Broken Men April 10, 1865

Part II of The Vote Collectors starts in 1865, long before the 2018 election: Bladen County resident Matthew Sykes served in the Confederacy but secretly joined the Union. This made him a traitor to many of his neighbors. Neill McGill led a group of men to punish Sykes one rainy morning. They found him hiding in a pile of raw cotton in a storeroom, tied him up and took him into the woods. Sykes’s wife Catharine found him hanging from a sapling. The men were tried and sent to prison, but their lawyer—a former Confederate lieutenant colonel named Alfred Waddell—defended them relentlessly. Weeks later, the men escaped from jail, in part because Wadell had paid a prison guard to allow them to chisel out a hole in the wall with a jackknife.