Wicked River

by Lee Sandlin

  As for the ultimate goal of the conspiracy, Stewart had taken it no further than the apocalyptic night of the insurrection, but others carried the story onward. In the version Frederick Marryat heard in 1839 (and the way it was told and retold in pamphlets and dime novels for decades afterward), the clan’s real objective had been to overthrow the governments of the slave states and establish a new empire, with its capital at New Orleans and Murrell as emperor.

  But was that still the plan? What was the clan up to? It didn’t seem to trouble anybody that the clan was proving to be very elusive. None of the members identified on the master list in Stewart’s first pamphlet were ever arrested or tried; nobody else ever came forward to confess membership; no intrepid adventurer ever followed Stewart’s lead and infiltrated the group to find out about its current status. In the years after the initial excitement faded, the clan appeared only in fitful, ghostly traces here and there in the lower valley and the South. The abolitionist Cassius Marcellus Clay, for instance, wrote in 1845 that the lynched gamblers remained unavenged and that he had heard that the clan was continuing to look for payback: “It is said that this fraternity have sworn eternal enmity against Vicksburg.” In 1853, the Texas Ranger, a newspaper in Galveston, Texas, ran a long story headlined THE MURRELL GANG IN WASHINGTON COUNTY, the gist of which was that a still-flourishing branch of the clan was up to its old tricks:

  Passing counterfeit money, stealing negroes, cattle, and other property, were the principal branches of business followed by this extensive association. A correspondent of the Ranger says, the number of negroes stolen from the counties named is very considerable. Two of the gang, Short and McLaughlin, were tried for murder in 1848, but by means of their associates on the jury got clear, and afterwards boasted that they had followed one of the state’s witnesses to take his life for giving evidence against them, which it is thought they succeeded in doing. The same correspondent says, the gang is composed of ministers of the gospel, merchants, lawyers, farmers, traders, and also that some editors of newspapers are inculpated, as having aided by their advice and support.

  But nothing more followed from this report—perhaps those “inculpated” newspaper editors hushed it up.

  Gradually the clan evanesced into folklore. John Banvard, artist of the “Three-Mile Painting” of the Mississippi, described in the pamphlet accompanying his panorama how he’d once been set upon by members of the clan. There’d been a furious gun battle, he said, and he’d left one of the villains dead—while he himself had rowed away with a souvenir line of bullet holes along the bow of his canoe. The actor Noah Miller Ludlow claimed in his memoirs that he’d first heard of the Mystic Clan during his earliest days traveling in showboats on the Mississippi, in the 1810s—when the real John Murrell was still a child.

  Mark Twain was fascinated by Murrell. In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the gold that Tom and Huck Finn find at the end is said to have been left behind by “Murrel’s gang.” In Life on the Mississippi, Twain recalls with a certain kind of nostalgic pleasure how Murrell used to masquerade as a preacher (Twain always liked tweaking church people), and he indulgently compares Murrell’s villainy with that of a current, highly celebrated outlaw, Jesse James:

  Murel was his equal in boldness, in pluck, in rapacity; in cruelty, brutality, heartlessness, treachery, and in general and comprehensive vileness and shamelessness; and very much his superior in some larger aspects. James was a retail rascal; Murel, wholesale. James’s modest genius dreamed of no loftier flight than the planning of raids upon cars, coaches, and country banks. Murel projected negro insurrections and the capture of New Orleans; and furthermore, on occasion, this Murel could go into a pulpit and edify the congregation. What are James and his half-dozen vulgar rascals compared with this stately old-time criminal, with his sermons, his meditated insurrections and city-captures, and his majestic following of ten hundred men, sworn to do his evil will!

  Among the whites of the lower valley and the delta, there had never been any serious doubt about Stewart’s story. The consensus was and remained that Stewart had been telling the truth and the insurrection had been a real threat. Frederick Marryat wrote in 1839 that while Stewart had recently been savagely vilified, his critics “no longer attempt to deny that his revelations were correct.” The actions taken by the committees and the courts of Judge Lynch may have been regrettable—even illegal—but however much the rest of the world condemned them, they had been necessary to stave off the ultimate catastrophe.

  Why were they so certain the story was true? Stewart had been, as Henry Foote called him, an “insinuating” man, and his masterstroke of insinuation had been his claim that Murrell was secretly allied with the Northern abolitionists. The way his pamphlet tells it, the abolitionists were a worse evil than the clan itself. The pamphlet offers Stewart’s vision of that awful day when the clan and the abolitionists would emerge from the shadows together and wreak destruction on the South—“the fertile fields and smiling scenes of his native land, destined to be deluged in the blood of his fellow countrymen; its cities and villages laid waste by the desolating march of a lawless and murderous band of ruffians and robbers, led on by a poisonous swarm from the ‘great northern hive’ of fanatics and incendiaries.”

  Passages like this went over very well in the lower valley. They were essentially how people pictured the abolitionists already: as a swarm of insects bent on destroying the South for some insane, inscrutable reason of their own. The fury against the abolitionists can be seen all through the Murrell excitement. The author of Proceedings of the Citizens of Madison County loses all sense of decorum when he comes to one of the white accused—the unfortunate A. L. Donovan of Kentucky, who had been “repeatedly found in the negro cabins, enjoying himself in negro society.” The author reports incredulously that Donovan was once heard saying that he couldn’t be a plantation overseer because “it was such cruel work whipping the poor negroes.” No wonder the local vigilance committee was so easily convinced that Donovan was what the author calls “an emissary of those deluded fanatics at the north—the Abolitionists.” He was immediately hanged. “Thus died an Abolitionist,” the author remarks with satisfaction, “and let his blood be on the heads of those who sent him here.”

  The source of this venom was generally unstated, but not hard to deduce. It was an article of faith in the South that the slaves were basically well-treated and that any cruelties they suffered were rare aberrations in an essentially humane system. It followed that any resentment the slaves might feel at their situation was being deliberately encouraged by outside troublemakers acting out of sheer malice. In the wake of the Murrell excitement, a large organization of Northern abolitionists made an ill-advised attempt to reach out to moderate Southerners and sway them to their cause: they began mailing their pamphlets in bulk to prominent white citizens in the South and in the river valley. The result was a public explosion. Nobody believed that the abolitionists were trying to influence white opinion; it was obvious they were trying to get their propaganda into the hands of the slaves and trigger an uprising. President Andrew Jackson condemned the abolitionists in his annual message to Congress:

  I must also invite your attention to the painful excitement produced in the South by attempts to circulate through the mails inflammatory appeals addressed to the passions of the slaves, in prints and in various sorts of publications, calculated to stimulate them to insurrection and to produce all the horrors of a servile war.

  Legislation was soon passed making it a federal crime to use the United States mails to distribute abolitionist literature. From then on, postal inspectors routinely opened mail sent from Northern addresses to Southern destinations to ensure that no prohibited writings were passing through. In states throughout the lower valley and the Deep South, possession of abolitionist literature became a felony; any Negro, any person of color, slave or free, found with such literature was immediately put to death.

  These actions, drastic though they might seem,
did nothing to calm white anxiety. Stronger action was required. In the years that followed the Murrell excitement, more and more laws were passed to stamp out anything that might kindle an insurrection. It became a capital crime to teach slaves to read and write; it was forbidden for slaves to assemble in public for any reason—a prohibition that was soon extended to free people of color as well. In fact, by the 1840s and 1850s, free people of color had come to be seen as one of the main sources of danger, and their lives were increasingly hemmed in by laws designed to keep them down or to drive them out of the slave states altogether. Some states forbade free people of color to move or travel without permission from the government; other states expelled all free people of color who’d been born or emancipated after a certain date; still others retroactively invalidated their emancipations, so that any freed slave who remained in the state would be sold at auction to a new owner. Just before the Civil War, Louisiana passed a law making it illegal for any slave to be emancipated for any reason.

  But none of it helped; the dread was unappeasable. There is no solid evidence that slaves anywhere in the South ever attempted to organize a large-scale uprising after the catastrophic failure of Nat Turner’s revolt in 1831—three years before the Murrell excitement even began. But the whites saw new uprisings everywhere. In December 1835, after the initial wave of the Murrell excitement had died down, it flared up again, this time in Louisiana. It began when a rural vigilance committee got a slave to confess that the insurrection was back on and was scheduled for its original date, Christmas 1835. (The committee may have been inspired by a play called The Great Land Pirate, based on Stewart’s first pamphlet, which had just opened in New Orleans.) The committee led a frantic search of all the plantations for miles around; a rumor spread that caches of weapons had been found in many of the slave quarters. New committees immediately sprang up, and regulators and slave patrols spent the rest of that month keeping watch. The plantation owners and their families were evacuated and waited out an uneasy Christmas in New Orleans.

  The excitement faded away by January—but two years later, it burst out again. This insurrection was said to have been betrayed before it could begin by a slave who was unwilling to see his beloved master harmed. More than fifty slaves and free Negroes were arrested by the local committees; twelve were executed. Two companies of federal troops were stationed in the region over the next several months to preserve order.

  From then on, every few years—sometimes more often than that—the excitement erupted anew in random places throughout the lower valley. It went essentially the same way each time: an overheard conversation among the slaves would be given a sinister interpretation by their owner, and there would be a flurry of interrogations and coerced confessions, then a general panic. After urgent sessions of the courts of Judge Lynch, several people, sometimes dozens, would be left dead. But in the end, the ultimate organizers of the conspiracy remained mockingly out of reach, and the panic was primed to break out again somewhere else.

  Anything at all could be the trigger. In New Orleans in 1840, after a few scattered incidents of hostility on the street between whites and disorderly slaves, one newspaper editorialist wrote that “the late repeated attacks of the negro upon the white man in our city should excite our suspicions whether they be not the piquet guard of some stupendous conspiracy among the blacks to fall upon us unawares.” By the 1850s, when fresh excitements were sweeping the South, one panic was set off in Virginia by the sight of a line of slaves heading to work in the mines: they were carrying shovels and pickaxes, and people thought they had armed themselves for murdering their masters. Another wave of panic spread through Texas in the summer of 1860 after a number of big fires broke out in the major cities. Texas happened then to be in the middle of a severe drought—but nobody blamed the weather. The fires had to be the work of secret gangs of disaffected slaves and infiltrating abolitionists. There followed a convulsive wave of arrests and lynchings. By early fall, when the rains returned, the situation briefly calmed. It flared up all over again that November, reached a new peak of fury, raged out into the lower valley, and then inflamed the whole South as the news spread that the archfiend of the abolitionists had just been elected president of the United States.

  13

  The Oracles

  IT WAS A CREDULOUS AGE. One reason people were so quick to believe in the Murrell excitement was that they were eager to believe in anything, no matter how strange, as long as it was bad news. They were particularly fascinated by occult portents of doom. Everybody knew that owls and whip-poor-wills were evil omens, that a dog howling in the night meant somebody was about to die, that prudent people had to carry a tuft of wool tied with thread at all times to prevent being ridden by witches. It was a time of séances and mirror divination and spirit rapping—an era when, as Melville observed in Moby-Dick, “the rumor of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a whole city.”

  Many people lived their whole lives in a penumbra of supernatural dread. Calvin Stowe, for example, the husband of Harriet Beecher Stowe, was a down-to-earth and practical man, but he was tormented all his life by visions of weird presences infesting the world. On the streets mingling with ordinary people, he said, was another race “with the human form and proportion, but under a shadowy outline that seemed just ready to melt into the invisible air, and sometimes liable to the most sudden and grotesque changes.” These “rational phantoms,” as he called them, were hunted by yet another supernatural race, which appeared as “heavy clouds floating about overhead, of a black color, spotted with brown, in the shape of a very flaring inverted tunnel without a nozzle.… They floated from place to place in great numbers, and in all directions, with a strong and steady progress, but with a tremulous, quivering, internal motion that agitated them in every part.” And then there were the devils—a great many devils, down every street and in every meeting place. They were “very different from the common representations,” he said. “They had neither red faces, nor horns, nor hoofs, nor tails. They were in all respects stoutly built and well-dressed gentlemen. The only peculiarity that I noted in their appearance was as to their heads. Their faces and necks were perfectly bare, without hair or flesh, and of a uniform sky-blue color, like the ashes of burnt paper before it falls to pieces, and of a certain glossy smoothness.”

  People troubled by apparitions like these did not find in the culture at large any kind of reality check. Newspapers in particular were infamous for their shameless romancing of the violent, the bizarre, the occult, and the fantastic. Reporters casually invented the most surreal stories out of thin air; editors hungry to fill blank pages ran them without a second thought. Mark Twain, in his early days as a reporter, was once so desperate for copy that he made up a particularly horrific mass murder; Edgar Allan Poe announced the first successful manned crossing of the Atlantic by balloon. Some of these stories grew into elaborate epics. The journalist Richard Adams Locke became famous for a series of reports describing the remarkable discoveries the astronomer John Herschel had recently made about the moon. Herschel’s new telescope, according to Locke, had disclosed that the lunar landscape was a colorful and rich tapestry of crystal valleys, hills of quartz, and basalt mountains covered with red flowers. It was also, Locke announced, swarming with intelligent life—most notably, a half-man, half-bat species with copper-colored fur and yellow faces. They were, Locke said, “doubtless innocent and happy creatures, notwithstanding that some of their amusements would but ill comport with our terrestrial notions of decorum.” He discreetly refused to specify what those indecorous amusements might be; he said they were “so very remarkable, that I prefer they should first be laid before the public in Dr. Herschel’s own work.” (Other newsmen eager for the details sought out the real John Herschel, who happened then to be at an observatory in South Africa; he had heard nothing about the story and reportedly could not stop laughing.)

  But the true crowd-pleasers were those romances that involved disaster—the larger the better.
The greatest popular upset of those years arose over the predictions of a Calvinist preacher named William Miller, who reviewed all the signs and concluded that the end of the world was at hand. Miller would later insist that he never actually pinpointed a time, but his followers took care of that for him: earth’s last day, they announced, was going to be March 21, 1843. By the beginning of that fateful year there were daily newspapers in several cities devoted wholly to discussions, analyses, and proofs of Miller’s prophecy. Two of the most prominent of these papers, Signs of the Times and Midnight Cry, were read all over America. An edition of Midnight Cry published for the frontier, The Western Midnight Cry, distributed from Cincinnati, terrified people throughout the Mississippi valley. By early March 1843, the writer John S. Robb observed, all the river men’s talk on the Mississippi was of “the awful evidences of a general conflagration, the signs of the times, the adding up of the times, the proof of their meaning, and the dreadful consequences of being unprepared—with ascension robes.” Miller, it was said on the river, was going to “burn down the world.” The belief spread into the remotest corners of the valley. When the feared day of March 21 at last arrived, the diarist Bennet Barrow, who owned an isolated sugar plantation in the bayou country, discovered to his annoyance that his slaves were in an uproar about the Miller prophecy and that no work could be done until he gave his slaves “a lecture on the folly of their belief that the world would end today.” Meanwhile, the boat people by the thousands were spending the whole of the twenty-first clustered in fright in the deepest channels of the Mississippi. The deep river, they believed, was the safest place to ride out the firestorm.