Clement Vallandigham Arrested, May 5, 1863

On May 5, 1863, Clement Vallandigham was arrested at his home as a violator of General Order Number 38, issued by General Ambrose Burnside.  Directed mainly at Confederate spies and Northern traitors, this order also warned that: "The habit of declaring sympathies for the enemy will no longer be tolerated in this department. Persons committing such offenses will be at once arrested."

On May 1, 1863, Vallandigham had spoken at a large Democratic Party rally at Mount Vernon, Ohio.  Aware that Burnside's men were in the crowd, Vallandigham attacked both the general and Lincoln. The former congressman declared that his right to speak was based on "General Order, No. 1, the Constitution of the United States." He lashed out at the "wicked, cruel, and unnecessary war." He spoke against the draft law, but did not go so far as to encourage men to disobey it. He also charged that "the men in power are attempting to establish a despotism in this country, more cruel and more oppressive than ever existed before."

Illustration of Vallandigham being arrested by soldiers

Vallandigham's enraged supporters burned the offices of the Dayton Journal, the Republican rival  to the Empire. 

Vallandigham was tried by a military court on May 6 and 7. His speech at Mount Vernon, Ohio was cited as the source of the arrest. He was charged by the Military Commission with 

"Publicly expressing, in violation of General Orders No. 38, from Head-quarters Department of the Ohio, sympathy for those in arms against the Government of the United States, and declaring disloyal sentiments and opinions, with the object and purpose of weakening the power of the Government in its efforts to suppress an unlawful rebellion."

The specifications of the charge against Vallandigham were:

Declaring the present war "a wicked, cruel, and unnecessary war"; "a war not being waged for the preservation of the Union"; "a war for the purpose of crushing out liberty and erecting a despotism"; "a war for the freedom of the blacks and the enslavement of the whites"; stating "that if the Administration had so wished, the war could have been honorably terminated months ago"; that "peace might have been honorably obtained by listening to the proposed intermediation of France"; that "propositions by which the Northern States could be won back, and the South guaranteed their rights under the Constitution, had been rejected the day before the late battle of Fredericksburg, by Lincoln and his minions", meaning thereby the President of the United States, and those under him in authority; charging "that the Government of the United States was about to appoint military marshals in every district, to restrain the people of their liberties, to deprive them of their rights and privileges"; characterizing General Orders No. 38, from Headquarters Department of the Ohio, as "a base usurpation of arbitrary authority", inviting his hearers to resist the same, by saying, "the sooner the people inform the minions of usurped power that they will not submit to such restrictions upon their liberties, the better"; declaring "that he was at all times, and upon all occasions, resolved to do what he could to defeat the attempts now being made to build up a monarchy upon the ruins of our free government"; asserting "that he firmly believed, as he said six months ago, that the men in power are attempting to establish a despotism in this country, more cruel and more oppressive than ever existed before."

"All of which opinions and sentiments he well knew did aid, comfort, and encourage those in arms against the Government, and could but induce in his hearers a distrust of their own Government, sympathy for those in arms against it, and a disposition to resist the laws of the land."
During the trial, testimony was given by Union army officers who attended the speech in civilian clothes, that Vallandigham called the president "King Lincoln".  

He was sentenced to confinement in a military prison "during the continuance of the war" at Fort Warren.  

On May 11, 1863, an application for a writ of habeas corpus was filed in federal court for Vallandigham by former Ohio Senator George Pugh.  Judge Humphrey H. Leavitt of the Circuit Court of the United States for the Southern District of Ohio upheld Vallandigham's arrest and military trial as a valid exercise of the President's war powers.  Congress had passed an act authorizing the president to suspend habeas corpus on March 3, 1863.

George Pugh

Controversy and protests ensued. On May 16, 1863, there was a meeting at Albany, New York to protest the arrest of Vallandigham.  A letter from Governor Horatio Seymoour of New York was read to the crowd: Seymour charged that "military despotism" had been established.  Resolutions were adopted and sent to President Lincoln.

On May 26, Vallandigham was taken to Confederates south of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and there entered Southern lines. 

Outraged at his treatment, Ohio state Democrats, by a vote of 411 -11, nominated Vallandigham for governor at their  June 11 convention.

Vallandigham was escorted by the Confederates to Wilmington, North Carolina, and shipped out to Bermuda, arriving there on June 17. 

In response to the public letter issued at the meeting of angry Democrats in Albany, Lincoln's letter of June 12, 1863, explains his justification for supporting the court-martial's conviction. President Lincoln wrote the "Birchard Letter" of June 29, 1863, to several Ohio congressmen, offering to revoke Vallandigham's deportation order if they would agree to support certain policies of the Administration.  Lincoln, who considered Vallandigham a "wily agitator", was wary of making him a martyr to the Copperhead cause and thus ordered him sent through the enemy lines to the Confederacy. Although he altered Vallandigham's sentence, Lincoln did not repudiate Burnside's military actions against a civilian.

Vallandigham traveled to Canada, arriving at Niagara Falls on July 5.  from there and Windsor, Ontario, conducted his campaign for the Ohio governorship. Candidate for lieutenant governor George Pugh represented Vallandigham's views at rallies and in the press. 

John Brough

Lincoln interested himself in the election, endorsed Republican candidate John Brough, downplayed the illegalities of a civilian's arrest and trial by military authorities, and claimed that a vote for the Democratic contender was "a discredit to the country." In the election of October 13. 1863, Brough defeated Vallandigham 288,000 - 187,000.

On February 15, 1864, the Supreme Court announced it would refuse to hear the case, saying that it had no authority to review the proceedings of a martial law court.  The decision, Ex Parte Vallandigham, decreed that the Court could not issue a writ of habeas corpus in a military case.

With the election crisis passed, Lincoln and the military ignored Vallandigham's return, in disguise, to the United States on June 14, 1864.  He established residence in 0hio, attended the August 1864 national Democratic convention in Chicago, and helped construct the disastrous "peace" plank in presidential candidate George B. McClellan's platform.

In postwar years the Democratic party declared him persona non grata at its 1866 Philadelphia convention, a meeting of old Federals and recently reconstructed Southern Democrats, where it was felt his presence was disruptive.  After he lost a bid in 1867 for election to the state senate, he resumed his law practice. 

Golden Lamb, Lebanon, Ohio

At the Golden Lamb Hotel in Lebanon, Ohio, on June 16, 1871, a gun went off while he was demonstrating to other attorneys how a defendant's supposed victim may have accidentally shot himself. He died there the following day.

Vallandigham is best remembered for the Democratic campaign slogan he created in May 1862: "The Constitution as it is, the Union as it was." 

Inspired by the story of Vallandigham's banishment and his remark at that time that he did not care to live in a country where Lincoln was president, Edward Everett Hale wrote The Man Without a Country (1863).

General Richard Taylor Surrenders in Alabama, 
May 4, 1865

At the war's end, Confederate General Richard Taylor, son of President Zachery Taylor, held command of the Department of Alabama, Mississippi, and East Louisiana, with some 12,000 troops.  By the end of April 1865, Mobile, Alabama had fallen and news had reached Taylor of the meetings between General  Joseph E. Johnston and General William T. Sherman. 

E.R.S. Canby

Taylor agreed to meet General E.R.S. Canby for a conference a few miles north of Mobile.  

On April 30th, the two officers established a truce, terminable after 48 hours' notice by either party, then partook of a "bountiful luncheon....with joyous poppings of champagne corks...the first agreeable explosive sounds," Taylor wrote, "I had heard for years." A band played "Hail Columbia" and a few bars of "Dixie."

Canby went to Mobile and Taylor to his headquarters at Meridian, Mississippi.  Two days later, Taylor received news of Johnston's surrender, and of Canby's insistence that the truce terminate. 

Taylor elected to surrender, which he did on May 4th at Citronelle, Alabama, some 40 miles north of Mobile. This surrender included all existing Confederate forces east of the Mississippi River. "At the time, no doubts as to the propriety of my course entered my mind," Taylor later asserted, "but such have since crept in." He grew to regret not having tried a last-ditch guerrilla struggle.

These forces included that of Nathan Bedford Forrest, whose troops surrendered on May 9  at Gainesville, Alabama.

Under the terms, officers retained their sidearms, mounted men their horses. All property and equipment was to be turned over to the Federals, but receipts were issued. The men were paroled. Taylor retained control of the railways and river steamers to transport the troops as near as possible to their homes. He stayed with several staff officers at Meridian until the last man was gone, then went to Mobile, joining Canby, who took Taylor by boat to the latter's home in New Orleans.

Edmund Kirby Smith 

Canby accepted the surrender of the Confederate forces under General Edmund Kirby Smith west of the Mississippi River on May 26, 1865.  Kirby Smith signed the terms of surrender in Galveston, Texas, on June 2, then fled to Mexico, and later to Cuba, to escape potential prosecution for treason.  He returned to take an oath of amnesty at Lynchburg, Virginia, on November 14, 1865.

Army of the Potomac Crosses Rapidan River, 
May 4, 1864

One man wrote in his diary that when they reached camp at a river, 

“A guard was placed along the bank of the river to prevent our washing, for fear of creating a sand bar.”

Wilmer McLean, born May 3, 1814

Wilmer McLean was born on May 3, 1814 in Alexandria, Virginia.  He was orphaned eight years later and lived with relatives for the remainder of his childhood years.

He was 47 years old when the Civil War began. 

The First Battle of Bull Run, July 1861

 McLean was a wholesale grocer in Virginia.  In 1853, at the age of 39, he married the wealthy widow of a physician, Virginia Hooe Mason.  In 1854, the couple and Virginia’s two daughters from her previous marriage moved into a farmhouse inherited from Virginia’s family.  This house was located on the 1,200 acre Yorkshire plantation in Bull Run, Virginia. Wilmer and Virginia McLean had five children: the two daughters from her first marriage, and two more daughters and a son.

McLean Home, Yorkshire Plantation

The Civil War began in April 1861.  The initial engagement on July 18, 1861 of what would become the First Battle of Bull Run  took place on McLean's farm.  Union Army artillery fired at McLean's house, which was being used as a headquarters for Confederate General P.G.T. Beuregard.  Edward Porter Alexander, a relative of Wilmer McLean and Beauregard's chief signal officer, witnessed the beginning of the battle from McLean's yard. 

Edward Porter Alexander

A cannonball dropped through the kitchen fireplace while Confederate officers were eating there; Beauregard wrote after the battle, "A comical effect of this artillery fight was the destruction of the dinner of myself and staff by a Federal shell that fell into the fire-place of my headquarters at the McLean House."

After the first Battle of Bull Run, McLean’s farmhouse was transformed into a Confederate hospital and imprisonment for Union captives. Confederate soldiers lingered for the next five months and 15 days. McLean received a rent payment of $825 upon their departure in March of 1862.

McLean was a retired major in the Virginia militia, but at 47, he was too old to return to active duty at the outbreak of the Civil War.  He made his living during the war as a sugar broker supplying the Confederate States Army.

He decided to move because his commercial activities were centered mostly in southern Virginia, and the Union army presence in his area of northern Virginia made his work difficult. He undoubtedly was also motivated by a desire to protect his family from a repetition of their combat experience. In the spring of 1863, he and his family moved about 120 miles south to Appomattox County, Virginia, near a crossroads community called Appomattox Court House.

On April 9, 1865, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Marshall of Robert E. Lee’s staff asked McLean if his house could be used for a meeting between Lee and Ulysses Grant.  The conference between Lee and Grant lasted about an hour and a half. 

Lee surrendered to Grant in the parlor of McLean's house.   Altogether, Lee spent about two hours at the McLean House and Grant remained there for about three hours.  

Edward Ord

Once the ceremony was over, members of the Army of the Potomac began taking the tables, chairs, and various other furnishings in the house—essentially, anything that was not tied down—as souvenirs. They simply handed the protesting McLean money (or not) as they made off with his property.  General Edward Ord paid $40 for the table Lee had used to sign the surrender document.   

Philip Sheridan

General Philip Sheridan got the table on which Grant had drafted the document for $20 in gold.  

 George Armstrong Custer 

Sheridan then asked George Armstrong Custer to carry it away on his horse. The table was presented to Custer's wife. 

Custer and his wife, Libbie

Another general got the chair Grant sat in, and General W.E. Whitaker procured the caned armchair that Lee used.

Lula McLean, the McLean's seven-year-old daughter, had left her favorite rag doll doll in the parlor.  One of the Union officer picked up the doll and called it the "Silent Witness" to the surrender. They all laughed, and he threw the doll across the room t0 Thomas W.C. Moore, of Major General Sheridan's staff.  For well over a century, the Moore family kept the doll as a "war trophy".  The doll was kept in a glass case with a brass plaque, sitting on the mantle in Moore's library.

The "Silent Witness" to the Surrender

"I have heard Mrs. McLean say frequently that the Union troops not only stole the tables and chairs besides other small furniture, but even took the childrens' play things..."
~ H.E. Spillman, Wilmer McLean's Son-In-Law

Union General John Gibbon, commander of the 24th Corps, Army of the James, used the house as his headquarters from April 10-17, 1865.

Union Troops at Appomattox Court House, Virginia

Later, McLean is supposed to have said "The war began in my front yard and ended in my front parlor".

The McLean Family on the porch of their home
McLean is the gentleman closest to the front door wearing the light colored jacket.
 His wife, Virginia “Jennie,” sits to his left. Also in the photo are Maria (21 years old), Osceola “Ocie” (20), Lucretia “Lula” (7), and Nannie (2).
(Wilmer Jr. (11) does not appear in the photo)
Photograph by Timothy O'Sullvan
Appomattox Court House, Virginia
Summer of 1865

After the war, McLean was unable to keep up the mortgage payments on the Appomattox Court House home, and the family returned to Mrs. McLean's Prince William County estate in the fall of 1867.  The "Surrender House" was sold at public auction on November 29, 1869.

The McLeans later moved to Alexandria, Virginia.  He worked for the Internal Revenue Service from 1873 to 1876.  In 1876, he transferred to the U. S. Bureau of Customs and remained employed until 1880.

McLean died in Alexandria on June 5, 1882 at the age of 68.  He was buried at St. Paul's Episcopal Cemetery in Alexandria.  

McLean's Grave

McLean's second home is now part of the Appomattox Court House National Historical Monument, operated by the National Park Service of the United States Department of the Interior.

In 1912, Mrs. Custer lent the table to the National Museum. In 1936, according to the terms of her will, the loan became a bequest, and the table has remained in the national collections ever since.

Lula McLean's rag doll was donated to Appomattox Court House National Historical Park in December 1992, and is now on permanent exhibit at the park.

Albion W. Tourgée, born May 2, 1838

Albion Winegar Tourgée was born in rural Williamsfield, Ohio on May 2, 1838, the son
of a Methodist farm family that migrated to the Western Reserve from Massachusetts. His father, Valentine, was a descendant of seventeenth-century French Huguenot immigrants, and his mother, Louise Emma Winegar, was of colonial Swiss ancestry.  His mother died when he was five. 

He attended schools in Ashtabula County, Ohio.  Later he attended high school in Lee, Massachusetts, where he spent two years living with an uncle. 

 Albion entered the University of Rochester in 1859, but left it in 1861 without attaining a degree. Upon the outbreak of the Civil War in April 1861,  he enlisted in the 27th New York Infantry. 

University of Rochester

As was common practice with students who enlisted before completing their studies, the University awarded him an A.B. degree in June, 1862.

He was 23 years old when the Civil War began.

First Battle of Bull Run

Tourgée was wounded in the spine at the First Battle of Bull Run in July, from which he suffered temporary paralysis and a permanent back problem that plagued him for the rest of his life. 

Upon recovering sufficiently to resume his military career, he was commissioned as a first lieutenant in the 105th Ohio Volunteer Infantry.  

Battle of Perryville

At the Battle of Perryville in October 1862, he was again wounded.  On January 21, 1863, Tourgée was captured near Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

Libby Prison

He was held as a prisoner of war in Libby Prison in Richmond, Virginia.  He was exchanged on May 8, 1863. 

Add caption

He fought in the battles of  Chickamauga in September and Chattanooga later that fall.  

Chattanooga

Tourgée resigned his commission on December 6, 1863.  Earlier that year, he had married Emma Lodoilska Kilbourne; their only child, a daughter, Lodoilska (Aimee), was born in 1870.

For the remainder of the war he served as a journalist, studied law, earned his M.A. at Rochester University, and taught school. 

After the war, Tourgée and his wife moved to Greensboro, North Carolina, where he and his wife could live in a warmer climate better suited to his war injuries. While there, he established himself as a lawyer, farmer, and editor, working for the Republican newspaper the Union Registrar. 

In 1866, he attended the Convention of the Southern Loyalists, where he unsuccessfully attempted to push through a resolution for African American suffrage.  An active participant as a Reconstruction Carpetbagger in his new home, Tourgée had a number of inspiring and harrowing experiences that gave him ample material and impetus for the writing he would later undertake. 

In 1868 he represented Guilford County at the state constitutional convention, which was dominated by Republicans. There he successfully advocated for equal political and civil rights for all citizens; ending property qualifications for jury duty and officeholding; popular election of all state officers, including judges; free public education; abolition of whipping posts for those convicted of crimes; judicial reform; and uniform taxation.  Nevertheless, he discovered that putting these reforms on paper did not translate into putting them into practice.

As a Republican-installed superior court judge from 1868 to 1874, Tourgée confronted the increasingly violent Ku Klux Klan, which was very powerful in his district and repeatedly threatened his life.   His judicial circuit was a center of racial conflict and Ku Klux Klan atrocities, including the brutal assassinations of Wyatt Outlaw and John Walter Stephens in Alamance and Caswell counties respectively. Nonetheless, Tourgée also won recognition for his ability, candor, and courage. He was an excellent judge, and his role in reforming the law brought praise. 

In 1870, in a letter to Senator Joseph Abbott of North Carolina, he wrote:

Men and women come scarred, mangled, and bruised, and say: "The Ku-Klux came to my house last night and beat me almost to death, and my old woman right smart, and shot into the house, 'bust' the door down, and told me they would kill me if I made complaint;" and the bloody mangled forms attest the truth of their declarations. On being asked if any one knew any of the party it will be ascertained that there was no recognition, or only the most uncertain and doubtful one. In such cases as these nothing can be done by the court. We have not been accustomed to enter them on record. A man of the best standing in Chatham told me that he could count up 200 and upward in that county. In Alamance County, a citizen in conversation one evening enumerated upward of 50 cases which had occurred within his own knowledge, and in one section of the county. He gave it as his opinion that there had been 200 cases in that county. I have no idea that he exceeded the proper estimate. That was six months ago, and I am satisfied that another hundred would not cover the work done in that time.

These crimes have been of every character imaginable. Perhaps the most usual has been the dragging of men and women from their beds, and beating their naked bodies with hickory switches, or as witnesses in an examination the other day said, "sticks" between a "switch" and a "club." From 50 to 100 blows is the usual allowance, sometimes 200 and 300 blows are administered. Occasionally an instrument of torture is owned.

Thus in one case two women, one 74 years old, were taken out, stripped naked, and beaten with a paddle, with several holes bored through it. The paddle was about 30 inches long, 3 or 4 inches wide, and 1/4 of an inch thick, of oak. Their bodies were so bruised and beaten that they were sickening to behold. They were white women and of good character until the younger was seduced, and swore her child to its father. Previous to that and so far as others were concerned her character was good.

Again, there is sometimes a fiendish malignity and cunning displayed in the form and character of the outrages. For instance, a colored man was placed astride of a log, and an iron staple driven through his person into the log. In another case, after a band of them had in turn violated a young negro girl, she was forced into bed with a colored man, their bodies were bound together face to face, and the fire from the hearth piled upon them. The K. K. K. rode off and left them, with shouts of laughter. Of course the bed was soon in flames, and somehow they managed to crawl out, though terribly burned and scarred. The house was burned.

I could give other incidents of cruelty, such as hanging up a boy of nine years old until he was nearly dead, to make him tell where his father was hidden, and beating an old negress of 103 years old with garden pallings because she would not own that she was afraid of the Ku-Klux. But it is unnecessary to go into further detail. In this district I estimate their offenses as follows, in the past ten months: Twelve murders, 9 rapes, 11 arsons, 7 mutilations, ascertained and most of them on record. In some no identification could be made.

And yet the Government sleeps. The poor disarmed nurses of the Republican party-those men by whose ballots the Republican party holds power-who took their lives in their hands when they cast their ballots for U.S. Grant and other officials-all of us who happen to be beyond the pale of the Governmental regard-must be sacrificed, murdered, scourged, mangled, because some contemptible party scheme might be foiled by doing us justice.

I could stand it very well to fight for Uncle Sam, and was never known to refuse an invitation on such an occasion; but this lying down, tied hand and foot with the shackles of the law, to be killed by the very dregs of the rebellion, the scum of the earth, and not allowed either the consolation of fighting or the satisfaction that our "fall" will be noted by the Government, and protection given to others thereby, is somewhat too hard.

I am ashamed of the nation that will let its citizens be slain by scores, and scourged by thousands, and offer no remedy or protection.

I am ashamed of a State which has not sufficient strength to protect its own officers in the discharge of their duties, nor guarantee the safety of any man's domicile throughout its length and breadth. 

I am ashamed of a party which, with the reins of power in its hands, has not nerve or decision enough to arm its own adherents, or to protect them from assassinations at the hands of their opponents. 

The wholesale slaughter of the war has dulled our Nation's sense of horror at the shedding of blood, and the habit of regarding the South as simply a laboratory, where every demagogue may carry on his reconstructionary experiments at will, and not as an integral party of the Nation itself, has led our Government to shut its eyes to the atrocities of these times. 

Unless these evils are speedily remedied, I tell you, General, the Republican party has signed its death warrant. It is a party of cowards or idiots-I don't care which alternative is chosen. The remedy is in our hands, and we are afraid or too dull to bestir ourselves and use it.

But you will tell me that Congress is ready and willing to act if it only knew what to do. Like the old Irish woman it wrings its hands and cries, "O Lawk, O Lawk; if I only knew which way." And yet this same Congress has the control of the militia and can organize its own force in every county in the United States, and arm more or less of it. This same Congress has the undoubted right to guarantee and provide a republican government, and protect every citizen in "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," as well as the power conferred by the XVth Amendment. And yet we suffer and die in peace and murderers walk abroad with the blood yet fresh upon their garments, unharmed, unquestioned and unchecked. 

And now, Abbott, I have but one thing to say to you. 

I have very little doubt that I shall be one of the next victims. My steps have been dogged for months, and only a good opportunity has been wanting to secure to me the fate which Stephens has just met, and I speak earnestly upon this matter. I feel that I have a right to do so, and a right to be heard as well, and with this conviction I say to you plainly that any member of Congress who, especially if from the South, does not support, advocate, and urge immediate, active, and thorough measures to put an end to these outrages, and make citizenship a privilege, is a coward, a traitor, or a fool. 

The time for action has come, and the man who has now only speeches to make over some Constitutional scarecrow, deserves to be damned.

Becoming one of Greensboro's leading citizens, he was active in a variety of community affairs and was a founder of the Negro school that became Bennett College. He promoted industrial and railroad development and conducted one of the region's early wood-turning industries. 

Despite ostracism, persecution, and frequent danger, Tourgée proved himself an able and involved citizen of his adopted state, and much in his conduct and achievement demanded respect. 

In 1879 he moved to Colorado and an editorial post with the Denver Evening Times. 

His largely autobiographical novel on Reconstruction, A Fool's Errand by One of the Fools, appeared that year and, becoming a sensational success with 200,000 copies sold, brought a small fortune and a new career. Five years earlier Tourgée had published a first novel, Toinette: A Tale of the South, which dealt with race relations in the slave South.  



In 1880 he completed a second Reconstruction novel, Bricks Without Straw. 

In 1881, Tourgée purchased a new home in Mayville, New York.   From 1881 to 1884, he published and edited a weekly literary magazine, Our Continent, which exhausted his fortune.  Faced with large debts and struggling with physical pain and depression, he earned an increasingly precarious living by lecturing, writing novels. 

Remaining an ardent Republican, he was also a critic of modern industrial society, and his novel, Murvale Eastman: Christian Socialist (1890), has been considered "the most carefully considered novel of Christian socialism" ever written. His articles on a variety of social issues appeared in most of the leading journals, and from 1888 to 1898 he wrote a weekly editorial column entitled "A Bystander's Notes" for the Chicago Republican.   This column typified Tourgée's incessant crusade for social reform and justice. It delved into practically every issue of the times, but his primary concern remained the race question, and he was without a doubt the nation's leading white advocate of racial equality and justice. 

In his editorials, essays, and books as well as his public and private affairs, he was forever exposing and denouncing white racism. In 1891, Tourgee founded the National Citizens' Rights Association, an organization devoted to equality for African-American citizens.  He worked with black leaders in such endeavors as the founding of the Afro American League and the passage of the Ohio anti-lynching law of 1896. 

What would become the Plessy v. Ferguson case of 1896 began when a group of prominent black leaders in New Orleans organized a Citizens' Committee in September 1891 to challenge Louisiana's 1890 law intended "to promote the comfort of passengers" by requiring all state railway companies "to provide equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races, by providing separate coaches or compartments" on their passenger trains. To assist them in their challenge, this group retained the legal services of "Judge Tourgée," as he was popularly known.

Homer Plessy

Tourgée, who served without pay as lead attorney for Homer Plessy, first deployed the term "color blindness" in his briefs in the Plessy case.  He had used it on several prior occasions on behalf of the struggle for civil rights. Tourgee's first use of the legal metaphor of "color blindness" came decades before while serving as a Superior Court judge in North Carolina.  

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) was a landmark Supreme Court decision, upholding the constitutionality of state laws requiring racial segregation in public facilities under the doctrine of "separate but equal".

The decision was handed down by a vote of 7 to 1 with the majority opinion written by Justice Henry Billings Brown and the dissent written by Justice John Marshall Harlan.

"Separate but equal" remained standard doctrine in U.S. law until its repudiation in the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education.

After the Supreme Court ruling, the New Orleans Comité des Citoyens (Committee of Citizens), which had brought the suit and arranged for Homer Plessy's arrest in order to challenge Louisiana's segregation law, replied, “We, as freemen, still believe that we were right and our cause is sacred.”

In 1897, President William McKinley appointed him U.S. consul to France.  He lived and served there in Bordeaux until his death, in early 1905, when he became gravely ill for several months. He succumbed to acute uremia resulting from one of his Civil War wounds.
He died on May 21, 1905 at the age of 67.

Monument

  Tourgée's ashes were interred in Mayville, New York, at the Mayville Cemetery.  He was  commemorated by a 12-foot granite obelisk inscribed: 

I pray thee then 

Write me as one that loves his fellow-man.

In November 1905, the black Niagara Movement sponsored nationwide memorial services in behalf of "Three Friends of Freedom"—William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and Albion W. Tourgée.

Abram Piatt, born May 2, 1821

Abram Sanders Piatt was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of  Benjamin McCullough Piatt of Ohio and Elizabeth Barnett of Virginia. His father was a Federal Circuit Judge and entrepreneur engaged in land development and flat boat trade in Cincinnati.  

Piatt Park in Cincinnati, donated by Abram's father, Benjamin, and uncle, John

Benjamin Piatt moved his family to Logan County, Ohio, in 1828.

Jacob Piatt, Abram's Grandfather

On November 10, 1840, Abram married his Kentucky-born first cousin Hannah Anna Piatt at  the home of his grandfather, Jacob Piatt, in Boone County, Kentucky. Abram and Anna eventually would have eight children. 

He attended the Athenaeum, (now Xavier University) in Cincinnati before returning home to the Mac-a-cheek Valley in Logan County, where he became a prosperous farmer.

He was 40 years old when the Civil War began.

Logan County, Ohio

In 1846, Piatt studied law briefly, and began editing and publishing the local Mac-a-cheek Press newspaper.

Piatt's wife, Anna, died April 10, 1861, in Macochee, Ohio, as the American Civil War was beginning.  A grief-stricken Abram became the colonel of the three-months' 13th Ohio Infantry Regiment on April 30, leaving his children in the care of a servant and his other family members. 

Later that summer, he raised a new three-years' regiment, the 34th Ohio Infantry, and clothed and fed them for a month and six days with his own money. The regiment became known as "Piatt's Zouaves" for their early zouave attire. 

One of "Piatt's Zouaves", 34th Ohio Infantry

Piatt also raised and equipped the 54th Ohio Infantry, which went into the field under the command of Thomas Kilby Smith.

Camp Dennison

On September 1, 1861, Piatt and the 34th moved to Camp Dennison near Cincinnati.  The regiment then was ordered to western Virginia later in the month.  It  saw its first combat action at Chapmanville, Virginia on September 25. 

During the fall and winter months, Piatt's Zouaves were on picket and scouting duty, and engaged in occasional skirmishing. In May 1862, the regiment fought with the Confederates forces under Humphrey Marshall near Princeton.

In 1862, Piatt was promoted to brigadier general and assigned command of the 1st Brigade, 1st Division, Headquarters, Mountain Department.  Later serving in the Army of the Potomac, he saw action at the Second Battle of Bull Run that August.

Aftermath of Second Bull Run

In the fall of 1862, Piatt and his regiment were detached from the Army of the Potomac and served in the Defenses of Washington, thereby missing the Battle of Antietam in September.

Battle of Fredericksburg

He badly injured his back when his horse stumbled and brought both of them to the ground during the Battle of Fredericksburg on December 12, 1862. As a result of his injury, he resigned from the army on February 17, 1863.

His older brother, Donn Piatt, became a staff officer in the Union Army during the Civil War.

Donn Piatt

Abram married again and resumed farming.  He and his brother both prospered.  After the war, they built a pair of castles near West Liberty, Ohio.  Mac-O-Chee (the home built by Donn) and Mac-A-Cheek (built by Abram) were begun in 1864.   Mac-A-Cheek was completed in 1871, and Mac-O-Chee completed in 1879. The homes were built only about 3/4 of mile apart from each other.

Abram was a member of the Ohio House of Representatives, 1865–66, and was the Washington correspondent of the Cincinnati Commercial from 1868-71.  He established and edited, with George Alfred Townsend, the Capital, a weekly newspaper, at Washington, D.C., 1871–72, and was its editor-in-chief, 1873-80.  He was arrested in 1876 by order of President Ulysses S. Grant on the charge of inciting the people through his paper to rebellion, insurrection and riot. 

Ulysses Grant

Abram retired to his estate Mac-a-cheek in 1880 and devoted himself to literary work. He edited Belford's Magazine from 1888-89.

Abram Piatt on horse at Mac-A-Cheek Castle

He died in 1908 from cancer at the age of 86.  He was buried in the nearby Piatt Cemetery.

Piatt's Tomb

Tours at Mac-A-Cheek began in 1912, four years after the death of Abram. 

When William McCoy Piatt (the fourth son of Abram) inherited the home, he had already amassed a large collection of artifacts and objects of interest. After commissioning a custom cabinet to display his collection, William opened his home to visitors who wished to view his Cabinet of Curiosities. 

William McCoy Piatt

Thus the family got into the tourist business, though it was a minor industry compared to the farm and grist mill located on the property.  Touring continued with the family living in the home until 1985, when the family moved out of their home. The Piatt family still owns and manages the museums.