It turns out that I was missing a handful of JAR libraries and I discerned this by looking through the JUnit TemporaryFolder log files. After downloading all the appropriate libraries I resolved my issue.
Download all the dependency jars to get any java code that works with accumulo from here: http://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.apache.accumulo/accumulo-core/1.5.0 and that should fix be a good starting point for addressing accumulo java code.