Wicked River

by Lee Sandlin

  Meanwhile, a new rumor was riling Vicksburg. Up until that point, the squabble with Cabler and his fellow gamblers had been seen as a strictly local affair. But somehow during that day a connection was made: people started saying that this whole business had something to do with the stories emerging from the plantation districts about John Murrell and the slave insurrection. By nightfall on July 5, people all over Vicksburg were quoting from Stewart’s pamphlet and saying the gamblers were members of the Mystic Clan.

  There was no evidence, not even a single coerced confession, but from that point on, the rumor was regarded as a proven fact. As one writer noted a few years later, “It was known that the gamblers as a body belonged to, or were cognizant of, the conspiracy.”

  On July 6, the local militia moved into the Kangaroos to enforce the resolution. They were accompanied by a mob of citizens determined to put a stop to the Mystic Clan. As the militia began rounding up the gamblers, the mob fanned out swiftly through the tangle of streets and alleys. Soon they were breaking into every gambling house and saloon. They stampeded the residents; they dragged out the faro tables and everything else connected with gambling they could find. They smashed it all and burned it; there were bonfires on every corner of the Kangaroos.

  The mob met with little or no resistance. But then they came to Cabler’s house by the wharves. A large, well-armed group of gamblers had barricaded themselves inside. The mob surrounded the house. The back door was forced open. The windows had all been blocked off by the gamblers, and the interior of the house was pitch-black. The scene rapidly grew confused. People began shooting. One of the shots struck and killed a leader of the citizenry, Dr. Hugh Bodley, one of the most well-regarded men in Vicksburg. A newspaper obituary the next day called him “universally beloved and respected”; Henry Foote, who knew him, said in his memoirs that he was “a most intelligent and high-spirited young gentleman, of great professional promise.” Bodley’s death put the mob in a frenzy. They stormed the house, seized five of the gamblers, and immediately hanged them.

  Over the next several days, the news about the hangings and the mass expulsion of the gamblers spread up and down the river. It caused an immediate wave of excitement. In river towns all through the valley, the committees of vigilance and safety were joined by new “anti-gambling societies” that took the events in Vicksburg as their model. They were guided by Stewart’s pamphlet and by the now-universal belief that the river gamblers as a class were connected to the Mystic Clan. They were also galvanized by the sudden appearance of the gamblers themselves in their midst: those who had been expelled from Vicksburg were scattering along the river and were showing up in alarming numbers in other riverfront districts. The anti-gambling societies made a great point of deploring the hanging of the five men in Vicksburg Landing—but they also put up posters announcing that any gamblers found in their communities “will be used according to the Lynch Law.”

  The weeks that followed were chaotic. As more towns purged undesirables from their riverfront districts, the Mississippi was suddenly swarming with a flood of displaced gamblers and prostitutes. They all were wandering from town to town, looking for any place without an antigambling society. Mostly they traveled by steamboat, but there were some large groups of gamblers who’d dawdled too close to a town’s deadline and found themselves unhappily thrashing through the forests on foot while pursued by hunting parties. Many of the gamblers drifted down to New Orleans, where anybody could be hidden; others showed up as far away as Texas.

  Meanwhile, in the rural counties the campaign against the insurrection was intensifying. Even though the July 4 deadline had passed with no signs of trouble from the slaves, nobody thought the danger was over. The committees in fact regarded the situation as so urgent that they dispensed with the trials before the lynching courts. Those who were arrested were simply hanged where they’d been caught. Sometimes their bodies were left dangling from the eaves of their houses or suspended from a high tree branch in a prominent place on the roadside, as a warning to the others. By mid-July every stranger found in the interior of Mississippi was being detained. Commercial travelers, itinerant craftsmen, wandering preachers—they were all caught up by one or another committee. One man hunting in the woods was arrested for possession of a shotgun and gunpowder. The vigilance committee found the evidence against him not completely conclusive—so they sentenced him to a flogging. But a mob had gathered outside the building where the committee was meeting, and when they heard the verdict, they were so outraged by its leniency that they stormed the building, seized the prisoner, and hanged him.

  The net of suspicion was wide. Since one of the original victims of the Madison County committee was a Thompsonian doctor, all Thompsonians were automatically suspect. Henry Foote, traveling in the Mississippi countryside that summer, came upon a dire scene in a small town east of Vicksburg: a crowd had tied a man to a tree and was flogging him. He had been put on trial by the local committee and, in a rare move, had been found entirely innocent, but the townspeople weren’t satisfied. It wasn’t that they were certain he was guilty of anything in particular. “He was, unfortunately, a Thompsonian doctor,” Foote wrote, “and on that ground it had been thought that he ought at least to be decently scourged.”

  Also included in the sweep were any locals the people had never much liked. One of these in Madison County, a William Benson, “was considered by the committee a great fool, almost an idiot”; the committee took pity on him and simply ordered him to leave town. Another was held in the local jail because he was deemed a “rascal.” He was visited by the committee after sunset and was flogged until long after midnight; when they came for him again in the morning to pass sentence on him, they found he had hanged himself. Others, where there was inconclusive evidence of their guilt, were treated with what the committee viewed as mercy. First the accused would be given a thousand lashes. Then he would be stripped naked, bound at his wrists and ankles, dumped into a boat, and set loose on the local river—to work himself free, or to fall overboard and drown, or to die of sunstroke as the boat floated through the furnace of the summer day on its way downstream toward the Mississippi.

  Meanwhile, the story of the Murrell excitement went on spreading, until it reached the world beyond the river valley. The people who had taken part in putting down the insurrection were shocked to discover that outsiders did not view the events in the same light they did. In fact, in the rest of the world, the valley’s response to the danger was seen as somehow worse than the danger itself. The hanging of the Vicksburg gamblers was regarded as an especially heinous injustice. There were outraged editorials condemning it in newspapers in the North and even in Europe. It became the subject of protest ballads and pamphlets and broadsides; ultimately there was even a touring panorama, a full-size version of the storming of Cabler’s house in the Kangaroos, with a sinister tree dangling with nooses in the background, awaiting the victims of the mob. The hanging of the gamblers was said to have been the event that first taught the rest of the world about the existence of the courts of Judge Lynch; it was the reason why “lynching” became a dirty word outside the South.

  The story of the summer became increasingly garbled as it circulated. The retellers outside of Mississippi and Louisiana were never altogether clear what happened when. The way it was most often told, the Murrell excitement had actually started with the anti-gambling riot in Vicksburg, and then had spread back to the plantation country. At least that was the version Abraham Lincoln heard. In 1838, Lincoln spoke at the Springfield Lyceum about “the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive ministers of justice.” Here was how he summarized the summer of 1835:

  In the Mississippi case, they first commenced by hanging the regular gamblers.… Next, negroes, suspected of conspiring to raise an insurrection, were caught up and hanged in all
parts of the State: then, white men, supposed to be leagued with the negroes; and finally, strangers, from neighboring States, going thither on business, were, in many instances subjected to the same fate. Thus went on this process of hanging, from gamblers to negroes, from negroes to white citizens, and from these to strangers; till, dead men were seen literally dangling from the boughs of trees upon every road side; and in numbers almost sufficient, to rival the native Spanish moss of the country, as a drapery of the forest.

  After the worst of the frenzy had passed—after the interrogations and the hangings had petered out, after the committees had largely disbanded, after the scattered gamblers had resumed their old ways (many of them had discreetly returned to the Kangaroos by the autumn of 1835), after the people in Madison County had started sleeping in their own beds again at night—a second edition of Stewart’s pamphlet appeared.

  It was a curious production. The original author, Augustus Walton, vanished from the title page, never to be heard from again. John Murrell’s name was pushed far down into the subtitle as well: the pamphlet was now called The History of Virgil A. Stewart, and His Adventure in Capturing and Exposing the Great “Western Land Pirate” and His Gang. There was also this new epigraph:

  I am not willing to admit to the world that I believe him.

  —A bitter enemy

  I care nothing for his jealous animosity. He may vent his poisonous spleen. I am sustained before the world by evidence that shall chain his envenomed tongue.

  —Stewart

  There had always been a certain amount of skepticism about Stewart’s original pamphlet. This wasn’t so in the lower valley, where the pamphlet had been universally accepted at face value, but it was especially true back in Tennessee, the site of Murrell’s arrest and trial. There John Murrell had been a known quantity. A lot of people had had dealings with him personally, and the notion that he was some kind of Mephistophelean master conspirator struck them as preposterous. They’d never heard anything about this “Mystic Clan,” and they didn’t believe it existed. To them, Murrell was a small-time horse thief, slave stealer, and swindler—nothing more.

  So how to account for Stewart? The skeptics pointed to one highly suspicious fact. When Stewart had been a witness against Murrell at his trial for slave stealing, he’d never said a word about the Mystic Clan or about the slave insurrection. Why not? There was an obvious explanation: he hadn’t thought any of it up yet. He’d waited until Murrell was safely convicted and thrown in prison, and then he’d spun the whole thing out of thin air, just to cash in on Murrell’s notoriety.

  There was another and darker theory. This was the version favored by people with a grudge against Stewart—in particular, those whom Stewart had identified in the pamphlet as members of the Mystic Clan. Their theory was that Stewart was lying about his entire relationship with Murrell. The initial meeting on the river road had never happened; Stewart and Murrell had actually known each other all along. Murrell really did run some kind of gang of horse thieves and slave stealers—and Stewart had been one of them. He had invented his story about being a secret infiltrator so he could dodge his complicity in Murrell’s crimes.

  Stewart responded to these rumors and insinuations with fury. The second edition of his pamphlet was substantially longer and more elaborate than the first because it was primarily concerned with fending off these attacks against his good name. He (or whoever was the now-anonymous author) sometimes talked as though the insurrection was only a minor sideline for the clan; their real business was the persecution of Stewart himself. Page after page of the pamphlet recounts the ongoing malevolence of the clan and Stewart’s own indomitable courage and fortitude in standing up to it. Stewart (still described only in the third person) is surrounded at all times with a halo of sanctimony; he is said to be “of untiring perseverance, and well schooled in the disposition of man; and possessed of an inordinate share of public spirit.” His critics, meanwhile, are “murderers, thieves, and refugees, brandishing their envenomed weapons of destruction.” Particular rage is reserved for “a certain Mr. A. C. Bane, who has been calumniating Mr. Stewart by means of abusive and slanderous letters, in which he has endeavoured to produce the impression on the mind of the public that Mr. Stewart was an accomplice of Murrell’s in villany.”

  The second edition of the pamphlet didn’t do anywhere as well as the first. Stewart blamed the poor sales on his critics, who he said were all secret members of, or at least sympathizers with, the clan. As one admirer of Stewart, the writer Philip Paxton, put it a few years later:

  His enemies, the yet undiscovered members of the clan, in a thousand ways sought to poison the public ear. They denounced him as a member of the clan, induced by hope of reward, by cowardice, or a spirit of revenge, to betray the plot. When a man has hundreds of secret enemies thrusting their stealthy but fatal daggers into his character, with but few friends who can but ward off the more open blows, his chance for obtaining even-handed justice from any community is small, and so it proved with our hero.

  Stewart’s response was defiance: in the next election he ran for Congress. He did so, Paxton said, “to test his popularity and the strength of his enemies.” He was badly defeated. He then capitulated: “Justly disgusted and indignant at the ingratitude of those for whom he had sacrificed so much, he left the state and country.”

  There were a lot of stories about where Stewart went after that. Back east somewhere, Henry Foote heard; or maybe it was out west; or maybe he’d gone undercover again with the clan. According to one story, he’d gotten rich. At the height of the original excitement, he’d been offered a ten-thousand-dollar reward by the Mississippi state legislature for alerting them to their danger—and he’d respectfully, even nobly, turned the money down. Now some people were saying that he’d somehow gotten hold of that money after all and was living in luxury in Europe. But Philip Paxton claimed to know the real story firsthand. According to him, Stewart moved to a barely settled region of Texas, where he lived in an isolated cabin in the desolate hill country along the Colorado River.

  Stewart still insisted that he was in danger from the Mystic Clan. He was so certain the clan had him under surveillance, Paxton wrote, that he “did not dare to venture out from his cabin after dark, to have a light in his room, or to sleep in the same chamber as his wife.” He let his hair and his beard grow wild, and if he had to go into town, he wore a disguise. He believed that the only reason the agents of the clan didn’t attack him directly was that they had been ordered to hold off by John Murrell himself. Murrell was still in the penitentiary in Tennessee, after his original conviction for slave stealing—but the moment he was free, according to Stewart, he was going to come west and take his revenge.

  In the spring of 1845, the news came that Murrell had finally been released. There were rumors in Texas—possibly started or encouraged by Stewart himself—that Murrell was coming, that he had been spotted at this or that railroad depot or stagecoach way station somewhere west of the Mississippi. Stewart grew extraordinarily frantic. But the weeks passed, and Murrell mysteriously failed to appear. And by summer, even if Murrell had arrived, he would have been sorely disappointed. Stewart was already dead.

  Some said it was natural causes—that was the version Paxton gave. Others said he’d been poisoned by persons unknown. According to another story, Stewart had been fatally shot in a saloon fight a short time before Murrell was expected to arrive in Texas. The man who shot him was a complete stranger, and nobody ever found out what they’d been quarreling about.

  As for John Murrell himself, he was never charged with anything connected with the insurrection. He served out his ten-year sentence for slave stealing. He had a tough time in the penitentiary, even by the standards of those days. In his first months, he had made a daring escape but had been recaptured a few weeks later; as punishment he’d spent the rest of his sentence chained to a stone block in his cell. Some said he eventually converted to Christianity and became a model prisone
r. Others said he went insane. In any case, he never said a word about Stewart, the pamphlet, or the clan.

  After his release from the penitentiary, Murrell disappeared from public view. There were stories that he was spotted in this or that river town along the Mississippi—a gaunt, pale, sickly street preacher who’d cough up blood as he harangued passersby about damnation and Judgment Day. He is reported to have died of tuberculosis in Memphis, a year or so after his release, in the squalid back alleys of the riverfront district.

  Over the next few years, as more writers took up the story, a fuller image of Murrell and the Mystic Clan emerged. Many questions left unanswered by Stewart were addressed. There was, for instance, the great practical mystery of how Murrell had managed to co-opt all the criminals of the lower Mississippi into his conspiracy. Philip Paxton described it as a feat worthy of Eugène Vidocq, the famous French master criminal turned private detective. Murrell had formed a kind of cordon of criminal police the length of the Mississippi, and anytime a crime was committed by somebody not in their lists, they would immediately investigate, identify the criminal, seize him, and bring him up before the clan for judgment. “The criminal was astounded,” according to Paxton, “on discovering that deeds which he supposed none but his God and himself to be cognizant of, were known by numbers, whose mandate he must obey implicitly, and among whom he must enroll his name, or be immediately exposed to the world.… All … were fish that came to Murrel’s net; the low gambler and the rich villain were equally received with open arms.”

  Other writers considered the extent of the clan and speculated on which celebrated criminals had been secret members. What about Alonzo Phelps, for instance, the backwoods highwayman and reader of Horace? His lawyer, Henry Foote, recorded his belief that Phelps had certainly been a member, or at least an associate. After all, hadn’t he called for the emancipation of the slaves, even threatening to start a rebellion himself? Then there was James Ford of the Ford’s Ferry Gang: a history published early in the twentieth century, Otto Rothert’s Outlaws of Cave-in Rock, examined the matter of Ford’s possible membership in the clan at length but found the evidence inconclusive.