A Courtroom Massacre: Politics and Public Sentiment in Progressive-Era Virginia

Abstract

REMINISCING, FLOYD ALLEN'S ATTORNEY RECOUNTED HIS CLIENT'S actions in the courtroom in Carroll County, Virginia, on March 14, 1912: [Floyd] hesitated a moment, and then he arose.... He looked to me like a man who was about to say something, and had hardly made up his mind what he was going to say, but as he got straight, he moved off to my left, I would say five or six feet, and he seemed to gain his speech, and he said something like this, 'I just tell you, I ain't a going.' (1) Floyd Allen (1856-1913), a prominent county merchant, farmer, and sometimes public official, faced a guilty verdict that morning for interfering with deputies performing their duties. Upon receiving a sentence of one year in prison, Allen announced his refusal to go with the sheriff when the officer moved to place him into custody. As Allen unbuttoned his sweater and fumbled beneath it, gunfire erupted. Floyd, his son Claude (1889-1913), his brother Sidna (1866-1941), and his nephews Friel Allen, Wesley Edwards, and perhaps Sidna Edwards pulled concealed pistols and exchanged fire with courtroom officials, some of whom--such as the court clerk Dexter Goad--had their own illicitly concealed weapons. The battle spilled out of the courthouse, with the building's columns and a Confederate monument in the center of the street providing cover. When the shooting ended, the judge Thornton L. Massie, the sheriff Lewis F. Webb, the commonwealth's attorney William M. Foster, a juror, and a witness in the case lay dead or dying. Floyd and Sidna Allen and Dexter Goad suffered gunshot wounds, as did several others. The bulk of Carroll County lies on the crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains, though the southern portion includes the precipitous slope of the Blue Ridge chain as it blends into foothills and the bordering Piedmont region of North Carolina. Writers and observers around America automatically applied the worst of Appalachian stereotypes when national headlines blared the news of violence in the county courthouse on that chilly March day. Both the newspaper reports and a flurry of rapidly prepared books by journalists and other outsiders brought the incident to national attention and explained the affair as the work of lawless, bloodthirsty mountaineers. (2) Most subsequent writing about the killings has been prepared for the purpose of entertainment or by partisan locals debating who deserved blame for starting the shooting. The authors of various songs and books have battled to establish control of the historical memory of the massacre, a rhetorical struggle that has reflected changing local and regional mores. Only recently have writers attempted systematically to analyze the courthouse shooting using documentary sources, and they have shown that the existence of an active two-party political system in the mountains of southwestern Virginia was a prerequisite for the incident. One master's thesis and two detailed chronicles by amateur historians situate the immediate origins of the violence in the context of political opposition and personal animosity between the Aliens--violent but well-to-do leaders in the county's Democratic Party--and Goad, Foster, Webb, and other prominent local Republicans who in the preceding few elections had displaced the dominance of the Democrats. With much zeal, Foster won several indictments after a relatively minor scuffle involving Wesley and Sidna Edwards disrupted a Primitive Baptist church service held in a schoolhouse in December 1910 by their uncle Garland Allen. In arresting the young men and bringing them back to Hillsville, the centrally located county seat, two deputies, Pink Samuels and Peter Easter, had one brother tied and the other handcuffed as their buggies passed in front of Sidna Allen's store in April 1911. An angry Floyd deemed this to be excessively humiliating, and he forcibly released them from their bonds. The officers alleged that Sidna Allen and Sidna and Floyd's nephew Barnett aided in the release, but trials on those charges had not been held when Floyd's refusal to accompany the sheriff from court triggered the courtroom bloodshed. …