F265 .C9S9 I '•^. ^ • '^^ ^-^ ^'^ wm ■ ,**' 'oi:^ 0*0 •m In presenting this Series of intensely interesting SEA ROMANCES to tlie Reading Com- munity, the Publisher has tlie satisfaction of knowing that they are The very best Books of their kind ever issued. LIST OF BOOKS COMPKISING THE ''RED ITVOLF" SERIES. Iffo. 1. Red Wolf, the Pirate. Xliis voluniP opens ^vitSi iHcideuts ot-ciiirBnu: at ti ITB usque rside. Tl»e Masked Strauffcr appears— The Vaiikee Prsvalees- uiiiJ King «f llic Waves— Tlie ISe.iutiful Sisters described— Tliroiig'IioEit tbe bo»!i^ tlie Wol£ sBioxvs liis fang's. Nom 2. The Black Bi?otliers. A Sail in Si^Ut— Tlie Crinsson MraiBs^Eit :— Kousjlii WeatUer— The Voiins^ Pilot Appears — Tl»e Queen of tJic Mist— !!>eatt» on the Altar Steps— Waiting: for Death on the Raft. Wo. 3m The Fii?ate^s Bride. Harry's Stratasreni— Red WislTs BSesoO ve -Sf.irtSing Discoveries— The IPirate Ship Blown Up— Bed Wolf t'ondenmed-Horriblc CrneJties of the Indians— The Ship on Fire. Wo. 4. The Mysterious Cavern. Escape*^roni the Pirates— A Ni&rht in the Coavesit— The Terrible Confession— The Mysterious Kxccutioner. Wo. 5. Jamha^ the Blach Pirate. The Plot— The Meed of Blood— She B^iiciC;^ Evius; doom* tUt.- V .mkec Privateer to Death —The Brave IJeutenant -Meeting oi" (he Black Panther and the Albatros. Wo. 6. The Black Kaj IVJffht on the AVaters— A Treachcron« Tib. Si D he Bandit and his Char^e-The L,onc Bousc-Mystcrious Affair— The AccEdcist en the VaultQ. Wo. 7. Biana^ the Sorceress. The Strange Missive— The Duel by Moonltght 'ahe Maroon Olrl-An Old Salt— The Terrible's Cabin— Strange Scenes at the AVcdding of Estelle The (Captain of the Schooner proves himself to be a Villajsj. Wo. 8. The Ocean Monarch- Clever Trick-Fearful Trap-CbarSey Prei n!>t(at.:l inf.. the Ifawning Gulf !-Ashley in his Cell-A Strange Scene-Death of the Black Pirate-Conclusion. Each of the above books is handsomely printed, on nice white paper froiw clear type, and has a very brilliantly colored cover. PRICE TWENTY-FIVE CENTS EACH. Shiffle copies sent to any address, in the United States, or Canada, postage f>ee. on reretp* V" ^vtail price. (Twentii-five cints ) Address R. M. DeWITT, Publisher, as Rose St.. bet^vecn Duane and Frankfort si«j., ]\eAV York. ^^ THE SWAMP OUTLAWS: OE, THE . NORTH CAROLINA BANDITS. Being a Complete History of THE MODERN ROB ROYS AND ROBIN HOODS. NEW-YORK: ROBERT M. DE WITT, PUBLISHER, NO. 33 ROSE STREET, {Between Duane and Frankfort Streets) INTRODUCTION. ^' 4 » ■» The homely old adage that there is nothing " new under the sun " is constantly verified bj^ actual facts occuring eveiy daj'. The accounts handed down by tradition * of "the bold archer Robin Hood" keeping whole counties on the alert, and disputing the right to kill fat bucks in the i-oyal forest with the boldest barons, have seemed al- most too daring for belief, yet liere we liave— in thisenliglitened period of the world's historj'— a wliole State of the most powerful and most enlightened nation of the earth successfully defied by a band ot less than a dozen Outlaws. Individual hunters essay to track and capture them, and their bones bleach in tlie forest paths for their temerity, troops— regular and irregular — attempt their subjugation, and are ingloriously repelled by these dauntles, law-defying Bandits. Not only are they secure in their swamjjy retreats. They boldly make raids into the neighboring country, and release prisoners from the constituted authorities. They fearlessly enter towns and deliberately carry off the municipal archives and county treasures — removing by main force immense Herring safes, whose strength baffled violence and whose ingeuiously-constructed locks no skill could open. The most fertile brain never conjured up such deeds of courage, cruelty and skill- ful military stratagem as have marked tlie career of these undaunted men, in whose veins the blood of the Indian and Negro is strangely commingled. Indeed, it seems as if the white Frankenstein by his crimes has raised a fearful monster that will not down at the bidding of his affrighted master. Strange, tmlikely and almost Incredible as the deeds may appear which crimson the sluggish swamp streams of the Old North State, and which are graphically narrated in the following pages,they ma^y be relied on as perfectly authentic. They almost superflu- rcej!^id world- reaching enterprises of this great journal. At a time when the proprietor of the Hei-ald is supporting a corps of brave men in the dense tropical forests of Africa, seeking to reach and save Livingstone (a task, by the way, that his own government has shrank from); wlien his correspondents are interviewing Bismarck and compar- ing notes with Gladstone — he finds time and means to send an intelligent corres- pondent right into the heart of the country where the red bowie-knife and death- dealing rifles of the Swamp Outlaws are carrying dismay and terror into the hearts of men, women and children. Indeed, there appears to be nothing too small for its microscopic or too large for its telescopic vision. A Baxter street light or a Sedan conflict alike find in the ubiqitous columns of the New York Herald " a local habi- tation and a name," ;. (vii.) ** are collected from the colmnns of tJi^ ^ew Tork\Eerald. It seems al ous, at this late day, to say anything m praise of tne w&nderfui re^soun ■ Ut~ ~ "-'w^v THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. Among the Lowerys, the Outlaw Ter- rors of North Carolina — Tuscarora, Senegal and Caucasian Blood Ming- ling in Their Veins — History of their Campaign — A Bloody Nine Years" Record— Sixteen Murders, — TInee Hundred Robberies, and Not a Man Lost to tlie Band — Hopeless Condi- tion of Affairs— The Old North State Dismayed and Baffled — Grapliic Pen Pictuie of Henry Berry Lowery, tlie Outlaw Chief — Portraits of " Boss" Strong, Steve Lowery. Aiidrew Strong and Tom Lowery. Shoe Hekl, N. C, Feb. 27, 1872. The bandit of North Carolina, Henry Berry Lowery, standing in perfect dis- dain of the authorities of the State, as well as of the tederal troops, it was deemed necessary to send a. Herald correspondent to study the situation. TO THE SEAT OF WAR. 1 left Washington City Thursday night and reported myself next day at noon in the office of Governor Walker of Vir- ginia. The handsomest man in the South was seated at the table, signing bills, in the old Confederate Supreme Court room. His beautiful, grayish black mustache, healthy gray hair, clear skin and smiling expression, every inch a lord lieutenant in the oldest of our shires, grew soberer as he said : — " Lowery ? Why a captain of the Vir- ginia militia applied to me yesterday to obtain permission for himself and forty men to hunt that fellow in the swamps of North Cjirolina. Lowery must be a good deal of a character." [a As I looked over the files of the Rich- mond newspapers, and their intimate exchanges of the tobacco, rice and tar region, I found the question of the day to be — Lowery. He was at once the Nat Turner, the Osceola, and the Rob Roy MacGregor of the South. With mingled ardor and anxiety, desire and trepidation, I pushed on by the Weldon road to Wilmington, the largest town of the State, where Lowery had once been confined in prison. There was there but a single question — Lowery. The Wilmington papers called tlie Robeson county people cowards for not cleaning him out. The Robeson county paper hurled back the insinuation, but hurled nothing else at Lowery. The State government got its share of the blame, and the State Adjutant General replied in a card that the militia and volunteers had no pluck on the occasion when he had tried them. Five men had mas- tered a Commonwealth. THE SCARE ON THE ROAD. An instance of the deep sense of ap- prehension created by these bandits in all southeastern Carolina is afforded by a dream which Colonel W. H. Barnard, editor of the Wilmington Star, related to me. The Colonel's paper is eighty miles from the scene of outlawry : " I dreamed the other night/' said he, " that I was riding up the Rutherford Railroad, and came to Moss Neck sta- tion, where the outlaws frequently ap- •1 10 THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. pear. I thought a yellow fellow, Indian- looking, came to the car door and said, ' Everybody can pass but Barnard ! I want him !' This was Henry Berry Lowery. Then I dreamed they took me into some kind of torture place, and poked guns at me and tantalized me." The newspapers were, however, making political capital out of the Low- ery gang, instead of calling upon an honorable and united State sentiment to suppress the scandal. The democratic pnpers cried, " Black Ku Klux !" and the republican papers retorted by asking where was the valor of the white Ku Klux, who could flog a thousand peace- ful men, but dared not meet five outlaws iu arms. "The democrats," said one Robeson county man, in my room, " as soon as they upset the republicans in Robeson county started to annihilate Scuffle-town and its vote by terror. They have been beaten in it. That chap Lowery has made them a laughing stock. He ought to be killed, but they skulk out of his reach." CRIME WITHOUT A COMPASS. Mayor Martin, of Wilmington, Presi- dent of the Rutherford Railway, which passes through Scuffle-town and the land of the outlaws, relates an incident, piti- ful at least to Northern ears, of the ignorance of these robbers, and the hope- less fight Ihey are making within the limits of all that is available to them. Adjutant General Gorham, who directed the late ignominious campaign against the Lowery band — where, by current re- ports, the main victories gained were over the mulatto women, the soldiery driving the husbands forth to insult and debauch their wives — said that Henry Berry Lowery, when asked to withdraw from the State, replied : — " Robeson county is the only I.iin] I know. I can hardly read, and do not know where to go if I leave these woods and swamps, where I was raised. If J can get safe conduct and pardon I will go anywhere. I will join the United States Army and fight the Indians. But these people will not let me leave alive, and I do not mean to enter any jail again. I will never give up my gun." Mayor Martin's solution for the diffi- cillty is for the United States to declare martial law over the whole Congression- al district in which Robeson county stawds, and make a systematic search with regular troops for these outlaws. He says that when they first took to their excursions they were camparitively sober, but of late have taken to drinking, and about four weeks ago they all, ex- cept their leader, got drunk at Ed. Smith's store. Moss Neck, and lay there all night ! " Whiskey," said Mayor Martin, " will reduce them in time; but they are very careful whose liquor they drink in these days. Henry Berry Lowery left his flask hanging an a fence a few weeks ago, and when he returned to get it he made everybody at the sta- tion drink with him." TO LUMBERTON. Early in the morning, Monday, Feb- ruary 26, I took the train for Lumber- ton, and from the forward car to the tail the freight was Lowery. In the second class carriage, escorted by two sheriffs, MacMillan and Brown, of Robeson county, was Pop Oxendine — the previ- ous said to be his literal name — brother of Henderson Oxendine, the only one of the outlaws who was ever brought to trial and hanged. He was chained to a regular army soldier, who had recently murdered a negro at Scuffletown, and he was a remarkable looking mulatto, with a yellowish olive skin, good feature.s, and THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. l^ a handsome, appealing, unreliable, unin- terpretable pair of blaclc eyes. So good looking a mulatto man, with such a complexion, I had not seen. Like the rest, he had the Tuscarora Indian blood in him, with the duplicity of the mixed races where the white blood predomi- nates. He was ironed fust to the seat and looked at me with a look inquisitive, pitiful, evasive and ingenuous by turns. If I should describe the man by the words nearest my idea I should call hini a negro-Indian gypsy. The passengers were apprehensive and inquisitive together, wanting to know all about Lowery and dreading to tncounter him. The fullest, and often very intelligent, explanations were made to me, and every facility was tendered to assist me to form accurate conclusions as to the characters in the band. Colonel S. L. Fremont, General Superintendent of the Rutherford Rail- way, will permit no passenger carrying arms for the purpose of shooting Lowery to ride on his trains, as he fears that such permission will endanger the safety of the railway. Lowery could toss a train off almost any day, but he seems to hold a superstitious respect for the United States mails. A few months ago a man by the name of Marsden announced that he meant to travel up and down the road as a detective and kill Lowery on sight. To put him to the test Lowery and all the band appeared with cocked shot- guns at Moss Neck station, and stood at a respectable, yet furtive, "present arms," while the braggart, for such he was, crawled under the car seat. Lowery offered $100 reward to anybody who would tell him whether Marden or Marsden was on the train, as he meant to follow the fellow up the road but he would not cross the platform himself. The conductors and engineers say that there is perfect safety on the trains, although none know when t-he outlaw leader may take offence against the com- pany or its officers. ' LUMBERTON IN COURT WEEK. The Rutherford Railway traverses the counties of the southern tier of North ^^ Carolina, passing few towns of ti>«...V^ magnitude, Imt built generally through ' the pitch pine woods, whose white boles, stripped a few feet from the ground and notched to provoke the flow of the sap and to catch it, resemble the intermin- able tombstones of a woodland burial ground. Swamps intersect the woods, and the resinous-looking waters of many creeks and canals alternate with deserted rice fields, the skeletons of old turpentine distilleries, the stubble of ragged cotton plantations, some oc- casional weather-blackened shanties, and now and then a sawmill or a pile of newly hewn timber. Flat, humid, almost uninhabited, is the traveller's first impression of the country. But there is a speck of light and life at Abbottsville, the home of ex- United States Senator Abbott, who has built up the ** Cape Fear Building Com- pany," to supply ready made houses to the people of his adopted State, and whose private residence, of yellow frame, is next to the large mill and branch railway of the enterprise. After five hours ride we came to the weather-blackened, unpainted town of Lumberton, on the flowing Lumber River, a branch of the Pedee. Lumberton is the seat of Robeson county, the stamping ground of Lowery's band. With one exception — and that disputable as the act of the band — no murder has been committed by the Lowerys beyond the lines of 12 THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. this county. It contains, by the census of 1870, 3,042 men above the age of twenty -one. By the census of 1850, the last pre- ceeding census available at this point of view, it contained 039 white* unubhi to read, and had at that time 1,171 free negroes, or more than even the popu- lous county in whicli Wilmington stands, and quintuple the free negroes popuhition of the aclj;xcent counties. Sculflftown a few miles distant from Lumbcrton was one of the largest free negro settlements in the United States before the war against slavei-y, and it was besides, an almost immemorial free negro settlement. This being Court week, the town of Lumberton was full of Scuffletownrrs, I r„i j,, sh.ipe, but too thin to look" very and I saw and talked with Siiich.ir | ^^j.^^,._ His face slopes from the cheek The incidents of these excursions will appear hereafter. Let me now address myself to describing the outlaws. DESCRIPTION OF THE OUTLAWS. HENUY BERRY LOWERY. Henry Berry Lowery, the leader of the most formidable band of outlaws, considering the.smallness of its numbers, that has been known in this country, is 'of mixed Tuscar^ra, mulatto and white blood, twenty-six years of age, five feet nine in';hes high and weighing about 150 poimds. * He has straight black hair, like an Iiidi 'U : a dark goatee, and a beard grace- Lowery, elder brother of the outlaws, and also with "Dick" Ox(Midine, who married the only sister of Henry Berry Lowery, and who keeps a barroom in the Court House viUage. Besides, 1 visited the scene cf the latest exploit^ of the Lowerys, the cap- ture of the most valuable safe in the town, as well as the county official safe, which they contemptuously rejected on the road. I also visited the jail where Hender- son Oxendine's gallows stood, and the bones to the tip of his goatee, so as to give him the Southern American con- lour of physiognomy ; but it is lighted with eyes of a different color — eyes of a grayish hazel — at times appearing light blue, with a drop of brown in them, but in agitation dilating, darkening, and, alth"Ugh never quite losing the appear* anc • of a smile, } et in action it is a »mile of devilish Uiiture. His forehead is good and his face and expression refined — remarkably so, con- sidering his mixed race, want of educa- court room, where a noisy crier made L.;,,„ ,i„j long career of lawlessness. proclamation from the open window, and the garrulous Judge Clarke was delivering a charge upon the enormities of these banditti, crying meantime into his pocket handkerchief. Besides, I talked with a great number of the leading citizens, who, to a man, were of Scotch descent, and at noon next day, resuming the train, I visited Scufllctown and slept with courteous entertainers at Shoe Heel, in the heart of the pine forest. A scar of crescent shape and black color lies in the skin below his left eye, said to have been made by an iron pot tailing upon him when a child. His Voice is sweet and pleasant, and in his manner there is nothing self- iniportaut or swaggering. He is not tilkative, listens quietly, and searches out whoever is speaking to him like a man illiterate in all books save the two gr>-at books of nature, xind human nature above all. THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. is MRS. HENRY LOWERY The color of the skin is of a whitish yellow sort, witlt an admixture of cop- per — such a skin as, for the nature of its components, is in color indescribable, there being no negro blood in it except that of a far remote generation of mu- latto, and the Indian still apparent. It is enough to say of this skin that it seems to suffer little change by heat or cold, exposure or sickness, good house- ing or wild weather. The very relatives of white men killed by Henry Berry Lowery admitted to me that " He is one of the handsomest mulattoes you ever saw." LOWERY PHYSICALLY. To match this face the outlaw's bodjr is of mixed strength and beauty. Il is wpII knit, wiry, straight in the shoulders and limbs, without a physical flaw in it, and as one said to me who had known him well since childhood, ** He is like a trap ball, elastic all over." lie h;i3 feet which would be notice- able anywhire, pointed and with arch- ing instep, so that he can wear a very shapely boot, and his extremities, like his features indicate nothing of the negro. A good chest, long bones, supple, ness, proportion, make his walk aud form pleasing to see. 14 THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. He is negligent about his dress, but his clothes become him and never dis- parage him. People have told me that he wore fine clothes ; but, when questioned to the point of re-examination, admitted that he had nothing on but a woolen blouse and trousers and a black wide-brimmed, stiff woolen hat, HIS ARMS. To see this trim youth as he appears whenever seen on the highroads or the piney forest bypath-' or as often at the railway stations of Moss Neck, Eureka, Bole's Store, or Red Banks, is to see young Mars bearing about an arsenal. His equipment might appear prepos- terous if we do not consider, the pecu- liar circumstances of his warfare — out- lawed by the state of North Carolina, without a reliable base of supplies, and compelled to carry arms and charges in them enough to encounter a large body of men or stand a long campaign. A belt around his waist accom- modates five six-barrelled revolvers — long shooters. Fiom this belt a shoulder strap passes up and supports behind, slinging fiishion, a Spencer rifle, which carries eight car- tridges, and it is now generally alleged that he has replaced this with a Henry rifle, carrying double the former num- ber of cartridges, while, successively, man after man of the band, by some mysterious agency, becomes possessed of u Spencer rifle. In addition to these forty or forty-eight charges Lowery carries a long-bladed knife and a large flask of whiskey— the latter because he fears to be poisoned by promiscuous neighborhood drinking. He can run like a deer, swim, stand ■weeks of exposure in the swamps and orest, walk day and nighty and take sleep by little snatches which, in a few days, would tire out white or negro. Although a tippler, he was never known to be drunk — a fact not to be justly asserted t^ his confederates. ^"^ Brought suddenly at bay he is •' observed to wear that light, fiendish, en. joying smile, which shows a nature at its depths savage, predatory and fond of blood. The war he has waged for the past nine years, within a region of twelve or fifteen milrs square, against county, State, Confederate and United States authorities, alternately or unitedly is justification for the terror apparent in the faces of all the white people within those limits. Lowery's band gives more concern to the Carolinas than did Carletou's Legion ninety years ago. LOWERY AS A BRIGAND LEADER. "What is the meaning of this?" said I to "Parson" Sinclair — the fighting parson of Luinberton — "How can this fellow, with a handful of boys and illi- lerate men, put to flight a society only recently used to warfare and full of ac- complished soldiers ? Explain it," "Lowery," answered Sinclair, "is really one of those remarltable execu- tive spirits that arises now and then in a raw community, without advantages other than nature gave him. He has passions, but no weaknesses, and his eye is on every point at once. He has impressed that whole negro society with his power and influence. They fear and admire him. He asserts his super- iority over all these whites just as well. No man who stands face to face with him can resist his quiet will, and assur- ance and his searching eye. Without fear, without hope, defying society, he is the only man we have any knowledge , of down here who can play his part. THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. 15 Upon my word, I believe if he had lived ao:es ai^o he would have been a William the Conqueror. He reminds me of nobody but Rub Roy." HIS BLOOD AND INCLINATIONS. The three natures of white, Indian and neirro are, however, seen at inter- vals to come forward in this outlaw's nature. The negro trace is in his love of rude music. He is a banjo player, and when the periodical hunt for him is done he re- pairs to some one of the huts in SciitHe- town and plays to the dancing of the mulatto girls and his companions by the hour, his belt of arms unslung and thrown at his feet, the peaceable part of the audience taking part with mixed wonder delight and apprehension. Sev- eral times tliis banjo has nearly betrayed him to his pursuers. Sheriff MacMillan described himself and posse once lying oat all night in the swamp and timber around Lowery's cabin to wait for him to come forth at d;iy light. *' And," said he, " that banjo was just everlastingly thrumming, and we could hear the laughter and Juba-beating nearly the whole night long." THE MULATTO SARDANAPALUS. The licentiousness of Lowery is suffi- cient to be noticeable, but while it never engages him to the exclusion of vigi- lance and activity, it also shows what may be traced in some degree to his Indian nature — the using of women as an auxiliary to war and plunder. He has debauched a number of his prisoners with the mulatto girls of Scuffletown, and the charms of these yel- low-tinted syrens broke up the morale of the late campaign in force against the outlaws, while, as some allege, the discovery of the Detective ,''handers ' S j plan to capture Lowery was made by a girl in Lowery's interest with whom . ganders spent his time. Lowery has said, and laughed over it, that he devised at a critical point in a truce between the contending parties that a bevy of the prettiest and frailest beauties in Scuffletown should come up and be introduced to one of the officers high m command. After that the Marc Antony in ques. tion laid down his sword, and gave practical evidence that the hostility of races is not so great as the slavery statesmen alleged. The indifference of the Indian to the loan of his squaws finds some parallel in Lowery's tactics. He himself is the Don Juan of Scuffletown ; but he sleeps on his arms* and will go into the swamps for weeks without repining. Women have been employed to give him up; but they either repent or he discovers their pur- pose by intuitive sagacity. THE OUTLAWS WIFE. The white society around him gave Henry Berry Lowery a lesson in self- schooling and sacrifice so far as women were concerned. After the murders of Barnes and Harris — offences which, some think, ought to have been included in the proclamation of oblivion for offences committed by both sides before the close of the war — Lowery stood up by the side of Rhody Strong, the most beautiful mulatto of Scuffletown, to be married. Aware of the engagement and the oc- casion, the Sherifi*s posse, with cruel de- liberation, surrounded the house till the ceremony was over, and then rushed in 16 THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. and took the outlawed husband from the side uf his wife. He was iftnoved to Lumberton jail, and thfi) sent still further away to Columbus county jail; but he broke throiij^h the bars, cscapi'd to the woods with the irons on his wrists, and made his way to his bride. They have three children, the fruit of their stolen and rudely interrupted interviews. A GLIMPSE AT MADAMS LOWERY. As I rode down on the train from Shoe Heel lo Lumberton, on the 28Lh of F« bruary, the conductor. Colonel Morrison, came to me and said :— " if you want to ^ee Henry Berry Lowery's wife you can find her in the forward second-class car." She iiad taken the train at Red Banks for Moss Neck — points between which the whole band of outlaws frequently ride on the freight trains — and at the latter notable station 1 saw her descend with her baby and walk off down the road in the woods and stop there among the tall pilch pines, as if waiting for somebody. The baby — the last heir of outlawry — began to cry as she left the train, and she said, mother-fashinii : " No, no, no, I wouldn't cry, when 1 had been so good all day !" This woman is the sister of two of the five remaining outlaws and wife of the third. The whites call her satirically, " the queen of Scuffletown ;" but she ap- peared to be a meek, pretty-eyed rather shrinking girl, of a very light color^ poorly dressed. She wore many brass rings, with cheap rep stones in them, on her small hands, and a dark green plaid dress of muslin delaine, which just revealed her new black morocco " store " shoes. A yellowish muslin or calico hood, with a long cape, covered her head, and there was nothing beside that I remember ex- cept a shawl of bright colors, much worn. It was sad enough and prosnic enouf^h to see this small v\'oman with her baby in her arms, carrying it along, while the husband and father, covered with the blood of fifteen murders, roamed the woods and swamps like a Seminole. Rhody Lowery is said not to be a constant wife, but to follow the current example of Scuffletown. Other persons, the negroes notably, deny this. A more persevering newspaper coi- respondent might settle the issue. LOWERY AS A TERROKIZER. Mr. Hayes, a republican, of Shoe Heel, whose knowledge of the Scuffle- town settlement is very good and whose practical Northern mind is not likely to be deceived, told me that Lowery, among h's numerous warnings served upon people, slopped one white man on the road and said, '' You are taking ad vantage of my circumstances and ab. sence to be familiar with my family. Now, you better pack up and get out of this county." The man lost no time in doing as re- quested ; for Henry Berry Lowery generally warns before he kills. In the matter of honesty in the observance of a promise or a treaty the people most robbed and outraged by this bandit ac- knowledge his Indian scrupulousness, " Mr. MacNair," he said to one of his white neighbors, -.thorn he had robbed twenty times, " i want you to gear up and go to Lu'nberton, where they have put my wife in jail for no crime but be- cause she is my wife ; that ain't her fault, and they can't make it so. You people won't let me work to get my living, and I have got to take it from THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. 17 you ; but, God knows, she'd like to see me inuivc my own bread. You go to Lumbcrton and tell the Sheriff and Cuunty G\»inniissioners that if they don't let her out of that j sil Til retaliate on the white women of Burnt Swamp Township. Some of them shall come to the swamp with me if she is kept in the jail, because they can't get me." LOWERY AS A TRUCE MAKER. Lowe I- V then named a point on the road whei-e he would meet MacNuir, and he met him instead three miles nearer to Lumberton. The feeling ot terror in llio county may be understood when, without more delay, Rhody Lowery was set free. While ill the region several persons urged mo to go out and talk to Lowery Sheriff i\facMillan and Mr. Brown, the son-in-law of the murdered SheiilT King — stran;i.e as it may appear for county officers, and I mention it to show the superstition inspired by this brigand — offered to obtain an interview for me with the wholo gang by' sending out some member of the Lo\^ry family to negotiate. My faith was not eq^ual to theirs, and I declined. " Do you suppose that fellow would givomo a talk?" I said to Calvin Black a merchant of Shoo Heel. " Yes, if ho could bo made to under- stand that your intentions wi-re pacific. The larg-e reward now out for him, amounting, for himself and party, to about forty-five thousand dollars, taken dead or alive, makes him apprehensive of assassination. But if he were to promise not to injure you, you could go any- where to see him with perfect iin- punity." This was general testimony. Rev. Mr. MacDiermid, editor of the Rohesonian, the county organ, who does his duty by unintimidated denunciation Lowery has sent me word that I had better be cautious now I write about him, but 1 believe that I could go to see him to-day, for he appreciates his con- sequence in the role he has assunu d." 1 noticed, however, that nobody did go to see him, and I fdlowed that high and general example. PRICE OF LOWERY'S HEAD. Since Jefferson Davis' flight and the reward put upon his head there has been no American criminal — probably none previously in all the history of the coun- try for (jffences at common law — who has been dignified with the amount of money offered for Lowery's overtaking. If it should appear in the North this sketch is too strong, I point to this re- ward and to the fact that this outlaw has already made a pergonal and bloody campaign against society longer than the whole revolutionary war. Osceola, OT* Pouel (vvho was an im- mediate mixture of Indian and negi'o blood, iin 1 who foutiht over a larjrer region), gave out in a much shorter space ofresistance. HIS CHIVALRY. Two things are to be chronicled in this man's favor, and I make them on the universal testimony of everybody in this region. He has never committed arson or rape or offered to insult females. While entering private houses neai ly every day his worst act is to drive the family into some one apartment andbartlicm there while the house is cooly and leisurely ransacked. A few weeks ago an aged lady, Mrs. MacNeil and her daughter, were shot with duck shot by somebody taking the name of Lowery's band, doubtless the party accused ; but the wounding of the of this outlaw, said : — " Henry Berry woman was not foreseen by the brigands, 18 THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. and they fired at old MacNeil, whose family of sons and son-in-law had become particul;irly offensive to them. MacNiMl told me the circumstances as follows : — He had been repeatedly robbed, his son-in-law Taylor killed, his sons ordered to leave the country, and now almost entirely alone, he was com- pelled to do a good deal of his own watching and to wait upon himself. Standing by his smokehouse one moonlight night he saw two men enter the yard and one of them walked straight up to the smokehouse door and began to pry it open. Partly concealed in the shadow of the fence, MacNeil cried — "Who is that?" No answer. He repeated the interrogation and the reply was — ■ " What in the hell is that your busi- ness V The Scotch blood of the old man mounted to his face, notwithstanding his long and not wholly undeserved mis- fortunes, and he went into his dwelling for his gun. His wife and his daughter bepouglit him not to venture out, and, on his refusal, followed him to the door. He called again : — " Who's that at my smokehouse?' The answer was : — " Lowery's band, God damn you." And in a minute a charge of buckshot poured in at the door, putting, as Mac- Neil said, sixteen buckshot in a place no bigger than his hat from the spot where he was expected to have been, and strik- ing his wife in the thigh, riddling her dress, and hitting his daughter in the shoulder and breast, so that the shot came out of her back. Both women will recover, although sorely wounded. The cause of this long persecution of MacNeil I will give in another letter. RUMORS AND JNCIDENTS. Colonel Wisehart, an old Confederate officer and a dauntless man, living near Moss Neck, has shot at Lowery several times, but always missed him, and jnce surrounded with a posse the outlaw's cabin, but he got off so mysteriously that they allege to this day that he had an underground passage. Lowery is said to whip his wife some- times and to have tiireatened also to shoot her, on the occasions of her re- proving his long absences. Some time ago she came, according to rumor, to a store at Lumberton and remarked : — *• Berry put his gun in my face to-day and said he meant to kill me, and 1 told him to fire it off — not to stop for me." The negroes charge that these stories are without foundation, and Deputy Sheriff Brown admitted to me : — , " Lowery will never leave this country alive." « Why ?" " Because he loves his wife and will not leave her whereabouts." I give some further rumors for what they are worth : — Henry B. Lowery is not a good shot except at close quarters — so says Boss Strong. The Boss remarked at Moss Neck one day : — " Henry is nothing much with that Spencer rifle, nor his shotgun, neither; but Steve Lowery can shoot the tail off a coon." Some of the Scuffietown negroes say differently, and give marvellous in- stances of the accuracy of eye and nerve of both Henry Berry and the majority of the gang. He certainly generally kills when he does shoot. Here is an instance of his coolness. A Mr. McRae who lives on the limits of Robeson county removed from the immediate country of the bandits, got off with other passengers at Moss Neck a fevf weeks ago, and said aloud familiary — " Where does this rascal, Lowery, THE SWAMP- OUTLAWS. 19 keep himself? I'd like to see the villain." A whitish negro, standing near by, unarmed, said, coolly — " Well, sir, if you'll step this way I'll show him to you." This was Tom Lowery. The astonish- ed pasenger was put in a moment in the presence of a sombre • looking mu- latto fellow wilh straight hair,' whose body was girt all round with pistols, and who carried two guns besides. " This is Henry Barry Lowery," said the other outlaw. " Yes," said Henry, " and we always ask our friends to take a drink with us." The passenger saw the significant bland look on both the half-breed faces, and he said, with all available assur- ance : — " I'll take the drink if you'll let me pay for it." " Oh, yes, we always expect our friends to treat us." PICTURE OF " SWARTHY INDIAN STEVE." The brigand of the Lowery gang, in appearance, is Steve, whose carriage is that of a New York rough, and whose thick, black, straight hair, thin, black moustache, goatte and very lowering countenance, set with blackish hazel eyes, give him the character his deeds bear out of a robber and murderer of the Murrel stamp. He is the most perfect Indian of the party, superadded to the vagabond. He is five feet nine inches high, thick set, round shouldered, heavy and of power- ful strength, with long arms, a heavy mouth, and that brusque, aggressive, impudent manner, which befits the high- wayman stopping his man. Steve Lowery required no great provocation to take to the swamps and prowl around the country by day and night. He is mentioned third on the list in the Governor's proclamation, figuring there at $500, or half the price of Henry Berry Lowry's head; is the oldest of the gang, said to be thirty-one, and his im- perious temper, insatiable love of rob- bery and insubordination to h s younger brother, the leader, once involved him in a quarrel, where he was shot in the leg. Steve has the worst countenance of any man in the gang. His swarthy, dark brown comple.xion, thin visage and quick speecli make him feared by any unlucky enemy who may fall into the hands of the outlaws. When Landers, the detective, was condemned to death and Tom Lowery slunk away, unwilling to see blood, Steve Lowery raised his gun and filled the unfortunate prisoner with a charge of buckshot. Steve has been concerned in nearly every robbery and shooting, perhaps every one, committed by this party. SKETCH OF BOSS STRONG. The youngest of the gang and the most trusted and inseparable companion of Henry Berry Lowery is his boy brother-in-law. Boss Strong, aged no more than twenty. The Strongs are said to have been derived from a white man of that name, who came from Western Carolina to Scuffletown and took up with one of the Lowery women. In this generation they are legitimate. Boss Strong is nearly white ; his dark, short cut hair has a reddish tinge and is slightly curling; a thick down appears on his lip and temples, butptberwise he is beardless; he has that dull, blueish eye frequently seen among the Scuffle-, tonians, and is taciturn. In repose his countenance is mild and pleasing ; but the demon is always near at hand when Henry Berry Lowery 20 THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. desires it to appear, and then the heavy blacit eye-bi-ows of the boy, which nearly meet over the bi-idge of his nose, give hinti a «lo he was not yet entirely given up to outlawry, and the republican politicians and advisers of the people of Scuffletown felt some sympathy for him and sought to save him. These looked upon the murders of Harris and Barnes as partly justified, in the former case by the monstrous character of the man, in the latter by motives of selfdefcnce and the collisions of the races in the war. The old slaveholding element of the county, however, unaware of the scourge or humanity they were creating and the talent as an outlaw leader he was to de- velop, resolved to have and to hang him at all hazards. They found that he was to be married to Rhody Strong, the most beautiful girl in Scuffletown, and, surrounding the house on the night of the ceremony, they took him from the side of his bride — one A. J. MoNair accomplishing his capture. The jail at Lumberton was then in ashes, and the county without a safe receptacle for THE YOUNG MURDERER AND BRIDE- GROOM, then only twenty years of age. He was therefore conveyed in irons to the jail at Whitesville, Columbus county, twenty- nine miles from Lumberton. Here the desperate young husband filed his way out of the grated iron window bars, es- caped to the woods, and made his way back to his wife. This was in 1866. In the interrupted enjoyment of fami- ly happiness Henry Berry Lowery ex- pressed a desire to quit the swamps and return to his carpenter's trade and peace- ful society. His republican friends la- bored again in his behalf, and they re- solved to plead the proclamation of ob- livion for offences committed during the war, issued by the federal department commanders throughout the South. Dr. QQ THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. Thomas, Freedrnen's Bureau Agent at Scuffletown, arranged with the Sheriff, B. A. Howell, that if Lowery treely gave himself up, he should be well fed, not be put in irons, and protected from the mob. United States troops at that time were quartered throughout North Carolina and the rebel element was dis- couraged. The Sheriff and Dr. Thomas called for Lowery at his own cabin, near Asbury church, and brought him into Lumberton in a buggy. A new jail had meantime (1808) been erected in the outskirts of the town, constructed en- tirely of hewed timber, Lowery was for a time tractable, quiet and confiding in his advisers. The SULLEN HOSTILITY OF THE TOWNS- PEOPLE— natural enough, no doubt, toward the muiderer of two citizens — soon began to develop, and complaints were made that Lowery had three meals a day, and not, two, like the other prisoners. He was fed fi-om the outside by a shoemaker who also acted as jailer, and this good treatment, added to reports of his proud and unintimidated bearing, led to a public cry that he ought to bo ironed and put on hard fare. It is charged also — and the story was told to me by three different persons living widely apart — that some of the towns-people, hearing of the line of defence to be assumed for to prisoner, had resolved to drag him tromjuil and drown him in the river at the foot of the jail-yard hill. At any rate Lowery grew suspicious and uneasy, and perhaps chafed at con. finement. One evening, as the jailer appnared with his food, he presented r. knife and a cocked repeater, and said : — " Look here, I'm tired of this. Open that door and stand aside. If you leave the place for fifteen minutes you will bo Bhot as you come out!" He then walked out of the jail, turned down the river bank, avoiding the town stopped at a house and helped himself to some crackers, and, crossing the bridge, was never again seen in Lumber- ton. THE BAD CHARACTER, COMING OUT. From that day to this he has led the precarious life of a hunted man and rob- ber, killing sometimes for plunder, sometimes for revenge, sometimes for defence. He has refused to trust any person except those who by bloodshed put themselves out of the pale of society like himself, and he has collected a pack of murderers whom he absolutely com- mands, and who have finally diminished to five, the rest being sent off ars un- worthy, useless or uncongenial " My band is big enough," he said last week. "They are all true men and I could not be as safe with more. We mean to live as long as we can, to kill anybody who hunts us, from the Sheriff down, and at last, if we must die, to die game." To another person he said. " We are not allowed to get our living peace- ably and we must take it from others. We don't kill anybody but the Ku Klux," A steady moral decline and growmg atrocity has been remarked of Henry Berry Lowery, but he has committed no outrages on women and no arsons. His confidence and sense of lonely and des- perate independence have become more marked. A cool, murderous humor has gained upon him, and he is a trifle fond of his distinction. Frequent exhibitions of magnanimity distinguish his bloody course and he has learned to arrogate to himself a protectorate over the inter- ests of the mulatoes, which they return by a sort of hero-worship. There is not, probably, a negro in Scuffletown who would betray him, and his prowess is a THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. 27 household word in every black family I ONLY A TOOTH AT EACFI SIDE. in sea-board Carolina. His consistent and UNFLINCHING METHOD OP WARFARE has gained him awe amon^^ the whites, nmounting nearly to respect, and by a certain integrity in word and perform- ance he has come to deal with all ihe community as an absolute and yet not wilful dictator. Like the rattlesnake of the swamps, he sends warning before ho kills, and only in robbery is remorseless and sudden. The family is divided in verdict upon his conduct. Patrick, Sinclair and Purdy, who are Methodists, speak pretty much in these terms (quoted from Pat- rick Lowery, who is a preacher) : — " My brother Harry had provocation — the same all of us had — when they killed my old father. But he has got to be a bad man, and I pray the Lord to remove hiin from this world, if he only repent first." AN ANTE-BELLUM EPISODE. A good deal of the above is probably deceitful. The current opinion of Scuffletown is as follows, in the language of an aged colored wofnan at Shoe Heel. " Massa," she said, "Henry Berry Lowery aint gwying to kill nobody but them that wants to kill him. He's just a paying these white people back lor killing his old father, brothers and cous- ins. His old mother I knew right well, aud she says, " My boys aint doing right, but I can't help it ; I can only jiss pray for 'em. They wan't a brought up to do all this misery and lead this yer kind of life." " Massta," resumed Aunt Phoebe, " this used to be a dreful hard country for p()or niggers. Do you see iny teeth up yer, Massta ?" The old woman drew her lip back with her finger and showed the empty gum, vith "My massta — his name's MacQueen (or MacQuade) — knocked 'em all out wid an oak stick. God knows I worked for him wid all my might ; but, you see, he wasakeepin'black women and his wife gwine to leave him, he wanted me to say she had black men, and I'd a died first ! He whipped me and beat mo, and at last he struck me wid a stick over de mouf, and, Massta, I jess put up my hand up to catch de blood and all de teef dropp ed in de palm of my hand. Oh, dis was a hard country, and Henry Be.rry Lowery's jess a payin' 'em back. He's only a payin' 'em back! It's better days fur de brack people now. Massta, he's jess de king o' dis country." This is a perfectly literal version of a Christian old woman's talk. Bandit and robber as he is, and bloodstained with many murders, this Lowery's crimes scarcely take relief from the blotched background of an intolerant social con- dition, where the image of God was out- raged by slavery through two hundred years of bleeding, suffering and submit- ting. The black Nemesis is up, playing the Ku Klux for himself, and for many a coming generation the housewives of North Carolina will frighten the chil- dren with tales of Lowery's band. Still, the fellow is a cold-blooded, malignant, murderous being, without defenders even among republicans. MURDER OF SHERIFF REUBEN KINO. The first great crime succeeding the killing of Brant Harris was committed in the motive of house robbery upon a highly esteemed old citizen of advanced years, the Sheriff of Robeson count^ Reuben King. This happened on the night of January 23, 1869. Henry Berry Lowery has since said that he had no intention of uccomplish- 98 THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. ing the death of this gentleman, "but thrtt, being poor, and aware that King had a quantity ot' money in his possession, the" boys" wanted to rob him, and had no notion of putting him out of the •world. After being shot King lingered till the 13Lh of March, and his antcm..rtem statements, added to the oonfes.sion of Henderson Oxendino, tine of the rob- bers, give us a complete history of the tragedy. Lowery alleges that he whipped Goorge Applewhite, the negro who fired the fatal shot ; bnt this may be moie cunning, and, besides, the ban- dits have charged the crime upon John Dial, the State's witness. The rufliatis, hearing tliat King was possessed of considerable money, came down from Scnfflett^wn and hid in a thiclvet near his house, which w;is two miles south of Lnml)erton. There ihey built a fire to warm themselves, and, bts ing only partly armed, they cut blud- geons from t'lie swamp and trimmed them. IDial remarked, "The old Sheriff may resist us !" " If lie does," exclaimed Boss Strong, "we'll kill him 1" Tliey blackened their Faces to disguise their identity and race more securely, and then, to the number of eight or nine moved, with the stealth of Indi..ns, up to the dwelling of the hale old gentle man. Sheriff King was reading the report of a recent Baptist Convention beside his fii-eplace. In another part of the room — the parlor — Edward Ward, one of his neighbors, who had come to pass the night., was reading a book. Sud- -•denly the door was pushed open and A ROW OF BLACKENED, HIDEOUS FACES appeared over the threshold, while a j gun barrel was pointed at King, and »n I imperative voice said : — " Surrender I" The man Ward sat as if paralyzed. The Sheriff, roused at the summons from his book, scarcely understood the situa- tion. By a fatal, instinctive movcmeni he leaped up and seized the menacing firearm, and bent it down toward the floor. Henry Berry Lowery, the hold- er of it, struggled at the buLt and bent it up again, and in the wrestle the piece was discharged into the parlor floor, burnlnj; and scarring the boards there. By th s time the closeness of the en- counter and the Slieriffs stiff and pi)w- erful hold upon the gun had brought his body around so that his back was toward the open door. At this instant a pistol, at close quarters, wr.s fired into the old man's head from behind, and he fell to the floor in agony. The robb<'rs im- mediately, and without show of resis- tance, fired at EJwurd Ward and felled him with a wound which lasted for months. The females of the fimily, rushed in and stood horrified sj>ectaiors of the misery of the two men. The blackened and excited faces of the robbers struck them wiih additional terror. "Water!" gasped the bleeding Sheriff* " I am burning up ! For God's sake give me some water 1" "God damn you!" cried one of the villains, " what did you fight for? "YOU SHAN'T HAVE WATER.- It was a scene of indescribable bloodi- ness—the screaming women, menaced by the resolute robbers; the groaning victims, the disguised faces of the fienda and their lust for plunder paramount. No wonder that Henry Berry Lowery, ashamed of the remembrance, threatens to shoot any man who says he took part in the performance. THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. f» THE HOME - GUARD DEMORALIZED. After a little time one of the women was allowed to go and get water, while the rest were locked up under guard. Then the robbers ransacked the house? opened trunk after trunk and took some of them out in the yard to investigate their contents. They finally made their escape laden with plunder, and it was not until John Dial pointed out the place wliere they had cut clubs in the swamp and built the fire that the whole matter was exposed. Dial has now been in jail at Whitesville two years. Two of the person."} concerned in this murder have been condemned and escaped, two we in jail and one was hanged. THE ONLY BANDIT HANGED. Henderson Oxendine was finally arrested at the house of his brother-in- law, George Applewhite, the negro, while waiting for Mrs. Applewhite to be confined. The authorities, aware of the condition of the culprit's sister, stayed around the house all night and got in at daylight, supposing Applewhite to be there. They at once arrested Ilenrler- son Oxendine and Pop Oxendine. The persons named as present at the murder of Sheriff King, in 1869, were John Dial, Stephen Lowery, George Apple- white, Henderson Oxendine, and C:il\ in Oxendine. These at least were in the so THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. custody of the officers at one time, while Henry Berry Lowery, Boss Strong and others also present, were at largie. Steve Lowery and George Applewhite were condemned to be hanged, when, prematurely, the majority of the pris- oners, among them the condemned, dug their way out of the prison. When Henderson Orendine was hanged there were about thirty-five per- sons present in the »ma1I jail yard, bu^ the tree tops overlooking the enclosure were filled with whites and negroes. The gallows was of the rudest con- truction, built against the high picket fence of the jail, with a trap, which was held up by a rope passing over the short beam secured, behind the upright joist by a wooden clamp, so that it could be severed by the blow ot a hatchet. Oxendine's mother came to the jail the morning of the execution and condoled with her boy. He was a thin-jawed, columnar-necked wild, whitish mulatto, with ears set back like a keen dog's, a good forehead, pierc- ing, almost staring round eyes, with dark, barbaric lights in them, a nose eminent for its alert nostril, and a long ish, near bottomed chin, set with thin, dirty ish beard, and a mouth of African suggestion. Pride and stoicism were in his expres- sion, and negro-like, he sung a couple of hymns on the gallows out of the Baptist collection. His executioner was a Northern rough named Marden, or Marsden, a waif from somewhere, who resembled a sailor's boarding liouse runner, and was of lower estate than the Lowerys. This is one of the beings who has rung himself in on the people of Robeson county, ostensibly as a detec- tive. He pinioned Oxendine and then severed the supporting rope with the hatchet. No attempt at rescue was made. THE MURDER OF OWEN C. NORMENT. ■ The first murder committed in cold blood for revenge was upon the person of Owen C. Norment, who lived four miles from the hut of Henry Berry Lowery and eight miles from Red Banks station. His house was also three miles from Alfordsville, on the road to Lumberton, and not far from the dwelling of a white desperado called Zach McLaughlin. Aaron Swamp, a feeder of Back Swamp, was near Nor- ment's house. This murder was com- mitted by Zach McLaughlin, by order of Henry Berry Lowery, who, with his command, was posted near. Itr was the first white man killed by the gang since 1864, a lapse of more than five years. Norment was an overbearing ex- slaveholder, who had shot a man dead at Charlotte, N. C, for calling him a liar, and had been tried for it and ac- quitted. He had very black hair, whiskers and eyes, and weighed aboilt one hundred and sixty-five pounds. His ofllence was raising the people against the Lowerys, charging robberies to them and threatening them. Hearing loud noises, as of the stir- ring up of domestic animals, the rat- tling of wagon chains, «fec., outside of his house. Norment walked out in the dusk of a Saturday evening and asked who was present. Hearing somebody moving in the dusk, he called for his wife to give him his gun. Almost immediately a gun was fired only ten feet from Norment and he was shattered in the lower members and elsewhere with shot and ball. He fell instantly, and being removed to the house, a servant was despatched for a physician. THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. 31 Dr. Dick obeyed the summons, and being driven in a mule buggy by one Bridgers, they were greeted, one mile from Norment's house, with a discharge of firearms, which killed the mule and forced the driver and the doctor to take to tlie woods. The same night Archie Graham, a neighbor, was shot and dangerously wounded, and also Ben MacMillan, an- other obnoxious personage. The house of a Mr. Jackson, on the Elizabeth road, was also fired into and his dog killed. The robbers held carnival that night and resumed the reign of terror. Norment's leg was amputated, but the doctor was nervous, as the wounds were fatal, for he died on Monday morning, thirty-six hours after being shot, leaving a wife and three children. THE MURDER OF JOE THOMPSONS SLAVE. The Lowerys had once been slave- holders, and Henry Berry always refers to the full blacks as " niggers." A good while prior to the time of the killing of O. C. Norment the Lowery gang shot dead a negro belonging to one Joe Thompson, who lived at Ashpole Swamp, sixteen miles from Lumberton, and was a neighbor of Henry Berry Lowery. The band had robbed Thompson's house of bedclothing, &c., and, thinking of some story relative to their doings which the negro had told, they shot him dead at his own shanty. Then they ordered Thompson's driver to gear up the family carriage and drive them home, which he did, and they left the vehicle not far from Henry Berry Lowery's house. • „.,,[ ..,.., This must have been about at the close of the war, for the driver narrates that three United States deserters or escaped prisoners were then with the mulatto robbers. THE FATE OF ZAUH M'LAUGHLIN. This Zach McLaughlin, who is alleged to have inflicted the mortal wound upon Mr. Norment, met with a fate justly deserved. He was a native of Scotland, and one of a low, sensual, heathenish type of white men who consorted with nuiiattoes and spent his low energies in seducing mulatto girls and women. Hciving laid out in the swamps with the Strongs, Lowerys and Applewhite, lie picked up an almost equally renegade white by the name of Biggs, when, one evening, the twain met at a mulatto shanty upon an identical object — nam.ely a mulatto syren. As they quitted the place to go home McLaughlin, who was drinking deeply of villanous liquor, said to Biggs, with an oath : — " I'll kill you right here unless you join with me and rob the smokehouses and shanties of some of these fretdmen. We want you with our crowd, and you've got to come or die." Biggs says in his statement that he went, out of the fear of death, and helped in the robberies of that night, but privately made up his mind to escape from McLaughlin or lo kill him, McLaughlin finally grew very drunk, and insisted upon building a fire at a place in the swamp and resting there. These two men were now quite sep- arated Irom other companionship, and when the fire was lighted, McLaughlin, who possessed a monopoly of the arms, compelled Biggs to sleep between him- self and the burning brands, while he, meantime, bent akimbo over the burn- ing blaze and dozed. Biggs began to test the sleeping out- 33 THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. oast by rolling and moving, and finally by jostling McLaughlin. Remembering his description of his pistols, and in particular one pistol, which was described as NEVER MISSING FIRE. Biggs manage 1 to pull it from the sheath in McLaughlin's belt. With this he shot the white outlaw through and through and then slipced away into the swamp to see if he moved. The drunken beast being perfectly dead, Bi^gs made his way to Lutnber- ton and related the story. Search was made, and o|i the spot of ground indi- cated, beside the extinguished fire, the bloody carcass of McLaughlin was dis- covered. Just previous to this affair — Novem- ber 9, 1871— McLaughlin and Tom Lowery had escaped from Lumberton jail by availing themselves of a loose iron bar and wrenching the grates off the jail windows. Biggs received $400 for his two shots into McLaughlin's body. He has figured in a siibordinate degree since that time as a volunteer to capture the outlaw chief. McLaughlin was altogether a meaner specimen of mankind than the Strongs and Lowerys. THE MURDER 07 STEVE DAVIS. On the 3d of October, . 1870, the Lowery band of outlaws appeared at the house of Angus Leach, near Floral College (female), and proceeded to seize a large quantity of native brandy, dis- tilled the;e for the fruit-grov/ing neigh- bors — some say brandy designed to to evade the revenue laws. Lowery 's band was alert and fond of strong drink, and they seized all the available vessels at hand — kegs, pitch- ers, pots and measures — to transport the liquor. Unwilling to despoil without inflict- ing pain, they struck old Angus Leach over the hip with a gun stock, disabling him, and a negro man, showing some solicitude for the fluid property, they tied up, whipped him with a wagon trace and slit his cars with a penknife. TIk liquor which they did not remove they destroyed bef )re the United States revenue officer could find it. Next night the persons who had placed their fruit, &c., for distillation at this place, started in pursuit of the fugitives. They found the whole party, very drunk, at George Applewhite's, between Red Banks and Plumer's station. Applewhite was an alert, thick-lipped deep-browed, woolly headed African, with a steadfast, brutal expression. Firing into the house the outlaws rushed out, well armed and spoiling for a fight. The neighbors wounded nearly every man of the party. Boss Strong was shot in the forehead Henderson Oxendine in the arm and George Applewhite in the thigh. Steve O. Davis, of Moore county, a fine young man and brave as youth dare be, rushed ahead of the party and forced the fighting in the swampy edge of tb« field where the outlaws were. Henry Berry Lowery took deliberate sight upon him and shot hiwi through the back of the head. He fell dead. THE MURDER OF CARLISLE. I possesss no data upon the murder of a Mr. Carlisle, who appears to hava been killed in the early part of the open and announced warfare, except the record that some of the bobtail followers of Lowery's band were accused of the crime. One " Shoemaker John,'* not proven guilty of the murder of Mr. Carlisle, received a sentence of ten years in tha State Penitentiary March 1, 1871, for THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. 33 burglary. Tie appeared to be glad of the opportunity to go safely to jail and to escapo, on the one hand, the mob, and on the other the Lowery gang. "DAL BAKER." In the fal! of 18GG Daniel or " Dal" Baker was shot in the leg while near Scuffletown, and his leg had to be amputated. Several other shootings occurred about this time, and the war being now well understood, the citizens, volunteers, militia and two companies of United States troops started in to make a set campaign against the outlaws. Here soiree atrocities were committed properly belonging to this narrative. Among the crimes of the Lowery band must be placed in legitimate con- text some of tiie more precipitate crimes committed against the mulatoes of Scufflftcjwn by their white neighbors. Eight negroes have been killed by the whites episodically in the hunts for the Lowerys. THE MURDER OF BEN BETH A. Ben Betha was a fall-blooded negro and a violent radical republican among his color, and he was used by the re- publican politicians to disseminate their doctrines and keep the color in Scuffle- town united in vote and sentimeait. He was what is called a praying politician, apt to be frenzied and loud in prayer and to exhort wildly, and he has ountiing enough to ring politics and the wrongs of the colored people into his prayers, so that he might have been said to pray the whole ticket. Last winter the democrats having full possession of the county, and the Ku Klux going barefaced and undisguisedly through Samson, Richmond and the adjoining counties, it was resolved to Tiake an example of this praying negro. The Coroner of the county, Robert Chaafin, got a party ostensibly to hunt for Lowery, he being the pretext for all Ku Klux operations in Robeson, and it is alleged that some members of the party came out of Battery A. United States artillery, tlien posted in and about Scuffletown. THE ROBESON COUNI'Y KU KLUX seldom wore disguises, the Lowery pre- text covering all their operations. With eighteen young ijien they start- ed towards Ben Betha's and the propo- sition was then sprung to take him out and kill him that night. Alarmed at this, Chaafiu, the Mao- Queens, and some of the more prudent turned back, afraid of Judge Russell's bench warrants. Malcolm MaeNeil now took command, and, at the head of ten men, marched up to Ben Betha's door between twelve and one o'clock, and rapping there, said to the negro as he appeand : — "Come out here? We want you.'' Tiie darky seemed aware by their reso. lute fices that his hour, long threatened, had come, and he turned j'bout and said to his vvife — " Ole woman, I specs they's gwine to lull me. Mebbe I'll never come back no mo'." *' Go and get your hat !" was the n<^x% order, and then the negro was lifted out of the shanty, and for one quarter of a mile there was no sign of his well known foot tracks. The fact was that he had been lifted on a horse and ridden off a quarter of a mile, so as to hide his traces. The tracks reappeared after a certain distance and the negro was never more heard of after that night, but was found dead, shot through and through. Judge Russell called upon the Grand Jury to indict every man of this party; but the Grand Jury, with that prove - 84 THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. bial Southern justice manifested towards the negro, IGNORED THE BILL, and then the Judge, with almost extra Jiidicial severity, put his written protest on the records of the Court, and denounced the action of the Grand Jury as outrageous. He then issued his bench warrant, and outlawed every man concerned in the killing of Betha, and they all ran out of the county. Malcolm MacNiel went to Baltimorej where he is a clerk in a store, and his brother has fled to Mississippi. This happened only a few months .ago. The negro waiter in the hotel at Lum- berton said to me in the presence of several white men of the town : — " They say they go up to Scuirletown to hunt Lowery ; but I never knew them to go there without killing some inno- cent person," THE MURDER OF HENRY REVELS. The murder of Henry Revels, a mu- latto boy, is another case in point. One night Dr. Smith, north of Scuffletown, came into that settlement and said he had been shot at on the road by somebody. Dr. Smith was a brother of Colonel Smith, the democratic Treasurer of the councy, and also a merchant at Shoe Heel. Putting their heads together the Shoe Heelers concluded that the fellow was Henry Revels, a likely mulatto, who had become a leading republican and was somewhat saucy around that region. He had been brought up by Hugh Johnson and made a body servant, so that he had a better appearance and more intelligence than the ordinary run of Scuffletowners. Fifteen or sixteen men on horseback and in buggies started out from Shoe Heel and rode six miles off, to Johnson's place, and took young Revels by force out of the house, telling him not to open his mouth. They carried him to the vicinity of Floral College, wiiere resided the Rev. Mr. Coble, chaplain on the occasion of the killing of old Allen Lowery. There Revels was shot dead and his carcass thrown behind a woodpile. The negroes found the carcass and called up the reverend divine to iJentify it. Coble, by this time not anxious to fall into the hands of Judge Russell, had the Coroner cited, but before a jury could be summoned some person concerned in the murder took the body and hid it in a mudhole, where tlie negroes ngain discovered it and the inquest w.ns held. Warrants were issued for these Ku KIux, and put in the hands ofJuhn Mac Niell, of Smith township, the constable there, but he failed to do his duty and all the parties ran away. THE OXENDINES SHOT AND WHIPPED. This MacNeil, although a constable and head of the militia in his township, was personally concerned in the outrage on the Oxendines. Hearing that Tom Lowery, one of the outlavvs, was dead, and wishing to prove it and discover the body, perhaps for the purpose of getting the reward, it was resolved to pay the Oxendines a visit. They went to the house of Jesse Oxendine, son of John, who was work- ing quietly at turpentine-making, and MacNiell said : — "Where is Tom Lowery buried?" John Oxendine replied that he did not know, and was not aware that he was dead. The constable's posse then put a strap around the neck of Oxendine, and, pass, ing it over the limb of a tree, hung him TH**. SWAMP OUTLAWS. 35 up but the mnn's weight broke the limb. They hung him to a second limb, but the sapling- bent toward the ground. Then they put the strap around his neck so th;it the ends hung over, and two men pulled it each way until the negro jirew black in the face. Nearly at the same time they shot another of the Oxendines, at his own gate-post through both hands. Bench warrents were issued, but they could not have them served by the Sheriff or the United States officers, and the fifteen or twenty men concerned in the outrage went out of the county for a while until the thing blew over. In this brutal way the hunt for Henry Berry L )wery goes on, and the people who cannot catch him revenge them gelves upon his neighbors. THE MURDER OF " MAKE' SANDERSON. The murder of Make Sanderson — Make meaning Malclom — would have been fully investigated had it not been for the fact that Tom Russell, a brother of the republican Judge Russell, was one of the party who murdered him and the Judge let the subject drop on that account. Make Sanderson was a mulatto of such light skin that before the war he enjoyed the general privilege of whites. He married a sister of Henderson Oxendine, who was afterwards hanged at Lumberton. Sanderson's wife bi ing also the daughter of John Oxendincj who was a half brother of old Allen Lowery, father of the Lowery gang. There appears to have been nothing charged against Make Sanderson except his relationship by marriage to the Lowery family. It is generally asserted that he was a harmlesss man, " bossed" by his wife. On one of the periodical futile raids for Henry Lowery the militia, or the volun- teers, among whom was Murdoch Mac- lain John Taylor, the Pursells, Tom Russell and others, arrested Make Sanderson and Andrew Strong, and, tying their wrists together so tightly that the blood came, marched them to the house of Mr. Inmaii, a republican and father of the boy afterwards KILLED BY THE LOWERYS. At In man's they got a plough line, and, tying the two more securely, then marched the pair to John Taylor's who lived about two miles from Moss Neck. As John Taylor had gone over to the house of his father-in-law, William C. MacNiell, the march was continued to that point, and here, in the dusk, the party stopped in MacNiell's lane, send- ing messages to and fro until dark. The object of this was to keep the crime within the circle and not put the MacNiells in danger of Henry Berry Lowery's vengeance. While the negroes were led together Andrew Strong, certain that he was going to be shot, gave his penknife to Ben Strickland, another negro, and told liim to give it to his wife, because it was all that he had in the world, and he should never see her again. This latter point came out as circunt)- stantial evidence,because afterwardsJohn Taylor attempted to deny that he ever had Andrew Strong in custody when he was brought before the Court for the murder of Make Sanderson. At dark both negroes were brought up to William C. MacNiellJs yard, and all the party of capturers took food oh the piazza, and while there John Taylor, a black-eyed, black-haired, bearded, reso- lute man and the most determined hunter that ever started against the Lowerys, walked out of the house upon the piazza. Both the negroes fell on their koees 36 THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. and held up their hands, bound as the) were, .•iiiJ cr'uul : — "O, j\Ir. Tavlur, save my life! Save my life !" A KU KLUX NERO. Taylor drew back with his foot half raised, as if about to liicli them, and he said, bitterly : — " If all the iniilatto blood in the coun- try Wiis in you two, and with one kick C could kick it out, 1 would send you all to hell together with my foot." The negroes were tlien taken across MacNuilTs dain, where John Taylor, within a fjw weeks, was to fall dead with the roof of liis head shot otf, and marched to the woods north of Moss Neck station, about one mile, until the party reached a sort of wild dell in the lonely country. John Taylor did not accompany the party, but the two MacNeills did, and :ilso Murdoch MacLain, Tom Russell, some of the Pursells and John Pater- son, of lliclitnoiid county. Andrevv Stronj;, who afterwards re- lated these iueidents to his lawyer, says that himself and Make Sanderson were now made to stand up together, asked if iney had anything to say, because they had now got to die, and with this their hats were pulled down over their eves witn an ostentation of pity. Mur- diKJh MacLain, who appeared to be the cnptain, then cried out : — "The shooting party will be Nos. 1, 2, and 3. Step out !" Andrew Strong asserts that No. 2 was "Sandy'' MacNeil, brother-in-law of John Taylor. Make Sanderson, who appeared per- ft-ctly resigned, asked if they would give him time to pray. After a little conterence the answer was : — " Yes, you may pray." Strong says that Make Sanderson then fell on his knees and made the most wonderful prayer that he ever heard in his life, the woods ringing with his loud, frenzied utterances as bespoke of his wife and children, and finally, negro fashion, he became so earnest that one of the fellows, who had a towel wrapped around his head — so had the majority — stepped up and hit Sander- son with the butt of a pistol, saying. "Shut up, you damned nigger! You shan't make any such noise as this if you are going to be shot !" AFTER THE PRAYER, there was some little delay among the assassins. Some ot them were evidently growing frightened between the prospects of vengeance from Sanderson's connections and Judffe Russell's Court. This interval Andrew Strong im- proved to loosen, little by little, the rope which tied his wrists to Sanderson's and suddenly getting his hand out he rushed into the woods and ran like a deer. They riddled the woods with buck- shot and ball, but never saw him again until he appeared against John Taylor and others in the Court at Lumberton, The remaining negro, who exhibited no desire to run, being a weak fellow without much stamina, was taken back to the mill dam by MacNiell's house,for the party had lost spirits and feared that the other negro would inform upon them. Here, it is said, they consulted with John Taylor, who said that indecision would do no good, and that now the negro had better be killed, since h'S companion would spread the tidings. "For two days Make Sanderson was not seen. John Taylor and all the band denied having encountered him at all, A negro found him below the mill tail, in the swamp place behind the mill. THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. 31 A SPY CAUGHT BY THE LOWERY BANDITS- shot in the abdomen with a great quantity of buckshot, and then again shot in the bade of the neck, in such close quarters that his hair was burned as by the flash of a pistol. The man looked as if he had first been shot and then endeavored to grope his way up out of the water, f -r the palms of his hands and fingers were torn. The body was deposited in MacNiell's mill and then hastily buried, but the Magistrate of Lurnberton, Parson Sin- clair, had it disinterred and the inquest held. The verdict was, " Shot by parties unknown to the jury." Magistrate Sinclair issued warrants for the leaders in this aflair, and sent them to prison without bail ; but Judge Russell, notwithstanding the high nature of his offence, released John Taylor on a bond of $500, supposedly because Tom Russell was in the transaction. When Henry Berry Lowery heard that John Taylor was out on |;500 bail, and that this was considered security enough for the murder of his relative, he said — "WELL, I WILL KILL JUHN TAYLOR there is now no lavv for us mulattoes." Three weeks afterwards, as John Tay. lor crossed the mill dam, coming down 36 THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. from the house of his father-in-law to the station, the gang of outlaws rose from the swamp within thirty yards of the place where Sanderson had been killed' and Henry Berry Lowery shot the skull and brains out of Taylor and then rob- bed him of his pocketbook Thus perished a man brave, zealous, active and a good citizen to all but negroes, whom, with the old-fashioned contempt for slaveholders, he regarded, in the language of Judge Taney, as " without rights that white men were bound to respect." Here my letter exceeds bounds, and I will try to finish up the bloody reca- pitulation in one more article. THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. ™ THE MULATTO CAPITAL. Origin of the Free Negro Settlement. First Ai»pc:ii;iiic'e of the Loweiy Hali-BiiH'ils The Old Tiiscarora Blood. Life and Feeding in Si-nffle- town. Caiif which picket is a log guard house for small t)ffenders. I stepped inside the jail yard, nobody objecting, to make a sketch of the gal- lows where Henderson Oxendine recent^ ly met his fate stoically, no rescue at- tempted, only the singing of a couple of voluntary hymns himself, negro fashion. The cord supporting the drop was not severed by the Sheriff, but a desperado from Ohio voluntarily assumed the office. While I sat within the sloping jail yard 1 heard a banjo " tumming" in the jail, and the negroes confined there were comparing with Pop Oxendine and the newly arrived offenders for Wilmington the relative quality of meals vouchsafed at the two prisons. The Lumber River, which flows into the Little Pedee, of South Carolina, and reaches the sea near Georgetown, is at THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. 41 this time of the year little wider than a city street, and of running water, but barely fordable and capable of carrying logs and rafts of lumber down the six score miles of its course. Hearing horrible imprecations made on the other side of the river, accom- panied by cries of " Give me my knife ! Yes, J'll cut his heart out ! I say gi'e me my knife ! My blood's been insult- ed. A man ot hono' can't live after he's been kicked out o' that court room !" (fee, &c., I was relieved to find that it was merely a negro lad, rej(jicing in his rights as a freeman, who wanted to escape, Lowery-fashion, from his mother and brother, and vent his whiskey courage upon somebody. There are many negroes, as 1 found, whose freedom takes ttie form of boast- ing and cursing. 1 failed to perceive in the attorneys and merchants of Lumberton any particular crudeness or inferiority. Judge Leech and several others were representative men of good sense, but of strong, unmanageable political and social prejudices, and they have suc- ceeded in segregating and solidifying the negro vote, so that the two faces may about be said to make the two political parties. Here, in the large and motley crowd assembled to attend Court, were to be seen the rival elements of this pro- vicial population. The whiles generally wore butternut, copperas-colored or gray home-spun stuff and large-rimmed, flat, stiff felt hats. Many of them were very ignorant and could not read, and looked upon the Court as the very judgment seat of Caesar. ** You just stand up and when your name is called you say ' guilty' and pay j your money," I heard a lawyer say to a boor. The boor looke 1 as if it required vast heroism to say even as much THE SCUFFLETOWNERS AT COURT. | Here, also, were the Scuffletown mu- lattoes — that curious race — imposed up- on for many generations by m.ister and slave, their husbands cuckolded their women debased and intimidated, their freedom not worthy of the name. Had Hobeson county exerted decent endeavors to protect these immemorial free people, when slavery was the law and the horrible radical had not yet subverted " the constitulion " which few of the folks who weep for it ever read, or, reading, respected — this (xisting outlawry would have been precluded. Scuffletown, over whose name and etymology there seems to be debate, possibly got its name from the long scuffle of the whites and the slaves to reduce it to peonage and make freedom under the condition of color, contempti- ble among the mulattoes. Nobody in the whole region could account for this free negro settlement — one of two large aggregations of yellow men which has existed in North Carolina since the organization of society. There were many theories, but no reasons at hand for them. I conceive that these negroes might have been the slaves of tories driven from the State at the close of the Revo- lution, or of the emancipated slaves of the Quakers, and that they increased and multiplied by accessions from run- aways, by the birth rate of force ex- erted on them and by the necessity of union or the sympathy of all neighbor- ing free negroes with a homogeneous settlement. The comely mulatto women, the strange mulatto men, both sexes decent- ly clad, were plentiful in town — some 42 THE SWAMP OUTLAWS arriving on mule back, some in short, homemade carts, many on foot. There was a good deal of drink inj^ among the men and of covert courtship and ogling among the girls. Virtue was evidently not uniformly high in Scuffletown. SCUFFLETOWN TOPOGRAPHICALLY. The Rutherford and Wilmington Railroad runs westward from Lumber- ton River. Eight miles northwestward it strikes the station of Moss Neck. Seven miles from Moss Neck it strikes the station of Red Banks. These two stations bound Scuffletown, which spreads besides three or four miles on both sides of the track, and is surrounded on three sides with swamps, which send branches of swamp up through it, and in wet weather each of these swamps are receivers of supplies " bays," bottoms, or pools, which per- meate the mulatto fortress. In fact, it is a part of the " great swamp district of North and South Carolina, below the terrace of h Us, and yet is nothing particul.irly frightful, even to a sti'angcr, and quite unlike our notion of the swamps of Florida and Louisiana. Tliese swamps enclose the rivers and their arteries laterally for a few yards, and often, or generally, as the stream ■winds, there is swamps on one side and low clay sand bluffs opposite. It is a mean country for troops to trespass upon, but not an impregnable country. I believe that I am safe in saying that no Northern society would plead this region as excuse for not following up and annihilating such a crowd as Low- ery's band. THE LAND OF LOWERT. Taking the railroad as the axis of reference, and looking away from Lum- berton noriiiwestward, we see Rafl Swamp leave the river first, and after six or seven miles incursion northward, send on, parallel with the railroad on the right, Burnt Swamp, Panther Swamp, and Richland Swamp, exten- sions of each other. On this side of the track Lowery's band have never com- mitted a murder, unless they killed the McLeods, Two or three miles above Raft Swamp — the river bending to the right of the track — the Lumber River, itself swamp girt, sends off at opposite sides Bear Swamp (for Jack's Branch), which en. closes Moss Neck and Bule's stations, and Back Swamp, which lies about paralled with the Lumber for twenty miles, and projects to the southward Ashpole Swamp and Aaron Swamp. Here, then, are four series of swamps, counting the swampy Lumber River. The swamps are only a mile or two apart and their feeders diminish the distance. On Back Swamp the Lowery band keeps its ambush and secret camps. The Lumber River is his line of de- fence from the railway. The swamps around Moss Neck are the scenes of its boldest assassinations. The house of Henry Berry Lowery, the leader, is biyond Back Swamp, five miles from Moss Neck station, and covered in the rear by Ashpole and Aaron Swamps, and all Scuffletown is his political ally and " boozing ken." The operations directed against him start from Lumbert on on the east and Shoe Heel on the west, twenty-one miles apart, and each twelve miles from his fastness. Further in his rear, on the South Carolina side, the Little Pedee as well, send up parallels of swamp. Florence, a great prison pen for federal troops in the war is fifty miles behind him. THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. 4^ As old Aunt Phoebe said to me at Shoe Heel. " Boss, Henry Berry Lowery is de king o' the country " SCUFFLETOWN AS A DEFENSIVE TRACT. The free negroes settled upon the Scuffletown tract because the poverty of the soil and the half inundated condition of the region brought it within their means and debarred it from the capacity of white men. In wet weather, after raiiis, when the Lumber River and its tributaries rise, this region is almost flooded, and then the only means of inter-commu- tiic.'ition are small paths, known only to the inhabitants, which connect the island- like patches and atFord a labyrinthian, mazes for escape to any who keep the clues. The Lumber River has bridges at but one or two points, and, being swift and deep, must be crossed by scows or rafts. In summer a luxuriant undergrowth covers all the swamps and low places, and even the prairie pine land, so that one cannot see his own length, while in winter the streams are full of water and the swamps more extensive. The gallberry tree, sweet gums, post oak, hickory, cypress and all the pine varieties, grow in the swampa and on their margins, and the bamboo vine, stretching out eccentrically and profli- gately, makes a nearly impenetrable abatis. The serpents are numerous and often dangerous, including every variety of the moccasin, the rattlesnake and the largest specimens of water and black snakes known in temperate regions. Lizards live in the decaying logs, and snapping turtles appear in the pools, creeks and bays. The woods are plentifully supplied with wild cats, which kill pigs and lambs; and the silence of the night in the rep- tilian region is broken by the great ill- omened owl, which utters no mere " tu- whit," but appals the silence with his long foreboding note, like the very demon of the woods mourning for prey. A TOUR OF SCUFFLETOWN. The stranger who expects to see ii? Scuffletown any approach to a munici- pal settlement will be disappointed. It is the name of a tract of several miles, covered at wide intervals with hills and log cabins of the rudest and simplest construction, sometime a half dozen of these huts being proximate. Two or three places to sell a low character of spirits exist where the dwellings are densest. The people have few or no horses, but often keep a kind of stunted ox to haul their short, ricketty carts, and a man with such a bovine hubin and a pair of old wheels is esteem- ed rich ; yet, living upon such land and for so many years, the mulatoes of Scuflletown would have esteemed them- selves well to do had they enjoyed any security from their white neighbors. Tiiey had little more equity before a jury than negroes, and it was no great ofl^ence to violate their asylums and court their wives and daughters. The whole Lowery war afterward began with Brant Harris' keeping in a sort of servile concubinage some girls courted by the Lowerys. To visit a Scuflletown shanty, repre- sentative of the whole, is to pass by a cow lane or foot track up through a thicket and suddenly come upon a half- cleared field of old pine and post oaK, enclosed by a worm fence without a gate. A little old lever-weU of the crudest 44 THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. mechanism — seldom of the dignity and proportions of a pole well — stands in this lot, the male proprietor of which is «it:ing on the worm fence, and he replies to youp neighborly salutation without changing his position. Advancing, to the caDm it is found built of hewu logs, morticed at the ends the chinks stopped with mud, the chimney built against one gable on the outside, of logs and clay, with sticks and clay Rbove, where it narrows to the smoko hole. There is beside the large chimney place, a half barrel, sawed off, to make lyo from the wood ashes, and the other half of the barrel is seen to serve the uses of a washtub. A mongrel dog is always a feature of t'lo establishment. The two or three acres of the lot are generally ploughed and planted in potatoes or maize, both of which come up sickly. The yellow woman commonly has a baby at the breast, and from half a dozen to a dozen playing outside on the edges of the swamp. The bed is made on the floor ; there are two or three stools ; only one apart- ment comprising the whole establish- ment. , LOWERY'S CABIN. Just such a place as the above is the house of Henry Berry Lowery, the out- law chief, except that, being a carpenter he has nailed W'eather strips over the interstices between the logs and made himself a sort of bedstead and some chairs. His cabin has two doors, opposite each other, in the sides, and it has been so many times shot through and through with rifle balls that his wife can now stand fire as well as her husband. The Scuffletowners go out to work as ditchers for the neighboring farmers, who pay them the magnanimous wages of $6 a month. As many of them are intemperate a neichborinff trader with a barrel of molasses and a barrel of rum speedily gets the $6 from the whole party. The above picture while true of the majority of the Scufiletowners. is not justly descriptive of all. The Oxendines are all well to oo, or were before this bloody fend began, and the Lowerys were industrious carpen- ters, whose handiwork is seen at Lum- berton, Shoe Heel and all round that region Great crimes in Scuffletown were rare before the war. Petty stealing and pilfering of chick- ens and an occasional pig were not un- known. The whites hated the settlement because it was a bad example to the negroes. But most of the people were Baptists or Methodists, and nearly all owned their homesteads. RISE OF SCUFFLETOWN. By the census of 1860 Robeson county contained 8,459 whites, only three free blacks, all males, and the extraordinary number of 1, 459 free mulattoes. There were only 113 foreigners. But one county — Halifax — contained so many free mulattoes, and that was the county whence the grandfather of the present outlaws of Robeson emigrated. In 1800 there were 2,165 mulattoes and 287 free blacks in Halifax. Wake county had next below Robeson 1,19G mulattoes, and after Hertford county, with 1,020. There were no counties in all the State with more than a few hun- dred ; the average was not above fifty to each county. At the same time Robeson county had 126 slave mulattoes and 5,329 slave THE SWAMF OUTLAWS. A& ADVANCE OF THE TB-OOPS INTO THE SWAMPS. blacks. Altogether the county contain- ed 15,489 souls, the free population making almost two-thirds. It stood considerably above the aver- age counties of the State in slaves and population, and out of the full-blooded Indians (1,158 in number) ascribed to North Carolina, none were set dovpn either to Robeson or Halifax county. The antiquity of these free negro set- tlements might be inferred from the fact that by the census of 1850 only two slaves were manumitted that year. In 1860 there were manumitted 258, or one out of every 1,283. In the latter year there were 5,262 fugitives from North Carolina to 17,501 from South Carolina. Where did the South Carolina fugi- tives hide? Perhaps no inconsiderable portion of them sought the swamp counties on the southern tier of North Carolina, and begged the charity of this large free ne- gro settlement. THE INDIAN RACE OF THE LOWERYS. The question ensues, whence came the Indian blood of the Lowerys ? who are by general assertion and belief partly of Indian origin. Why should they and their blood relatives show Indian traces while Scuffle- 4C THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. town at large is mainly plain, unroman tic mulatto? TheJ-e wei'P two sets of aboriginese in North Carolina — the Cherokees of the west, mountainous Carolina, who re- moved at a comparatively recent period to the Indian Territory and of whom several remnants remain in the extreme western corner or pocket of the State, numbering 1,062 in Jackson county alone. Judge Leech, of Lumberton, says that he saw a Cherokee once who resembled Patrick Lovvery so closely that he called out, " Is that Patrick ?" Besides the Cherokees there was the Atlantic coast confederacy, led by the Tuscaroras and abetted at the great mas- sacre of 1711 by the Hatteras Indians, the Pamilioos and the Cothechneys. These Indians, after a determined resis- tance to the whites, which resulted in scaring the Baion de Gruflf, the Swiss founder of Newbern, out of the New World, accepted a reservation of lands in Halifax and Bertie counties, near the Roanoke R.ver. They emigrated to New York and joined the Five Nations a few years af- terward, being thought worthy in prow- ess to be admitted to that proud con- federacy, but they held the fee simple of their lands in North Carolina until after the year 1840. Some persons of the tribe must have remained behind to look after these lands, and among these, as will be seen hereafter, was the grandfather of the Lowerys. The pride of character of the Tusca- roras was such that the Cherokees, Creeks, and other tribes joined the ■whites to subjugate them, and Parkman «ays that the Tuscaroras were of the same generic stock with the Iroquois and conducted the southern campaigns of those Five Nations. Hildreth siiys that they were reputed to be remnants of two Virginia tribes, the Manakins and Manahoa s, hereditary enemies of Captain John Smith's Pow- hatan. They burned the Surveyor General, who had trespassed on their lands, at the stake, and were in turn partly sub- jected to slavery by the militia of South Carolina. Eight hundred of them were sold by their Indian enemies to thft whites of the Carol! nas at ono time, and in 1713 most of those at liberty retired through the unsettled portions of Virginia and Pennsylvania to Lake Oneida, New York. This criminal code, enforced against Allan Lowery, the father of Henry Berry Lowery, the outlaw, has had the result of making Robeson county the seat of a fierce warfare for revenge. Persons curious about the seventy of this code may see a digest of it in Hild- reth, Colonial series, vol. II., pp. 271 — 275. The Tuscaroras, in their prime, had 1,200 warriors in North Carolina. In l807 they bought a tract from the Holland Land Company with the pro- ceeds of their North Carolina lands, and it was about at this period that the ancestor of the Lowerys removed from Halifax county to Robeson county. THE LOWERYS SETTLE IN ROBESON, The following statement of the origin of the family is derived from the note- books of Colonel F. M. Wishart, which were entrusted to me to look at by Captain F. H. M. Kenney, of Shoe Heel :— James Lowery, the grandfather of H. B. Lowery, came trom Halifax, N. C, and settled at what is called Harper's Ferry (in the centre of Scuffletown, two miles from Bule's store), built a bridge across Drowning Creek, and THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. 47 kept it as a toll bridge ; also kept a [ public house for the accomodation of I travellers. He was wealthy and fairW "espected by all, and owned slaves. He married a woman by tne name of , and had three sons, George Travis Lowery, Allen Lowerv and Tho- mas Lowery. Allen Lowery, the father of the band leader, married a woman by the name of Mary Combes and settled on the south side of Back Swamp, in a desert- looking wilderness, and was the father of Patrick, Purdie, Andrew, Sinclair, William, Thomas, Stephen, Calvin, Henry Berry and Mary. Old Allen Lowery was a good, peacea- ble citizen, and well liked. He was a great hunter in his young days. With his neighbors — Barnes, Mc- Nair, Moore and others — he was willing to share his last cent. All his boys were mechanics with him, and the fam- ily got on smoothly and industriously until the summer of 1864, when three* " Yankee " prisoners escaped among many from the pen at Florence, S. C. They made their way to the house of Allen Lowery aud were comparatively safe, as nearly all the white people were in the Confederate army and the State laws would not allow the mulattoes to enlist in the ranks. The Scuffletowners were mustered in only as cooks, &c., or conscripted to work on the brestworks about Wilm- ington. There is a story current that the Low- erys in the Revolutionary War were tory bush whackers, but it is also alleg- ed that one of the family received a United States pension up to the day he died. Some of the boys were willing to enter the Confederate army ; as their father had kept slaves, but their proud spirits recoiled from working on the fortifications among the negroes. As the war progressed and the Low- erys got to understand it ihey Sympa- thized with the North, and entertained at their cabins its escaped soldiery Irom Florence. A DEMOCRAT'S ADMISSION". Mr. Bruce Butler, an earnest democrat and a prominent lawyer in Wilmington, said, in reply to an interrogatory : — " I don't think politics has anything to do with this outbreak. It began in the war, when our impressing officers made a requisition upon the free negro settle- ment and pulled away these outlaws or their relatives to work on our fortifica- tions. They complained of the food the treatment, the work, and so forth, and, I believe, the chief outlaw himself ran away. Then there was hunting made for him and he got to lying out in the woods and swamps ; next to stealing, next robbery. Murder and outlawry followed in time — bad begun grew worse — that's my understanding of it. " OLD ALLEN LOWERY One evening at Lumberton I sat in the office of Judge Leech, half a dozen gentleman present, and they described old Allen Lowery. The disposition generally manifested by the white peo- ple of Robeson county is to put little stress upon the murder of this old man, but to ascribe the crimes of Henry Berry Lowery's band to lighter cause and to separate the motive of revenge altogether from his ofTences. " The Lowerys," said one of the per- sons present, "were always savage and predatory. By conducting a sort of.^ swamp or guerilla war during the Revo- lution they accumulated considerable property, and at the close of that war 48 THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. were landholders, slaveholders and people of the soil. Then they grew dis- sipated duiiiig the time of peace, and their land was levied upon to pay debts- Being Indians, with an idea that their ancestors held all this land in fee simple, they could not understand how it could be taken from them, and for years they looked upon society as hav. ing robbed them of their patrimony." "Yes," said one present, "Allen Lower y brought me a case against a man who wished to sell a piece of pro- perty he had formely owned, and he could 11^ t be made to understand that the man had a good title for it. When they were holding the examination, just before they shot him in 1805 the old man pleaded in extenuation of the plun- der found in his house that he had never been given fair play but had been cheat- ed out of his land. He said that his grandfather had been cut across the hand in the Revolution, fighting for the State, and that the State had cheated all his family. He had the Indian sentiment deep in him, of having suffered wrong, and imparted it to all his sons. Here is Sink (Sinclair) Lowery with the same kind of notions tcj this day. He said a little while ago, ' We used to own all the country round here, but it was taken from us somehow.' " " He was a good carpenter," said another, " and brought all his boys up in industriously. He built this office in which we sit. He had a peculiar kind of eyes ; they would prowl around your face until you got off your guard and then he would give you a piercing look through and through. He had a heap of mixed white and Indian pride, but I believe he was whipped at the whipping post once for pilfering, but that was so far back in his youth that nobody re- membered it except by tradition. His SOD, Sinclair, married a white woman The Lowerys and Oxenduies were gen- erally accounted the highest families in Scuttletown." " Well," chimed in another voice, " he was considerable of a heathen and never went much to church except very late in life, when he became a Methodist class- leader. Old Allen married a girl early in life and had one child, but being in- different or disappointed about her, he wandered off two years to South Caro- lina, and when he returned, without di- vorce or notice of any sort, he married a different woman. "Taking example from him the first wife also mariied a new man. By the second wife old Allen Lowery had all these children. Nobody ever had any complaint to make of him or his boyfl until the murder of Barnes, eight years ago." THE FIRST MURDER. Henry Berry Lowery grew up with his father, a carpenter and a hunter. He was noticed to be a boy of good appearance, -quiet address, pleasing and modest enough, but also to cherish deep resentments and to readily take affront. His eyes had iiidden in them, a-nd prompt to come forth on provocation, the hazel Indian lights, and when he was ordered to the sand pits, below Wilmington, to do laborer's duty, at the age of seven- teen, he ran away, and returned to Scuffletown, where he was repeatedly hunted, and by none more than by John A. Barnes, his father's next neighbor, and by J. A. Brant Harris, a white man o^bad character, who domineered over Scuffletown. He remained for many months ba tween the swamps and the shanties, and was joined by Steve Lowery and othei relatives and acquaintances. Unable to work for a living under these conditions, the party had to forage upon the whites> THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. 49 Thus, insensibly, formed vajijabond and desperate habits, in which, there is reason to believe, they found apt tutors in some escaped Union prisoners who had made their way from Florence, S. C, by the light of the North Star, straight into Sciiffletown, and who, to avoid capture, hid in Back and Lumber Swamps with the young Lowerys, Strongs and Oxendines. Blood}' example, the self-reliance of an outcast and distaste for peaceful pursuits soon overcame Henry Berrv Lowery, and he grew to hate the slave- holders and to identify himself ideally with the wrongs of all the mulatto settlement. BRANT HARRIS. This fellow was a bluff, swaggering, cursing, redfaced bully, entrusted by the rebel county authorities with keep- ing the ppace in Scuffletown and hunt- ing up deserters and conscripts, and he meantime gained a penny by "farming a turpentine orchard," selling rum, &c. He looked like a slave dealer, and was the terror of the poor wretches of Scuffletown, whom he used to flog, un- roof and insult at will. , Being a libidinous wretch he took possession of some of the lightest dams- els in the settlement, and one of these was courted honorably by a cousin of young Henry Berry Lowery. Seeing the white man so much at the hut of his girl one of the young Lowerys threatened among his people to kill Brant Harris if he did not let her alone. This being reported to Harris he was seized either with apprehension or rage, knowing, perhaps, the Indian aualities of the Lowery lads. He therefore put himself in ambush to kill the lad who threatened him, but by mistake shot the wrong Lowery, the brother of the boy he hunted. This mistake made Brant Harris aware that his present peril was greater than before, for he had now raised the savage ire of all the Lowcrvs and their Indian kin. lie therefore seized both the broth- ers of his victim as persons who owed military service on the fortifications ot Wilmington, and was deputed to march them from Scufiletown to Liimberton. On the way this monster delibi rately murdered both boys, and one of the three, at least, was found with his skull beaten in by a bludgeon, A fourth brother made his escape to the Lowerys and joined II(>niy Berry Lowery, who vowed to kill Brant Har- ris at sight. The foregoing is thus ingeniously paraphrased by Colonel Wishart in his book said to be designed for publica- tion, part of which, in manuscript, I had the privilege of examining: " A man by the name of Brant Har- ris, who had been a sutler and turpen- tine merchant at Red Banks, had a dis- pute with the Lowerys (cliarged to be about stolen chickens) and he finally killed three cousins of Henry Berry Lowery named Jarman, George and Bill." ' Now, there is no record that the Lowerys in question were not as re spectable as Brant Harris, and it was several years before Henry Berry Low- ery's victims amounted to three. Brant Harris weighed 230 pounds. His character may be inferred from the fiict that some of the females of his surviving family have given birth to mulatto children. THE MURDER OF BARNES. Before the fugatives in the woods and kinsmen of the Lowerys had dealt out retribution to Brant Harris the family of Allen Lowery had become 50 THE SWAMP OUTLAWS embroiled -with thpir nearest neighbor, a bachelor named John A. Barnes. This Barnes was a fine himter and could track the fugitives with his prac- tised eye through the swamps, so that he was an obstacle to them as well as an enemy. The following is Captain Wishart's version of this assassination, the first in point of time committed by Low- ery's band : — After the escaped prisoners from Florence reached the Siiffletown district- they made the acquaintance and sought the hospitality of Allen Lowery's fam- ily. Henry Berry, Stephen and William Lowery, wishing to give their new friends good table fare, went to the neighboring farm of Mr. Barnes, their oldest acquaintance, and stole two of his best hogs, two miles distant, caried them home and salted them nicely away for long consumption. Barnes followed the cart track to Allen Lowery's house, saw the remains of the butchering and cleaning, and, getting out an officer and a search warrant, swore to his mark on the ears of the hogs, as found on the re- jected heads among the offar. The three young Lowery's — Henry, Steve and Bill — were nowhere to be found. Barnes requested old man Lowery and all his boys henceforth to keep on his land or he should help to forward them to the batteries to work involun- tarily. Here the struggle commenced and threats passed and repassed. On the 12Lh day of December, 1864, while James P. Barnes was going to Clay Valley Post Office, a distance of one mile (the Post Office at the store of Captain W, P. Mores), he was waylaid half way by H. B. Lowery, Bill Lowery and (as supposed or charged) by the Yankees and shot. He fell with twenty buckshot in hisk breast and side, and then Henry Berry c Lowery deliberately walked up to him with a shotgun, and although Barnes cried, " Don't shoot me again — I am a dying man," the young mulatto Indian, then not more than sixteen or seventeen years of age, replied : " You are the man who swore to shoot me," and fired another load into his face, shooting off part of the cheek. The whole party then crept into the swamp and disappeared. Some of the neighbors, hearing the shooting and hallooing, hurried up and heard the dying statement of Barnes that Henry Berry Lowery was his murderer. THE FIRST BURGLARY. Soon afterward these young men went to the house of Widow MacNair, for the purpose of robbing a confederate colonel. The sick soldier there lent his pistol to the widow, who wounded one of the robbers, and they carried him off to Colonel Drake's, some distance away, and ordered Widow Nash, the only per- son in the house, to attend to him till well, on pain of death. The man re- covered in perfect secrecy. THE SECOND VICTIM. It now became Brant Harris' turn. The young Tuscarora who had taken the first life without a shudder — and that the life of a man generally reputed to be a good neighbor and useful man — built himself a " blind," or curtain of brush and old logs ; and as Brant Har- ris rode by in his buggy, near Bute's store, in the early part of 1865, he was riddled witb buckshot, THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. 51 His horse ran away, and carried him a considerable distance. Few people sympathized with Har- ris, although all were now aware of the existence of a savage band of outlaws in the swamps, who resisted and baffled all means to bring them in. * Before any efficient means could be adopted to arrest young Lowery and his brothers and associates in the in- tricacies of Back Swamp the army of General Sherman, making the grand march, swept on by Cheraw and Rock- ingham to Fayetteville, and the fora- gers or " bummers," who strayed out on the flanks, pounced upon Robeson county. ALLEN LOWERY'S OFFENCE. At Scufflotowu they found iu the Lowery's guides, informants and enter- tainers, who posted them as to the sta- tus of the leading rebels of the county, the wealthiest homesteads and such other matters as a rapacious soldiery would wish to know. Some of the Lowery boys went out with these troops and brought home part of the spoils. At this period an execution had been' levied on old Allen Lowery, and his son Bill, at law, proprietor of the house and. ground where the old man and his wife resided. Bill had probably had assodation with that part of the family which had fled to the swamps, but there IS poor testimony that old .Allen had ever committed any robberies. His son William, the new master of the place, governed the old man, who was now sixtv-five years of age. DEATH OP THE OUTI.AWS FATHER. When Shfrman's army had passed on to Fayetteville and Raleigh the ma- lignant rage of the people of Robeson county turned upon this old citizen and the helpless part of his family. They little knew what a young de- mon they were to arouse for seven en- suing years in the wild boy who resided in the swamps, and whose motto was to be " Blood for blood ! " They resolved that the Lowery's were then committed adherents of the Yankees, that the blood of Barnes and Harris was unaccounted for, and that it was necessary to make an example of somebody in Scuffletown to teach them that the end of slavery was not yet the colored man's triumph. Blind, inconsiderate, brutal ill-will and cruelty were at the bottom of this movement. It started between Floral College and what is now called Shoe Heel. A meniber of the gang was a Presby- terian preacher named Coble, or Cobill, an old apostle, exhorter and Pharisee of slavery, and one of the leaders in it was Murdoch MacLain, who, six years afterward, tumbled out of his buggy, shot thro'jgh and through by Henry Berry Lowery. These, among twenty others, marched upon old Allen Lowery's cabin, and dragged out the old man and his wife, and two of the sons, found on the prem- ises, Sinclair and Bill. Searching the cabin they found sev- eral articles said to have been filched from the white neighbors. This Mi'sa justification enough. They carried the old people off to a safe nook and there went through the farce of examining them. The devil's own priest — Coble or Co bill — got a prayer ready to make at the execution, and to make his holy role hypocrifioally consistent, he pleaded for the life of Sinclair Lowery. 1 The negroes say these white Ku KIux 52 made the condemned people of the fam ily dig tlieir own graves. They stood the old mnn, at sixty-five years of age, up* beside his son, both of them enduring the ordeal with Indian stoicism, and, by the light of blazing torches, as one account relates, shot them to deatii with duclc shot and ball. Coble or Cobill got off his prayer and perhaps his gun. Before they shot the father and s(m they endeavored, witli blanced fear of the vengeance of the North, to niaiic the poor old wife of Al- len Lowcry confess to some justification for their act by pointing their pieces at her and firing volleys over her head un- til she was nearly paralyzed with fear. From a thicket near at hand Henry Berry, the son of Allen Lowery, saw the volley fired which laid his brother and father bleeding on the ground. There he swore eternal vengeance against the perpetrators of the act. Fourteen citizens have paid part of that penalty in the succeeding seven years. He has been the greatest scourge the South ever knew from one of the inferior race, and has developed a cunning, blood- thirstiuess, activity and courage uumatch- THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. ed in the history of his race. Some have compared him with Nat Turner. HENRY BERRY LOWERY AND NAT TURNER. The insurrection of Nat Turner took place in Southampton county, Virginia, August, 1831, just over the line from Halifax county, North Carolina, where the grandfather of the Lowerys lived. In Southampton county, as in Halifax, abode Indians, a few of whom still re- main — the Nottoways. Nat Turner was the senior of Henry Berry Lowery, and was thirty-one years of age and a slave. He was a praying ignoramous and believed himself inspired to kill off the whites, which he commenced, with four disciples, by killing fifty-five men, women and children. Tiie insurrection lasted only two days and after hiding several weeks the leader was caught and hanged. Henry Berry Lowery has never been caught and held. He is a bloodthirsty remoseless, able bandit leader. In my next letter I shall take up the catalogue of his crimes. THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. 53 THE BANDIT IN JAIL. NOllTII CAROUIVA OSCEOLA. Further Murders by the Lowery Out- laws. A Comparison. Alive or De:i(l. Higli Rewards for the Cap- ture or Killing of the Bandits. Thril- ling Stories of the Swamp War. Cold-blooded Assassinations. Sudden Murders. Cool Robberies. Ruthless Retaliation and Footpad Generosity. The Feud with the M'Neills. The Fight. Lowery's Wonderful Escape and Deadly "Stratagem. Fearful Death of Sanders, the Spy. Torttn-ed lor Three D:iys, Briused, Bled, Poi- soned, and Finally Shot. Romance Outdone by Facts. How the Suc- cess ot the Gang Demoralizes Young Scnffletown. The State Powerless. WiLMiNoroN, N. C, March 2, 1872. Since my return and rest in this city I have seen the report of the Ku KIux Committee, which is, in general, con- firmatory of the information 1 have sent you from personal investigation, analy- sis and belief. The astounding feature of the Lowery band is that they have so long baffled detection and paralyzed the public spirit and citizen resistance of Carolina. Liv- ing upon the border of the North State, they have passed, in their excesses, the boundary line, and some of the murders have been done almost within hearing of South Carolina. Yet, when the State proposed a vig- orous campaign against them, and the 54 THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. militia and volunteers were companies of regular United States troops were finally withdrawn because an equal num- ber of citizLHis would not operate with them. Adjutant General Gorham stig- matized the militia in a newspaper let- ter, and said that the regulars, men and officers, obeyed orders and showed cool professional pluck. This campaign was made at the worst season of the year, the heat and miasma rising and the woods and swamps cov- ered with thick, concealing vegetation. Twenty-eight volunteers enlisted for this ignominious campaign under Cap- tain Wishart, " the flower of the coun- try," most of them grown to active years since the close of the rebellion. They were spruce young fellows, fond of a drink and a spree, and I am enab- led to present some picture of them from Captain Wishart's diary. i A GLIMPSE OF THE SWAMP WAR Thus run four of Wishart's excerpts: — Saturday, August 5. — Militia ordered to Lunibertou ; a pretty sight ! Ne- groes, inulattoes, whites — all drunk, without arms, ammunition or anything, only money enough to get whiskey. Later in August. — Two of my men drunk ; one lost his boots, one his pistol * * and the pilot was drunk * * The red bugs and yellow flies would kill an elephant * *. Saturday, October 29, 1871. — Henry, Berry, Steve, Andrew and Boss were at Bear Swamp Academy to-day at pub- lic speaking on educational purposes. All had two double-barrelled shotguns apiece. They captured old J. P. Sin- clair, who outlawed them. Later in thk Hunt. — Andrew Strong was seen Saturday, October — , at — , Complained of being nearly worn out. THE LOWERYS AND THE FLORIDA SEMINOLES. As there is a cry for United St£.tes interference in the Lowery war, it may be timely to advert to a war held in a similar country in the era of Jackson and Van Buren. THE SEMINOLES were originally Creeks from Georgia. They numbered in Florida, 1594 men, and of all sexes and ag'es 3899, exclusive of 150 negro men, escaped slaves. To subdue these Seminoles took a campaign of five years and cost $19, 500,000, besides the pay of the regular army and losses sustained by settlers from Indian ravages. Above twenty thousand volunteers were called out, Osceola, the Seminole brave most dis- tinguished, was thirty-two years of age when the war broke out ; Nat Turner was thirty-one; Henry Berry Lowery was eighteen. Osceola was half white, and his Eng- lish name was Powell, the same with the Florida assassin of Secretary Seward, who was remarked to resemble an Indian when he was hanged as Wash- ing to, in 1865. The Seminoles brought into the field 1,660 Indians and 250 arms-bearing negroes. Persons familiar with the Florida war trace resemblances between Henry Berry Lowery and the Seminole chief called Coacooche, or Wild Cat. Both young men, they made war a predatory pastime, grew merry with ex- citement, were cruelly active, and they both ridiculed and laughed at the soldiery floundering in the mud and water to overtaken them. THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. 55 .I'UDE OF THE CAROLINA. NEGROES TOWARD THE OUTLA-WS. In passive allies the Lowerys are nearly as well befriended as the Semi- iioles, for all Scuflletown wishes them at least no ill. When the troops pursued the scoun- drels they could hear a peculiar baric like that f>f a cur precede thcin, and die away in the distance, the mulatto's war- ninj^ note passed from shaiiiy to shanty to put Lovvery on thn qui vive. If soldiery or armed men are on the railway train a moviment among the negro train hands will be observed as th<' locomotive approaches the stations of Scuffltitown, What happens in Wilmington to- night will be in the knowledge of the outlaws within fifieen hours. It is this prescient, omniscient, unac- countable apprehension and intelligence of the Lowery which has stricken the community infested with a dumb terror. The negroes generally in the State show adherence to these colored mur- derers. The Legislature passed a bill, ratified by the Governor February 8, 1872, offering a reward of $10,000 for Henry Berry Lowery, and $5,000 for each c»f the fi)llowing m^-n : — Stephen Lowery, Boss Strong, Andrew Strong, George Applewhite and Thotnas Lowery. It was proclaimed as follows : — Now, therefore, I, Tod R. Caldwell, Governor of the State of North Caro- lina, by virtue of the authority in me vested by said act above recited, do issue this my proclamation offering the following rewards in addition to those heretofore offered to be paid in currency to the party or parties who shall ap- prehend and deliver, dead or alive, any of the outlaws hereinafter named to the Sheriff of Robeson county. This reward, in addition to a small reward offered previously by the State and another by the county, brinj^s the price of the band up to about seventy- five thousarid dollars. The attitude of THE BLACK LEGISLATORS was ominious. When the questi^\n came up of off-Ting an enlarged reward for these outlaws several republicans, chiefly black members, voted against it. It finally p.iss.-d by 74 to l8. Caw- thorn, colored, and Fletcher, colored, made speeches advocating it. Mills proposed to increase the reward even more, which Mabson, colored op- posed. Page, colored, offered an amendment to the effect that the reward was to be considered open for thirty da^s, and meantime the outlaws be permitted to leave the State. This was rejected. The yeas and nays were called. The following persons, among others, about half of whom were colored, voted against offering the rewards: — Bryan, Burns, Carson, Hargrove, Heeton, Johnston, Marler, Page, Smith, Reaves and York. This excerpt shows that Lowery's popularity is not confined to th(i nt^groes of Robeson county, but is considerable throughout the State. He interrupted an educational meet- ing some time ago with his whole armed band, and demanded the proceedings of the Legislature to be read. The State Adjutant, General, Gorham, stigmatized the Scuffle tonians in his report as deceitful and in collusion with the Lowerys. AFRICAN CHARMS FOR THE BAND. The superstition of this gang of out- laws h IS been suggested as a mode of affrighting them. W^hen Henderson Oxendine waa 5C THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. drove the men to the woods. INCIDENTS OF OUTLAWRY. hanged there were found in his coat I moments on the piazzn, when the Low- dockets a piece of human bone, appar-l ery band, lying in watch, rushed up ently taken from the human hand, between them and their arms and and a quantity of mixed herbs. Being interrogated as to whether their many bloody deeds had not given the surviving bandits visions of ghosts I April 29, 1871. Henry B. Lowery and fears of being haunted by their «nd Boss Strong went to :i house in dead, the wife of one of them con- Richmond county and took two mules fessed that, although never hesitating i'nd a wagon out of a citizen's barn, in determination, both Henry Berry filh^d the wagon with corn and drove in and Tom Lowery and Andrew Strong style to Scuffietown, where the corn tvere often blue and mentally uneasy. ■ At this the county newspaper of Robeson — a very complete and spright was equally distributed. Having no use for horses and vehi- cles they returned the team the same lyTocal paper, edited by a clergyman day to the owner. named McDiermii— printed a local May 3, 1871, Henry B. and Steve about the discovery of spiritual anil- , Lowery and Boss and Andrew Strong lery, baneful drugs, witchcraft, &c., in- I went on a robbing excursion to the tended to be read by the Lcmeiys, and house of Mr. Parnell, near ScufTletown to fill them with apprehension. The males of the family fled to the These outlaws take the newspapers woods, the females were bolted away daily, and some time ago, in hunting over the deserted shanty of Lowery, a copy of the Robesonian was found, with in a retired apartment, and the house despoiled. The bandits waited all niaht tor the the endorsement torn from the wrapper, males to come home, and threatened to and then carrried to the publishing of-. l^iH them if they inopportunely arrived. fice and the address was there identified. The person implicated confessed that Henry Berry Lowery gave him the money and ordered him to subscribe vicariously WHERE DO THEY GET ARMS ? The Lowerys probably procure their improved arms — the breechloaders especially — through some of the more avaricious country merchants, and are made to pay heavy rates with the money they have got by robbery. They have depleted the \vhole region round Scuffletown of guns and pistols. ' In one case a white family slept on their arms and walked with them con- tinually ; but one Sunday, releasing vigilance, left their guns for a few One day in October, 1871, a Mr. McNeill was out in the woods hunting coons with a fine dog which belonged to him. As the darkness came on he heard what seemed to be human footsteps around the tree he was watching. Filled with the superstition of Low- ery's band he made haste to get home. Next morning, sure enough, as he sat at Monbeck station, Henry Berry Low ery appeared, armed like a pirate, double-barrelled shot gun, Spencer car- bine and five revolvers in his belt, but cool as a cucumber. He had a dead coon over his shoul- der. "Mr. McNeill," he said, "as your dog treed this coon, I thought it no THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. S7 more than right to bring it to you. I Vvish you would lend me that dog to coon a little on rny own account " " No," said McNeill, " 1 can't spare that dog, but 1 have got another one at home which I might lend you." "Oh," cried Lowery, "never mind. I guess I can get along without it." And he Wiilked off as demurely as any honest neighbor. To show this outlaws fearlessness, it may be instanced that when he went to tha house of one McKinsley, near Red Bank, he pulled off his whole belt of arms and then threw them down on the piazza while he ordered the family to prepare him a meal in a remote apartment and par- icook of it there. The leading white families remaining in Seiiffletown are the McNeills, Ed. Smith, Alex. Mclntyre, Nick and Wil- liam Kelly, jKjhn McNuir, and the Ty- lers. The ablest leader against Lowery has been J. Nicholas Maclain, who has been obliged, nevertheless, to leave the county and go to Georgia. He is a light-complexioned man, sallow, wiry, and beardless. EDITORIAL COURAGE. Mr. James, local editor of the Wilm- ington Journal, received a letter from a brother editor at Lumberton after the •-.afe robbery in February, 1S72, to this effect :— All the able-bodied men in town have gone west in pursuit of the outlaw. It is needless to say that I start east by the first train. One Oxendine, commonly called Dick, keeps a bar at Lumberton, unable to have any repose at Scuffletown. His father was the " best-to-do " negro In that settlement, and was for a time County Commissioner, with a salary of $5 a day. The Lowerys have not always been ^ peaceful family, even prior to the war and it is related that John Quince Low- ery killed a relative about 1858, and wag branded for it in the hand at Lumber- ton, x^ Several of these outlaws have beien acquitted before the Courts. Applewhite was conderhned, but broke jail, as did Steve Lowery. Tom Lowery was in Lumberton ja^l when Henderson Oxendine was hange^d in the jail yard. Applewhite had been a slave at Golds, boro, and, although a black man, he married a nearly white Oxendine girl. Andrew Strong married Henry Berry Lowery's sister, if I am correctly in formed. Tom Lowery married a girl of ScufHetown named Wilkins, and Steve Lowery married an Oxendine. •re THE DEATH OF APPLEWHITE. It appears to be well established that Applewhite is either dead or laid up from serious wounds received in a com bat with the militia, near Red Bank, in October, 1870. "** He was fired upon and pursued, and the bloody tracks in the leaves and bushes showed where he had stopped to rest and supper. His little daughter told the Sherifl and posse that he had been hit in the mouth, neck and breast and could not articulate, and that he repeatedly fainted^ His mulatto wife dressed his woundg with spirits of turpentine, and the mis- erable man had then to return tq the swamp. Soon after this he was surrounded in Lowery's cabin, and had to escape as best he might by the aid of the band, in the darkness before the dawn. IN THE SWAMPS these outlaws live on little island-like 58 THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. patches, burrowing under brush, and j terrapin, threw himself into the water at one place it was found that they had I on the remote side of the scow, tilted it constructed a commodious cabin. They seldom move at night except to do robberies, and take advantage of the darkness to slip into the huts of their relatives and befrienders. LOWERY'd CABIN. The home of Lowery is now deserted, and its log walls and doors show the marks of bullets, shot and balls fired from the woods and swamps. There are two doors on the sides, opposite each other, and a trap was at one time concealed in the floor, the hinges hidden or mortised beneath. This trap afforded admission to a aort of mine or covered way, which ran under the surface about sixty yards to the swamp. This passage way was filled up sev- eral moittbs ago, and the house is no longer tenable by the bandits. Here Lowery was surrounded in May, 1871, by Sheriff MacMillan, George Wisehart and a posse of nine in all, but, after aome exchange of shots, Lowery pulled out a small false closet or buttery by the chimney, acting as a concealed door, and he crept off with his entire party. THE FIGHT AT WIREGRASS LANDING. A few months later than this, in the autumn season, he performed an escape of almo.st incredible audacity. There were twenty-three soldiers at a spot called Wiregrass Landing, and as they looked up the narrow channel of the Lumber River they saw Henry Berry Lowery paddling a small, flut- , bottomed scow, his belt of arms un- buckled and thrown in the bottom of the boat. Instantly the whole party opened fire, when Lowery, with the agility of a up like a floating parapet, and reaching inside successfully for his weapons, aimed and fired as coolly as if he were at the head of his band on solid ground. In this position he actually wounded two of the men imd put the whole posse to flight. Sheriff MacMillan vouches- for the literal truth of this statement, ' A GENERAL JAIL DELIVERY. Some of the jail breakings of this party have been remarkable. May 10, 1871, Henry Berry and four other men sudiienly appeared in Lum- berton jail, where Tom Lowery and Pop Oxendinc were heavily ironed. The rescuers bored with augers around the staples of three doors, and also bored around the irons fastened in the floor, when all the part^ went forth nonchalantly. MURDER OF GILES INMAN. Mr. Inman was needlessly killed while bringing up reinforcements to Sheriff, MacMillan. Inman was a youth of eighteen or twenty, and a resolute spirit to cleanse the county of its marauders. The Sheriff of the county had sur- rounded Henry Berry Lowery's house and had shown the white feather, with a large part of his posse ; and therefore, there was a steady cry for the reserves. As ia the ballad of Horatio, Ti ose behind cried, " Forward !" And tboae in front cried, " Back." Lower; , meantime, had secretly and like a snake slipped out of his cabin, and h« panted for blood. Throwing himself down in the bushes near the path, only 500 yards from his house where the w hite hunters lay in force, he ordered his band to pick off the advanc- ing party seriatim. THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. 5^" His own carbine brought down Giles MURDER OF HECTOR AMD A. T. MAC NEILI, AND WILLIAM BROWN. Inman instantly. At the same instant Roderick Thomp- son, another volunteer, was mortally wounded by Boss Strong, and Frank MacCoy was badly wounded. Intnan's family is said to have been republican in politics. MURDER OF MURDOCH AND HUGH MACLAIN. The murder of the two brothers, Mur- doch and Hugh MacLain, was achieved whiK*. they rode together along the pub- lic road in an open buggy, and accom- plished after long and cool deliberation. They had several times approached the dwelling of these young men, and rattled chains and stirred up the domes- tic fowls and animals, but Murdoch was too prudent to come out. He was a superb specimen of the self- reliant, impulsive, military Southerner, never capable of acknowledged merit in a negro accompanied with humility, and at the murder of Allen Lowery by the neighborhood he was second in com- mand. As he was riding along Henry Berry Lowery from a " blind" at the roadside and at close quarters snapped his gun. Murdoch instantly reached for his arms, which he carried with him perpet- ually, but before he could bring it to his shoulder he was riddled with buckshot, and the horse started off at a gallop j^ith both brothers mortally wounded. , H This murder has been the latest com- mitted by the Lowery band, and its .purpose was solely revenge. In killing MacLain Henry Berry Low- ery shed, the blood of one of the highest youthful spirits in that region, but one^ unfortunately, whose record against the colored race was long and hard and dark. The murders of Hector MacNeill, A. MacMillan :ind William Brown happen, ed in the summer of 1870, within sight of a large camp of troops and directly upon the railroad track near Bure's sta- tion. It had been deemed sagacious to make prisoner the wife of Henry Berry Low- ery and to deposit her and her children in Lumbertoii Jail as an accomplice of the outlaw chief. Filled with rage at this act Lowery and his gang made their way rapidly across the swampy country and, throw- ing themselves down behind some decay- ed railway tier, waited like panthers for the soldiery lo appear. They came leading the mulatto wo man and her children, jocular and un- suspecting. Suddenly there was a series of re- ports of firearms, and the three persons named were down on the track moaning in the anguish of mortal wounds. The woman and children were left standing on the track and the rest of the escort party ran away more or les« injured with buckshot. Berry Barnes was shot in the head and Aleck Brown in the ankle. The troops fired the camp, riddled the woods with ball, but the creatures of the swamp were nowhere to be seen, and the woods resumed their melancholy and silence. The three victims belonged to the best families of whites in that region, and their summary fate filled the whole country side with the pall of woe and terror. Society seemed to have become dis- rupted, the law without avail, and ven- geance without call or reach of God or man 1 talked on this matter with two oi CO THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. the intimate white neighbors of the Lowerys — viz., MacNeill, and McLeod. MacNeill is a little, thick-set, aged old man, with hard, twinliling eyes and homespun clothes. , " I think 1 ought to liave some sym- pathy," he said, "I have been robbed time and again, my wife and daughter shot at my threshold, my son-in-law, Taylor Willar^, and his family, returned ,upon my hands for support, and my ^sons banished from their country on penalty of death." •• "Tliey have robbed me," said McLeod, .** of above three thousand dollars, com- pel me to give them food and set it out on my table for them, and when my >vife said the other day to Henry Berry Lowery that he l;i^d impoverished us, l^e answered coply : — " Well, I always know where to come when I want anything." " They took my watch," resumed McLeod, " and stopped me the other day, and seized mj pocket-book. Low- ery looked over its contents and said, * Sixteen dollars, is that your whole pile 1 Well, I won't take that.' " ,. " 1 have no desire to see any ven- geance done to thetn," concluded McLeod, /' if they only leave the coun- try and never return. I say let thern go, for really this band looks like as if it never would be caught and never give us any peace." THE MURbfill'' bP DANIEL AND MAC- NEILL M'LEOD. In Moore county, a night's ride from Scuffletown, a party of disguised men killed Daniel and MacNeill McLeod aiid stabbed two women and a boy. The motive was apparently robbery, as the victims were supposed to have been in receipt of a large sum of money, and, as a horse and buggy had been Stolen the previous night near Shoe Heel, the act was supposed to have been committed by Lowery's band. The perpetrators of the act v^ere never discovered, but a negro neighbor of the McLeods was shot dead by the citizens on suspicion of having been a spy of the Lowerys. It is not that clear this band in chargeable with the crime. The story of John Taylor's death was partly recited in a previous letter, but as a crime, and not merely as a codicil to the death of " Make " Sanderson, it deserves repetition. THE MURDER OF JOHN TAYLOR. January 14, 1871, Henry Berry Lowery murdered John Taylor, the most determined and uncompromising of his pursuers, at Moss Neck, on the mill dam, within two hundred yards of soldiers on guard at the railway station. The outlaws had previously robbed Taylor, threatened him, and sent him wot-d that he should be killed on sight. Taylor had spent the previous night with his father-in-law, William C. Mc- Neill, who lived a short way from the depot. Saturday morning, at eight o'clock, he started with Malcolm D. MacNeill toward the depot to meet the train. Henry Berry Lowery and two others suddenly rose up from the swamp be- side the dam, and Henry Berry fired a shot gun three feet fmm Taylor's head, sending the whole charge through his head and temples, blowing ofl part of the skull, and fragments of the brain fell into the mill .dam and floated down against the bank with the current. Steve Lowery almost instantly fired at Malcolm MacNeill. Henry Berry Lowery ran out of th« swamp, seized the quivering body o( Taylor by the legs and robbed it of $50 carrency. The troops at the depot rushed down THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. 61 THE OUTLAW SHOT IN HIS CABIN. to the spot where the outlaws disap- peared into the swamp and fired, and the same evening the Lumberton militi;i took to the swamps, twentj-five in number, and stayed out all night. Not finding anything the people began to advocate bloodhounds as the only way of tracking up the desperadoes. THE MURDER OF JOHN SANDERS. No crime known to modern society presents such dark, mediaeval features as the killinsr of Sanders, a detective policp officer fiom Boston and a native of Nova Scotia. It was the concluding portion of a career of wild adventure, and to this day the people of Robeson county turn pale at the bloody reminiscence. Sanders was one of several man who have sought to obtain the large reward offered for these outlaws, dead or alive, in a sum in gross equal to a handsome little fortune, and he was accredited by the Sheriff of New Han- over county to three or four white re- publicans of Scuffletown. Sanders appears to have been desti- tute of honor ; but his scheme of cap- turing these men was a shrewd one. 62 THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. Aware that they were anxious to j of apprehension and undoubted bold- leave tlie swamps and get safely out of ness. the United States to Mexico, or, at least, to the frontier country, he pro- posed to show them the way, assume to be their protector and friend, and ulti- mately to give them up on the road by arranging, beforehand, to have them inteisected at some point in South Carolina or Georgia. At the time Henry Berry Lowery fathomed this design and slew Sanders for his treachery a wagon had been prepared and packed, and the outlaws had fully agreed to slip off, escorting their movables and families under cover «)f the woods and broken country. To bind them to his confidence by extraordinary means Sanders prosti- tuted the rites of Masonry and ORGANIZED MASONIC LODGES in the Souffletown region while teach- ing a , small negro school in that vicinity. He spent eighteen months of per- severing cunning to win the sceptical hearts of the bandits, but became him- self corrupted by their females, and reckless of speech and association. Being suspected and looked upon with an evil eye for living among the mu- lattos and teaching them, S.inders also joined the Ku KIux to appease the white population, and, it is rumored, was concerned in several night enter- prises, whippings and vigils. Here we have the perfection of Goblin reality — a man sworn into Masonry and, also, the Invisible Em- pire, for the purpose of bringing a band of outlaws to justice. S inders was a stoop • shouldered, thin-vis:iged, hook-nosed man, with a broad, sharp forehead ; he had keeness He died as he had lived, in mystery, and out of the sight or reach of pity- ing man, and there is reason to bt - lieve that his fate was to be attributed to the want of caution of some of the county authorities who had learned his purposes. SANDERS' CAPTURE BY THE 'i LOWERYS. ^ In the middle of December, l870, Sanders established a camp in a " bay" near Moss Neck, close by the house of William C. MacNeill. Sandtjrs was a loose talker, ami had informed many persons of his object, and MacNiell's sons visited hirn in his secret camp and gave him advice and information. Accortling to the statcnK nt of one of the MacNeill boys, made before he wan wanted out of the country, there was a rendezvous of several of the neighbors called at Sanders' camp on Sunday, November 20, 1870. Some of the young men got to the camp at four o'- clock in the afternoon, but M-icNeill did not arrive until seven o'clock. As he walked down toward the "bay" t,he young men slipped up to him and, with ghastly faces, whispered that they were all surrounded and that to move would be certain death, covered, as they all were, by the shot guns and pistols of their besiegers. The impetuous MacNeill reached his hand toward his pistol, when four men rose up in the bushes close bcsid*? him- — namely, Henry Herry Lowery, Stephen Lowery, George Applewhite and Bos>» Strong. Henry Berry Lowery advanced, with a cool, fiendish look, and took MacNeill's repeater from its case, and told him to make himself at home that night, for h« THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. 63 would be (letained. MacNeill, disarmed^ joined th« other prisoners around thg outlaw's t'iirnp (iro. After diisl< Henry Berry Lowery led MacNeill off from the camp into the swamp and said : — " God d.unn your soul, I want you to tell me where Sanders is. He is expect- ed here. If you don't tell me where he is and why he don't come I will Uillyou dead. I intend to kill you anyhow when I get S:i!iders. You had better own right up !" Not obtaining anything from Mac- Neill, the outlaw walked him back to the fire, and, after a little time, Steve Lowery took MacNeill out for a like purpose. Steve Lowery told MacNeill that it" he did not make a clean breast o' his knowledge of Sanders Henry Berry Lowery would make the whole gang rid- dle him. Steve sliowea ^ilacNoill a pack of cards wh'ch he had purchased at the Scotch fair, a few miles from Shoe Heel, und remarked, " We boys go anywhere, and THE WHOLE COUNTRY BELONGS TO US." Young MacNeill testifies that all that night messengers were sent out to confer with invisible persons, whose voices were heard on the road side. These posted sentinels and the outlaw leaders in camp kept up communication all night long and toward daylight the bandits grew very impatient and threatened their prisoners many times. At early dawn Steve Lowery being out on guard, the detained prisoners heard the cry " H ilt ! " and heard sev- eral other voices belonging to persons not seen in the camp. Almost immedi- ately the voice of Sanders, the detective, Was heard, saying, " I surrender." Henry Berry Lowery, George Apple- j white, and Henderson Oxendine now r; n our, and the command was heard to take the prisoner on to the Back Swam^. In a few moments Henry Berry Lowery and his brother Stephen returned, saying, " We have got the buck we wanted." Henry Berry Lowery then turned to Malcolm MacNeill and said, " God damn you, 1 have a great mind to kill you right here. 1 ought to have killed you before. " You have been hunting me for years. You are young, stout, and healthy, however, and 1 don't want to take your blood. I hate to interfere with you and your people ; but you have already (lone so much to have me hanged or shot that it Would be right if 1 .should kill you right here. I will let you go this time, however; but you make yourself scarce in this country. Your folks may keep that shebang at Moss Neck; but you won't know when your time has come. Get out of this country mighty quick. Your father may stay here if he wants to, but TELL HIM TO WALK A CHALK LINE." Young MacNeill then retired, covered with the rifle of his unappeasable foe, and he lost no time in obeying commands and quitting the country. Sanders, whose voice he recognized, was never seen again by mortal eyes except by the outlaws. Nearly a mohth after the arrest of Sanders, and on the testimony of the people detained at his camp by the Lowerys, three persons were arrested as accomplices in the murder and charged with being guardians of the road and entrappers of the unfortunate Sanders. These were Dick Oxendine, who now keeps a barroom at Lumberton, John Sampson and Robert Ransom. 64 THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. The end of the unfortunate Sanders was related by Henderson Oxendine, one of the outlaws, prior to his execu- tion, and is fully confirmed by Henry I'xrry Lowery himself, who said : — •• The efficif-ncy and morale of my command compelled me to kill San- ' ers. We all pitied him, but if I iiadn't killed him I would have had no li^'ht to kill John Taylor or any of the rest." They inarched Sanders to a secret camp on a small island in Back Swamp, near the residence of the late Zach T. Chandler, and proceeded forthwith, with devilish malignity, to torture him, by firing volleys over his head, bruising him with guustocks and clubs, and filially by administering doses of arsenic to him and OPENING HIS VEINS WITH A KNIFE, For three days, or until Thursday, these horrible wretches surrounded their white victim, their dull blue eyes calmly enjoying his agonies, and he reminded every hour that escape or mercy were hopeless. Human or savage nature, happily, seldom presents a picture so atrocious as one decoyed and disappointed man guarded in the wild swamps of Caro- lina, but almost within sound of Chrsi- tian firesides, looking into inevitable and violent death after days of pain. The victim's fortitude and philosophy earned the respect of his murderers, and before carrying his sentence into execution they permitted him to write a farewell letter to his injured wife and family, which they posted by mail with a sort of grim and military observance of justice. The object of keeping Sanders alive for the better part of a week has not been explained — whether due to divided councils, love of persecuting him while 1 still alive, or the desire to wrest infor- mation from him. He hud reason to lament that he ever left his residence and associations in enlightened Nevv England, to die thus miserably in the swamps of the Pedee region, among the human moccasins that infested it. On Thursday night the outlaws told Sanders that his time had come, and they blindfolded his eyes and tied him to a tree. He made a few words of a prayer and gave a signal, and at once Steve Lowery, the darkest Indian of the group, EMPTIED BOTH BARRELS OF HIS SHOT GUN into the helpless wretch. After the hanging of Oxendine, a party of twenty-five soldiers and citi- zens, led by Mayor Thomas and Lieuten- ants Home and Simpson, followed the directions given by Oxendine, and, without difficulty found the camp where Sanders had been confined. It was in the densest part of the swamps, and scattered around were the spade used for digging the grave and some cooking utensils. They proceeded to search for the re- mains, and found them decently wrapped in a blanket, and deposited face up, with the hands folded in a dignified manner, and the daugerreotype of THE MURDERED MAN'S WIFE reverently placed upon his breast. These cool particularities and delibera- tion make the tragedy even more hein- ous by the awe which they inspire. It is murder with the appearance of sovereignty and martial right. The occurence will frighten the rising generation of Carolnia for the century to come. THE SWAMF OUTLAWS. 65 THE ANARCHY CAUSED BY THE LOWERYS. One looks in vain for any other cause of this fateful and scandalous state of affairs in an old and sedate part of North Carolina than the anomalous fact ot a large free negro settlement in a period of slavery, and tiie shiftless, predatory and insolent dominion of a few families in it of corrupted and savage blood, which could be tamed with difficulty and never quite sub- jugated. Freedom fell with almost tropical heat and spontaneity upon this settle- ment and warmed to active life the Lowery vipers, who proudly essayed to compete in military qualities with the late slaveholders and Confederate sol- diery. Party politics has only availed to intensify, prolong and dignify this strife, while meantime murders reach the score and the robberies are innume- rable. Enougn can be said on the side of the Lowerys to give them a trifle of an apology, but the condition of things is now such that all classes of the popula- tion are interested in the death and overthrow of tljese scoundrels, who are worse than Ku Klux — they are Apaches. They are turning the heads of the colored people and prompting ijegro imitators, and THE VERY CHILDREN OF SCUFFLE- TOWN are growing up barbarians with the lust for plunder and rapine. There is little to choose between the politicians of the rival parties. The undoubted existence of Ku Kluxism — now perished utterly and without mourners or apologists — has made the republicans take the part of the Lowery gang as a necessary reac- tion and return of resistance. But the Lowery feud began in 18G3 before the Confederacy was suppressed, and proceeded entirely from causes in- separable from the war. The leader of the gang, and, indeed, all associated with it, have shown a ferocity, a premeditation and an insol- ence fright! ul to understand and destruc- tive of all example and order. Tne State and county autiiorities have dene their best and accomplished noth- ing. The desperation and confidence of the outlaws is greater than ever. They fear nothiug and terrify all. Can Congress pr the President permit the colored people of the South to be longer debauched by this spectacle of a few men of color defying a State ? ^H^^^O) U.r: OMINOUS INTELLIGENCE. Wilmington, N. C, March 23, 1272. The latest intelligence from the Herald correspondent in the hands of the Robeson county outlaws renders even more grave the question of his probable fate. It was his intention to accompany the outlaws to their several hiding places, they agreeing to carry him to their haunts in the swamp blind- folded, and it was his intention to leave them on Monday next if possible. To- day Khody Lowery, the wife of Plenry Berry Lowery, appeared at the depot at Moss Neck and made a statement to the special messenger of the Herald as to the recent movements of the correspond- ent. MRS RHODY BRINGS STRANGE NEWS. Rhody states that npoa the return ol the Herald correspondent from Mosa Neck yesterday, after his delivery of his package of correspondence for the Herald bureau here, he was seated in h^jr cabin when Andrew Strong and X' 6C THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. Steve Lowery suddenly entered and peremptorily ordered him to •' COME AND GO WITH US. " Rhody states the Hkarald corres- pondent, manifesting great trepidation, immedinteiy obeyed their order, and was last seen by her moving in com- pany with the outlaws, whose manner towaid him was sullen and menacing, in thj direction of the swamp. Rhody has seen nothing of the Herald corres- pondent since his departure from her cabin, and s:ie professes entire igorance of the disposition made of him by the outlaws. AN OMINOUS HINT. In connection with this I make an ex- THRILLING FACTS. The Herald Correspondent Among the Lowery Bandits. A Week in tiie Hands of the Lowerys. Tlie Fathei of tlje Oxeiidines. The Motlier ol the Lowerys. Her Bitter ISiory by tlje Grave of the Murdered. Khody Lowerv, tlie Qiieou of Sciiffletowu. Face to Face With tlie Terrors. Tlieh" Appearance and Equipment. A Night in Khody Lowery "s Cabin. Lite of tlie ilunted men. Terrible Tales From Terrible Tongues. A Bliiullold Jounipy to Their Hiding Places — The Island Armory. Released from Bondage. Excitement in VVllininiiton. Wilmington, N. C, March 25, 1872- ARRIVAL OF THE CORRESPONDENT. To the amazement, and yet to the great satisfaction, of*the public here the tract frt)m'aletttfr fr noon CREATED AN INTENSE EXCITEMENT, and despite the fearfully stormy weather the Herald correspondent was the ob- ject of curiosity and the Heiiald was the theme of discussion and praise. The universal sentiment in Wilmington is that the Herald correspondent is the hero of a wonderful feat of daring, and there is universal rejoicing that he has of profound apprehension here regard" «"*"/ ^^^'^P^'^ ^^^ ^"-^^^ perils which have for more than a week past envir- oned him. Details given by your cor- respondent regarding bis adventures among the outlaws confirm the accounts given in the Herald despatches of the THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. (57 PER[L AND DIFFICULTIES which he has undergone. He left for New York this afternoon, and will give to the Herald the fullest possible de- tails of his thrilling adventures. On Friday last your correspondent was t.ilvcn by the outlaws farther into the swamp, and CONDUCTED BY THEM BLINDFOLDED from Rhody Lowery's cabin to several of their most secret hiding places. At the moment of leaving Rhody's cabin the Hkrald correspondent experienced the greatest sense of personal danger suffered by him during his career with the outlaws. Tom Lowery h;id especi- ally urged the killing of the "DAMNED YANKEE," and as the other outlaws conducted him away from Rhody's cabin, with the re. mark to Rhody that he would never see daylight again, your correspondent had little hope but that Tom Lowery's savage threat would be executed. Con- ducted by outlaws through the swamp blindfolded, except when his captors chose to remove the bandage, he trav- ersed the swamp, in some places wad- ing almost WAIST DEEP IN WATER, and again reaching solid ground, thus gaining one of the hiding places of the outlaws, which he inferred to be situa- ted upon an island. The blindfold was removed, and he found himself an in- mate of a low, pitched cabin, in which a modem tely tall man could not pos- sibly stand erect. In this cabin were from THIRIT TO FORTY SHOT GUNS but no smaller arms. The outlaws would not permit him to look out of the window and make any observations of the surroundings. He was told that he was already the possessor of more of their secrets THAN ANY OTHER HUMAN BEING outside of their gang, and more than they intended anybody else should ever have access to again. While in the swamps your correspondent was repeat- edly informed by the outlaws of iheir suspicions that he would attempt tt» chloroform them, and that he was a government spy sent to repe.it t'lo role in which the Detective Sanders had been caught by them. A DEMOCR.\TIC DEMON. He was also told by Steve Lowery that a prominent democrat of Robeson county had given them information that he was a federal spy and that he would undoubtedly do them great harm before he left them. "Still, " said Steve, " we l)elieve that you are honest, and we will trust you ; but DONT UNDERTAKE TO COME HERE AGAIN because you know too many of our secrets. " Steve then added, " We have trusted three other men besides you and they all betra) ed us, but still we will trust you and let you GIVE THE HERALD ALL THE INFOR- MATION you can about us. " After leaving the swarnps the outlaws carried your corres- pondent on Sunday buck to Rhody's cabin, and this morning accompanied him to Moss Neck, WAVING A FRIENDLY ADIEU TO HIM as the train left. As a mark of their confidence in the honesty of his inten- tions toward themselves, the outlaws gave the Hekald correspondent 68 THE SWAMP OUTLAWS A DOUBLE-BARRELLED SHOT GUN, formerly belonging to Henry Berry Lowery, the deceased outlaw chief, and Steve Lowery presented him with three silver pieces, to be given, one to' his wife, another to his baby, and the third to be iiept by himself as a souvenir of his trip among the Carolina outlaws. Your cori-espoudent is warm in his ac- knowledgment of Rhody's services to himself in aiding him to retain the con- fidence of the outlaws, and. PRAISES HER COURAGE and intelligence. Rhody carried him to many points of interest, among others to the grave of the unfortunate Sanders, a spot whidi the outlaws seemed to d.-ead visiting with a reinaka- ble superstitious apprehension. Upon one occasion the Hkrald correspondent was withiu half a mile of the grave of Sanders and begged the outlaws to CONDUCT HIM 10 THE GRAVE, but they refused, as they also did to visit tlie graves of other victims of their vengeance. The satisfaction of the community of Wilmington at the safe arrival in their midst of the daring Herald correspond- ent is heightened by his confirmalion of the previous tidings from him of the deaths of Henry Beri-y Lowery and of Boss Strong, the second in cleverness and courage of the gang of outlaws. During the absence of your correspond- ent in the swamps the excitement in Wilminuton was at fever heat and found some curious forms of expression. FIRST LETTER FROM OUR CAP- TURED CORRESPONDENT. SCUFFLETOWN, RoBKSON CoUSTY, I N. C, March 1, 1872 J That the thrilling pictures given in son county swamps, in North Carolina, with the history of their deeds of daring murder and rapine, had awakened a deep sensation over the United States, was everywhere evident. It seemed incredible that a band of five men should persistently defy a community such a^s the Old North State. The criminal supineness of the State authori- ties, the inactivity of the federal govern- ment and the terrorized condition of the inhabitants of the district all expressed an anomalous condition of affairs which CALLED FOR TITE FULLEST INVES- TIGATION. The account given by another corres- pondent had exhausted' all the infor- mation surrounding the gang, had given graphic sketches of the now famous mulatto settlement, with its ominous name of Scuffletown, had detailed the outrages by the gang, and traced back their history to the days of the rebel fortifications at Wilmington, when Henry Berry Lowery first took to the swamps, to avoid impressment to work with the slaves of the Southern plant- ers. Escaped federal prisoners, too, from the Confederate prison at Florence. S. C, were seen fiitting across the swamps and HIDING FURTIVELY AMONG THE SHANTIES of the free negro settlement of Scuffle- town to take their places awhile with H' nry Berry Linvery and his fellows in the swamps. By and by came the sweep of Sherman's army to the sea, and it was related how the '' bummers" found guides and supporters among the free mulattoes of Scuffletown. It came out, to-, in a ghastly way, that the rebel whites of the district, wishing to wreak their vengeance on the Herald of the outlaws of the Robe- ' the colored people, came in the night to THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. 69 olJ Alien Lowery's cabin, and, dragging forth himself and his son William, mer- cilessly SHOT THEM, FATHER AND BOY, with the one volley, and then went their way, putting two of iheir supposed ene- mies out of the way only to create a pack of avenging devils in the persons of the old man's sons and their outlawed friends. The war closed, and, rightly or wrongly, the white people of Robeson county true to their murder of the fa- ther, exempted the Lowerys from the act of oblivion. How truly has it been said t'at " we can never forgive those we have injured ! " The end of" the strife between North and South brought no peace to Scuffle- town The " angels " were in the swamps robbing by day murdering by ni-iht : the rebels had become Ku Klux, and from fighting manfully in the sun- light were trooping in THEIR MURDEROUS MASQUERADE, under the pines and cypresses at night and draL'cinjr a neero here and there from his .shanty, let him sing his wild, hurried prayers for a minute or two, and then stopping it all Wjjth buckshot, but carefully skirting the outlaws themselves, some day to fall, like John Taylor, under a " bead " drawn by Henry Berry or one of his brother outlaws". This was not civilization. The irre- sponsible lex talionis of the hater and hated, the state of things that created in the land of Muscovy between serf and feudal master the phrase that de- scribed the murder of the latter by the former as " the wild justice of revenge," existed in the land of the Lower}*^ with tiKire (logr;iding surroundings than ever before or in any otner country. That social, restraining force called government had failed to put an end to it, and there seemed, previous to the Herald's expose, to be a sort of hisses aller agreed on in tacit t^pathy by a'\ parties. But even yet the outlaws thtmselvrs had not spoken. THE OUTLAWS STORY FOR HIMSELF was unuttered, except through his sen- tence of death by word of mouth, fol- lowed pretty surely by execution through the barrel of a rifle. In perhaps any other state of things no more would be needed previous t<. setting about his censure. As things stood it seemed that there must be something needing fuller detail — some thing of moment in their position which neither the shivering sympathizers of their own race nor the vaunting but trembling white foes thereof would or could impart. This was to be got from the outlaw's lips along. It did not require much deep reason- ing to arrive at this conclusion. It forced itself naturally forward, and the journal which had enterprise enough to gather the fir^t part of the story could surely learn the second. Without, then, any feeling of rashness or bravado that I am aware of, but simply in the exercise of a grave duty, to shrink from which would be abhor- rent to my nature, I LEFT FOR THE WOODS AND SWAMPS of Robeson. My preparations were simple as my mission was direct, and relying on my ability to make the honorable nature of my purpose apparent even to the des- perate men it was my deliberate pur- pose to meet face to face. Passing over the incidents whifh do not properly belong to my narrative, 1 70 THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. may say that on my arrival in Wil- iiiington I f'uuud the Lowerys and the Herald expose to L»e the only topics of interest in that quiet Carolina town, and the tone of the well-dressed, lounging chivalry about the hotels was not at all encouraging. I told the object of my visit to several, and the universal verdict was " A DANGEROUS GAME, STRANGER, rather you than nic," They recalled to ine with all the discouraging emphasis which a slow ejaculation of alternate words and tobacco-spittle can command the fearful fate of Saunders, the detec- tive, and generally finished by saying : — " AN' HE WAS SM ARTEHBN YOU LOOK, STRANGER." This continual replication of warning did not tend to clieer ine. It recalled in a painful way I had never before imagined the poem oi Excelsior with its dismal forebodings of a fatal ending to my venture, but I dashed these all away. The thought that Longfellow's aimless young mad- man who died in the snow, had nothing ill common with a man endeavoring in his own humble way to serve the civili- zation which lay so sadly wrecked out in the swamp region beyond. If the scare had reached Wilmington, I reasoned, I shall not then have much difficulty in getting the whites of Robe- son county to assist me in ridding them of the objects of their terror through, perhaps, A MORE MERCIFUL WAT than killing ihem off like dogs. But in this I was destined to be mistaken Excepting Captain Morrison ; the *' king of conductors " on the Wilming- ton, Charlotte and Rutherford Railroad. and Ed Hayes, of Shoe Heei, no one encouraged me to proceed. From the ticket agent, from whom I bought a ticket for Moss Neck, at Wil- mington, with his horrified ej.iculation — " My God ! stranger, you are not going to stop there !" To the merchants of Shoe Heel, who assured me death would be the sure fate of any stranger who would venture into Scuftletown, I heard Imtthe one opinion, that the Lowerys were devils and would welcome an opportunity to kill a white man. Before leaving Wilmington I pre- pared A LETTER, DIRECTED TO U. B. LOWERY. Stating that I desired to interview him for the Heiiald and offered to give myself into his hands if we would grant me the interview. It was my intention to stop at Moss Neck and attempt to find a messenger who would deliver my letter, but on the train Captain Morrison advised mo to go on to Shoe Heel where 1 would find better accomodations than at Moss Neck, and from where I could certainly send a messenger to the outlaws. I took his advice, but was unable to find any one in or about Shoe Heel who would deliver or who knew any one who would present my petition to the " King" of Robeson county. The reported killing of Boss Strong, it was supposed, had SO ENRAGED THE OUTLAWS that the time was particularly inauspi- cious for my visit. I met here James McQueen, or Don- ahoe, of Richmond county, N. C, who asserted he had killed the notorious Boss. He is a tall, awkward, shambling, THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. 71 dark complexioned man, of Scottish decent, twenty-five years of age ; he has very small eyes, which he has a trick of dropping the instant he is looked at. The next morning, March 14, I left Shoe Heel and came to Eureka, or Buie's Store, half way between Moss Neck and Red Bank. At the store, close to the railroad, the colored clerk, of whom I enquired the road to Patrick Lowery's, left the store to point it out to me. To him 1 stated the object of my vis- it, and asked him to inform any of the outlaws he might see what I was after. TEIE FATHER UF TWO MURDERERS. Soon after leaving the store I met an old negro who asked me if I was look- ing for anybody, when I told him I wanted to go to Pat Lowery's. He told me I was in the right road, and added : — " I's skeered of strangers most to deff, but you hain't got no gun. " This was Jack Oxendine, the father of Henderson, who was hung in Lum- berton in 1870, and Calvin, who is now in the Wilmington jail, charged with being implicated in t le King murder. At the conclusion of his introduction he said ; — " ' Fore God, dis is powerful bad country to live in ; ebery now and den de Ku Kluck come in yer, and with their shootin' an' whippin' an' hangin', an' de men out by deyselves totin' dere guns, I's scart to deff. " A short half mile from the station brought me to THE HOME OF PAT LOWERY, the oldest brother of Henry Berry, and a preacher. When I got there he was working in his carpenter shop, near his house — for he is not above honest labor notwithstanding his profession. I at once unfolded the object of my calling» and asked if 1 could be permitted to stay with him a few days, while I would make efforts to meet the outlaws. He was perfectly willing I should make his house my home while here, but thought my chance of seeing Henry was very slim. It had been reported for the past four weeks that he was dead, and many be- lieved it, even some of his friends, while the majority thought the story had been originated by his wife and brothers to cover his escape from the county. Patrick told me Sceve and Tom Low- ery HAD PASSED HIS HOUSE A FEW DAYS BEFORE, but it might be a long time before they would be in their immediate neighbor- hood again. After a long conversation betweea him and James Oxendine, a well-to-do mulatto farmer living near by, it was decided that my best plan would be to \ go over to the home of old Mrs. Low- ! ery, the mother of Patrick and Henry. They both assured me it would be perfectly safe, for the outlaws never in- terfered with any but those who trou- bled them. For a consideration Patrick consent- ed to give me his horse on which to' ride over, and his son Allen, a bright boy of sixteen, to guide me. After a dmner of CORN BREAD. BACON AND COFFEE. we started on our journey, and I must « confess to a slight sinking of the heart I as I lost sight of the railroad and plung- I ed into the swamps, the lurking places | of tbe Lowery outlaws. I IN THE OUTLAWS LAND. I had ridden about a mile, when the discomfort produced by my horse's »72 THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. •^miserable gait, and the banging of my rvalise against my legs, became too •great, and 1 proposed to my guide that he should ride awhile. But the charge was not for the better, ^nd it had scarcely been made when we came to one of the low places in the road that are so common here, called *■' branches," and which are feeders to the swamps Alontf one side of these branches are laid, or erected on stumps, logs for the leonvenience of pedestrians. They are generally unhewfl, all very narrow, many of them decayed, and very few that stand firm under any move- hient. At the first of these I came to, after dismounting, I LOriT MY BALANCE, and got into the water knee deep. I remounted the horse, then, and, except- ing the gait and banging aforesaid and crushing of my legs against the trees, first on one side and then on the other, as I followed Allen in the narrow foot- path through which he led me, I suffered no great inconvenience. About two and a half miles from Patsedo we came to the " Back Swamp," where for about three hundred and fifty yards the black water crosses the road flowing sluggishly through the brush, and cypress trees. A long the foot logs here Allen ran, with the confidence inspired by long practice. ANDREW STRONGS CABIN. About a mile from the Back Swamp we passed the cabin of Andrew Strong, one of the outlaws, where his younger brother, Boss, was shot the Friday be- fore. We passed close to the house, and a Couple of wom^n came to the door, and [ stood there as long as the house was in sight. As I have since learned, there was another pair of eyes watching us from a thicket near the house. Andrew Strong himself, with HIS GUN READY FOR A SHOT, in his hand, studied me as 1 passed. Another long stretch of water, mud, and sand, and we came to Henry Berry Lowery's house, now in the occupancy of his wife, Rhody. A quarter of a mile further and we reached our desti- nation, the home of OLD MRS. ALLEN LOWER Y. Here we were greeted by the loud and decidedly savage barking of three large dogs. Two or three very light mulatto girls drove them, away, and opened the gate for me ; as I passed in I was put in the presence of the old woman, who gave me a very hospitable reception, and assured me I was wel- come to stiiy as long as 1 pleased, if I could put up with their rough fare. Mrs. Lowery has the largest house in this section of country ; it is weather- boarded, has four good sized rooms, and a kitchen attached, aud a wide porch in front. It is on a plantation containing about seventy-five acres, and has numerous out-buildings connected with it. There has been no division of the estate or property since old Allen Lowery was killed, the children GIVING ALL THE PROEITS TO THEIR MOTHER. One son, Sinclair, living near, super- intends the farm, and assists her when necessary. This little plantation pro- duced last year eight bales of cotton and four hundred bushels of corn. Soon after my arrival I met Sinclair, who is a dark mulatto, with a good THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. 73 ^J"' I ^ a^^- BOSS STRONG countenance. He told me he did not know whether Henry Berry was alive or dead ; that no one had seen him for four or five weeks. Mrs. Lowery said the same. Sinclair added : — " I will be glad it he is dead, for he is a very bad man, and has done a heap of harm." He further told me he had not been on friendly terms with Henry since the marriage of the latter to Rhody Strong ; the marriage it had been announced would be solemnized at his mother's iiouse, and Sinclair, fearing that an attack Would be made on the house by the officers in pursuit of Henry, objected to the ceremony being performed there. When Henry was arrested he accused Sinclair of having informed on him, and ON GUARD. they had never been on good terms afterwards. Steve and Tom TOOK PART WITH HENRY in his quarrel ; so that Sinclair could give me no information of the outlaws. I would here remark that this band are known in their neighborhood by the name "outlaws;" their friends call them and they style themselves out- laws. When I returned to the house after the conversation with Sinclair, who was working in a field. I was presented to Rhody, the wife of Henry Berry Low. ery. THE " QUEEN OF SCUFFLETOWN." This young woman is remarkably 74 THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. pretty ; her face oval, of a very light color; large, dark, mournful-looking eyes, with long lashes ; well shaped moutii ; with, small, even teeth, well rounded chin ; nose slightly retrousee, with profusion of straight jet black hair, combine to make her a very pleasant object to gaze at. She has small hands and feet, and on the latter she wears No. 2, and still cramps her feet less than the majority of white women. She is of medium height, with a very well developed figure, and is between twenty- one and twenty-two years old. When I add that she has a low sweet voice, and a great many little graceful motions of her head and body, it will be seen that she is a rara avis in Scuffletown. To the above description I regret that 1 aiif compelled to add that this queen cannot write, that SHE SMOKES A PIPE AND RUBS SNUFF. When Rhody learned the object of my visit she said she would undertake to have my message conveyed to the outlaws, and she had no doubt they would grant me an interview. Henry Berry, she said, was away, and she could not tell when he would return. I walked home with her, and examined carefully the home of the notorious out- law leaden. THE OUTLAWS NEST. The cabin of this man is built pre- cisely as are all those of the poorer miilattoes — one story high, logs Irom three to eight inches apart, the intersti- ces not filled in as in log houses at the North, but covered by boards on either the inside or outside, never both. This house had the 'boards on the outside. Th'-re are two doors, opposite each other, secured by modern bolts and buttons, and on the third side is the capacious hearth or fireplace, with chim- ney built of logs, lined and floored with clay. On the side opposite the fireplace stands the bed, and above and beside it are stretched several poles, upon which hang the clothes of the family. There are no windows, nor any open- ings for light but the doors and chimney. Indeed, of some twenty houses of mu- lattoes I visited, I found but two, those of Mrs. Allen Lowery and Patrick Low- ery, in which there were windows. The house of H. B. Lowery is within a small enclosure, which is surrounded by a large one, and is on his father Allen's estate. The furniture of this house consists of ^ * A BED, A TABLE. THREE CHAIRS, and three stools. Over the fireplace are pasted a number of pictures cut from the illustrated papers, while a colored print, labelled " The Two Beau- ties," hangs over the table. Rhody had left her "help" — a light mulatto, who had been engaged by Andrew Strong to stay with her for six weeks for a pair of shoes and a calico dress — in charge of HER CHILDREN— Sally Ann, aged five ; Henry Delany, aged three, and Neelyatin, aged one year and two months. They are all of a very bright color, strong, active, and healthy, the boy being particularly bright. He is said to be.ir a strong resemblance to his father. I spent an hour or more uilh Rhody, She told me, further, if 1 would come back the next morning she might have some information for me, and that in the meantime I might rest assured I would be in no danger from the out- laws or their friends. THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. 75 BY THE OLD MAK'S GRAVE— OLD MRS. LOWERYS STORY- The next morning ( March 15 ) old Mrs. Lowery took me to a small unen- closed grave in a field near her house, where, marked by four rails lying on the ground, was the grave of her husband and son William. The old woman's voice was broken, and the tears rolled down her withered face even now as she told me how they met their death. There had been no trouble between them and any of their white neighbors, except that some of their sons had fled from the officers who wanted to take them to work in the rebel fortifications at Wilmington. In 186-4 a party of whites, com- manded by James Barnes, came to the house and took the old man and Wil- liam away, at the same time, THEY ASKED FOR SPADES, and took some along with them ; some of them returned directly and carried old Mrs. Lowery and her two daugh- ters to the house of a white man, Rob- ert McKensie, where they were locked up in a smoke house. Mckensie then went away saying he was going up to see how the Lowery men were faring. When they returned home, in a thicket not far from the house, they found a new-made, shallow grave, in which were the bodies of Allen and William Lowery, lying one above the other, riddled with musket balls. The next day they came back and took me out into the woods and said they were going to kill me if I didn't tell them where the Yankee prisoners were hid. I didn't know and I told them so, but they wouldn't believe me. They blindfolded me and tied me to a tree, and said they were going to shoot me. I heard them firing, and then I fainted. When I fainted they untied me and sent the girls to bring me too. This was old Mrs. Lowery's story, and all the mulattoes whom I met and questioned about it, told me about the same thing. From the grave of the Lowery's I went straight to Rhody's house. As 1 ^entered the gate of the outer enclosure I noticed a man standing in the doorway who stepped back within the house. As I reached the inner gate he again came to the door and I CONFESS TO SOME NERVOUSNESS as I saw his equipments. But it was no time to stop now, and in a moment 1 was in Henry Berry Lowery's house, in the presence of Steve Lowery and Andrew Strong, two of the famous swamp outlaws. With as composed aQ air as the nature of the case would per- mit I stepped forward. " I believe these are the men " (I am not sure but that I said gentlemen) "1 wanted to see," and extended my hand to the one nearest me, who grasped it cordially as Rhody mentioned his name, Andrew Strong, and mine, and then repeated the ceremony with Steve. Both of them oflTered me chairs ; but I accepted that from which Andrew had just arisen, it being nearer the fire, and immediately EXPLAINED MY PURPOSE in seeking them. I told them the great paper of America had givt n some at- tention to them, and had published their histories as furnished by the white people of Robeson county ; but that the people of the United States might have a clear and just conception of affairs here I had been sent down to see them, hear their stories and the circumstances that had made them outlaws and se« 76 THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. rtow they lived. I told them further' that i HAD NO WEAPON BUT A SMALL REVOLVER, which they could have while I was with them, but which they would oblige me by returning when 1 left them. They replied that Rhody had told them the nature of my business, that they were glad of an opportunity of giv- ing their story to the country, for the " papers were telling so many d — d lies about them," that I would be perfectly safe with them, and that I might keep my pistol. ^ THE MEN I MET. '^ Steve Lowery is five feet ten inches high, thick set, with long arms and legs, and is very strong ; he has a very dark yellow complexion, hazel eyes, bright and restless, black straight hair and thin mustache and goatee. He was armed with a Spencer rifle, two double-barrell- ed shot guns, one of the latter and the ■rifle being slung from his shoulders, and three six-barrelled revolvers in his belt, while two United States cartridge boxes hung from his shoulders. Andrew Strong is nearly white, about six feet high, with rather mild eyes and reddish beard and hair, the latter cut short. He carried a heavy rifle and the same number of shot-guns, revolvers and cartridge boxes as Steve Lowery, be- sides a heavy canvas haversack. His impedimenta ("turn," he calls it) weighs not less than a hundred pounds. He ADJUSTED ALL HIS EQUIPMENTS ON ME, and I could barely stagger across the floor with them. After a few general remarks, Andrew told me they would tell me all I wanted to know if I would question them. As the shooting of Boss was the chief 'i-opic I had heard discussed after leaving Wilmington, I told them I had seen James McQueen or Donahoe, at Shoe Heel, arid had taken down his version of the affair, and would now like to know if it was correct. 1 read to them McQueen's story as follows : — DONAHOE'S STORY OF KILLING BOSS STRONG. " Last Thursday night (May 7), 1 reached the house of Andrew Strong, on the edge of Scuttletown, about ten miles from here, at twelve o'clock, I fixed a good blind about 150 yards from the house, and lying down, I watched the rest of the night and all the next day, eating some provisions I had brought along. About half-past seven P. M. Friday, Andrew came out of the woods, and after stopping and looking around him in all directions he went into the house, and directly come out and gave a low call, when Boss came out of the woods to the house; they were each armed with two rifles and two or three revolvers. A little after eight o'clock, when I thought they would be at sup- per, I slipped up to the house and look- ed in through the cat hole in the door, as I supposed they were eating their supper by the light on the hearth. Be- side Andrew's wife, Flora and a Miss Cummings were there. I kept watching there until Boss laid down on the floor with his feet to the fire and his head to- wards me and commenced PLAYING ON A MOUTH ORGAN. Then I saw my cnance, and 1 pushed the muzzle of my rifle (a Henry) through the cat nole until it was not over three feet from his head, took a steady aim bv the light of the fire and shot. When I fired the women screamed and said:^ THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. 77 LIKENESS OF SANDERS THE SPY. •'HE'S SHOT," "NO HE ISN'T," "YES HE IS," and I looked in as quick as I could get my gun out of the way. Boss' arms and legs had fallen straight from his body, and there was a little movement of the shoulders as if he was trying to get up. Andrew Strong was then stand- ing IN THE SHADOW IN THE CORNER and he stayed there until I left. He taid to his wife, *' Honey, you go out and see what it is," and opened the door opposite the one 1 was at and pushed her out, but did not come around to the side I was ; but went in directly and said there was nobody about. He sent her out' again, telling her to look in the corners and jams ; but before she had got well out, he said, ♦' Come back. Honey, he was blowing on that thing and it busted and blowed his head off," and directly after he said, "My God I he's shot in the head ; it must have come from the cat hole," and sent his 7ft THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. •wife out again, and I slipped off. Wlien I returned the cat hole was shut up and the house was all dark. Then I come back to Shoe Heel." I THE OUTLAWS HOLD A COUNCIL. ! Before they left they went out of the house and held an animated conversa- tion of perhaps half an hour's duration in the garden, after which Steve address- ed me : — " We've trusted three men before and ebery one of dem betrayed us, an' we swo' we'd neber trust no stranger agin, but you look honest, an your story 'pears to be all right, an' we is gwine to trust you some. Now you's got a- bout Donahoe's shootin Buss, we are gwine to keep you heah till you can PUT IN DE PAPER HOW WE KILLED DONAHOE. We won't hurt you, an? you kin travel about whar you hab a mind to in dis place, but you must swear an oath dat you won't try to go away without us lettin' you". I was somewhat dismayed at this speech, but expressed myself satisfied with the arrangement. I saw I would have an opportunity of seeing wild life not often enjoyed by Northern men, and felt that I was in no great danger if I acted honestly towards my captors. PART TO MEET AGAIN. The outlaws then slung on their equipments, and after promising to meet me at the *' New Bridge,'' three miles distant, the next morning, strode into the heavy pine forest, and I went back into the cabin, where Rhody taught me how to rub snuff. ScuFFELTowN, March 22, 1872. THE DEATH OF HENRY BERRY LOW- As this letter cannot be read by the people of this settlement before I have left it, the most important piece of in. formation I have to communicate shall be given first. Henry Berry Lowery, the notable chief of tne notorious swamp outlaws is actually dead. This is denied by all of his comrades, and his relatives profess to be ignorant of hi8 fate. But from evidence the most reliable, when connected with a well-connected chain of circumstances, I am enabled to give you a correct account of THE DEATH OF THIS ROBBER CHIEF. Between February 13 and 16, in company with his Jidus Achates, Boss Strong, Henry Berry Lowery was ranging the country in the neighborhood of Moss Neck in search of some persons whom he had been informed were hunt- ing him, while Steve and Tom Lowery and Andrew Strong were stationed at a rendezvous on Lumber River, near the " new bridge." About one and three- quarter miles from Moss Neck station, within short gunshot of the road leading from Inman's Bridge to McNeill's mill, they discovered in the bushes a newly made " blind " (a place of concealment or ambush made by intertwining the branching of the thickly grown bushes.) It was not then occupied, and Henry Berry, believing it had been recently made by one of his pursuers, who would shortly return to it, ensconced himself in it, while Boss made a blind for him- self a short distance off^ covering the road. But a few minutes after they had placed themselves in their respective positions the report of a gun was heard from Henry's hiding place, and when Boss, who waited to hear a word from his chief or an answering shot from an enemy, cautiously approached the spot, Henry Berry Lowery lay on his back, with one barrel of his shotgun discharg- ed and his nose, forehead and the THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. TO WHOLE FRONT OF HIS HEAD BLOWN I horseback for the New Bridge. On the 1 way I passed the " Devil's Den," a desolate wild spot in the Back Swamp, where is said to be one of the hiding places of the bandits. Our destination was Moss Neck, where I wanted to mail some letters and send some private despatches to the telegraph office at Wilmington, and they wanted to OFF. The broken ramrod and the missing wiper showed he had been trying to draw a load from his gun. Boss drew the body into a thicket, and notified his companions, who straightway buried him where, in all human probability, the eye of man will see him never. Thus perished this remarkable man, and his death marks the dissolution of this most formidable body of despera- does. The large sum of money he was said to be in posession of is also lost to the country, for no member of the band, not even Boss nor his wife, knew the whereabouts of his treasure chest. The remaining outlaws have made diligent search, but as yet have had their labor for their pains. Henry Berry was said to have had a good deal of money, besides his share of the proceeds of the Lumbertoti Bank, from which some thirty thousand dollars were taken. It appears to have been his habit of appro- priating to his own use THE LION'S SHARE OF ALL MONEY taken, giving the subjects the other booty. But to resume the story of my life among the outlaws. A little after dark on the evening of the day I ntet Andrew Strong and Steve Lowery I returned to Henry Berry's house, in pursuance of his wife's invitation, to spend the night there. After supper Rhody said I SHOULD SLEEP IN THE BED, while she would make a couch tor her- self, help and family on the floor. The next morning, after a breakfast on the same chicken we had tried the night before, with a guide furnished by the friends of the outlaws, I started on SEND THEIR MESSAGE TO THE HERALD. We heard the train east coming when we were about a mile from the station, and ran the whole distance from there. They would not go up to the train, nor would they let me go until I promised them solemnly, with my hand on my heart, that I would not go off in it, and would hand their despatch, as well as my own, to the conductor. From Moss Neck, with a young man- who had been taken prisoner by the outlaws, when they captured the detec- tive Saunders, but who now appeared to be on very good terms witii them, we went down the railroad about a mile and then half a mile south into a " bay," where Saunder's ''camp" had been lo- cated. From this desolate spot we returned to Moss Neck, where 1 MET THOMAS LOWERY, another of the outlaws, and upon whose head is set a price of $5,000. Toin Lowery is five feet ten inches high, strongly built, with a lighter complex- ion than Steve, but darker than Henry Berry. He has rather regular features, a high forehead and the brightest eyes of the three outlaws I met. He has a short, black beard, and straight, black hair, and is more refined in his appear- ance than Steve or Andrew Strong. He was armed precisely as they, with 80 THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. a rifle and two shotguns and a belt full of revolvers. He said he had heard of my presence in the neighborhood and was glad to see me. It being now about one o'clock we were all naturally hungry, so Steve bought a couple dozen of eggs from a woman near by, who boiled them for him, and we went into the store at Moss Neck to eat them,, which work we accomplished by cutting them in halves with our knivfs, sprinkling coarse salt on them and gulping down each half from its shell. I ate four, the remain- der being devoured by the three out' laws. In addition to the eggs we had some GINGER CAKE, CHEESE AND WRETCHED WHISKEY. After dinner I was taken to McNeill's mill, near Moss Neck, the place where that Make (Malcolm) Sanderson was killed, and where, within a few yards of the former, one of his murderers, John Taylor, was subsequently punished. The place was pointed out to me, and the story of their respective deaths told by Andrew Strong. WHERE MAKE SANDERSON AND JOHN TAYLOR WERE KILLED. In September, 1870, Andrew, who up to that time had been charged with no offence, and was then working at his home, was called up from his bed at about eleven in the night by a party of over twenty men, who said they wanted him to go along with them a little ways. When he had dressed and gone out to the party he found they had another man (Make Sanderson) with them. After they had gone about a mile one of the party, McNeill, turned to Andrew and said, " You'll never see morning again," and upon his prisoner asking why and what he had done was answered that he was a d — d nigger and a spy for the Lowerys and so was Sanderson, and they had determined to kill them all. On the road to Moss Neck they were shot by John Taylor, to whom the pris- oners made a strong and passionate ap- peal for mercy, to which he replied, " If all the mulatto blood in the country was in you two and a movement of my foot would send you to hell I would make it." Soon after the prisoners were tied together and led to a secluded spot about a mile from Moss Neck, where they were to die. Sanderson asked for time to pray, which, after some consul- tation, was given him. In the midst of his supplications for pardon h« was in- terrupted by a blow from a pistol and told to hurry up and not to pray so loud, as GOD WOULD HEAR HIM ANYHOW. When he had finished they were taken to a proper distance from their captors to be shot at, when Andrew, who had been working at his bonds ever since they were put on him, broke them sud- denly and rushed for the woods, fol- lowed by the shuts of his enemies. Make Sanderson's body was found the next morning near McNeill's mill- pond riddled with bullets. It was said he was standing on a plank over the race, and at the first fire fell into the water still alive, and crawling out on the land below was shot on the ground where his mangled body was found. For this murder John Taylor was arrested, but held to bail in the sum of $500. When H. B, Lowery heard this he remarked : " We mulattoes must carry out oifr own laws: I will kill John Taylor," and on the morning of January 14, 1871, with a company of soldiers with- in 200 yards of him, he and Boss Strong THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. ftl rose from the road, a hundred yards from where Sanderson had been killed the fall before, and at a distance of less then ten yards shot the top of his head off. AN OUTLAW CONCERT. After Andrew had told me this his- tory and had shown me where Sander- son and Taylor were killed, and where Henry and Boss were ambushed, we re- turned to the store, where for a couple of hours in a back room Steve and Andrew " picked " the banjo, played on the violin and sang negro melodies to an appreciative and enthusiastic audi- ence. Steve sings very well, and the peculiar airs with which he was accom- panied on the banjo were novel and ex- ceedingly pleasant. A LODGING PAID FOB. When we fir.ally left Moss Neck it was for the purpose of finding a place for me to spend the night. About three miles up the railroad we came to the residence of Tom Chavis to well-to-do mulatto, where Steve engaged lodging for me, telling them to give me a good supper and allow me to retire to bed immediately after, for I was '* clean done worried out, " and he would pay the t)ill ; and, fixing a point to meet me the next day, the outlaws strode away to ward the swamps. THE PRESS ON THE OUTLAWS AND HERALD ENTERPRISE. Our rural friends the Southern edi- tors, are at it again. Past all their comprehension seems the fact that a New York journal could have a corres- pondent in Africa and one among the Carolina outlaws of the same time. Here, for instance, is an enlightened little rag from Mississippi, the Pilot. Hear what it flutters. ^ord help a country with such pilots, although they do boast of being '• official journal of the United States." THROUGH THICK AND THIN. (F m the Daily Mississippi Pilot, Marcli 22). One of the New Yoke Herald cor- respondents was recently killed while searching for Dr. Livingstone, in the interior of Africa, and now another has fallen into the hands of the Swamp An- gels, led by the bandit, Stephen Low- ery, in North Carolina. The Lowerys say they will not kill him ; only inter- view him until they prove ■ whether he is an impostor or not. Can't the Herald spread this on a little thicker? It seems to us remarkably " thin." THE HATE OF COLOR. When the bull-fighters of Seville wish to enrage the plunging toro they flash a piece of red cloth before his eyes, and straightway he becomes mad. When you wish to enrage a grand old unpro- gressive, hardshell democrat of the Southern stripe show him something black, and the rabies will follow direct- ly after. The following is the painful result of a Newark man finding out that the Lowerys were colored ! IF THEY WERE ONLY WH[ (From the Newark (N. J.,) Daily Journal, March 25.) The Swamp Angels are not yet ex- tinguished, and it is even a matter of doubt to the present time whether the leader is dead or has run away or will yet turn up in some fresh raid upon society. Would it not be well for Grant to extend a " protectorate" over Robeson county? The Herald re- porter has not yet been heard from, and when a whiteman, in thelegitimat* 82 THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. pursuit of an honorable busines, cannoi pass safely through our own country, we think it would be better to postpone a protectorate over Mexico until we have regulated matters somewhat bet- ter at home. Had Henry Berry Lo.w- ery, and his g mg been white men would they have been permitted to ex- ist? We pause for a reply. Here now is a southern man, who at- tends to his business of news collecting. We like this. He reports that the Herald correspondent was in danger, and we are thauliful to him : — BRAVE RIIODY LOWERY. (From the Wilmington (N. C.) Journal, March 24.) The wife of Henry Berry Lowery, the (lutlaw chief, was at Moss Neck de- pot yesterday as the train passed that point, whither she came for the purpose of delivering a despatch from Hender- son, to be sent north from this city. She states that the correspond-nt was at Lowery 's cabin, near Moss Neck, on Friday evening, about six o'clock, when Tom Lowery, Stephen Lowery, and Andrew Strong entered it and roughly told him to get up and go with them. He told them that he was ready; but first asked permission to send off A de- spatch to his paper, which was accorded him, when he wrote the despatch and gave it to the Lowery female, who, as we have seen, fulfilled her promise to deliver it to the conductor of the train. Henderson then accompanied the out- laws, bound for the recesses of Scuffle- town swamp. It was reported here yesteruay, the report coming from Shoe Heel, that Henderson had been killed by the out- laws, but the report is generally dis- credited. WHO IS TO BLAME ? Here is another solution of the que8> tion. The Edgefield Advertiser said it was Grant ; the Raleigh Ura said it was the Ku Klux ; the Wilmington Star now says it; is Governor Caldwell. Wonderful ! It admits that he sent down his Adjutant General, but forgets to mention that the cowardice of the population of Robeson county made his efforts ineffectual. They can only tell half truths down there. (From tlie Wilmington Star, Marcli 24.) CALDWELL AND LOWERY That Henry Berry Lowery and hie little band of robbers and cutthroats should, for so long a time, set law and civilization at defiance — should pillage, outrage and murder with un paralleled impunity — affords food for reflection upon the sort of government we have, and more especially gives ample oppor tunity to know the men who pretend to administer that government in the in- terest of justice, of law, of humanity. It is a melancholy thought that is forced upon the intelligent North Caro- linian, that the government of his native State is inadequate to protect him from the ravages of the highway robber and the bullet of the midnight assassin. Low, indeed, is the condition of that people who are in daily jeopardy of life and property. Terrible is the state of that society that must thus live in con- stant peril. We charge it upon Governer Cald- well — and his conduct sustains the charge — that he has been lax, lukewarm and careless in this matter of putting down the Lowerys. We charge it upon him, that while innocent blood of good men appeared to him from the swamps and plains of Robeson and invoked high heaven for THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. 83 vengeance, he lifted scarce a little finger to arrest the dangerous course of the assassins, was dumb to piteous entreaty, heeded not the cries of consternation that went up to Him from a suffering, outraged, imperilled people. We charge these things home upon the Governor of North Carolina, and the people know that the facts sustain the charge. He was appealed to for a long while in vain. He was appealed to persistently, and after taking much time he sent his Ad- jutant General to the scene on the out- rages. The result was a failure. When he should have renewed again and again his exertions to capture or kill the outlaws he refused altogether to act. But to-day, in North Carolina, not a hundred miles from Wilmington, we have a band of men, not a half dozen in number, who are open and notorious desperadoes, killing whom they list without the fear of punishment before their eyes, going at the dead hour of the night into towns,capturing iron safes and robbing them of their contents — a mere handful of men, riding roughshod over county. State and federal authori- ties, with a nonchalance and bravado that would do credit to the daring and subtle Bedouin of the desert. Here, in the latter part of the nine- teenth century, in a land that boasts of the excellency of its laws and the security afforded by its government, what do we see? Alas ! it would be well to be blind, if blindness brought contentment. But free citizens, with souls in their bodies, cannot shut their eyes to the attrocious violations of law, peace and order in Robeson county. / Men, with the common feelings of humanity — individuals upon whom one ray of the sun of civilization has shone — must experience pity, shame, and in- dignation at the spectacle of a petty gang of mnlattoes committing act after act of the most fiendish outrage of law, deed after deed of the most, abandoned savagery, perilling the imiustrial inter- ests of a whole section, filling the pub- lic mind with apprehension and terror, and doing these diabolical crimes with almost the certainty of non-interference, if not protection, by a radical adminis- tration. Upon the head of Tod R. Caldwell rests the responsibility, the terrible re- sponsibility of the deeds of these mur- derous villains. Let him, and him alone, bear the blame and reap the deep curses of an outraged, afflicted people ! It will not do for his partisans to say that he could not suppress these pitiful outlaws. He did not try to put them down. He would have shown his humanity and his efficiency as a Govern- or had this band been composed of white men and his party had chosen to dub them Ku Klux. Oh, yes ! What calling out of militia a la Holden j What making of requisitions upon Grant ! What an upstir of loyalty ! What an outburst of patriotic zeal would there have been had Lowery been a Ku Klux ! Pity ! pity ! So much party capital is lost ! Long ago would the little band have gone to the criminal's bourne, and the very name of Lowery have been a stench in loyal Northern nostrils, and a new hate of the South been added to the catalogue now long as the list of ships in Homer. Again we pile up the counts in our bill of indictment. We charge it upon Governor Caldwell that he can meddle in law-making, can make himself Legis* 84 THE SWAMP OUTLAWS. lature and Supreme Court, can starve Penitentiary convicts and drive inmates of the Asylums from the place of medi- cal aid back to their homes. We charge it upon Governor Caldwell that he is forward and meddlesome and obstinate and cruel where these virtuous and praiseworthy quualities of his head and heart can be bestowed upon con- servative enemies. We charge it upon Governor Caldv/ell that he so despises our party that he cannot in his official conduct do members of that party any justice. Governor Caldwell that he does not make a hearty and an earnest effort to stop the reign of lawlessness, rapine and murder around Scuffletown and Moss Neck. We charge it upon Governor Caldwell that he is callous and brutally indifferent to the higher instincts of humanity, that he is active only in belief of party, zealous only when party exigency requires zeal ; that he would long since have stopped the Robeson outrages if the Outlaws had been con- servative whites instead of radical blacks. These charges are preferred by the whole body of intelligent, law-abiding people of the State whom he disgraces and outrages. If he quails not before them, if their indij^nant voices move not his rough, fretful, splenetic and sav- age nature, then is he sunk and sod- den in the lowest pit of degradation, and there is no hope for him, then is he forever damned in the estimation of all good and peaceable citizens. TPE END. rNOTE —Many of the loregolng article? are introclucea merely to explain how such a state of things could possibly exist in a civilized country. Tlie fierce hate of politi- cal lactionists entirely bliadiii- tliem to the disgrace and injury mflicted upon their common country by the toleration of .wrong deeds whether perpetrated by one nl as8 or another.! R. M. Dc Witt's List of Valuable and Popular Works. GET THE BEST! GET THE BEST!* " Most perfect book on tha hone ever written." DE WITT'S COjyiT'LETE AMERICAN FARRIER AND HORSE DOCTOR. AN AMEBICAN BOOK FOR AMERICAN HORSEMEN, With Oopioui Notes from the best English and American authorities. Shewing plainly how to Breed, Beax, Buy, Sell, Cure, Shoe and Keep that most useful and yaluable animal, the Hone. By COL. CHRIS. FORREST. CONTENTS. Chapter First. — The JTitrtt in America. History of the American horse— Breeds— Origin— Effect* of elimate and food — Importation — Pony Breeds^ Chapter Second.— Wou> to Buy a Hone. What do you want him for? — What is his work to be, and what sort of horse does your work call for t — What sort of country do you live inl — Wh:tt are your facili- ties for stabling and feeding? — What do you know about a horse 1 — What is your market ! Chapter TYkirA,— Looking at a Bone. External peculiarities — Color of coat and feet — Condition of the coat — Taking him out of the stable— The age of the Horse — The mark in his teeth— The head and neck — The ear — The eyes — The nostrils. Chapter Vovirtti,— More jihout Buyina a Hont. The horse's neck— The PoU-eril — The shoulder and its masks— The chest — The foreleg and knee — Knee sprung and splints — Tied in below the knee — Wind- galls. Chapter Wittlx,— External Sijnt of Diteate. The body ot the horse — Form of back and barrel — Flesh and the want of it— Fistulous withers and other sores — The loins and haunches — The hook and its diseases — Windgall, Curb, Capped-hock, Spariu, String-halt, Mallinders, &c. — Feet and ankles. Chapter Sixth.— Trying Tour /•urcfta**.— Tak- ing a guaranty — Get a chsince to try the horse— Lead him home yourself — Signs of stumbling — The feed test — Promptness in takint; home a bad horse. Chapter Seventh.— 5o«»w! General Adviet. Dis- pasition, temper, courage — Deceptive appearances — English colt racing — Hard usage of youug horses— Decrease of ralue — Increase of Talue— Problems for horse-ownen. Chapter Eiffhth.— •?u«a*e(v^ (A* Hortt. The abdompu and its appendages — Sore throat — Strangles— Lampas— Gastritis— Dyspepsia— Bot* and their history. Chapter Nineteentti. -lHt(r:^et of Hones. In- flammation of the bowel* -Colic Jjiairhoea and dys- entery — Strangulation and hernia Worms — Liver disease— Kidneys— Diabetdi-Bladder, etc. Chapter Tvrentleth.— ^t>ceU*econd. — Fever— Typhtiit Ftvtr. yeve*— Typhoid Fever— Olanden— Farcy. Chapter Twenty-third.— Breeding. Inflit *nce of sire and dam — Heat — Inheritance of qualities — Age — Si«8 - Foaling— Working mares — Weaning— Feeding— Handling. Chapter Work. Tvrentr-fourth. — Training for niostrated with sersral Talaable Plates, and aniserous Eagraring, showiho ths rossb at he appean i« HBA.LTa and whan Dibxaskd. This book contains over 200 pages, bound in boards, with a splendid illuminated cover. Price 60 Cents. A handsome and durable edition of this work, bound in cloth, elegantly lettered in gilt. Price 75 Cents. B^" Copitt of tht above Book ttnt to any address in tht Unittd .VaUs or Canadas, free of postals, on rtctipt of rttaU prietm Send Cash Orders to R. M. DE WITT, No. 33 ROSE STREET, N. T. R. M. De Witt's List of Valuable and Popular Works. AN EVERLASTING CORNUCOPIA OF~FU¥T BLACK JOK FOB BLUE DEVII^S. Broad Grins from Young Africa ! Hugo Guffaws from Sable Age I Wit from the Plantation! Wit from the Kitchen ! Fun Ashore ! Fun Afloat I Jokes from High and Low Life t Woolly Compli- cations, conducive to Loud Laughter ! A Book full and running aver with side-tpliUing fun " pecooliar " to t?u darkty'd race. The most complite collection of " Black Diamonds " ever dug from the mines of Cuffydom ; contains the concentrated essence ot all that ia so laughably the peculiar characteristics of Sambo. CHOCK FULL. OF COLORED PHILOSOPHY! Highfalutin Sermons, Die-away Songs, Ivory opening Jokes. Excruciating " Conunderfums," Dark reflection* on Love, Law and Logic ; Profound cogitations on Man, Monkeys, Morality and Money ; Deep investijrations into the mysteries of '* Persimmons " and " Culled Pussons," on ketchin' Eels, Gals and other Slippery things, on rintring the Debbil and Yaller Gals, on But we can't begin to enumerate half the funnyisms squeezed between these two covers. We will for the reader's edification, merely mention some of th« good things pro- vided tor the selection of the public in the *' Black Jokes." Bear in mind that this encyclopaedia of all the enjoyable JOKES, QUIPS and QUIDDITIES, EPIGRAMS, RHYMES, REASON and RIDICULE, FOLLY, PHILOSOPHY and FOL-DE-ROL, has been Illustrated with near One Hundred of the most Comic of all Comic Desigpus ever Engraved on iw^ood. The whole making a. time-killing companion for the traveller, a counsellor for the afilicted, the delight of the '• Homo Circle," and a perpetual feast of rib-fattening laughter for every man, woman, and child in Christendom. 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TTniled Stales or Canadas, post-paid, on receipt ofprxtc ROBERT M. DE WITT, Publisher, 33 BOSe STBEETf (Between Duaru and Frankfort SU., N. T.) G-IST THU BEST ! ©ET THE BEST I OR, COUNTING-HOUSE CORHESPONDENT. Containing Plain, Practical Dix'ections for Carrying on every Kind of Commercial and Banking Business. Includinp: Mercantile Letters on every Conceivable Subject, Laws nnd Usages of Banking and Broki^ratrr, Forms of UtKcial Papers of Shipping', Insurance, etc., etc. Also conlaiuiuir an Extensive and very Useful Glossary of Words and Phrases, used in Commercial and Banking Circles. Tosretlier with a very full Exposi- tion of the Specie and Paper Currency ot the Whole World, and llieir Intrinsic auJ Nominal Value. BY THE AUTHOR OF " Webster's Chairiuan's Maniisvl," " ^Vebster's Reciter," " AVebster's Prac*iciil Letter-W^riter," etc., etc. This Book contains over 200 pages, bound in boards, -vcith a splendid illuminated cover. Price 50 t'eiitsi. A handsome and durable edition of this work, bound in clotli, eleyantiy lettered iu gilt. Price 75 Cenl». CONNECTICUT COOK BOOK And Housekeeper's Assistant. Containing Plain and Economic Styles of Diessi'ia- and Cooking every kind of Fish, Flesh, Fowl and Veg- etables, in the most Healthful and Inviting Manner VV'ith full Directions for Laying and Decorating tin- Table ; Carving the Meat, and Serving the Vegetab es and the Dessert. To which is added, a large nnniber of 'iried Jteceipts for Preserving, Canning and Curing all sorts of Vegetables and Fruits, so as to Retain tlieir Original i'lavor and Appearance. By MRS. »f. ORR. This Book contains over 200 pages, bound in boards, with a splendid illuminated cover. Price 50 Ceilt!>>. A handsome and durable edition of this work, bouml in ciotli, elegantly lettered in gilt. Price 75 CeillM. ■^VE ESTER'S CHAIRMAN'S MANUAL AND SPEAKER'S GUIDE. Showing Plainly and Clearly How to Preside Over and Coiduct every Kind of Public Meeting. With full Expositions ot the Manner of Procedure in the American Con-iress, the British Parliament, the Legishi- ture of New York, the grand Lodge of F. and A. Masons, etc. To which is added, Numerous Precedents from the best authorities. Also, the Full Text of the Constitution of the United States, with all its Various Amendments. BY THE AUTHOR OF "Webster's Practical L,etter-\Vriter," " ^Vebster's Reciter,'' etc. *^f* This volume conlains 200 finely printed pages, i'l l>o:inl>. Price - - - - • 50 Co'itS. An elegant and edition iu clotli, gilt lettered. I'rscc »--«•»-- 75C'e.. »^. THE " HEATHEFoHINEE " MUSICAL ALBUM.^ Containing' Fifteen Pieces of Clioice Song's and. Ballads — mostly Comic. Tbe Music arrang^cd for Voice and Piano, ex:pressl^' for this IVork, By HENRY TUCKKR. 9. Act on the Square, Boys. 10. PuBTTT Polly, if you Love me, do say " Yss." 11. She Danced Like a Fairy. 12. Nevrr go East of Madison Square. 13. On, Buys, On, The Coast is Always Clbar. 14. I \VisH 1 was a Fish. 15. The Bird on the Tree. 1. Heathen Chinee. 2. When my Ship Comes Home. 3. If EvEii I Cf.ASE TO Love. 4. Housekbkprk's Woks. 5. WHfN THr. Corn is Waving, Annie. 6. Bother the Men. 7 It's Nice to be a Father. 8. That's the Style rou .me. Boys. PRICE 50 CENTS. The laughable piece that gives title to the above, is bound to be the most popular of recent times. It is so thoroughly "Chinee" in all its characteristics that one would think its admirable composer had fed on bird's nests — and nightingales' at that — all his life. The other pieces are all capital ones, master productions of their respective authors. Nothing approaching this collection has ever before been presented to the public (except in this series). Just think of it ! Fifteen first class pieces of rare excellence for Fifty Cents. At the regular music publish- er's prices this numbar of pieces would cost Five Dollars! A richly colored characteristic lithographic picture adorns the cover. H^' Printed equal to the best music, on fine, thick paper. I£F" Copies of the above Books sent lo any address in the United Slates or Canadas, free of postage, on receipt of retail j'rice. Send Cash Orders to Address on First Page. PIERCE EGAN'S STORIES. The author of the following great booKK. has attained a success as genuine, and pronounced in his peculiar field, as either Marryat, Buhver or Dickens. He has the won- drous faculty of imparting an intense and absorbing interest to his varied characters. His plots are real miracles of ingenious complication, their denouments being riddles impossi- ble of solution by the most penetrating of novel readers ; and yet all is conducted to a natural and probable explanation. Pierce Egan's popularity is continually on the in- crease, and most deservedly so — for he continually improves : so tha this last seems always to be his besi book. I=jrico 23 Ooiat£3 X'rico 23 Oeoo-xs IF'x-iGO 23 Oeiats I^jriGO SO Ooxxts IF'ricG so Ooiits r'i'XGO SO Ooxits IPi'ico SO OGHts l>'Ove). Address ROBEET M. DE WITT, Publisher, 33 Rose street. l** t.""" 4^^' '•^ '^^^ ^oV^ T^^^* .^"-^^ ^^wiB^" or'^^ %/ /JIfe'v '^-.„-/ :.^l<^:: ,* .. € /^ •^' 'r^ 0^ ^^0^ ^ ^<==- '^ Cv ^e^ NyoAiiiii^ 'vjb. « ^V./"-i<^: .7* A ^. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 006 049 452 6