Sue Mundy

by Richard Taylor

  What puzzled him most was why Prentice seemed so intent on transforming him into a woman. As for Lieutenant Flowers, Magruder gave him the name in jest but also for a practical purpose. Each rider in the band agreed to take an alias to mask his actual identity, although Sam Berry, too well known in Mercer County, made little effort to conceal his. Even former friends he encountered on the street addressed him as Captain. But Prentice’s christening Jarom as Sue Mundy was a horse of a different color. Though the alias might afford him some anonymity, he knew it must also have some unannounced purpose, one of more advantage to Prentice than to him. Who was this Prentice? What did he gain by gendering Jarom as a woman? Jarom suspected he would hear more of Miss Mundy if he followed the papers.

  Some questions about Prentice produced some facts about his past and where he stood amid the political uncertainties that eddied around the military rule of Stephen Burbridge, the recently appointed military commandant of Kentucky. Jarom could not understand them fully, but he did know that Prentice was a New England Yankee moved south, an ardent supporter of the old Union, though his own house, like the nation’s, was divided. Through questioning Sam Berry and others, he pieced together rough sketches of Prentice and Burbridge.

  Born in rural Connecticut, Prentice could read the Bible or any text put before him by the age of four. He went on to graduate from an Eastern college. A Whig, he came to Kentucky to write a campaign biography of Henry Clay to support the senator’s aspirations to become president. Though Clay did not go to Washington as the nation’s chief executive, Prentice wrote so well he was invited to edit a newly founded paper, the Daily Journal. His wife, a native of Louisville, became the mother of his four children. She entertained regularly and soon had a reputation as a socially prominent hostess. Two of their children, a boy and a girl, died young, probably of cholera or any one of a number of afflictions that plagued the river valley. Before her own death she made no secret of her allegiance to the South, nor did her remaining sons, both of whom joined the Confederate army. Clarence, the first to enlist, rose to the rank of colonel. The other, William, rode with Morgan’s Partisan Rangers until he was killed in September of 1862 during one of Morgan’s raids in fighting at Augusta, Kentucky, a small town on the banks of the Ohio. Tragically, a friend mistakenly fired the minie ball that killed him, confirming Jarom’s experience that bullets play no favorites. Prentice, Magruder informed him, had little use for Confederates but neither did he cotton to the radical Republicanism of Burbridge, the most powerful name in the state.

  Stephen Gano Burbridge was a native of Georgetown, one of the satellite courthouse towns in the Bluegrass that ringed Lexington. He graduated from Georgetown College and the Military Institute at nearby Frankfort, the state capital. At the time the war started, he owned a large plantation in Logan County, not so far from Mary Tibbs’s Beech Grove. Though trained in the law, he farmed until the outbreak of war, when he organized the Twenty-sixth Kentucky Infantry for the Union, and was commissioned a colonel at the age of thirty. Having shown his valor at Shiloh, he became the commander of federal troops in Kentucky when Braxton Bragg invaded in 1862. He served in Mississippi during the siege of Vicksburg. For his bravery at Cynthiana he won the commendation of President Lincoln and the rank of major general of volunteers, a promotion that led to his appointment as military commander of the District of Kentucky in August of 1864.

  Armed with power to subject the state to martial law and effectively write his own rules, Burbridge issued orders that eventually stirred the resentment of even the staunchest Unionists. As Berry explained it, President Lincoln had fueled dissension by suspending the writ of habeas corpus. Burbridge started his reign by ordering that any Confederate sympathizer within five miles of a guerrilla incident could be arrested and banished from the state. But his most infamous order was number 59, which provided that four guerrilla prisoners would be shot in reprisal for each Union man killed by guerrillas. In Louisville, Burbridge had executions carried out on the commons just west of the Nashville Depot, usually holding them on Sundays to draw the largest crowds. He had a problem because demand exceeded supply. Few actual guerrillas were at large, and those few were devilishly difficult to catch. His solution was to substitute regular Confederate prisoners of war. Of the more than fifty executions Burbridge approved, many were of duly enlisted Confederate prisoners of war, many of them Kentuckians. He was quickly condemned as a fanatical murderer and became the most dreaded and hated man in Kentucky. Going a step further, he decreed in October that all irregular bands of armed men disconnected from the rebel army were guerrillas and that no guerrillas would be received as prisoners.

  “It doesn’t take much guessing,” Berry said, “to get a sense of what Burbridge means by no prisoners.” His raised a phantom pistol in his hand and clucked off a shot.

  As for the name Sue Mundy, Jarom supposed that someone at Harrodsburg had used that name to describe him. He’d never heard it before, either at Shaker Run or any of their stops outside the town. Prentice’s statement about the name being well known was another fabrication. Never before, so far as he knew, had it appeared in print, at least in reference to him. Why would this stiff-necked old pen-pusher, Union down to his buttons, create a Sue Mundy? The only thing Jarom could imagine was that news of the more distant war had become so grim or so humdrum that Prentice wanted to season it a little and had come up with an ingenious idea. Why not put a brassy young woman in the saddle and sell more papers? Jarom also divined that the whole thing might be politics, something he had no head for. What he did know was that reading about himself in the paper sent an electrical current through him, both thrilled and scared him.

  Over the next few days Berry the schoolteacher concocted an elaborate theory. Reduced to its essentials, the theory was that Prentice created Sue Mundy to embarrass the Union authorities, whose presence in the state had become intolerable to many loyal Kentuckians. Burbridge’s murders swayed public opinion against the Union presence. Even if his tyranny won few converts to the Confederacy, it gained sympathy for victims whose only offense was loyalty to the Lost Cause. Shooting the innocent alienated Burbridge from both sides.

  Scanning the papers when he could get them, Sam Berry began to record Burbridge’s excesses and report them to Jarom. A firing squad executed two nonguerrilla inmates of the military prison for the murder of James E. Rank. On July 22, guerrillas killed a Union man named Robinson at Eagle Creek in Scott County. Burbridge responded five days later by sending a detail to shoot some so-called guerrillas in retaliation. On July 29, Burbridge sent two alleged guerrillas from prison in Louisville to be shot close to home at Russellville, where a certain Mr. Porter had been killed resisting some guerrillas. On August 12, four prisoners were shot at Eminence in Henry County. A firing squad executed three more in Grant County on August 15. And so on. The shootings of four men—Wilson Lilly, Sherwood Hatley, Lindsey Duke Buckner, and M. Blincoe—especially galled Jarom because they faced a firing squad near Jeffersontown in retaliation for the shooting of a Union soldier “by Sue Mundy’s guerrillas.” A damnable lie. Similarly, near Bloomfield, another party of executioners shot James Hopkins, J. W. Sipple, and Sam Stagdale for the killing of two Negroes by Sue Mundy’s men. Also a lie. Neither Jarom nor anyone he knew had committed these murders. Prentice, not one to confirm or deny what lay in his interest, found it convenient to attribute any unexplained death to Sue Mundy.

  The most shameful of the executions, in Berry’s estimation, occurred at Frankfort, the state capital. In November, Burbridge’s executioners singled out four Confederate prisoners in custody at nearby Lexington to be shot in retaliation for the shooting, presumably by guerrillas, of Robert Graham, a loyal Union man who lived in nearby Peaks Mill, a small community on Elkhorn Creek about nine miles from the capital. The unlucky prisoners, their names drawn by lot, were John Long and S. Thomas Hunt, both Kentuckians from Mason County, Elijah Horton of Carter County and Thomas Lafferty of Pendleton County. Hunt, a twen
ty-year-old lawyer from Maysville described as a “striking specimen of manhood,” had been captured on his way to enlist in the Confederate army. Berry pointed out that technically he was a private citizen. Lafferty was in his seventies, emaciated and in poor health as a result of his confinement. The authorities held him for his unpopular political views, but he was never an active combatant. Berry knew nothing about Horton and Long except that they had been guilty only of opposing the federal intervention in the affairs of sovereign states south of Mason and Dixon’s line.

  Jarom later learned that the drawing had been made at nine o’clock of the evening preceding the executions. One officer drew slips of paper from a hat held by another man in blue. A third dutifully recorded the names as they were read out to give the procedure a greater semblance of legitimacy. Not one of the prisoners knew what the drawing meant, but a sanguine few believed it signified exchange or perhaps some special privilege. The prison blacksmith soon resolved the mystery. Jailers, as each prisoner’s name was called, ordered him to place his right foot on an anvil so that shackles could be riveted to each ankle. The shackles were attached to a long chain, at the end of which was a forty-pound ball. Having one’s name called, it became clear, was no privilege, but for good reason no one announced the penalty.

  Early next morning, guards marched the four condemned men, who toted their balls on their shoulders, onto a railroad car and transported them by locomotive to Frankfort, about twenty-five miles away. Once in the capital city, wagons conveyed them through old Frankfort, crossing the covered bridge into South Frankfort, depositing them finally in a pasture belonging to a prominent farmer named Hunt. The guards gave them shovels and ordered them to dig their graves, four shallow trenches in a low corner of the field. Fifty soldiers stood by to prevent any irregularities, twelve of them designated as a firing squad. Reverend B. B. Sayre, a local schoolmaster and minister of God, offered up a prayer at the prisoners’ request.

  During the prayer Lafferty somehow managed to slip the weighted shackle over his thin ankle. With head still bowed, Reverend Sayre pronounced the amen, and the prisoners began rising to their feet. At that instant, Lafferty, amazingly agile for a man of his years, whirled and bolted across the pasture toward a stone fence that ran along the farm lane. A few seconds elapsed before the guards, taken by surprise, got off a shot. By that time Lafferty had reached the stone fence, nearly thirty yards away. Just as he mounted the top, poised to jump, several balls struck him, and he fell dead on the other side.

  The rest of the execution, as reported to Jarom, went as planned, as though to compensate for the botched work of the executioners and the pluck of one old Confederate who should have been at home dandling his grandchildren. One of the prisoners asked for a sip of water, said to have been dipped from one of the graves. Without any more delay, guards blindfolded the survivors and lined them up before the shallow pits. Someone gave the “ready, aim, fire,” and they dutifully fell a few feet from their graves. Even among the executioners few took pride in the work done that day.

  Berry returned to Prentice’s reasons for discrediting Burbridge. “Finally,” he said, “the guerrilla scare is a means of discrediting Burbridge’s standing as a soldier and his judgment as head of the military in Kentucky.”

  He explained that the war dividing the country had become as personal and as vicious in Kentucky as in Kansas and Missouri. Each day the papers contained reports of guerrillering, some shootings and robberies occurring in the very suburbs of Louisville.

  “Whatever’s in the pot,” Berry said, “it finally boils down to politics.”

  Prentice, he explained, wanted to check the influence of Burbridge, his fanatical crony Reverend Robert Jefferson Breckinridge, and the rest of the radical abolitionists in Kentucky. Prentice also opposed Lincoln, and though he played up the crimes of guerrillas, he was careful not to be too critical of Burbridge, a powerful man who could censor the newspaper. Although he bridled at the order not to accept guerrillas as prisoners of war, he jabbed Burbridge with indirect hits that he could manipulate and defend. Many loyal Kentuckians also opposed freeing slaves, especially without remunerating their former owners. The Union initiative to recruit Negroes into the army stirred even more resentment. Berry told Jarom he’d heard that even Colonel Frank Wolford, Morgan’s old nemesis, had been arrested for making a speech in Lexington opposing the induction of Negroes. “The people of Kentucky,” Wolford declared, did not want to “keep step to the music of the Union alongside of Negro soldiers.” Such a practice, Wolford said, was “an insult and a degradation” to Kentuckians “for which their free and manly spirits were not prepared.”

  So why create a Confederate guerrilla in the form of a woman? Because a mere woman fighting and ranging the state with no fear of capture proved that those commanding the army of occupation were incompetent and should be replaced. Berry, who had a touch of the poet himself, described Prentice’s desire to undo Burbridge’s harsh policies and remove Burbridge himself as “treading with a lighter step.” Whether heavy step or light, Sue Mundy became the means by which Prentice portrayed Burbridge as a bungler and a fool.

  Sue Mundy. On the one hand, Jarom had no objection to the name, especially since it kept his real name from the public eye. However, he resented deeply such characterizations as “practiced robber,” “scoundrel,” “cutthroat.”

  Jarom took Prentice’s references to his being a woman less as a threat to his own manliness—his boyness?—than as an affront to his character. He liked to wear his hair long. Was it true that an individual’s essence and vitality, like Samson’s, resided in his hair? He didn’t know. The feminine cast of his features, his whiskerless jaw, he could do nothing about. Did he feel an attraction to men? No, not in any sexual way. He had fantasies about having women constantly, though unlike Magruder and Sam Berry he did not resort to the company of whores. Often he tried to imagine Mollie Thomas, and other attractive women who crossed his path in country towns and farmsteads, nude. Yet Prentice kept playing up his identity as a woman, like a cat that toys with a captured mouse before killing it.

  Beneath the playful surface he recognized Prentice’s savvy and calculating nature. Prentice the teaser, he was sure, was Prentice the fox. He himself never encouraged the story that he’d impersonated a woman. Nor had he got up as a woman to pass through the lines and spy among the enemy. Perhaps there was truth to the rumor that the name originated with a young woman of easy reputation in Nelson County, an Amazon with unruly long hair who Jarom was said to resemble but had never seen. Who called him Sue Mundy first? He neither knew nor cared, but he suspected that it was Prentice, and that the name caught on with others, except his comrades, who continued to call him Jarom.

  Nor did he appreciate Prentice’s wit, though Sam Berry was of the opinion that the man had mastered the art of invective and innuendo. Prentice once boasted that he filled his editorial quiver with quills of all sizes, from those of a hummingbird to those of an eagle. Jarom began to keep a little collection of Prentice’s quips and puns, placing them between the leaves of an old account book he found discarded along the road near Bloomfield. Sometimes during a lull he would take them up. Most appeared during the fall in numbers of the Louisville Daily Journal.

  Many think that it makes no difference on what day of the week a man dies, but we confess that we shouldn’t like to die of a Mundy.

  You have been an awful girl, Sue, we must say. You have killed so many persons, of all colors, that no doubt white, yellow, and black ghosts haunt you continually, the black ones coming by day because black doesn’t show at night.

  Our journal may bring you and your fellows to justice and thus be to you and them not only a newspaper but a noose-paper.

  Sue Mundy, the she-guerrilla, who murders people for pastime, is said to be unmarried. There’s a nice opening for some enterprising young rebel.

  A Kentucky correspondent of a Richmond newspaper called Sue Mundy “a great woman.” She is not very grea
t now but she may be by and by.

  Sue Mundy is reported to say that she won’t marry any man. We guess she is reserving herself to marry Satan. The poor devil will have a hard time of it. She will broil him on his own gridiron, butter him with his own brimstone, and turn him on his own pitchfork.

  We fear that we can’t make a bargain with you, pretty and gentle Sue. Still if you will name time and place, and promise not to have any improper aims at us and not to look through other sights on getting a sight of us, in short not to be at all snappish toward us, and not to frighten us, as ghosts are said to be frightened by a cock, we may meet you and talk matters over with you confidentially. Abstemious as we are, we would rather accept the contents of one of your pilfered whiskey barrels than those of your pistol barrel. We would rather feel the wadding of your bosom than your pistol wad. We would prefer to see all the stock you have ever “lifted” rushing furiously toward us rather than behold your Colt’s stock lifted at us. We should be almost as willing to see the nipples of your bosom as the nipples of your fire-arms. You may drill your troops as thoroughly as you please, but please don’t go to drill a big hole through us.