October 1902 and the hanging of Jim Buchanan just a week after the crime was committed. The story—a black man hanged for killing three white people in a small town on the edge of the Deep South during the Jim Crow era—stuck in my mind, and a few years later I decided to produce a narrative series for the newspaper that recounted, day by day, what happened exactly one hundred years earlier. The series provoked considerable comment in town from folks wondering why I was stirring up such painful old memories. I pointed out that a photo of the hanging was proudly displayed in the Historic Town Center downtown, so it wasn’t all that big a secret.

With the encouragement of friends, I pitched the idea of expanding the series into a book to Bill Bishel at University of Texas Press, who encouraged me to do so and actually offered a modest advance—a first for me.

For a solid year, I worked on this book nearly every moment that I wasn’t actually earning a living as a newspaper editor and publisher. It was a fascinating experience.

There are many people who proved invaluable in providing information and encouragement, and I apologize in advance if I have left anyone out.

Among those to whom I am in debt is Larry A. Woods, an East Texas researcher who kindly provided me copies of newspaper clippings on many germane subjects, already categorized and in chronological order. His work saved me dozens of hours of poring over microfilms. The librarians at the East Texas Research Center at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches were unfailingly helpful, as were those at both the Center for American History at the University of Texas and the Texas State Library in Austin.

While delving into archives for a few days in Washington, D.C., I was treated with great kindness by researchers at the National Archives and the Library of Congress, who helped me find obscure material dealing with Reconstruction in Deep East Texas.

Juanita Tarpley Peters, the granddaughter of Lizzie Hicks—who was the only surviving member of the family murdered in 1902—showed up unannounced at the newspaper office a few weeks after the series concluded. She generously let me make copies of a number of photographs related to the hanging, which had never before been published, and spent some time with me relating how the story of this family tragedy had been passed down through two generations. Mrs. Peters has since passed away, but her daughter was kind enough to grant me permission to publish these photographs.

Neal Murphey and his cohorts at the San Augustine History Center provided a wealth of original material concerning the Border-Wall feud. The project that Murphey spearheads involved digitizing and indexing more than 150 years of public records dating back to when Texas was under Mexican rule. It is a treasure trove of Texas history, now available at the touch of a keyboard.

John Ross’s master’s thesis, written at Stephen F. Austin State University, on legendary Sheriff A. J. Spradley proved invaluable in providing the dates of articles in the Daily Sentinel of Nacogdoches. This again saved me dozens of hours of poring through microfilm.

Donna Phillips, district clerk of Nacogdoches County, and Debra Gaston, county elections administrator, were both helpful in ferreting out old court and election records.

Renè Guajardo agreed to scan and retouch the photographs in this book, many of which were reproduced from hazy microfilms or tattered prints. Karen Standridge helped me locate a number of the photos in the Sentinel archives and elsewhere.

Finally, my thanks go to Judy Morgan, who was kind enough to read this manuscript in advance and offer advice and suggestions.

The assistance of all the people named above helped make this a better book. Any errors of omission or commission that remain are my own.

Introduction

THIS IS THE STORY OF THE HANGING OF A BLACK MAN IN THE South for a grisly crime that he almost certainly committed.

Whether or not Jim Buchanan was guilty, his execution for the murders of three members of the same family was described many years later by the sheriff who brought him to justice as a legal lynching. Buchanan died in the town square of Nacogdoches, which calls itself the Oldest Town in Texas, just six days after the bodies of Duncan, Nerva, and Allie Hicks were found in their rural home in the hamlet of Black Jack, twenty-five miles east of Nacogdoches.

By the time Buchanan was hanged in front of hundreds of people—a goodly number of whom wanted to skip the legal niceties and burn him alive—his name was a household word across the South. Newspapers breathlessly recounted the desperate measures taken by lawmen to keep Buchanan from the lynch mobs determined to kill the young man—actions taken so that he could be brought back to Nacogdoches and legally executed.

This is also an account of race relations, politics, violence, and news-papering during one of the darker periods in southern history—when the promise offered by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation soon turned into bitter fruit, as blacks exchanged one form of bondage for another. The freedmen were no longer physically and legally bound to their masters. But the economic stranglehold of tenant farming and sharecropping meant that, in effect, little had changed. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the few remaining political rights of blacks vanished as well, because Jim Crow laws ruled supreme everywhere south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

For a brief time, however, it appeared that Nacogdoches County—which had once been home to some of the luminaries of the Texas Revolution, though its shining light as a Texas star had long dimmed—would be a leader in a progressive movement that would battle not only to include blacks in the political process but also to push for economic justice for the have-nots of both races. That movement in Nacogdoches County was led by an East Texas lawman who became a larger-than-life figure during his three-plus decades in politics. His bitterest enemy was the powerful local newspaper editor, and their feud became the stuff of legend.

It was a violent, fascinating time in southern history. It is this writer’s hope that this modest account sheds some light on what it was like to live in Deep East Texas in and around the turn of the last century.

PART I

A Murder, a Manhunt, a Trial, and an Execution

CHAPTER ONE

Three Killed in Black Jack

October 11, 1902

FINALLY, THE HEAT OF SUMMER WAS GONE.

In Deep East Texas, summer is the longest season. From May until early October the hot air hovers, thick with humidity and mosquitoes. This year had been no exception, though in late June a freak storm had dropped fourteen inches of rain in twenty hours, causing a flood that washed out all the bridges over the Attoyac River, which divides Nacogdoches and San Augustine counties, and wreaking widespread damage in the old Spanish town of Nacogdoches, the county seat.¹

By October the leaves were just starting to turn in the thick woods that ran along the rivers and creeks, although it would be November before the crescendo of color was at its peak. Eight days earlier a thunderstorm had swept through, dropping more than four inches of rain in a twelve-hour period, causing more flooding, and slowing efforts to rebuild the bridges across the Attoyac. Once again, the red-dirt streets of Nacogdoches turned into an ochre slop that clung to everything. Since then, the weather had been sunny and the mercury moderate, with highs in the upper 70s and lows dropping into the 50s at night.²

It is likely that Duncan Hicks, his wife, Nerva, and their daughter, Allie, had spent the previous evening enjoying the cool air on the front porch. Before air conditioning, families tended to gather on the porch as the sun began to set, the day’s work done. Hicks, forty-eight, was a farmer, as were most folks living in Black Jack, a small community four miles west of the Attoyac and an equal distance north of Chireno, the closest town of any size.³ The Hicks family farm was no more than a few hundred yards east of the river. Duncan likely grew cotton and vegetables, maybe some tobacco—a crop the county’s boosters hoped would help fuel a cigar-making factory recently established in Nacogdoches, twenty-four miles to the west.

Black Jack in 1902 wasn’t exactly booming. A correspondent for the Daily Sentinel in Nacogdoches earlier that year had described the community as having two mercantile stores; a doctor’s office; a blacksmith and wood shop; a single church building, which looked more like an old barn than a house of worship and which was shared by the Baptists and the Methodists; and an old eye sore of a school building. Careful not to be too critical, the anonymous correspondent praised the residents of Black Jack, saying that all they need is a little hustling up.⁴

The same correspondent complained that the condition of the road leading out of this place towards Nacogdoches is almost impassible in wet weather. That road was El Camino Real, the King’s Highway, hacked out of the forest in the seventeenth century all the way from Louisiana to San Antonio and from there down to Mexico.

Duncan Hicks was from Mississippi, and the red-dirt roads, rolling hills, cotton fields, and thick forests of East Texas no doubt reminded him of his birthplace. Nerva, fifty-eight, was a Texas native whose father was of German descent. They had been married nearly twenty-four years and had two children, one of whom, Lizzie, was married and lived in Hooker Bend, Louisiana, just across the Sabine River (completion of Toledo Bend Reservoir in 1969 would send Hooker Bend underwater). Allie, who had turned twenty-one in July, still lived with her parents.⁵

Neighbors considered the Hicks family prosperous and respected. Sheriff A.J. Spradley, for two decades the chief lawman of Nacogdoches County, described them as peaceable, quiet, unassuming citizens who attended to their own business and bothered nobody.⁶

A modern invention, the telephone, had made its appearance in the city of Nacogdoches in the 1890s. The first daily newspaper in the county, the Daily Phone, was started in 1899. Readers were encouraged to phone in news items. The paper’s name was changed a year later to the Daily Sentinel.

The news on October 10, a fine autumn day, was a bit slow for editor Bill Haltom’s tastes. He published the Sentinel six afternoons a week, taking off Sunday.

Haltom wrote:

It is quite dull about the courthouse today. The grand jury has adjourned, the judge and all the visiting lawyers have gone home, and even the sheriff has gone off with a copy of yesterday’s Sentinel to study the definition of a Nacogdoches county independent.⁷

Haltom was referring to Spradley, who had run as a third-party candidate for the past decade. This fall the sheriff was running as an independent. Haltom, a yellow-dog Democrat, and Spradley were longtime political rivals.⁸

It wouldn’t be long before the crusty editor, with his drooping moustache and piercing eyes, would have plenty of material to fill the pages of his modest newspaper, which usually ran just four pages a day.

OUT IN THE BOONDOCKS OF BLACK JACK, NEWS TRAVELED mainly by word of mouth. Neighbors were accustomed to checking on one another, stopping by to pass along the latest tidbits of news or to discuss cotton prices and politics.⁹

And that’s likely why J. W. Jernigan, a longtime Black Jack resident, finally decided to stop by the Hicks home, two miles east of the community, on Saturday evening, October 11. He’d passed by several times earlier and not seen anyone outside—certainly unusual for a farming family on a pleasant autumn day.

As the sun was about to set, the temperature dropping nicely into the 60s, Jernigan pulled into the Hicks residence. What he discovered would horrify the community and make the front pages of newspapers across the South for the next seven days.

Duncan Hicks lay on his front porch, a blanket or sheet over his body, the top of his head blown off. Nerva Hicks was nearby, also dead of a shotgun blast to the head. Their daughter Allie was dead inside the house, her head beaten to a pulp. It was believed that she had been sexually assaulted.

Jernigan alerted neighbors, and someone left on horseback for Nacogdoches, traveling in the dark at a breakneck gallop along that red-clay ribbon of dirt, through the forest and the cotton fields.¹⁰

Once the rider arrived in Nacogdoches with the news of the murders, Sheriff Spradley immediately set out for Black Jack in the darkness, hoping to arrive by early daylight Sunday.

It was now up to him to solve what would be called the most horrific crime in the county’s history.

CHAPTER TWO

A City with a Long Past

THE NAME NACOGDOCHES COMES FROM THE NACOGDOCHE tribe of Hasinai Indians, who made their home on the present site of the city, between two creeks that run from north to south, the Banita and the Lanana. The tribe was one of eight in the Hasinai confederation of Caddoes, four of which lived in the area that became Nacogdoches County. Archaeological evidence, including a number of burial mounds, indicates there was a large Caddoan settlement in the thirteenth century near where downtown is now located, and there is evidence that Indians had settled in the area as early as the ninth century. Explorer Alonso De León apparently came through the village while on a mission in 1690 to discover how far the French had encroached on Spanish territory.¹

In 1713 the French, intent on both Christianizing the Indians and establishing trade with them, sent Louis Juchereau de St. Denis, an inveterate adventurer, from Biloxi, Mississippi, through Louisiana to East Texas, with a load of merchandise, about two dozen white men, and as many Indians as necessary.² Ostensibly, his mission was to find a Franciscan friar named Francisco Hidalgo, who had turned to France after Spain had spurned his efforts to establish missions deep in East Texas.³

St. Denis followed one narrow trail after another—trails already blazed by Indians and animals—through Nacogdoches and all the way to the Rio Grande on what later became known as the Camino Real or King’s Highway (also known as the Old San Antonio Road). The trail that St. Denis followed, created in part by Indians and animals, had been expanded by three previous expeditions: Alonso De León in 1690, Domingo Terán de los Ríos in 1691, and Gregorio de Salinas Varona in 1693 had built on earlier attempts to establish missions in East Texas, traveling from Monclova, Mexico (the first colonial capital of Texas). As one historian noted, it is more accurate to consider the Camino Real as a network of trails.⁴ As he traveled southwest from Nacogdoches, St. Denis visited a number of the abandoned missions that had been established by Father Damian Massanet in the late seventeenth century.⁵

After crossing the Sabine River, St. Denis and his party trekked for more than three weeks before reaching the first Tejas village, where some modest trading took place. But St. Denis vowed to push on, justifying his incursion into Spanish territory by the quest for Father Hidalgo and his desire to tell authorities that the Tejas Indians wanted the Spanish missionaries to return.⁶

St. Denis and his party arrived at the presidio of San Juan Bautista del Río Grande, near present-day Eagle Pass, in 1714, causing some consternation among government officials that a party of Frenchmen had traveled so deeply into New Spain. The commandant, Diego Ramón, concluded that St. Denis had violated the viceroy’s prohibition against foreign traders or merchandise entering the colony. Ramón put St. Denis under arrest in his own home and wrote the viceroy for instructions. While in such commodious custody, St. Denis fell in love with and received a promise of marriage from Manuela Sánchez, Ramón’s beautiful granddaughter.⁷

Ramón finally sent St. Denis under guard to Mexico City, where he again used his considerable powers of charm, this time on the viceroy, who not only freed St. Denis, but also appointed him commissary officer and guide for a new expedition into Texas. Thus, besides finding a new love, St. Denis found a new nation. He began working for the Spanish. As one writer put it, St. Denis played an active part in establishing Spanish presence in East Texas, and his skill in Indian relations and willing cooperation with the padres made a favorable and lasting impression on them.⁸

St. Denis returned to East Texas three years later with Domingo Ramón, a son of the commandant of San Juan Bautista, under orders to counteract attempts by the French to encroach into Texas from Louisiana. He eventually helped reestablish six missions along the Camino Real, including one at Nacogdoches, Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de los Nacogdoches.⁹

That mission operated more or less continuously until 1772, when the Spanish decided to abandon all the East Texas missions and evict the settlers living near them. Few Indians were being converted, and resources were needed to protect settlements in and around San Antonio from attacks by Apaches and Comanches. In addition, France had ceded Louisiana to Spain in 1763 after the French and Indian War, in hopes of keeping that vast territory out of the hands of the British. Thus, Spanish fear of French encroachment into East Texas ceased.¹⁰

In 1756 King Ferdinand VI of Spain ordered the Marqués de Rubi, a Spanish field marshal, to inspect the interior missions—a daunting task that he procrastinated against undertaking for more than ten years. By then Ferdinand VI was dead, and his half brother, who had assumed the throne, once again pushed for the inspections. The Marqués de Rubí finally reached the Nacogdoches mission in 1767.

He wasn’t impressed by what he found: a single missionary and no converted Indians, nor any immediate prospects. There were apparently a few settlers, but hardly enough to justify using any military resources to protect the territory. The Indians’ lack of enthusiasm for Catholic conversion and a chance to save 44,000 pesos a year prompted Rubí to recommend the missions be closed, and that colonization in the area between San Antonio and Louisiana end. Spain was simply stretched too thin, especially since the more substantial settlements around Bexar faced increasingly hostile Indian tribes.¹¹

The governor for the region was sent to Natchitoches, Louisiana, the mission farthest to the east, to order the expatriation of the settlers to San Antonio and the closing of the missions—an order that was highly unpopular. Many of those being repatriated dropped out as the exodus headed west. About two dozen settlers stopped at Gil Ibarvo’s ranch in El Lobanillo, just west of the Sabine River, and still more stopped in Nacogdoches. Though most of the settlers did leave East Texas under Spanish orders, a number of them remained behind, pleading illness or pressing matters, or else simply vanishing into the woods for a time.¹²

Ibarvo, who likely was born near the Natchitoches mission of Los Adaes in 1729, had no intention of giving up his vast holdings in Deep East Texas and Louisiana. Besides, he apparently had established a lucrative contraband business by smuggling livestock out of Texas and illegal goods in from the French. He was once thrown in jail for several months by a previous governor for selling to the French horses stolen by the Indians from the Spanish.¹³

He became the spokesman for the displaced settlers in their attempt to get the Spanish government to change its mind, and he went to Mexico with fellow settler Gil Flores to speak to the viceroy. Ibarvo received permission to go to Mexico from the governor of San Antonio, who also did not agree with the king’s order to vacate East Texas. Doubtless that decision played a role in the viceroy rather surprisingly—and quickly—reversing the king’s order.

Some rather complicated machinations, counterorders, and vague instructions ensued, but it’s sufficient here to say that the settlers, at least those who wanted to, returned to East Texas, nesting at first near the Trinity River in Madison County. From there, new outposts were established, and old ones resurrected. But the Madison County post was subject to hostile Indian attacks, so in April 1779, Ibarvo, by now the settlers’ unquestioned leader, moved his charges eastward eighty miles or so into the old Nacogdoches mission site, picking up scattered stragglers and loners along the way.¹⁴

Ibarvo, whom the Spanish finally realized had a talent for forming alliances with the various Indian tribes in the area, was given the lofty title of Lieutenant Governor of the Pueblo of Nacogdoches and promised an annual salary of 500 pesos a year.

In a short time, as one writer put it,

this growing and viable community immediately supplanted the historic role of Los Adaes, even though the townspeople were forced to defend themselves until the arrival of Spanish troops in 1795. In future years when Nacogdoches would serve as a counterweight against Anglo-Americans, its influence would rival