Died 15 August 1868, Franklin, Tennessee, United States | ||
Samuel A. Bierfield [?-August 15, 1868] is believed to be the first Jew lynched in the United States. Bierfield and his African-American clerk, Lawrence Bowman, were apprehended in Bierfield's store in Franklin, Tennessee and fatally shot by a group of masked men believed to belong to the Ku Klux Klan, on August 15, 1868. No one was ever convicted of the crime, however.
The case
Following the crime, on August 17, the Nashville Union and Dispatch published an article soothing the fears of the local Jewish community that this was "a war waged against them" by assuring them that Bierfield had been a murderer, "among the very few criminals of their nation", based upon "the letter written by the negro Israel Brown to John Nolin [sic]", and that "It is known that the terrible Ku-Klux Klan had nothing to do with this murderer's execution". In the letter, the contents of which had been widely publicized in the area, Brown stated that Bierfield had hired Brown and others to murder Jeremiah Ezell, a white farmer who had been killed on July 18. Brown himself had "escaped". John Nolan, the supposed recipient of the letter, stated that he did not know any Israel Brown, and when Captain George Judd and Brevet Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Gelray, dispatched by the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands to investigate the case, sought to see the actual letter they were told that it had been lost, leading Judd and Gelray to conclude that the letter was a forgery intended to deflect suspicion.
In September, John Pogue Jr. was arrested and charged with Bierfield’s murder, on the strength of the eyewitness testimony of one Ed Lyle. However, Judge John Hugh Smith released Pogue after seven people came forward providing him an alibi. The Republican Banner wrote that Lyle had named Pogue in order to collect the $500 reward offered for information in the case.