Sneakout

Around 1865 Thomas Jefferson (“Jeff”) Eubanks, a farmer in Cave Twp, Franklin Co, Illinois, established a sawmill on the west bank of Ewing Creek, where it was crossed by the road from Benton to Thompsonville. Houses were built for the new mill workers, a store was started, and a jail was erected. Why a jail in such a small community? It was probably needed. In addition to a handful of houses, a mill, and a store, the village had six saloons! Men (and it was only men in those days) sneaking out of their houses to booze it up gave the community its name, “Sneakout.” Yes, that was really the village name.

Sneakout had a bad name and a bad reputation. The village was not only a source of excessive drinking, aided by Hiram Summers, who supplied liquor, it was notorious for its roughness. Worse of all, Sneakout was headquarters of the KKK (sometimes called the “Golden Ring”) of Williamson and Franklin counties. The location was ideal for the Klan. Cave Twp bordered "Bloody" Williamson Co, and the area was isolated and lawless.

It was in Sneakout that Aaron Neal organized the group of masked miscreants, many of whom farmed in Cave, Frankfort (particularly in the Crawford’s Prairie area), and Eastern townships. Aaron, who was designated “Grand Master” and who claimed earlier membership in the original Klan, was everything a KKK member was not expected to be. He had served in the Union Army during the Civil War, he was the son of a Primitive Baptist minister, and he had read law, entering into private practice. Come to think of it, being a Baptist minister’s son might not have been a detriment at the time.

Church or school, possibly at Sneakout, Mar 2007.

Little, possibly nothing, remains of Sneakout today. During a 2007 trip, a search for the remnants revealed an old Church or School, but nothing else. The village vanished when good timber for the sawmill was used up and when a new train track ended its isolation. And the loss of saloon clientele when the KKK was (temporarily) vanquished also impacted the community. But more on that later.

Many Franklin Co towns have disappeared over the years. Sheldon R. Jones has produced an informative map of Franklin Co, showing its towns, both extant and extinct, and has granted permission to use it in the Summers book.

Map of Franklin Co, Sheldon R. Jones. Some locations are estimates. Sneakout has been marked with an added red arrow.

The Egyptian Klan

With its large influx of southerners, Little Egypt, Southern Illinois, had a worrisome number of Confederate sympathizers during the Civil War. Active in the region was The Knights of the Golden Circle (KGC), a pro-slavery group. It was claimed that in 1862 Williamson Co had 1000 Knights, an incredibly large number considering that in 1860, the county had only 12,205 residents. It has been proposed that the KGC was the forerunner of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in Southern Illinois and certainly the viewpoints of the two organizations were similar.

The KKK originated in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee, and is said to have reached Southern Illinois by 1867. It had certainly arrived by 1871, when forty men attacked the farm of John Baker on the Williamson-Franklin county line, driving him and his family off. The following year, on 22 Apr 1872, fourteen (some say ten) riders in masks, robes, and pointed caps hung Isaac Vancil, a 73-year-old Williamson Co farmer known for his multitude of illegitimate children and rough, ignorant, and overbearing life style. Though the hanging was carried out in Williamson Co, members of the Franklin Co Klan were present. At least two trial witnesses who testified against the Klan for Vancil's slaying were afterwards murdered.

The seven southern Illinois counties with KKK activity, 1867–1875.

The Klan increased its activity, eventually operating in seven Southern Illinois counties: Franklin, Williamson, Jackson, Saline, Johnson, Union, and Pope. During 1874 and 1875, the "Egyptian Night Riders" claimed to have conducted about one hundred raids in Franklin Co. There was little activity against African Americans, who were nearly nonexistent in most of Southern Illinois. The Klan acted instead as vigilantes, claiming to right wrongs and to punish miscreants living immoral lives. In fact, much of the activity appears to have been to settle personal grudges. One newspaper reporter at the time said the cause was just “inherent ‘cussedness’.”

Were the night riders in Southern Illinois really the Ku Klux Klan? They called themselves Klansmen, their dress and oaths resembled those of the original Klan, and they were considered KKK members by government officials and newspaper reporters. If it walks like a duck…

On the other hand, the Illinois organizations appeared to be relatively nonpolitical. Some members were even said to be Republican, an absolute “no-no” for Klan members in the deep south. And some Illinois Klansmen had fought in the Union Army during the Civil War. But, for convenience, we will continue to refer to the Southern Illinois masked rider groups as the KKK. They certainly believed they were.

St. Louis Republican newspaper, 23 Aug 1875

Dr. Andy Hall, a prominent early 20th century Mt. Vernon, Illinois, physician, who lived in Franklin Co at the time of the KKK, has described their activities. 

The headgear of the Franklin county. clansmen consisted of a tall white cap with peep holes and a long flowing robe that covered the entire body. And as they always completely covered with white blankets, even the heads of the animals except for the peep holes through which to see. This was to prevent the possible identity of the animal, disclosing the name of the rider.

 At one time they were so numerous and active in that community that one could seldom start out on the highway without meeting from ten to thirty clansmen. Their principal activities were directed to supervising all the social, moral and business affairs of the community. Unfortunately they administered punishment to their personal enemies and to those who dared to disobey their orders or warnings. For several months they carried on unmolested, visiting isolated farm houses in the dead hours of the night, called the occupants outside and warning them what they should do or should not do and frequently punishing them in various ways.

But what does all of this have to do with the Summers family? We shall soon see.

Little Egypt

During the “Winter of the Deep Snow” in 1830-1831, and some severe winters following, counties in the south of Illinois supplied food to the northern part of the state, an action that may have given rise to the name “Little Egypt” or just “Egypt” for Southern Illinois: 

There is an old tradition handed down from the early settlers along this road about the people coming down from the north to buy corn in an early day. The frost having killed all the corn in the north, in the southern part of Illinois the corn was not hurt by frost. The people near Goshen had come down the Old Goshen road to Knight's Prairie west of McLeansboro where they stopped to stay over night with one of the early settlers by the name of Knight. The corn buyers accosted the early settler by using the Bible expression “We are the son of Jacob and have come into the land of Egypt to buy corn.” From this expression we derived the cognomen of 'The land of Egypt.” Since then all Southern Illinois is known as 'EGYPT" or The land of Egypt." (H. M. Aiken, Franklin County History, Centennial Edition)

 It is sometimes claimed the southernmost Illinois city was given the name “Cairo” because it lay in “Little Egypt,” but the reverse may be true. On 9 Jan 1818 the governor of Illinois territory signed into law an act to incorporate the “City and Bank of Cairo.” The city was named well before the food shipments following the winter of 1830 and afterwards. Perhaps the position of Cairo at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, reminded the founders of the Egyptian Delta. But, of course, there may have been earlier food shipments.

 And the Egypt designation could have began in 1799 when Baptist minister John Badgley termed the fertile lands near southern Illinois town of Edwardsville, Illinois, the “Land of Goshen,” a Biblical area in Egypt.

City of Cairo, Illinois, panoramic map, 1885.

Southern Illinois, “Little Egypt,” was known for its huge coal deposits, though the Summers family was apparently never involved with this. And it was also known for its large concentration of settlers from southern states, such as North Carolina and Tennessee, from which the Franklin Co Summers immigrated.

In his 1918 book on the history of Franklin Co, H. M. Aiken states

The early settlers of the county who came from the South, brought with them, a hospitality and sociability, that could not be excelled anywhere in the U. S. The typical Yankee possessed many good traits of character but the genuine hospitality and sociability of the people of the South was a great inheritance of which Franklin County received in her early days.

Franklin County is indebted to her early settlers for the gentle, Christian spirit that had been a great factor in moulding[sic] the character of the founders of Franklin County.

Joy, peace, and contentment and affection encompassed and enveloped their homes. Southern ideas govern our social intercourse and Southern hospitality is dispersed. The traveler passing through the county upon our public highways is always greeted with an affable "Good-day, Sir," and if he should stop at a farm house in quest of information he will be politely invited to 'light and come in." Refreshments will be offered him so cordially and unostentatiously that he at once concludes that he has found a county where kindness, chivalry and hospitality do not entirely belong to the ages that are past.

 No description could be further from the truth. Inhospitable and unsociable, Southern Illinois had a plethora of crime and violence. In 1875 a newspaper reporter described Little Egypt residents as 

Dirty roughs, clad in two shirts, butternut homespun, and cowhide boots, hanging round the "drug stores" (here grogshops are so designated), to drink benzine, discuss who is "the best man," and, if enough benzine have been consumed, to settle that great question by fighting it out then and there. Men, as one soon learns of them, who are born bullies, every mother's son of them, and who are so proud of nothing as having knocked down some other man, and, while he was down, kicked, choked, bit, and gouged him, until the victor has spent his strength and his rage.

The stereotypic resident was said to be “lazy, ignorant, anti-intellectual drunkard who loved a good fight and held the law in slight regard” (Illinois Historical Journal, Spring, 1985, pp. 17-44). Assaults and murders were rampant, particularly in Williamson Co, with its vicious family vendettas, but also in adjacent Franklin, Jackson, and other Litte Egypt counties. Suspects usually escaped punishment owing to badly managed prosecutions; lying, threatened, or murdered witnesses; and biased or frightened juries. And all too often they were simply "nolled" (legal slang from L. nolle prosequi, charges dismissed) for no apparent reason.

Counties in black voted for the constitutional convention

that could have legalized slavery.

Little Egypt was exceedingly racist, particularly the city of Cairo, home to a large number of blacks, estimated at more than ten thousand during the Civil War, mostly fugitive “contrabands.” About three thousand remained in the city after the war. Though the first Illinois state constitution, published in 1818, stated that slavery shall not be “thereafter introduced,” slavery continued to be tolerated. The historian Darrel Dexter has described Illinois as a "quasi-slave" state. Use of slaves was allowed by law until 1825 for the salt works in the southern Illinois county of Gallatin. Documents show that at least five southern counties—St. Clair, Gallatin, Randolph, Edwards and Pope, where blacks were bought, sold, indentured, gifted, and taxed as property—embraced the institution of slavery. In 1853 the state legislature passed a law which made the settlement of African Americans in Illinois a crime. If African Americans remained in Illinois beyond 10 days, they could be arrested and fined.

The 1818 Illinois census for statehood showed Franklin Co with only sixty-seven blacks, fifteen “indentured” (slavery by another name) and fifty-two free. But, despite these low numbers, Franklin certainly supported slavery. When a vote was taken in Illinois in 1824 for or against a constitutional convention that could have made slavery legal outright, Franklin was one of eleven southern Illinois counties with a majority of votes for the convention. In Franklin Co, the vote was 170 for and 113 against. But Illinois, as a whole, voted 4972 for and 6640 against. Had the measure passed, the course of Illinois history would have been much different.

In 1876, after defending several clients accused of “crimes that would make the bailiffs of Hades blush,” the magniloquent lawyer Milo Erwin wrote a book about Williamson Co, inviting the world “to look with joy and pride upon a county redeemed from crime, and sparkling with brilliant gems of innocence and virtue.” Any sparkle was short-lived. Crime and violence continued in Williamson and the rest of Little Egypt, culminating in the 1920s with violent labor strikes, prohibition violence, and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. But, as we will see in our next blog, the latter was not a rise but a rebirth.

And this was home for the Wittenberg Summers Line! But crime-ridden Egypt may have been more than just their home. As we will see, it may have been their cultural cradle.

Darrel Dexter, Bondage in Egypt, Slavery in Southern Illinois, Southeast Missouri State University, Cape Girardeau, Missouri, 2010.