Valerie Bauerlein is a Wilmington, North Carolina native and (ugh) Duke graduate who covers southern culture, economics and politics for the Wall Street Journal. She worked for several regional newspapers in the Carolinas prior to joining the Journal’s team in the mid-2000s.
Bauerlein covered the tragic saga of South Carolina’s Murdaugh Family for the Journal. Her first book, The Devil at His Elbow, available on amazon, chronicles the life, trial, and ultimate conviction of Alex Murdaugh for killing his wife and youngest son. Critics have praised Bauerlein’s writing as “graceful” and “cinematic” and if you weren’t aware of the Murdaugh clan you could easily mistake Bauerlein’s engrossing prose for a robust work of Southern gothic fiction.
Fans of non-fiction true crime and John Grisham novels will undoubtedly enjoy the page-turning, comprehensive account of Alex Murdaugh’s meteoric rise to the top of his state’s legal community, where he was elected President of the South Carolina Trial Lawyers Association, and his subsequent, even more cataclysmic tumble to convicted double murderer and inmate in South Carolina’s penal system.
But we suspect readers of our newsletter will find the book’s secondary narrative especially intriguing. Students of post-reconstruction and Jim Crow-era Democratic politics in the South will find her history of Hampton County and South Carolina’s 14th Judicial District fascinating. Entitled “Murdaugh Island” and tucked in part two of her book is Bauerlein’s chronicle of how the Murdaughs used the solicitor’s office – roughly equivalent to a North Carolina District Attorney – to build a rural Southern courthouse political machine and birth a family legal and political dynasty.
Non-Southerners often struggle to appreciate how rural, culturally conservative parts of North Carolina and the South could remain so staunchly Democratic in their politics even into the early 21st century. To understand, you must go all the way back to the 1880s and 1890s post-Reconstruction era.
We’ll use North Carolina as an example of the genesis of the system (you can learn more about this period in James Bebee Jr.’s well-researched book Revolt of the Tar Heels: The North Carolina Populist Movement, 1890-1901.) Though overly simplistic, post-Reconstruction politics in North Carolina could be described as a brief moment of hopeful racial reconciliation when white yeoman farmers formed the Populist Party and joined with black Republicans in the Piedmont and East and white Unionist Republicans in the mountains to form a “Fusion” governing coalition focused on modernizing North Carolina.
In response, the Democratic Party, led by News & Observer publisher Josephus Daniels, future Democratic Governor Charles Aycock, and future Democratic US Senator Furnifold Simmons, launched a White Supremacy crusade in 1898 that abruptly and brutally snuffed the life out of this hopeful moment in North Carolina politics. Whipped into a racist fury by the News & Observer, a generation of future Democratic Party leaders, including Simmons, Aycock, Claude Kitchin and Cameron Morrison, organized, funded and led terrorist mobs known as “Red Shirts” in a violent campaign of intimidation, voter suppression, election fraud, assault and even murder – targeting the governing coalition of black Republicans and white populists. These heavily armed terrorists traversed the areas of the state where the Fusion movement was strongest, threatening and assaulting black Republicans and white Populists to suppress their vote. The impunity of the Red Shirts was so great that during the final days of the 1898 campaign, they stopped and boarded a train looking to assault incumbent Republican Governor Daniel Russell. He only narrowly escaped by hiding in the train’s baggage. On Election Day 1898, the Red Shirt campaign succeeded as Democrats swept out the Fusion coalition, retook the General Assembly and set about consolidating their political and economic power by excluding blacks and, to a lesser extent, Republicans from participating in North Carolina’s electoral politics for close to 75 years. Not willing to risk federal government intervention to remedy the election outcome, an army of Democratic Red Shirts descended on Wilmington – the largest city in North Carolina at the time – and violently overthrew the city’s Fusionist government. In the process it burned the city’s thriving black newspaper and murdered an unknown number of black Republicans and their white allies.
Following the 1898 election, Democrats, aware that maintaining a standing militia was not a viable long-term strategy for suppressing their political opponents, adopted a two-pronged plan to perpetuate their political power. The first prong was the disenfranchisement of black voters through a combination of constitutional and statutory barriers like poll taxes, literacy requirements and grandfather clauses. The second prong involved legitimizing and institutionalizing the system of intimidation utilized by the Red Shirts. Across the rural South, that system manifested itself in Democratic courthouse-based political machines that used the collective political power of a county’s sheriff, lawyers, prosecutors, state legislators and, occasionally, local press to enforce partisan discipline on the community through a combination of intimidation, legal favors and political patronage.
You’d be hard pressed to find a more succinct or persuasive account of the near absolute power, pervasive influence and ingrained corruption of a rural southern Democratic courthouse political machine than Bauerlein’s account of the Murdaugh-led organization’s near century long domination of South Carolina’s Low Country. Through meticulous research, the author identifies and explains how careful exploitation of South Carolina’s unique judicial system – which allowed assistant solicitors to maintain a private practice of civil law and the legislature to appoint judges – enabled the Murdaugh machine to build and perpetuate power.
The family passed the elected solicitor’s office down across three generations from father to son for a total of 86 years between 1920 and 2006. Without spoiling the whole story, the Murdaughs used the office to, among other things, cover up crimes, protect their bootlegging operation, and build immense personal wealth. In the process, they managed to burden the already struggling local economy by leveraging two quirks in South Carolina law: the first allowing an assistant solicitor to maintain a private civil legal practice and the second allowing a plaintiff to bring a civil action against a business that has operations in a South Carolina judicial district even if the action resulting in the civil suit did not occur in that judicial district.
The Murdaugh Law Firm’s civil litigation practice was so adept at suing businesses that the American Tort Reform Association identified Hampton County as one of the 10 worst “Judicial Hell Holes” in America. In one particularly telling anecdote about the tort environment cited in the book, Walmart once bought property in Hampton County with plans to build a new store, only to turn around and donate the land for a local park once their general counsel’s office realized the litigation implications of operating in the 14th Judicial District.
While we like to think we hold ourselves to a little higher standard than our southern neighbors, North Carolina was home to its share of colorful, and often-times corrupt, courthouse-based political machines.
Some of the best known include:
- Madison County’s Ponder-led machine that controlled the sheriff’s office and formed the power base of 4-term House Speaker Liston Ramsay. Among its more infamous incidents was the dynamiting of the Ponder homeplace by a political foe. It declined following a federal investigation in the 1980s.
- Billy Watkins’ Granville County machine, which Tim Tyson claimed in his book about racial violence and the subsequent trials in Oxford in 1970 managed to make all copies of local newspaper accounts from the period disappear from the state archives and University of North Carolina libraries.
- Alamance County’s Kerr-Scott machine, which elected two governors, a US Senator, an agriculture commissioner, and a host of powerful state legislators.
- Southeastern North Carolina was home to several, occasionally competing, political machines, including:
- Charlie Rose and Terry Sanford’s machine in Cumberland County.
- The Richmond County machine controlled by Raymond Goodman, the longest serving sheriff in state history.
- And perhaps most infamously, Columbus and Bladen County’s machine, which was weakened by the ColCor investigation in the 1980s.
While these organizations had shifting alliances in the generally decisive Democratic primaries for statewide offices, they usually united in opposition to Republicans in the general elections.
But lest you think it was all Democratic bliss and harmony, in the early 1980s Rep. Ron Taylor of Bladen County was convicted of arson for having the tobacco business and warehouses of Bertie County’s political kingpin, Sen. Monk Harrington, burned to the ground in act of retribution… which puts any current conflicts between Republicans in the North Carolina Senate and House in some perspective.
We can only hope a researcher and author with Bauerlein’s talent, will one day undertake a definitive history on North Carolina’s courthouse political machines.