Greene County (continued)

PART IV: A Murder in Perry Township


Samuel McCann was a Greene County resident serving with the 7th (West) Virginia Infantry who had returned home to look for deserters. At a bar in Mapletown on Friday, March 14, 1864, McCann attempted to arrest two deserters from the 7th (West) Virginia, James Songston and Otho Herrington. The two men had been missing from the regiment for about a year, and in an article describing the incident in the Waynesburg Messenger on March 23, 1864, it was reported that the two had recently returned to Greene County from Ohio where they had enlisted and received bounties. By 1864, this was a common practice for deserters from the army known as “bounty jumping.” When McCann found Songston and Herrington in the Mapletown barroom, he immediately accosted them and reached for Songston. Herrington and Songston both drew revolvers, Songston’s pistol misfiring just as McCann seized him. Herrington fired his gun at McCann from behind. The bullet passed through the side of McCann’s head and came out the corner of one of his eyes. McCann immediately pitched forward into Songston’s arms, who then threw him to the floor causing McCann to break his shoulder blade. Songston and Herrington then escaped before any further attempt could be made to arrest them. The Messenger reported that McCann was expected to recover from his wounds.
Thus, by 1864, Greene County began to experience some of the violence that gripped the whole country because of the war. Professor A. J. Waycoff in his history of Greene County only relates a single episode of Union soldiers operating in Greene County, describing an incident when Federal troops camped on the Courthouse lawn and then marched to Mount Morris to break up a band known as the Knights of the Golden Circle. Exactly what Professor Waychoff was describing is hard to say. He may have been thinking of some strange combination of the events in Davistown with Captain Showalter and Captain Cuthbertson. It is also possible he was describing a different event altogether. One thing is certain, much more was going on at home during the Civil War in Greene County than the nineteenth century county historians revealed. Oil was discovered on Dunkard Creek in 1861, and by 1863, Dunkard Township was in the midst of Greene County’s first oil boom. Farming was the lifeblood of the county. By 1850, over half the land in the county had been improved for farming. There were more than twice as many sheep in Greene County (55,000) as there were people (22,136) in the years prior to the war. Furthermore, in an article in The Waynesburg Messenger on December 11, 1861, along with politics and news of the war, the editor included an article of interest to a vast number of the county’s farmers on “Destruction of sheep by dogs.”
On November 20, 1864, a woman from Richhill Township, identified only by the initials M. L. R. wrote a letter to “Cousin Neddy.” From her point of view, despite the tragedy of the war, farmers in Greene County were doing well. She wrote:
“. . . everything appears to be plenty, and demands a high price, cattle is worth Seven cts in the rough (fat cattle) hogs, 10 to 12, do. Sheep Six dollars per head, and upwards, Chickens 50 [cents] per pair, and everything in proportion, yet there appears to be plenty of everything, and that is good, I suppose one reason of the high prices of everything is money being so plenty, everybody is into Some kind of speculation, Some in oil, some in western cattle and hogs, Some one thing and some another . . ..”

She also told Cousin Neddy that “Joe” had purchased some cattle and hogs “out West this fall.” She hoped that the venture would turn out well and that Joe would “make considerable on them, enough to hire him a Substitute, for I expect there will be another big draft this winter, or next spring.” “Their [sic] is some Soldiers here at Waynesburgh,” she wrote, “They are part of an Invalid Corps, they are taking deserters, etc etc . . . .”
Among the deserters being sought by the Federal authorities in early November 1864 was a young man from Perry Township named Thomas Phillips. Phillips, who was about thirty years old at the time, was the son of Peter Phillips, a Perry Township farmer who according to the 1860 census owned property worth about $300. Having been drafted into the military in the fall of 1864, the younger Phillips failed to report and made it well known in the community that he was not going to report. On Sunday evening, November 6, 1864, Phillips was attending a party in Perry Township when he was informed that Federal authorities were on their way to arrest him. He immediately left the party, declaring his intention to shoot anyone who tried to arrest him. Apparently deciding to ambush his pursuers, Phillips concealed himself along the road. Not long after that, William Brown, a son of Reuben Brown, Jr., a prominent farmer in Perry Township, and T. S. Morris, a son of Mount Morris merchant E. F. Morris, came along the road on their way home from a wedding. When they approached the place where Phillips was hiding, he fired at them three times, missing Morris but hitting William Brown with the second shot in the left temple.
Two days later, on November 8, 1864, E. F. Morris appeared before Perry Township Justice of the Peace A. F. Ammons and swore out an affidavit for Thomas Phillips’ arrest on the charge of assault with intent to kill T. S. Morris and William Brown, Brown having so far survived his wound. The township constable, Brice Howard, arrested Phillips, who was then released on bail set at $3000. At that time a Charles Coss and William Phillips put up the money for bail.
Within a few days, William Brown died of his wound, and his father, Reuben Brown, Jr., appeared before Justice of the Peace Joseph Connor in Mount Morris to swear an affidavit for an arrest warrant for Thomas Phillips for murder. Justice Conner issued a warrant, and Constable Brice Howard again took Phillips into custody, committing him to the county jail in Waynesburg on November 12, 1864. The Washington Reporter and Tribune noted in an article published November 16, 1864, that Phillips may have shot Brown “perhaps thinking” he and Morris “were the parties in pursuit of him.” At any rate, tempers in Perry Township were running high. It was reported that threats had been made to lynch Phillips before he was arrested and jailed.
The case of Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. Thomas Phillips was filed in the Court of Quarter Sessions of Greene County at number 7 December Sessions 1864. The county district attorney, J. G. Ritchie, sought an indictment for “murder felony” from the Grand Jury. The Grand Jury listened to testimony from several witnesses, including Thaddeus S. Morris, Dr. Spencer Morris, Dr. L. W. Ross, Washington Fox, Phillip Heite, Mary Phillips, Charles Coss, John Coss, Brice Howard, Minor Long, Cisey Rose, Ellsworth Russell, and John McClure. After due deliberation under their foreman, W. S. Ritchie, the Greene County Grand Jury returned a verdict of “ignoramus” in the case filed against Thomas Phillips. A Latin term literally meaning, “We do not know,” the verdict of “ignoramus” was a decision by the Grand Jury rejecting the indictment. In essence, the jury decided that even if the facts in the bill of indictment drawn by the district attorney were true, Phillips’ conduct did not warrent criminal punishment.
As frustrating as the verdict must have been for the Reuben Brown family, it is just as puzzling for anyone looking at the case in hindsight. The only documents available in the Greene County Clerk of Court’s Office are the entries in the Quarter Sessions docket, the affidavits for the arrest warrants, the warrants themselves, a transcript from Justice of the Peace Ammons docket, and the indictment. There is no transcript of testimony, so it is hard to analyze what happened. The surviving records seem clear that Thomas Phillips did shoot William Brown that night on November 6, 1864. Indeed, the Brown family was convinced of it because in Greene County historian Samuel Bates’ biographical sketch of Reuben Brown, Jr., he states that Reuben’s son William was killed by accident by a deserter during the Civil War. Calling the incident an “accident” may be the key to understanding the verdict. It is possible that the jury looked at the case as a tragedy for both the Brown and the Phillips families. William Brown had been killed by mistake. Thomas Phillips, because of a military draft law passed by a distant government in Washington, D.C., had felt it necessary to defend himself from what several citizens of the county no doubt felt would be an illegal arrest for violating an unconstitutional law.
If this analysis is close to the truth, then the jury may simply have decided to deal with Brown’s death by leaving the parties in the position they occupied by virtue of the tragedy of the times. Recognizing that the killing was really only an accident, the jury simply could not bring itself to find enough evidence to indict Thomas Phillips for an intentional killing. Violence had come to Greene County not in the form of soldiers firing on civilians. More tragically, violence came to the community at the hands of neighbor firing on neighbor.