Echoes of Gone with the Wind: Post-Civil War Crime Riles Louisiana

 

Cordelia Vanlandingham Cheatham: 1841-1924 (Maternal First Cousin 4x Removed)

While reading Gone with the Wind recently for my book club, I was struck by Mitchell’s use of two attacks on white women by black men as a sort of justification for the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. I questioned whether such type of attacks actually took place. Did women truly fear black-on-white crime during Reconstruction and the following decades, or was it all a pretext to make the Klan seem like a necessary instrument of vigilante justice? While researching the Vanlandingham family, I ran across news articles from May 1907 describing an attack on the elderly Cordelia Vanlandingham Cheatham by a black man apparently intending to rob her family. I was surprised by the event itself, by some of the ugly references in the news articles, and also by the realization that I may have misjudged Margaret Mitchell.

Cordelia Vanlandingham, born in 1841 to Oliver Cromwell Vanlandingham and his wife Mary Drake, had married an editor and clerk named Edward Cheatham in 1860. They settled in the Baton Rouge area where they raised four daughters and a son. Following Edward’s death in 1899, Cordelia lived with her unmarried daughters Elizabeth and Clara (known as Cheappie and Tal for some reason) in a rather rural area of Baton Rouge’s Third Ward. According to the news account, the home “was on the Bayou Sara road, and is in a sparsely and somewhat isolated section” ten miles north of the city.  

On May 18, 1907, a black man came to the Cheatham door at 10:30 p.m., claiming to be an employee of Cordelia’s son Ed who needed to deliver packages to her. When Cordelia stepped outside, the man attacked her, saying, “If you holler or make any noise, I’ll kill you.”

Cordelia struggled with the man and called to her daughter Cheappie, who came running with an ax. According to one news account, she threatened to “split his head open if he did not let her mother go, and made an effort to brain him with the ax.” The other newspaper said she swung at the man several times and managed to get him out of the house so she could lock the door. The man, “still bent on his murderous design” according to one newspaper, shot a gun through a window at the women and then ran. The newspaper said that only his poor aim kept him from killing the women.

One news article had an interesting detail:

“The screams of Mrs. Cheatham by this time had attracted the attention of an old negro woman, who, with her husband, lived in the yard. She yelled out to ask what was the matter and said that the old man would be there in a few minutes.”

I found it interesting that both the perpetrator and some of the rescuers were black. I was also intrigued to not that one newspaper failed to include the black woman’s intervention.

The article noted that:

“Mrs. Cheatham can give no description of her assailant, owing to the intense darkness surrounding the scene of her struggle. She remembers that the negro was very black.”

Ed Cheatham’s employee named Robert Pigeon was grilled by the local sheriff and a whole posse of angry neighbors the next day, but luckily was able to prove his innocence—someone had impersonated him to get Cordelia to open the door. The other news report stated that the sheriff had actually arrested the employee, and only released him when Cordelia Cheatham denied he was the perpetrator.

Poor Mr. Pigeon had a lucky escape. It appears lynching the robber was a real possibility. There was a chilling line in the New Orleans article:

 “It is probable that if the perpetrator of the deed is captured by the residents of that section before the sheriff’s officers can secure his arrest and identification, there will be some public demonstration.”

Lovely euphemism: public demonstration. The Shreveport newspaper was more forthright, and called it a “lynching”.

I found no articles relating to an arrest. Three days later, a posse was still searching. Another hapless man had been arrested but eventually released when they could find no evidence against him.

So how did this crime compare to those in Mitchell’s novel? Gone With the Wind featured two crimes. The first instance involved Tony Fontaine killing a former slave for verbally harassing his widowed sister-in-law in a sexual manner. The second instance was a physical attack on Scarlett as she returned from her sawmill. The perpetrators intended to rob her, but also probably intended to rape her as well. In that instance, the perpetrators included a white man as well as a black man, and Scarlett was rescued by one of her former slaves, also black. This paralleled the Cheatham incident, as black neighbors helped rescue Cordelia. In the novel, Scarlett’s husband Frank, a Klansman, gathered the Atlanta Klan members and sought to avenge her attack. The perpetrators were killed, but so was Frank.

I found it interesting that several of the articles relating to Cordelia Cheatham’s attack specifically stated that they believed the motive and intent of the criminal was robbery, not “a criminal assault” which must have been a delicate way of referring to rape. They were trying to calm the citizens of Baton Rouge, probably hoping to avoid the murder of a suspected perpetrator, where in Mitchell’s book, murder was the accepted fate of the perpetrators.

Still, the existence of these articles and the attention the attack on Mrs. Cheatham drew statewide shows that Mitchell was probably basing her novel’s crimes on real attacks that occurred in Georgia—crimes that would have been extremely rare, but would have inspired great fear and anger among white residents during Reconstruction and the decades that followed.  

 

Sources:

Newspapers.com - The Shreveport Journal - 21 May 1907 - Page 4 1907 Attack on Cordelia Cheatham

Newspapers.com. The Shreveport Journal. 21 May 1907, Tue · Page 4

Newspapers.com. Mrs Edward Cheatham assaulted, the Shreveport Times 20 May 1907.

Newspapers.com The Times-Democrat, New Orleans, Louisiana · Monday, May 20, 1907.