Welcome to Daily TWiP, your daily dose of all the holidays and history we couldn’t cram into The Week in Preview.

As the saying goes, no good deed ever goes unpunished. For his efforts to squelch the Ku Klux Klan and protect African Americans and newly freed slaves, William Woods Holden was rewarded with the distinction of being the first U.S. governor to be removed from office. His tenure as governor of North Carolina was terminated today (March 22nd) in 1871.

After the Civil War ended in 1865, slavery was abolished, an outcome that angered many Southerners. The Ku Klux Klan decided to take matters into its own hands. In addition to other acts of violence, the Klan assassinated North Carolina state senator John W. Stephens, who was very involved in the local black community and had helped them to organize politically, and lynched Wyatt Outlaw, an African American night police officer employed by the town of Graham.

The assassination and lynching happened within a short period of time during the late spring of 1870 and took place in Caswell and Almanace counties respectively. On July 8, 1870, Governor Holden decided to resort to drastic measures. He declared martial law in both counties due to a state of insurrection and assembled the militia, headed by Union guerrilla fighter Col. George Washington Kirk, to stop the Klan.

Holden suspended the writ of habeas corpus in order to faciliate Kirk’s activities. Anyone who was arrested and held on suspicion of Klan involvement was therefore denied access to a judge’s ruling as to the legality of their imprisonment. Roughly one hundred arrests were made, many of them prominent citizens.

Holden’s actions received little support and were even condemned by President Ulysses S. Grant, who was also an opponent of the Ku Klux Klan. None of the arrested individuals were ever tried and all were released by the end of August. Holden disbanded the militia in September and declared the state of insurrection at an end in November.

In the eyes of those who had been arrested, however, the matter was far from over. Holden was impeached Dec. 14, 1871. On March 22, 1871, he was convicted of six out of eight charges related to the arrests, mostly pertaining to false imprisonment and unnecessary roughness, and removed from office. He remains the only North Carolina governor to be impeached.

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– Teresa Santoski