copyight 2 July 2022 by
Hershel Parker
Ch. 14--Cousin Willy Sims Causes the Danville
Massacre--and Causes Jim Crow?
Soon after the war Sims was in Chatham, Virginia, where he married Matoaka
Whittle and was taken into his law firm by her father, James Whittle. In 1875,
after Matoaka had been married to Sims for several years, Whittle constructed a
house for them, shrewdly putting the
house in trust for Matoaka and her children. Henry H. Mitchell describes
the house: “of brick kilned on the
premises and original-growth shortleaf pine, the house boasts rare
tongue-and-groove siding, a raised English basement, a story-and-a-half window
bay, 11 fireplaces, 15 rooms including an upstairs ballroom, original
horsehair-based plaster, ornate plaster medallions and cornices in three rooms,
and — hidden from the observer — extensive insulation installed when the house
was built, long before such came into popular use. William E. Sims is one of
Chatham's most colorful and controversial historical figures, and his home,
built in the Italian style by father-in-law James M. Whittle, was
probably Chatham's most ostentatious when it was constructed during the 1870s.”
. . . . This Sims-Mitchell house is now a B&B.
Sims, starting
as a Democrat, like Whittle, became
(for some years) a protégé of William Mahone (1826-1895). Mahone, a cynical
promoter of himself as a railroad engineer and would-be railroad director, had
owned slaves before the war then had massacred many blacks at Petersburg as
they tried to climb out of a bomb crater and surrender. Mahone joined the new “Readjusters”
intent on reducing (that is, repudiating) the debt Virginia incurred when the
western part was separated in 1863. For this Readjusting, which restored some
social services such as schools, Mahone and his followers like Sims were
willing to ally themselves with Radical Republicans. He was a Scalawag in 1883 when
he was running for the Virginia senate. Just before the election in Danville (in
Pittsylvania County, some fifteen or twenty miles south of Chatham, near the
North Carolina border) on 3 November 1883 Willy Sims made a speech to a mainly
black audience. It should have consolidated his Republican-Readjuster (black
and white) victory to the state senate but instead it destroyed the party in the
county and far beyond it.
All alone, by that speech, Willy Sims became
what the Petersburg, Virginia Mail
called him, the “Danville Assassin” (as quoted in the Staunton Spectator on 5 February 1884). He
incited what was called by Radical Republicans the “Danville Massacre,” what
was called by Democrats the “Danville Riot” and what was minimized by the
Boston Evening Transcript on 55
November 1883 as a “Street Fight” (“A War of Races. A Street Fight Between
Negroes and White men at Danville, VA.” Modern historians of the Readjuster
Party have also called the events a “Danville Street Fight.” As massacres and
riots in this country go, it was nowhere near the worst, but Sims’s speech had
far-reaching consequences. Henry H. Mitchell says: “Racial fears fanned by news of the Danville Riot resulted in the
turning out of office of the Readjuster/Republican political machine in
Virginia.” That was bad enough, for it meant that in Virginia negroes pretty
much lost their very recent privileges--including the right to vote and to hold
public office. Mitchell continues with what sounds like overstatement but, if
you think about it, you see that he is right. He says Sims caused the riot and
that because of the ways it was reported--all over the country, Tennessee to
Kansas to Illinois to Vermont--it became “a significant factor in precipitating
the eclipse of the Republican Party in the South for nearly a century.” Worse,
it sped if it did not cause “the widespread introduction of Jim Crow
segregation laws and practices.”
Mitchell is right: Hyper-aggressive,
reckless, frail (from war wounds), becoming increasingly deaf, brave to the
point of suicidal behavior, by his spectacular miscalculation in one speech
Sims demolished his noblest goals. Human character, the zeal or frailty of one
man, can have gigantic consequences. One cousin, you will see, caused the
Buffalo Soldiers-Houston whites riot in 1917. You can’t put all
the blame on Cousin Willy Sims for Jim Crow laws and a century and a half of
discrimination against Blacks, but you can see some truth there. If it had not
been Willy at just that time, it might have been someone else and the result
might have been the same, but it was Willy who precipitated the end of
Reconstruction in Virginia.
When word arrived in Virginia of Sims’s
death in Colon (now Panama), John R. Popham, a minor politician, told a
reporter at the Washington Post (as
printed in the Lexington, Missouri, Intelligencer
on 5 September 1891) that Sims “was the gamest man” he ever saw. He went on: “His
courage was of that reckless and desperate type that seemed to render him
insensible to fear. He never counted the number of his foes, and would as soon
defy twenty men as one.” “Desperate,” Popham thought, the root meaning of which
is “hopeless.”
Aggressive defiance seems to have
started early. This is Mitchell again: “William Sims's
later tendency toward controversy may have surfaced during his senior year at
Yale. It is plausible to assume that upperclassman Sims might have been a
ringleader in a campus disturbance in early 1861, during which Southern
students raised a flag of secession on Yale's Old Campus; Northern students, in
turn, stormed the building where the flag flew and tore the banner down.”
Plausible indeed!
The
Wilmington, NC Morning Star on 23
October 1881 reprinted a story from the Richmond Dispatch. The Readjuster candidate for governor of Virginia,
William Cameron, was understood to first call Wade Hampton III (1818-1902) a “Carpet-bagger.” He was, of course, not a
carpet-bagger but a South Carolinian, owner of more slaves than almost anyone
else, a Confederate Lieutenant General by the end of the Civil War. Afterwards,
he was horrified at blacks voting and holding office and, sympathizing with the
goals of the KKK (if not riding out with them) to the point of paying legal
expenses for some KKK members. In the race for governor in 1876 his
paramilitary Red Shirts intimidated blacks, keeping them from voting. In that
bloody and disputed election he became governor of white South Carolina in
1877, and later served two terms in the U. S. Senate from South Carolina. “Carpet-bagger”
made no sense, but many in the audience understood that Cameron had just
“convicted Gen. Wade Hampton publicly of falsehood.” The next speaker, Major Ficklen,
“said that Cameron would not have dared to say what he had said if Senator
Hampton were present.” Cameron arose and began to explain himself, saying that
he had used a conditional construction--“If” Hampton had said [here we need to imagine
many words and phrases], then he was
a liar. Cameron had far too much time and far too many words go between the
“If” and “Liar!”
Ficklen
did not succeed in refuting Cameron because Sims intervened--he “leaped upon
the stand, and, confronting Cameron, said excitedly, ‘You may say that to him,
but you shall not say it to me. I am a relative of Wade Hampton’s’” Friends of foes of Cameron rushed upon the
stand, and a “serious row” was averted only by Cameron’s managing to call
everyone’s attention to his “If” construction. In his anxious justification he
emphasized the “ifs” and greatly shrank the number of words he had spoken before
“giving the lie conditionally.” An alert listener, J. P. Harrison, gave Sims
credit: “Sims’s act brought him to put ‘if’ where it belonged, and made his
statement absolutely without effect.” Sims’s father was John Hampton Sims, the
middle name for his mother, Nancy, so Sims was indeed a kinsman of Wade Hampton
III, a second cousin once removed, close, the same relation I have to hundreds
of Americans, including my second cousin Bill Costner’s sons, one of whom spoke
eloquently at the funeral of Whitney Houston, a black woman.
How
did Sims feel about his kinsman Hampton having owned many slaves? How did he
feel about his own father’s owning 81 slaves in 1860, according to the census? How
did he feel about Hampton’s campaign for Governor of South Carolina in 1876?
Did close blood kinship trump morality? politics? His confrontation with
Cameron was 1881. Was it Democratic rabble-rousing in Virginia that stirred him
in the first months of 1883, before the election? The Democrats had indeed been
terrified at how they were left, defeated in battle, impoverished by the war,
and often disenfranchised. Here are samples gathered by the Staunton Spectator on 6 November 1883:
From
the Danville Times:
WILL
YOU FIGHT TO DAY WITH MAHONE “UNDER THE BLACK FLAG?”
“Be
ready with guns.” That’s what the negro Squire Toliver said in his speech the
other night. Was there a white man present? If so, did he dare to applaud such
a sentiment. Such is the pass to which the negro rule has gotten in Danville,
and we hope that our exchanges [the other newspapers to which they sent copies]
will publish it in order that other communities may take warning from our
deplorable fate.”
From
the Charlottesville Chronicle:
Infamy.--D. B. Strouse, from Salem,
reports that Gov. Cameron in his speech there said, “I understand there are
white people here who are afraid that their daughters will have negro babies.”
If
Gov. Cameron or any other man talks in this way from the stump in Virginia, he
should be taken right out and treated to a coat of tar and feathers, be he
drunk or sober.
From
the Charlottesville Chronicle again:
White
men of Virginia, if you lose this election you will not only have mixed
school-boards, but mixed schools, and perhaps negro teachers, with a law compelling you to send your children to
school. Dost like the picture?
For months this rabble rousing had been
persistent, as in this from the Richmond Dispatch
on 24 February 1883: “The State Board of Education has appointed two negroes on
the School Board for Richmond. Are the white people of this State going to stand
it? Will they not rise up in a body and put down the Coalitionists?” This was
from the Danville Times, where Willy
Sims was a leading Coalitionist (Republican and Readjuster).
Local
Democrats (of the “Conservative-Democratic
Party) printed and distributed a broadside called “COALITION RULE IN DANVILLE.”
Coalition-Radical was their
name for the Republican Party, also called the Adjusters or Readjusters. In the
South where politics was being redefined from Congress, party names needed
hyphenation and recombinations in order to clinch immediate arguments. The
Democrats were protesting the present majority rule by negroes and their white
allies. They were terrified that the rest of their lives they would have to
live as a minority in the town they had ruled. Readers of the broadside might “form some idea of the injustice and humiliation to which our
white people have been subjected and are daily undergoing by the domination and
misrule of the radical or negro party, now in absolute power in our town, and
under the leadership of William Mahone, seeking to extend and perpetuate its
power all over the Commonwealth.” The census of Danville in 1880 had counted
7526 in all, 4,397 “colored” and 3129 “white,” but three years later the
Democrats claimed there was much larger population and “a much larger
proportion of blacks now than in the year 1880.”
Whites,
the broadside said, were paying twelve or thirteen times as much in taxes than
negroes and every dollar paid by negroes was returned to them in the form of
schools for their children. Blacks and their white allies had divided the city
into wards so that in two wards the blacks were sure to win, as they did, electing
seven out of twelve of their candidates for the council and their candidates
for the justice of the peace from each ward. Out of nine policemen four were
negroes, “two of them acting not only as policemen, but one as
health officer, and the other as weighmaster at the public scales
and clerk of the market. Out of the 24 stalls and stands at the market, 20
are rented out by the council to the negroes.”
The market
stalls were previously run “by polite white gentlemen, with their clean white
aprons,” had become “the scene of filth, stench, crowds of loitering and idle
negroes, drunkenness, obscene language, and pettit [petty] thieves.”
The authors of
the broadside saw themselves as helpless against the Constitutional amendments
pushed through by the Radical Republicans in Washington: “our town is
practically in the hands of and actually controlled by the officers and slaves
of the Federal government, not one of whom has a dollar’s worth of visible
property within its limits, and this too by the most shameless usurpation . . .
. The revenue collector declared, when he was elected president of the town
council, that it was his intention to use the patronage of the council to build
up the radical negro party. . . . White men are arrested for the most frivolous
acts by negro policemen and borne along to the Mayor’s office followed by
swarms of jeering and hooting and mocking negroes, and tried, fined and
lectured and imprisoned by a negro justice, and then followed
to the jail by the same insulting rabble. . . . The notoriety which this state
of things has produced, has attracted to the town large numbers of idle and
filthy negroes, from the border counties of North Carolina, and from Halifax,
Mecklenburg, and Charlotte, Va.—Although there is a law against vagrants, they
are never disturbed. . . . Negro women have been known to force
ladies from the pavement, and remind them that they will “learn to
step aside next time.” In several cases where the lie has been given to a
white lady to her face by a negro. It is a very common practice for the negroes
who are employed about out houses to allude to white ladies and gentlemen
as men and women and to negroes as ladies and gentlemen.
This is a practice almost without exception with the negro women. They do it to
irritate and throw contempt upon the white race.”
The Democrats, many of them recently disenfranchised,
professed to fear intimidation at the polls. The city council, they said, had
just “passed a resolution requesting the Governor to have Federal troops sent
to our town on election day; to intimidate the white people at the polls.” They
were to be pitied: “Now fellow citizens of the Valley and Southwest, we cry out
to you in our affliction to deliver us from this awful state of humiliation
and wretchedness. . . . Their fellow citizens could “help us throttle this
vipor [viper] of Negroism that is stinging us to madness and
to death, by voting against the Coalition-Radical candidates who are
yelling and screaming with delight at the prospect of fastening its fangs into
us forever. Is it right that the
negro should have all this given him then be allowed to control our offices and
plunder our treasury besides? It is an injustice at which we now know your
humanity will revolt. It is the injustice of the frozen serpent, which after
being warmed into life by its benefactor, stings him to death. Help us, fellow
citizens, by voting for the Conservative-Democratic candidates for the
Legislature, for unless they are elected we are doomed.” More than
two dozen signatures followed, usually name and occupations (James W. Bruce,
Merchant), sometime a company name (Redd & Jordan, Warehousemen).
“Tobacconist” followed six of the names. There were grocers, builders, and
foundrymen, but no schoolteachers or ministers.
Willy Sims carried a
copy of this Democratic broadside when he went to address a mainly black
audience on 2 November 1883 in Danville. Everyone of every political party knew
that what he did at this meeting caused the bloody riots the next day. The
Danville Times and all other papers
knew “Who Provoked the Danville Riot?” Here I use the account (by telegraph) in
the Indianapolis News from a
“Washington special to the Commercial Gazette,” “The Danville Riot. a
Democratic Account of the Inciting Cause With Some Republican Comments.”
According to the
Danville Times editorial (repeated
the Indianapolis News), it was “W. E.
Sims, a Coalition speaker,” who provoked the riot “twenty-four hours before the
shooting began”:
He “rose amidst
the shouts of at least five hundred negroes;” moreover, “he stood on the steps
of the court house with a large torch-light before him.” The Danville editor
was there and saw the “horrid spectacle; one lone white man standing amidst a
vast crowd of Africans, who were yelling and whooping at the top of their
voices”--and at night. But that was not all. “Sims rose with the famous
Danville circular in his hand, and the first thing he did was to read the names
of all the signers, twenty-eight in number, men of the highest standing and
universally respected. He denounced the statements in the circular as ‘false.’
and their authors as ‘liars.’ His object seemed to be to inflame the minds of
the negroes against those gentlemen, and to stir up bad feelings between the
rich and poor.” Sims read the names of the signers a second time, “saying they
were all a set of liars, cowards and scoundrels.” You would think if anyone in
Virginia knew the political and personal consequences of calling someone a
liar, it was the Willy Sims who had leapt upon the stage in 1881 to denounce
William Cameron for seeming to call Wade Hampton III a liar.
The editor of the
Danville Times exclaimed, “Just think
of it! A speaker denouncing in that style twenty-eight of our most respected
citizens, and the negroes yelling their applause with hellish delight. Can
anything be imagined better calculated to bring on a row?” Yet not one of the “white
Democrats” offered violence to Sims that night: “not a hair of Sims’ head was
touched. Moreover they permitted him to get in a buggy with James Vesper and
drive out of town the next day unincumbered [sic].” “After he was gone,” the Republican editor of the Indianapolis News, said, the “‘law-abiding’” and
“‘peace-loving’” citizens of Danville turned in and began shooting the
“‘niggers.’”
The Charlotte Observer gave a description copied in
the Newton, North Carolina Enterprise:
“The riot that occurred in Danville last Saturday afternoon . . . was even more
serious than at first reported. Three negroes were shot dead in the street, and
it was known that several others were mortally wounded, but it was not until
Sunday morning that the real loss of life was known. Six dead negroes were
found in various parts of the city, making the total killed nine. Twenty-eight
were wounded. Mr. Walters Holland, the young white man who received the first
bullet fired, is the son of Mr. C. G. Holland, one of the wealthiest men in
Danville. He was shot in the head and though his condition is still critical,
he was yesterday reported to be slightly improved.”
On Sunday morning, 4 November, the Alexandra Gazette put out an EXTRA in which great
capital letters and bold face type diminished gradually: NEGRO RIOT IN DANVILLE. ONE WHITE MAN MORTALLY
AND SEVERAL SLIGHTLY WOUNDED. SIX NEGROES KILLED--NUMBER OF WOUNDED UNKNOWN. THE GRAYS [the
militia] AND CITIZEN VOLUNTEERS IN POSSESSION OF THE TOWN. ALL QUIET AT LAST
REPORTS. When the riot started, said the Gazette, the Democrats were meeting nearby in the Theatre
discussing the Circular and the “speech last night to the colored people by W.
E. Sims.” The Gazette had swept
Virginia papers for comments such as this from the Richmond Dispatch: “the white men of Danville
seem to have forborne the defence of their rights until forbearance had ceased
to become a virtue. . . . Every white man’s blood has boiled when he read of the
indignities to which the whites of Danville had for some time been subjected by
the negroes there. These negroes had evidently come to regard themselves as in
some sort the rightful rulers of the town.” Now order was restored, and
Danville was set for the reestablishment of white rule for more than a century.
The Boston Evening Transcript 5
November article, no source named, summed up the theory that the bloodshed was
the result of a “conspiracy to force the issue upon the white people by the
leaders of the coalition movement.” Whites were absolutely in the right: “the
whole history of Virginia, up to and including the present time,” shows that
whites “have never raised the race issue, but that in every case it has been
forced upon the white men against their protest, and in an offensive form.” The
great villain was William Mahone and his “conspirators, for their own wicked
and selfish ends.”
Conspiracy
charges went both ways. From Washington a special was sent to the Cincinnati Commercial-Gazette (13 December 1883):
“Virginia’s Shame: Accumulating Evidence of a Deeply Planned Scheme.” The
“whole affair” was “a desperate scheme of the Democrats to prevent an honest
vote.” The whole article was a masterpiece of conspiracy language. There was
“reason for believing” this or that. There were unnamed “citizens of the South”
whose “standing cannot be anywhere questioned.” The writer’s “advices are most
reliable, and are derived from sources that are certain to have the best
information.” When the “array of testimony” is made known, it will “show the
world the full extent of this monumental crime.” A private letter from Chatham,
“twelve miles distant” from Danville--or sixteen or twenty miles, some would
say, dated 10 November, says this of “the Liberal candidate for the State
senate”: “Sims’ escape from the Danville brigands and ruffians was almost
miraculous. Owing to his deafness” (perhaps the earliest reference to this
condition) “he did not, and does not now, appreciate the danger he was in. He
was saved partly by accident, and partly by the prudence of his friends. His
coffin had been made and paid for, and the cut-throats were guarding all
passages to and from the city. Fortunately, the room he occupied was in a
building, the front entrance to which was up an open flight of steps not five
yards from the end of a long, dark, narrow alley. This, with the help of two
friends, who furnished him with assistance, enabled him to leave the city in
safety, This measure was inaugurated in accordance with a preconcerted
programme, and was fomented by cowardly villains.”
What follows is from a clearer reprinting in
the 15 November Cincinnati Commercial
Tribune,” again from a private letter from Chatham, who made this avowal:
“I am satisfied that the whole thing was planned weeks before. I am constantly
hearing of persons who knew of it before it happened.” He had a new story:
“Sims was hung in effigy here last night, and his life threatened in all
directions. You can form no conception of the terrorism existing in this
section. It is kept up to fever heat in order to shield the cowardly murder at
Danville.” The Bourbons (the Democrats) may not be done: “A gentleman who was
at Danville on Friday last says that the condition there is volcanic, and that
while all is quiet, the most moderate of the Bourbons predict that if the
wounded white man Holland, dies, his death would be the signal of an outbreak
against the negroes more destructive than that of the 3d. The quiet is only
external.” Sims (see below) claimed to have remained in Danville until noon,
the day of the riot. He went to “Richmond on Sunday, the fourth,” to ask that
state troops be sent to Danville.”
Later in Washington,
D. C. he gave an interview to the National
Republican (21 November 1883). There he explained his failure: the military
“only increased the danger to the
readjusters” Pittsylvania county. The National
Republican gave diminishing headlined: “DANVILLE” “An Interview with Col.
Sims on the Atrocious Massacre.” “Overthrowing a Majority by Murder,
Intimidation, and Fraud.” Finally, “A straightforward Statement of the
Occurrences Leading to the Tragedy.” The reporter gave a description: “He is a
short, well built gentleman, apparently a little more than 40 years of age, and
of very pleasing address.” Inaccuracy mixed with truth: “He is a native of
Virginia, and has acted with the conservative or democratic party until 1882.”
The reporter challenged him: “Col. Sims, it has been said that you made an
incendiary speech on Friday evening, the second, and that it was the cause of
the massacre on the following day.” He denied the charge: “I said nothing
whatever of an incendiary character. On the contrary, one J. P. Harrison has
written a letter to me, which was published, stating that many colored readjusters
would probably be threatened by our own colored people and coerced into voting
our ticket. In my speech I took occasion to notice the letter, and, in the
presence of a thousand colored and four hundred white people, I told the colored
people that if the charge was true I regretted to hear it; that the leading
principle of our party was a free ballot, and that I would condemn any forcible
means to influence any man’s vote, white or colored.” Without being incendiary,
while “many of the signers of the circular where present,” he proved the
falsity of nearly every allegation in it, and asked my hearers if it was not
mean and cowardly to circulate such a slanderous paper in the white counties of
Virginia, when they were ashamed to circulate it at home where people knew the
facts.” It had been distributed “by the carload” elsewhere, but had not been
available in Danville.
On 3 December
1883, Sims from Washington wrote to a Yale friend he had last seen twenty-two
years ago, as he left to join the Confederacy. He had remained in Danville on November
3rd , often in public, until noon, without seeing signs of hostility
toward him. “The massacre occurred four hours after I left the city, when the
Democratic mob slaughtered innocent and unarmed colored people.” Now he was
astonished to “see the time when Southern people should band together in
violent mobs” to take his life because he opposed “the Bourbon Party of
Virginia.” He insisted that in his speech on 2 November he had not appealed to
“race prejudice,” but had warned “the colored people” that the Democrats “would
omit no opportunity” of arousing the white men against them. On election day
they should “go to the polls unarmed, not allow themselves to be drawn into
discussions or controversies, and to deposit their ballots quietly as peaceful
and law-abiding citizens.” The friend gave the letter to the Hartford Courant, from which the New York Times reprinted it 9 December 1883. Sims
insisted he had not slandered the 28 signers, but even if he had done so “that
certainly could have been no excuse for the democratic party to massacre
innocent and defenseless colored men twenty-four hours afterwards.”
What Popham wrote
in 1892 confirms the fresh accounts: “Everyone expected he [Sims] would forfeit
his life as the penalty of his reckless words. It was said that his coffin had
been ordered, and people were momentarily expecting to hear that Sims had been
shot down. Yet he walked the streets of Danville as cool as though he had heard
nothing of the threats against his life. He was not molested, as probably his
mortal enemies revolted at the idea of murdering a man of such magnificent
nerve.” But in the next years he spent much time in Washington and elsewhere.
In 1884 Congress got around to an investigation
of the Danville “riot.” During its course Senator Zebulon Vance, formerly Confederate
North Carolina governor, behaved badly. The Greensboro Patriot on 24 April 1884 headlined its story: “Senator Vance Loses
His Temper.” (See Ch. 6 for Vance’s brutality to Union sympathizers in
northwest North Carolina.) Sims’s lawyer had informed the committee that if any
witness were to assail his character, Sims would speak out about “the moral
character of Senator Vance, Representatives Cabell and George D. Wise, and
others.” Senator John Sherman, brother of William Tecumseh Sherman (toughness
running in the family), intervened to prevent Vance from bringing charges
against Sims without full committee approval. Vance sputtered: “It is unusual,
sir, and it is damnable, and I defy the whole hell-fired crowd to assail my
character, here or anywhere else. I never heard of such a proposition as making
a war against a member of the committee who is simply doing his duty. It is a
threat, sir, which I despise and defy and contemn.” Vance put Mrs. G. B.
Rawlins of Baltimore on the stand, and tried to override Sherman:
“Senator Vance
said that it had been put in evidence that Sims was a man of good character,
and that his defeat in the election was due to intimidation and violence.” That
would never do. “I propose to prove,” he continued, “that this man is a thief;
that he stole the bonds of this witness on the stand here, and that he is
utterly unworthy of belief. He has blackened the character of reputable
citizens of Danville, and we propose to show who he is.” Sims’s lawyer (John S.
Wise) demanded that Sims be allowed to answer the charges, and more: “Also that
Mr. Sims hurls back the insinuation into the teeth of its author, and at the
proper time and proper place will prove that it is a falsehood in the whole
cloth.” The report concluded: “Sims still maintains his purpose not to let the
matter drop here. He claims to have in his possession some very damaging
documents,, which he will give to the public through the newspapers if he is
not allowed to vindicate himself before the committee. He is recognized as a
man of courage and desperation, and will not hesitate to execute his threats.”
Sherman kept Mrs. Rawlins from testifying.
Mrs. Gay B.
Rawlins, widow of Edward A. Rawlins of Mecklenburg County, Virginia, gained a
very public hearing in the Richmond paper, The
Campaign reprinted in the Abingdon Weekly
Virginian on 10 July 1884. In the reprinting this article was called
“Sherman’s Witness,” oddly, since Mrs. Rawlins was Senator Vance’s witness, not
Sherman’s. The subhead begins: “The performance of Wm. E. Sims--How he
converted the property of Another Person to his own Use.” She charged that
“some time during the year 1882 William E. Sims persuaded her to entrust him with
the key to her box” (in the Safe Deposit Company of Baltimore.” He had removed
20 bonds totally $500 each, she said, sold them, “and converted the money to
his own use.” Furthermore, a judge in North Carolina, accepting Sims’s claim to
be her attorney, turned over to him $1,395.32, which he diverted to his own
uses.
A special dispatch to the Boston Herald dated Washington, D. C., the day
before: “Mahone’s Revenge: The Virginia Boss Removes Col. Sims from His
Government Position.” After the “riot” Mahone had come to Washington that
winter “to direct the Danville investigation on the part of the Readjusters,”
thereby “relieving Mahone entirely.” Mahone made him sergeant-at-arms, but in
Chicago Sims announced his partisanship for James G. Blaine, not Chester A.
Arthur. Mahon read the Blaine delegates out of the Republican party, whereupon
“Sims told him to his face that he was a tyrant, and that no party could ever
hope for a permanent success which was led by bosses such as Mahone, who
allowed no liberty of either thought, speech or action on the part of their followers.”
Sims never had another occupation for long. This 19 April 1885
letter was written by another of Sims’s Yale friends, E. P. McKinny to S. E.
Baldwin: “I write to ask if you know any thing of the condition of Billy Sims.
He wrote to me a short time ago saying he was in need of temporary assistance
and giving me a brief history of his affair. He was driven out of Virginia by
political persecution after the Danville affair and lost his Law practice. He
has also become partially deaf and finds this a great obstacle to his gaining a
foothold in a new place. He took part in the Republican campaign and I infer
staked his all on the Expectation of Blaine's success. He is now out of
Employment, out of Means and doubtless out of friends. He says he is trying to
do some newspaper work but his deafness is against him yet he needs skillful
medical treatment. I hope you may be able to render him assistance in some way.
If you cannot do more will you write him a letter of Encouragement.”
Willy
hung on. For some time he worked as a bookkeeper in the Senate printing room. The
Baltimore Sun on 16 July 1885 said
that at the Republican convention he was shut down after he tried to challenge
Mahone: “Mr. Sims, of Pittsylvania, submitted a plan of party organization
giving the selection of the local committees to the people instead of Mahone’s
executive committee. The plan was submitted to the committee on resolutions,
which reported it adversely and in favor of the present plan.” The Sun said a colored delegate, A. W.
Harris, protested at “listening for eight hours to the wrangling of those he
had always believed his superiors, while none of his own race had spoken a
word, and he was tired of it.” The Alexandria Gazette on 23 July 1885 understood Harris to be “instigated” by
General Mahone to abuse Senator Riddleberger and Col. Sims,” but while doing
the abusing said something worth remembering: “whenever they saw a white man
constituting himself their champion, they should watch him.” Washington Post, 7 November 71889 introduced
Sims this way: Col. William E. Sims, a representative anti-Mahone Republican of the Danville
region of Virginia, returned to this city yesterday from his voting place at
Chatham, Pittsylvania county. Said Colonel Sims: “I am as you know an
anti-Mahone man of five years standing,” having not been with him in person
since early 1884--really, the Chicago convention.
Sims
told a horrific story of the election in Chatham. In the voting room he
witnessed the systematic suppression of votes by negroes. Miller Ragsdale, a
notorious card sharp, illegally opened the secret ballots: “ Runners were
posted outside to warn colored men that their ballots would be known and their
employment taken away if they voted the Republican ticket.” “No Republican
voter was allowed to vote who had been absent thirty days in the last twelve
months, although their homes and families were there . . . Colored voters who
had always lived and voted there were told that they had been transferred to
precincts twenty-five or thirty miles distant, although they protested that they
had never heard of the precinct and could not get there. Many were told that
their names were not registered, although they had heretofore always voted
there. The recently registered colored voters were all told that they did not
look like they were of age, and on their offers to prove their age they were
told they would not believe a negro on oath.” Such were “only a few of the many
outrages perpetrated,” Sims said. He concluded: “I have heard of and seen
election frauds before, but this far surpassed all my ideas on that subject. In
fact, it was no election at all. It was a grand farce under the form of law.”
Blaine
used his influence in 1890 to send Sims to Colon (then in Colombia) as consul.
When an employee read his personal mail Sims was furious, an may have
brandished an umbrella at him. Popham said that at Colon Sims’s “aggressive
nature got him in trouble more than once. Perhaps it is true that he “was
assaulted by three stalwart Jam[i]aca negroes,” but “was ready for them and
sent a couple of bullets into one assailant, whereupon the others fled.” He
died from an attack of cerebral meningitis (it is thought) in July 1891, and
was buried there far from Mississippi and Virginia, in the Mount Hope Cemetery.
He never changed--confrontational and reckless.
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