Take the Sword: Killing Rufus K. Anderson

Abstract

Take the Sword: Killing Rufus K. Anderson Paul M. Pruitt Jr. (bio) Then said Jesus unto him, “Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.” Matthew 26:52 watered by the tombigbee and sipsey rivers, pickens County lies west of Tuscaloosa County and east of the Mississippi state line. It was created by the Alabama state legislature in 1820.1 Among its earliest white settlers were men like Josiah Tilly, who “always preferred life among the Indians” (neighboring Choctaw tribesmen) “to staying with his own family.” Or consider Daniel “Rambler” Johnson, a somewhat reluctant farmer—he “being so much in the woods, and loving his gun and roving life better than labor and domestic habits.”2 Many frontiersmen were “squatters,” and as such were displaced in the government land sales of the 1820s, when rings of “land sharks” bought for resale to more substantial settlers. These latter arrived steadily from previously settled areas—especially from South Carolina, Tennessee, and Alabama’s Tennessee Valley—to purchase rich cotton-growing lands in the vicinity of the [End Page 78] rivers.3 These planters often brought their slaves with them; by 1830 the county’s population was more than 6,600, of whom more than 1,600 were African American.4 Rufus K. Anderson arrived in the mid-1820s, from Tennessee by way of a short stay in Moulton, Alabama.5 Anderson, whose troubling history is recounted below, settled in or near the village of Pickensville (then the county seat), close to the banks of the Tombigbee.6 A lawyer, Anderson no doubt found plenty of legal business there, fueled by the aftermath of the Panic of 1819 and its attendant wave of litigation—over defaults on loans (often contracted at usurious rates), disputes over land titles, and other commercial troubles of the state’s infancy.7 Something of Anderson’s success as an attorney is seen in the fact that he successfully represented one client, a creditor, in a case that reached the Alabama Supreme Court in 1830.8 It was not the fate of frontier settlers to rest easy. In any case, Rufus Anderson was not capable of living a peaceful life. The essay below follows the course of two homicides he committed and concludes with an account of the circumstances in which he was killed while attempting a third. Because nineteenth-century historians and journalists thought these events worth explaining, we know much more of Anderson’s “interior” life than we might expect of a typical frontier lawyer. Likewise, we know something of the lives and motivations of two of Anderson’s fellow attorneys, Gideon Frierson and Lincoln Clark. This knowledge provides fresh insights into the early period of state history, into white southern values, and into the inner workings of Alabama’s proto-legal system. [End Page 79] part ii: beginning at the end The story that the press reported from west Alabama in the summer of 1834 was simple if highly dramatic. Readers learned that on May 29, young Pickensville lawyer Gideon Frierson had killed Rufus K. Anderson in a “fatal rencounter” near Frierson’s office. Anderson, they read, had recently expressed a “deadly animosity” toward Frierson and had even stalked him during a journey through Mississippi. Having followed his quarry back to Alabama, Anderson made no secret of his intention; and as it chanced, Frierson was forewarned by friends. When he saw his enemy coming down the street, Frierson retreated into his office, where he had a loaded gun. Anderson pursued him—there was an exchange of shots, and the “unfortunate transaction” ended with Anderson’s death.9 A Tuscaloosa journalist praised Frierson’s “courteous” and “amiable” character, declaring that his conduct was justifiable as self-defense, on grounds of law and honor alike. “Had Mr. Frierson not defended himself as he did,” he wrote, “he would either have acted the part of a coward, or would in all probability have been murdered.”10 The Frierson–Anderson affray was news from west Alabama to New Hampshire, and part of the reason was that Anderson was already [End Page 80] something of a celebrity. His very...