Sherlock Holmes vs. The KKK: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Civil War and Slavery

As January 6 is the birthday of “The Great Detective” (a/k/a Sherlock Holmes), [1] it is an appropriate occasion to acknowledge the impact the Civil War and slavery had on that world-renowned sleuth and his equally famous chronicler, John H. Watson, M.D. Also, as shown herein, a word is in order on the more obscure Joseph Habakuk Jephson, M.D., of the 113th New York Volunteer Infantry. What these three have in common is that they are all characters created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose remarkable chance meeting early in life with a famous African American abolitionist had an enduring influence on both Doyle and his literary creations.[2]

Followers of Holmes’ exploits know that Sherlock once confronted agents of the Ku Klux Klan.[3] As recounted by Watson, in late September 1887[4] a young man, John Openshaw, consulted Holmes. Openshaw feared for his life. He had received an envelope whose contents consisted entirely of five dried orange pips. Written inside was “K.K.K.” and “Put the papers on the sundial.” Both his uncle and then his father had received similar missives prior to their suspicious deaths. Openshaw explained that his uncle had been a prosperous planter in Florida before the Civil War and had fought under Stonewall Jackson and John Bell Hood, rising to colonel. The uncle left Florida because of “his aversion to the negroes, and his dislike of the Republican policy in extending the franchise to them.”

Holmes deduces that the uncle had been involved with the KKK, but left America with records incriminating prominent members, which Klan agents are desperate to retrieve. After the Klan kills young Openshaw, an enraged Holmes—who has identified the “cunning devils”—sends them his own five orange pips, vowing revenge. Only their loss at sea saves them from Holmes’ righteous wrath.

Watson’s connection to the war, and especially its goal of emancipation, is illustrated by his admiration for abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher, as reported in Doyle’s story The Cardboard Box.[5] In the course of explaining how he deduced Watson’s thoughts, including his musing on the Civil War and the “gallantry which was shown by both sides in that desperate struggle,” Holmes correctly recounts how Watson also had been contemplating Beecher’s “mission which he undertook on behalf of the North at the time of the Civil War, for I remember your expressing your passionate indignation at the way in which he was received by the more turbulent of our people.” In that 1863 speaking tour, Beecher had placed slavery’s extinction at the center of the Union war effort.[6]

Watson’s admiration for the American abolitionist is emphasized by the revelation that that he has purchased a portrait of Beecher, which he contemplates hanging next to his picture of Gen. Charles Gordon. The mention of Gordon is telling. Gordon was greatly respected in British abolitionist circles as a fierce opponent of the slave trade.[7] Watson clearly is an abolitionist.

A final story in the Holmes Canon also is instructive. In The Yellow Face, [8] Holmes’ client, Grant Munro, seeks Holmes’ help in discovering the meaning of his wife’s sudden secretive and suspicious doings, which focus on the new resident of a nearby cottage. Holmes’ deductive powers fail him in this case. The cottage resident, rather than being the wife’s abandoned and blackmailing American husband—Holmes’s conclusion—turns out to be a child, “a little coal-black negress.” Little Lucy is the progeny of the wife’s first marriage, to an African American from Atlanta who died of yellow fever.

What is remarkable (for its day) is Doyle’s ending. In a scene of which Watson writes “I love to think,” Munro, after but a brief hesitation,[9] embraces both child and wife. Holmes, too, is touched by the scene.

Doyle’s pronounced sympathy—expressed through Holmes and Watson—for the victims of the “cunning devils” of the KKK, as well as for the causes of abolition and black civil rights, even racial inter-marriage, might have its origins in 1882, in what has been characterized as “perhaps the most momentous encounter [Doyle] had yet sustained in the course of his life.” Doyle was then a 22-year-old ship’s doctor on a vessel that touched the African coast at Monrovia, the capital of Liberia (named for President James Monroe). En route, the new U.S. Minister to that country joined Doyle for what became three days of intense conversation.[10]

The American Minister was the famous African American abolitionist leader Henry Highland Garnet. Even forty years later, Doyle vividly recalled their meeting:

The most intelligent and well-read man whom I met on the Coast was a negro, the American Consul at Monrovia. He came on with us as a passenger. My starved literary side was eager for good talk, and it was wonderful to sit on deck discussing Bancroft and Motley, and then suddenly realize that you were talking to one who had possibly been a slave himself, and was certainly the son of slaves…

This negro gentleman did me good, for a man’s brain is an organ for the formation of his own thoughts and also for the digestion of other people’s, and it needs fresh fodder…. I cannot trace that I made any mental or spiritual advancement during the voyage, but I added one more experience to my chaplet, and I suppose it all goes to some, ultimate result in character or personality.[11]

Garnet must have impressed Doyle not only with his intelligence and literary scope, but with his views on slavery, including Garnet’s belief that violence was appropriate to combat it. [12]  Doyle would have been primed for such a perspective. Shortly before meeting Garnet, Doyle had been horrified at seeing African coast slave prisons. In a report home, Doyle wrote that: “From what I saw of them I should think that, when full of their struggling, thirsty occupants, the Black Hole of Calcutta would be a sanatorium by comparison.”[13]

Indeed, only two years after encountering Garnet, Doyle published J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement.[14] This tells the story of a Civil War veteran, Joseph Habakuk Jephson, M.D., late of the 113th New York Volunteer Infantry, who books passage on the celebrated and mysterious Mary Celeste.[15] Jephson encounters a formerly enslaved African American, Septimius Goring, who murders the passengers and crew before settling in Africa. At the end of the story, Goring charges Jephson to take a message back to “the white race” of America, telling them of the evils of slavery and oppression and that there was a man willing to fight against such. As a final nod to Garnet, Jephson is rescued at sea by a ship (of the same line on which Doyle had met Garnet) called the Monrovia.

Other apparent homages to Garnet appear in the Holmes stories themselves. Garnet’s Maryland enslaver was named Col. Spencer. A Col. Spence Munro (“Munro” for Monrovia, or Monroe?) appears as a minor character in The Cooper Breeches. Further, Munro is the name of the husband in The Yellow Face.[16]

Any reader of the Holmes-Watson stories will have noted Doyle’s employment of American characters and references to events in America. Thus, that reader may attribute Doyle’s references to the Civil War, emancipation and the KKK simply as part of another effort to appeal to an American market. Little would those readers, then or now, suspect that those references might well be born of a young author’s chance meeting off the African coast with a remarkable man. That man left an enduring mark on Arthur Conan Doyle and through him, Mr. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson.

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Kevin C. Donovan, ECW’s newest Contributing Member, travels to London in June 2025 to present before the American Civil War Round Table of the United Kingdom, and will of course visit 221B Baker Street.

[1] Jennifer 8. [sic] Lee, “The Curious Case of A Birthday for Sherlock,” The New York Times, January 6, 2009, https://archive.nytimes.com/cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/06/the-curious-case-of-a-birthday-for-sherlock/.

[2] Spoiler Alert: This article reveals the conclusion of certain Doyle stories.

[3] Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Five Orange Pips,” The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, pp. 105-125 (Berkley Medallion Books, New York, NY, 1963).

[4] Note, however, that T.S. Blakeney’s study of the Holmes’ Canon (the four novels and 56 short stories) shows that Watson’s memory was faulty; the events must have taken place in September 1889. T.S. Blakeney, Sherlock Holmes: Fact or Fiction, pp. 62-63, 70-71 (Otto Penzler Books, New York, NY 1993).

[5] Doyle, “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box,” His Last Bow, pp. 38-60 (Berkley Medallion Books, New York, NY, 1963).

[6] American Rebellion. Report of the Speeches of the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, Delivered at Public Meetings in Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Liverpool, and London; and at the Farewell Breakfasts in London, Manchester, and Liverpool (Manchester, Union and Emancipation Society, 1864), https://archive.org/details/americanrebellio1864beec/page/n3/mode/2up.

[7] “Charles George Gordon,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_George_Gordon.

[8] Doyle, “The Yellow Face,” The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, pp. 34-53 (Berkley Medallion Books, New York, NY, 1963).

[9] In the American edition of the story, Munro struggles for “a long ten minutes,” rather than needing only two minutes in Doyle’s intended telling. Owen Dudley Edwards, The Quest for Sherlock Holmes: A Biographical Study of Arthur Conan Doyle, p. 274 (Barnes & Noble Books, Totowa, NJ, 1983).

[10] Edwards, pp. 255-257.

[11] Doyle, Memories and Adventures, pp. 49-50 (Little, Brown & Co., Boston, MA, 1924), https://archive.org/details/memoriesadventur0000doyl/page/50/mode/2up.

[12] Edwards, at pp. 261, 264. Edwards suspects that Garnet shared with Doyle Garnet’s famous 1843 Buffalo speech, in which Garnet powerfully called for violent resistance to the enslavers.

[13] Doyle, “On the Slave Coast with a Camera,” The British Journal of Photography, March 31 & April 7, 1882, https://www.arthur-conan doyle.com/index.php/On_the_Slave_Coast_with_a_Camera.

[14] Doyle, “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement,” The Cornhill Magazine, New Series, Vol. II, pp. 1-32 (Smith, Elder & Co., London, 1884),

https://archive.org/details/cornhillmagazine49londuoft/page/8/mode/2up?view=theater

[15] In 1872 the Mary Celeste was found in the Atlantic Ocean, uninhabited and adrift. The mystery of what happened to its crew and passengers persists to this day. Mary Celeste, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Celeste.

[16] Edwards, pp. 257-258.