1855-1879

Slaying reflects tensions of times

It reads like the script from a bad movie, but it happened in Fayetteville: It's a Southern town in turmoil in 1867, less than two years after the Civil War.

Many Confederate veterans have returned home to tough times, economically, socially and politically. The Union Army has taken control of state politics pending elections under a new constitution.

The federal regulators are encouraging former slaves to vote, and some black residents have even been elected to office.

In February 1867, a black drayman, Archie Beebe, is arrested on charges of assaulting a young white woman, Elvina Massey.

A crowd, including several Confederate veterans, gathers outside during a magistrate's hearing at the Market House (often called the Town House). As Sheriff Robert W. Hardie escorts Beebe from the hearing room to the jail, a man lurches at the prisoner and tries to cut him with a knife. Several of the men in the crowd are smoking cigars, reportedly enough to help cloud the scene.

Then a shot rings out and Beebe falls dead with a pistol ball in his head - killed, as one newspaper account puts it - "by a hand unknown."

Five arrested

Within weeks, the military government arrests four Confederate veterans and the magistrate who convened the hearing, on charges of murder and conspiracy. Eventually, after a sensational trial before a military court in Raleigh, three of the veterans - Capt. William C. Tolar, Thomas Powers and William David Watkins - are found guilty of murder and ordered to be "hung by the neck until they be dead."

A trial commission votes to reduce their sentence to 15 years at hard labor. In 1868, President Andrew Johnson, a North Carolina native, after hearing appeals from friends and family members, grants all three men full pardons. They return home from prison as folk heroes to many white residents.

Gradually, Southern whites regain power as Reconstruction-era reforms are stripped away.

Tolar goes on to considerable success in business and politics. He establishes a post office on 2,000 acres that he owns near the juncture of Cumberland, Robeson and Bladen counties, and it's named in his honor: Tolarsville.

During his first campaign for the state legislature, representing Robeson County, an "antagonist" asks Tolar whether he killed a man in Fayetteville, according to a newspaper account. To which Tolar reportedly replies: "'No, I killed a beast in human form,' and holding up the forefinger of his right hand, declares, 'there is the finger that pulled the trigger.'"