Copyright
2 July 2022 by Hershel Parker
Ch.
12
J. H.
Matthews, Liar, Slanderer, and Captain of a Murdering Crew: A True Story about
a Star Witness for the Freedmen’s Bureau in 1866. His Lies became History
Hershel
Parker
On 12
January 1866, J. H. Matthews, a twenty-three year old former Captain in the 66th
colored infantry, now a sub-commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau in
Mississippi, presented his superior, assistant commissioner Col. Samuel Thomas
with a disturbing report. Much of this report dealt with a slave sent on an
errand by his former master from Pike County to Amite County, Mississippi, late
in 1865, where he was abused. The second item was horrific: “I respectfully
invite your attention to a murder committed by one John H. McGee, some nine
months since” (that is, about April 1865) “which would challenge the world for
an equal in studied brutality, which was reported to me some time since, but
for want of facts I did not feel warranted in reporting before. The negro was
murdered, beheaded, skinned, and his skin nailed to the barn.” Matthews
concluded grimly that the condition of free blacks was becoming worse than
slavery and that the safety of the black race was in danger. In various
reprints, words were italicized: “The negro was murdered, beheaded, skinned,
and his skin nailed to the barn.”
What Matthews said
was false, but his accusation lives on in books, dissertations, and newspapers
and magazines. In his 2012 University of
North Carolina dissertation “What A Fall Was There” David Christopher Williard
on p. 174 said, “For gratuitous savagery, no incident matched that reported by
J. H. Matthews, a Freedman’s [that is, Freedmen’s] Bureau official stationed in
Amite County, Mississippi.” Even more recently, on 27 March 2015, Robert B.
Mitchell repeated the lies in the Washington
Post: “Congress also created
a Joint Committee on Reconstruction to investigate conditions in the former
Confederacy. The evidence gathered by the panel in early 1866 confirmed the
Radicals’ worst fears. Few locations seemed more dangerous for former slaves
than southern Mississippi. Capt. J.H. Matthews, assigned to the Freedmen’s
Bureau, told lawmakers that vigilantes in Amite and Pike counties whipped and
murdered former slaves. In a report to his superiors in the bureau, Matthews
told of one ex-slave being hanged and skinned. Outrages occurred elsewhere.”
Massachusetts
Senator George Boutwell, champion of the Freedmen’s Bureau (already ferociously
determined to impeach the new President, Andrew Johnson) read Matthews’s
report, probably as printed in the Congressional
Globe, and summoned him to Washington. James H. Matthews (I find the first
name in Fold3), the young sub-commissioner, was five feet eight and a half
inches tall, with a “fair” complexion, light eyes and dark hair, from Camanche
(so-spelled), Iowa. A student before he signed up in the U.S. Colored Troops in
December 1863, he had been “on duty in southern Mississippi since the 1st
of July last, either as provost marshal or sub-commissioner of the Freedmen’s
Bureau.” On 10 March 1866, Boutwell conducted a formal interrogation of
Matthews which was reported in the Congressional
Globe and quoted in many newspapers. A better witness was hard to imagine,
for Matthews told the zealot Boutwell just what he wanted to hear.
In
his travels through Pike and Amite counties and even into interior counties, Matthews
testified, he had decided that nine out of ten white men in southern
Mississippi had been “actively engaged in the rebellion.” Nine out of ten--he
had been toting up the numbers as he went. During 1865 in “ninety-nine cases
out of a hundred” the whites who had hired freedmen on contract had driven the
freemen off after harvest “without payment.” Amazing specificity: nine out of
ten! ninety-nine out of a hundred! In one “whole locality” the old system of
flogging was “practiced quite extensively” up through the end of 1865. Interfering
with the Bureau were “military organizations” participating “in very many of
these floggings and outrages.” Particularly during the Christmas holiday period
militiamen had patrolled the country, some with faces blackened, flogging and
otherwise maltreating the freedmen “and in some cases Union men.” Amite County,
Mississippi, was the worst. In one particular neighborhood, in Amite county,
almost the entire community,” he asserted, “must have been in this ‘black
cavalry’ organization, as they call it,” at least “thirty to forty able-bodied
men.” There had been “inhuman flogging,” in some cases up to “360 lashes”
merely because a negro had left his former master. Finally, on a trip Matthews
had made two months earlier, from Natchez to Vicksburg on the steamer Grey Eagle, wearing his uniform, he had
been “insulted and demeaned in every conceivable way by a party on board who claimed
to have been confederates.” In every conceivable way!
Matthew’s
superior, Col. Samuel Thomas, had taken much the same tone in 1865 in testimony
in Washington, but he took a
different tone in his general
order on 31 December 1865, where he was benignly paternalistic in addressing
blacks. He wanted to be sure blacks would not avoid making work contracts out
of fear that signing their name or mark might trap them back into slavery. He
wanted white magistrates to register all contracts and be sure the parties to
the contracts agreed on conditions and wages. The magistrates should keep in
mind “the extreme ignorance of the freedmen in all business or legal matters,
and explain, in a spirit of kindness, all the obligations that may come before
them for approval.” The magistrates were to be independent, but always aware
that the officers of the Freedmen’s Bureau would “not relax their vigilance in
watching the exercise of authority by the State officials.”
The
truth of conditions in Mississippi at the end of the war and under the new
Freedmen’s Bureau cannot be established from local or regional papers, as might
have happened in other times. Newspaper offices in the South had been casually
or quite deliberately destroyed by Union forces, thereby trashing history and the
present at the same time. Newspapers in Mississippi for 1865 and 1866 were few
and often survive only in scattered issues. I have not located Matthews’s
report dated 7 January 1866 in newspapers or official archives. The Jackson Clarion in the 23 January 1866 issue
refers to Matthews’s report which it had published in its previous issue, which
may not be extant. Toward the end of this paper, I quote two shocking documents
both based on what is apparently the only surviving account of the murder of a
distant cousin of mine, Alexander Benjamin Cook, by a troop of Colored Infantry
led by (imagine my astonishment at finding this) Captain J. H. Matthews.
Here
I do the best I can to reconstruct the story of what lay behind Captain Matthews’s
false accusations before Senator Boutwell, particularly those against John H.
McGehee (the proper spelling), a man wholly innocent of Matthews’s charge that
he had murdered a negro, beheaded him, and skinned him and nailed his skin to a
barn wall.
The
missing 22 January 1866 issue of the Clarion
contained an article entitled “A New War Upon the South,” a reprint of an
article from the Metropolitan Record.
That may not be the same article the Clarion
quotes in the 23 January issue, “portions of a report from the sub-Commissioner
of Freedmen, at Magnolia, on the New Orleans and Jackson Railroad, whose name
is Matthews.” What the Clarion prints is partly quotation and
partly paraphrase from the Metropolitan
Record printing of the “Report of the Joint Committee on
Reconstruction of the First Session Thirty-Ninth Congress, Government Printing
Office, Washington, 1866, Arkansas - Georgia - Mississippi - Alabama, pages
146-147.” On 23 January the
editor of the Clarion labeled
Matthews’s “atrocious calumnies” as “intended for Northern consumption, and to
serve as fuel to the flame of radical hatred to the South,” “radical” meaning
extreme abolitionists now become the party determined to punish the South. The
editor James J. Shannon promised to print any responses from the local people accused
by Matthews.
Shannon kept his
promise. On 14 February 1866, some whites in Amite County held a meeting which
the editor of the Jackson Clarion learned
of belatedly in one of its “exchanges” with other newspapers. Five men, John N.
Nessery, Van F. Swearingin, Thomas L. Moore, J. S. Reeves, and W. McKinson signed their
names, all vouching for what they wrote. (For convenience I refer to “Nessery’s
committee.”) They had examined Matthew’s charges one after the other and “showed
them up in their true character, so far as truth
could be predicated of them.” The Clarion
the next day printed the substance of the report of these Amite men, but an available
text is almost black on much of the extreme left margin. Clearly, the committee
understood that not everything Matthews said was entirely false. The men had
not previously heard of the abuse of the slave who came from Pike County on
business with the son of his former owner, but they checked the story and decided
it was substantially true. Their smoothed-over version is that after the negro
angered patrollers by arming himself one of them “under sudden exasperation
kicked him once or twice with little or no injury,” and the men ordered him out
of the neighborhood. “Once or twice” as evidence goes in the same category as
Matthews’s “nine out of ten.” The excuse for the heightened vigilance was, the committee
said, their apprehension of violence at the Christmas season. None of this is
self-explanatory to a modern reader, but the anxiety was real. Amite white
citizens in 1865 shared the great fear--spread throughout the South--that
during the holidays the former slaves would rise up in insurrection,
slaughtering whites. This phenomenon is well documented, notably by Dan T.
Carter in his August 1976 article in the Journal
of Southern History, “The Anatomy of Fear: The Christmas Day Insurrection
Scare of 1865” and by Steven Hahn in his 1997 “Extravagant Expectations” in Past & Present. The patrollers in
Amite County clearly did some serious injury to the negro described in
Matthews’s report, but the committee excused them on the grounds that they were
high strung out of the fear that had infected “sixty counties and a half dozen
parishes throughout the eleven states of the former Confederacy.”
Matthews’s next
charge was that “on Christmas day the militia gave the negroes a general
whipping.” This the committee called “wholly false.” Nor one negro was whipped
“by the militia or any one else,” as far as the neighbors could learn.
Matthews’s third
charge was that local men, Mr. Cain and Mr. Lumpkin, had aided the militia in
“most cruelly” whipping a negro woman on the Cain plantation. The committee did
its best to understand. Indisputably, the woman had struck a daughter of Mr.
Cain several times on the left arm with a “board” when Cain was not at home,
then she had left the premises. Cain wanted her back because she was under
contract to him; or perhaps (is this possible?) he thought his daughter
deserved to be whacked a few times. A week and a half after her return, several
relatives and friends of the daughter took the negro woman out of the Cain
house, without arousing Cain, “and administered to her a wholesome
castigation”—whipped her. “Wholesome” again goes in the “nine out of ten”
category. Nevertheless, she signed a contract for the new year and now declared
that she had “struck her last white woman with a board.” Greatly puzzled (what
did the “board” look like?), I am neither able to probe all the chicanery and
greed that infused the contract system nor to trace the subtleties of
black-white relationships in Amite County in 1866.
The fourth charge
was about Mr. Lumpkin’s having been “engaged” in the severe whipping of a negro
on his place. The committee labeled this “also wholly false” and quotes the old
“Squire” Lumpkin as saying, “Matthews is a vile slanderer.” (The
echo may be coincidental, but “Squire” Lumpkin may carry a witty reminder of
Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer,”
which had often been staged in Mississippi before the war.)
The members of the
committee took Matthews’s fifth charge as designed to “bring down on this
community the curse of a military force in our midst.” That is, such an
accusation might let zealots like Boutwell turn southern Mississippi into
occupied territory longer than some other areas. This inflammatory accusation was
that John H. MeGehee (the committee used the correct spelling) had killed a
negro some nine months earlier in “studied brutality.” They used italics: “The negro was murdered, skinned, and his
skin nailed to a barn.” Then they said soberly: “The utter falsity of such
a charge against John H. McGehee, would excite the mirth of his acquaintances,
if it were not apparent that deep seated malignity was at the bottom of it,
affecting not only him but this community.” The
committee found that Matthews had visited John H. McGehee hostilely--something
left out of his testimony in Washington. The committee fount “reason to believe
that the said Matthews, in a recent march through this neighborhood with a
regiment of colored infantry, attempted to get possession of Mr. John H.
McGehee, with the evident intention of taking his life.” How “recent is
unspecified,” but in 1865 most likely. Colored soldiers had colluded with white
officers, searching McGehee’s house, the whites distracting him by engaging in
conversation at length. One of his former slaves had given McGehee warning, and
he left the house after dark before some of the whites and blacks returned late
at night to capture him. In this case, Matthews on the basis of rumor had fixed
his suspicions upon John H. McGehee as the murderer and skinner of a negro and
apparently tried to seize him. The committee was sure that Matthews would have
harmed McGehee if he had been caught. Their suspicions were justified, as I have
found.
Nessery and his
fellows would have put the raid on John McGehee’s house in more horrified terms
if they had known of an unjustified rampaging raid Matthews had conducted with
his colored infantry near Vicksburg early in 1865. A white planter, a distant Cook
cousin of mine, was slaughtered. I give the whole article (the only such full document
I have been able to find) in the New Orleans Picayune for 21 March 1865, from the lost Vicksburg Herald of 17 March:
SHOCKING AFFAIR.
A MISSISSIPPI PLANTER MURDERED BY NEGRO
SOLDIERS.
On the 14th inst., Mr. A. B. Cook, a planter
living near Vicksburg, was murdered by pickets stationed near his dwelling. The
Herald gives the following account of the affair:
It appears from a report of Capt. Matthews, of the 66th
U. S. C. I., that he (Capt. Matthews,) was sent out with 30 enlisted men under
orders from headquarters 1st Brigade of Colored Troops, to “look up”
deserters supposed to be employed upon plantations in that vicinity. On
arriving at Mr. Cook’s plantation, he posted guards around the negro quarters,
and began to search them. He sent out two corporals and six men as a picket on
the railroad within one hundred yards of the house. A few minutes afterwards
Mr. A. B. Cook, who was in the city during the day, came riding home on
horseback.
The Captain’s report says that Mr. Cook drew a pistol and
fired (?) [sic] upon the picket, whereupon the guards fired upon him—a ball
taking effect just above the hip and passing through the body. Mr. Cook fell
from his horse when two men were sent forward to examine the body.
The report says that no arms of any kind were found with Mr.
Cook, which is no doubt true. From Mr. Cook’s well known character as a
peaceable and well disposed citizen, it is correct to say that he never carried
or had occasion to have arms in his possession. Mr. Cook was immediately taken
to his house, where he was found to be dangerously wounded, and fears are
entertained that he will not recover.
From other parties who have visited Mr. Cook, we learn that
the guard fired upon him without calling out halt! This we deem to be correct
as it accords with Mr. Cook’s statement. It is also stated that the guards
entered the house and acted in a manner very insulting to its inmates, besides
committing other outrages.
Major Davis, of the 5t United States Colored Artillery, who
is in command of a detachment of that regiment repairing the railroad at Mount
Albon, as soon as he heard of the affair, sent in a request to the commanding
officer of the brigade to have the matter fully investigated at once, which
will probably place this disgraceful affair in its proper light, and the crime
upon the proper party.
The New Orleans Times-Democrat on 21 March 1865 published a
shorter item from the lost Herald on
“Shooting a Planter”: “We learn by the Vicksburg Herald of the 17th that A. B.
Cook was shot upon his own plantation, about seven miles from Vicksburg, on the
14th, by some pickets who were guarding the road, while a search was
going on for deserters. Captain Matthews, commanding the searching detachment,
says Mr. Cook first fired at the pickets, but no arms were found upon him. He
was dangerously wounded. One account is that he was fired at before he was
challenged. The affair is to be investigated.” This account of the ambushing of
Alexander Benjamin Cook has never been used by a historian. It establishes J.
H. Matthews’s deadly incompetence and malice as a Captain of Colored Infantry. I
have not been able to find any record of Major Davis having investigated the
murder and other crimes committed by Matthews’s men. How many hours Cook survived
is not recorded.
Perhaps inspired by
the fact that Matthews got away with this murder, unpunished, members of the 52nd
U. S. C. I. shortly afterwards left camp and raided the house of Cook’s
brother, Jared Reece Cook, and shot him and his wife. Cook crawled out of sight
and survived (and later recuperated at his murdered brother’s house), but his
wife suffered through the night in the presence of her children before dying.
Nine of the looters and murderers were hanged, and Minerva Cook’s story entered
popular history. A. B. Cook, murdered by Capt. Matthews’s men, has been
forgotten. Matthews himself may have put it out of his mind during his shining
hours in Washington D. C. as he told George Boutwell what Boutwell wanted to
hear, in the process besmirching the totally innocent John H. McGehee, whom he
and his raiding party might well have killed (as he and his Colored Infantry “searching
detachment” had killed A. B. Cook) if McGehee had not escaped from his house before
the raiders returned late at night.
Without too much
trouble, apparently, just a little inquiring around, the members of the
committee figured out that the wildest story Matthews had heard was not about
John H. McGehee, not at all. He might have killed the wholly innocent John
McGehee. Matthews had “doubtless manufactured this accusation against John H.
McGehee out of the following well known facts,” which the committee gave “without
extenuation”:
Some time in the spring of 1863, a negro man
belonging to Mr. Samuel McGehee was hung by a portion of the Arkansas regiment
stationed in the vicinity. The negro had been caught by the cavalry near
Clinton, La., making his way to the Federal lines. Federal authorities were
then beginning to augment their army with negroes, and the unanimous voice of
Confederate soldiers was to put to death every negro man found [moving?--short
word lost on margin] into their lines. This negro was one of hundreds of
victims to this policy. After he was hung Dr. Thomas McGehee, a young
gentleman, living in sight of the place where he was executed, asked for and
obtained from the soldiers the body of the negro for examination. In doing this he was obeying the natural and
commendable inquisitiveness of the medical student. The next day, the knife, in
the hands of Dr. Thomas McGehee, and his father, Dr. Wm. C. McGehee, a
physician of age, character and standing in this neighborhood, did the work of
dissecting the dead body; and it was subjected to such scrutiny as is usual in
such cases. Parts of the body were also preserved, as is customary, and
afterwards subjected to such tests as they supposed would lead to knowledge in
the healing art. Nothing more was done with the body than is usual in such
cases: he was skinned only as such subjects are usually skinned, and for the
usual purposes, and with the usual privacy. Nothing is more common than
physicians cutting up, boiling, drying and preserving parts of the human body;
and if these are facts upon which Matthews has manufactured the story against
John H. McGehee, we scarcely know which he deserves most, pity for his imbecile
weakness, or contempt for his great ignorance. We distinctly state that John H.
McGehee was not connected with this transaction in any way, was not present at
the hanging or dissection, and is as innocent of any crime connected with it as
his false accuser.
The committee of neighbors put the killing of Samuel McGehee’s
former slave in the proper historical context. At the end of May 1863 John L.
Logan moved his Confederate 11th Arkansas Infantry to Clinton,
Louisiana. Confederate troops in mid 1863 in Louisiana and Mississippi would
have been obeying orders when they killed armed blacks, whether in uniform or
not. The Amite committee, remembering what it had been like three years
earlier, assigned the killing of Samuel McGehee’s slave to this period, some
time in the spring of 1863.
The McGehees familiar
to Nessery’s committee were substantial planters (and had been slaveholders), and
some were medical men as well. Samuel (1790-12 October 1866) was a second
cousin of mine, a few times removed. The Doctor William C. McGehee (1812-1873)
was a third cousin of mine a few times removed. Young Thomas Wren McGehee
(1841-1925) was my third cousin yet another time removed. Obviously none of these
educated, genteel men, owners of many slaves as they had been, would have
murdered, beheaded, and skinned a man for sadistic fun or out of malice in 1863
or even (Matthews’s date) 1864. And yet according to the neighboring five men the
elderly doctor and his young son had innocently done, for good reasons, part of
what Matthews said the John H. McGehee had done.
The war had
interrupted the excellent course of medical training that young Thomas was receiving.
The Biographical and Historical Memoirs
of Mississippi (1891) gives this account:
He received a fair education at Zion Hill. He then studied
medicine under his father for a few years, and took his first course of
lectures in the Cincinnati Eclectic School of Medicine in the winter of
1859-60. In the early part of the latter year he continued his studies with his
father, and during the summer also practiced some. In the winter of 1860-61 he
went to New Orleans, and after taking a course of lectures, left that
institution to enter the army, becoming a member of the Seventh Mississippi infantry,
in which he was elected regimental surgeon, in which capacity he served during
his service. He, however, entered the ranks, and participated in the battle of
Shiloh, where, during the second day’s fight, he received seven gunshot wounds,
one leg being badly broken, and resulted in his permanent disability from
further service. He returned home, put himself under his father’s treatment,
and owing to the unwearied devotion and care of the latter, the leg was saved.
Thomas had been a young doctor forced into medical practice before
he had completed his training. Bravely or recklessly, he had married on June
14, 1861, and in due course had children, the first born in wartime, in 1862. The
shortage of Confederate medical men was such that he was made regimental
surgeon: they used the available man with the best qualifications. In 1863, suffering
severely from all his wounds at Shiloh, although his father had helped him save
his damaged leg, Thomas saw a chance to be tutored in an anatomy lesson
supervised by his father. He could no longer attend a medical school, but
despite his injuries he could continue his education in anatomy at home, under
his father, as he recovered. Knowing that an armed black man had been shot, he
asked Logan’s men for a corpse that he might practice dissection on. He may or
may not have known that the body might have been that of a former slave of his
great uncle.
Thomas wanted a body
so his father could work with him in some out-building such as a barn, in
privacy, father tutoring son in anatomy in order to make him a better surgeon
later on, in war or peace. Whenever young Thomas needed to change position or
even prop himself up, his father was there with “unwearied devotion.” If
delicate flaying was to be part of the training (as it was at Edinburgh), then
fixing skin to an inside wall of the barn might well have been the best way of
studying it. Young Thomas’s asking for the body to work on was a gesture of
hope. His education interrupted, Thomas was doing his best to keep alive the
skills he had already learned while acquiring new knowledge and skills, and
preserving his ambition to continue his studies again, some day, formally. As
it happened, after the war ended he was able to return to New Orleans, to
resume his medical studies, and 6 March 1866, he graduated. Then, in 1866, while
his neighbors were defending his cousin John H. McGehee by telling the true
story of the professional dissection of a black man, he returned home, where he
began a long and successful practice in Amite or elsewhere in the area.
Judging from what I
have learned, many people in 1863 were falsely accused of atrocities while
others committed atrocities that may never have been recorded or may have been reported
in a document which no longer survives or has not been discovered. J. H. Matthews was an opportunistic self-promoter.
As a Captain in the Colored Infantry he led an out-of-control troop of colored
infantry in the unpunished murder of Alexander Benjamin Cook. Still a Captain
but also a sub-administrator in the Freedmen’s Bureau, he plotted with predatory
white and black soldiers to conduct a late night raid to capture John H.
McGehee—a raid all too reminiscent of his murderous raid on Cook. This is my
attempt to set one story as straight as the surviving documents allow. I do not
delude myself: once a lie enters history and is repeated for more than a
century and a half, there is probably no stopping it.
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