Sue Mundy

by Richard Taylor

  “Is there anything you would like to say?” Swope repeated, his tone this time immediate and palpable as a nudge.

  A hush came over those close about, and Jarom heard himself effortlessly intoning, louder than he imagined he was able, the words he’d repeated over and over in his cell.

  “I am a regular Confederate soldier and have served in the Confederate army four years. I fought under General Buckner at Fort Donelson and belonged to General Morgan’s command when he entered Kentucky. I have assisted and taken many prisoners, and have always treated them kindly. I was wounded at Cynthiana and cut off from my command. I have been in Kentucky ever since. I could prove that I am a regular Confederate soldier. I am not guilty of the murders charged to me. I hate no one. I hope I will go to heaven. I hope in and die for the Confederate cause.”

  From behind he felt a hand remove his forage cap. Blinking, he tried to adjust to a new intensity in the sun. Then across the sea of faces he saw the elm transfused with a flood of pink light, tree and light dropping into darkness as someone lowered the hood over his head, the smarting in his eyes instantly soothed. He swallowed. And then he felt the noose, deftly but firmly tightened around his neck. As Swope began the counting, he felt the invisible observers suck in their collective breath and hold, his own breath held and shortened under the smothering veil.

  “Lord, have mercy on my soul,” he said. “Lord, have mercy on my soul.”

  EPILOGUE

  As the procession was forming outside the military prison at Tenth and Broadway and before the guards brought Jarom from his cell, a tremendous bull suddenly appeared in the middle of Broadway. Apparently alarmed by the music, the throng of people in the street, and so much turbulent movement, the animal jumped its fence in a nearby field. According to a witness, the bull put his head down and pawed the earth with his forefeet, throwing clouds of dust over his shoulder. Fearing danger, some citizens in front, pushed forward by those behind, pulled out their pistols and fired at the bull. The wounds from the shots only inflamed the beast and made him furious, while the shots, “acting like an electric shock,” as the witness described it, made every man in the crowd either run or draw his weapon. Finally, as the crowd pressed against his lowered horns, the bull fell dead. Those behind thought a riot was in progress or that remnants of Sue Mundy’s band had arrived to cheat the hangman. People fled as the reserve inside the prison arrived with fixed bayonets, prepared to quell a riot. One commentator said the event engendered a black memory for the whole city. Had he heard the clamor outside, Jarom might have imagined the Berry brothers having arrived prematurely or perhaps on time to create a diversion of some kind.

  Billy Magruder was not well enough to stand trial until September of 1865. During the proceedings, four guards carefully carried his cot into the courtroom each day. After a leisurely trial of thirteen days the commission pronounced him guilty and condemned him to hang. He received the sentence without any visible emotion, requesting only that he be executed in Bullitt County, a request the commission denied. Instead, a scaffold was set up in the prison yard. He was a smaller catch than Sue Mundy, and only about a thousand spectators were on hand. Five months after Appomattox, the political climate was changing, and there was less tolerance of military bloodletting. Like Clarke, Magruder often met with the Reverend Talbot, who, at Magruder’s request, took down his confession. When the minister declined to have it published, Magruder persuaded Major Cyrus Wilson, his captor, to shepherd it into print. The result was Three Years in the Saddle: The Life and Confession, Henry C. Magruder, the Original “Sue Munday,” The Scourge of Kentucky, written by Himself. Wilson said he agreed to publish the confession “for the moral effect it would have on young men.” At the same time, with an eye to boosting sales, he misidentified Magruder as Sue Mundy. Praising Magruder’s undying loyalty to his friends, the Reverend Talbot, later quoted in the newspaper, cited instances of noble actions on their behalf. His spiritual state, in Talbot’s opinion, bespoke devotion to no higher being:

  He certainly had great tenacity for life both in terms of hope and physically. He has not made the preparation for dying that a man would naturally do who expected to die shortly. As his spiritual advisor, I have not attempted to teach him any further than the general truths of religion.

  On October 20, his execution day, a priest, not Talbot, came to his cell and administered the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church. His mother, who came up from Bullitt County, was permitted to stand with him on the scaffold, where he made a request for a last smoke. After taking a few puffs, he passed her the butt and whispered goodbye just before they lowered the hood. He was suspended “between heaven and earth” a minute or two after four in the afternoon. When the body was cut down, it was loaded onto his mother’s farm wagon and conveyed to Bullitt County, where his remains were buried on a hilltop near Lebanon Junction. Someone, probably a journalist, recorded his last public words: “Has anybody got a cigar?” For some reason, his comrade Henry Medkiff was released from custody after a stint in prison and allowed to go his way.

  William C. Quantrill was not so lucky. On May 10, 1865, Edwin Terrell and his guerrilla hunters surrounded the barn of James H. Wakefield on Salt River in Spencer County. Quite by accident, Terrell and a party of thirty or so of his men had been passing along the roadway and spotted horse tracks leading to the Wakefield barn where Quantrill and his men had taken refuge after a terrific rainstorm. As Quantrill, alerted by Terrell’s gunfire, was attempting to mount behind one of his men, the horse was shot from under them. Trying to pick himself up from the mud, he was hit by a Spencer ball that shattered his collarbone and ranged downward along the spine, paralyzing him from the chest down. A second freak shot took off his index finger, the trigger finger. Terrell had the wounded man loaded onto a wagon and driven to Louisville, where he died on June 6. In his last will and testament Quantrill left five hundred dollars to Kate King, known also as Kate Clarke, his common-law wife. With her legacy she went to St. Louis and opened what became one of the most famous whorehouses in the West.

  Adam R. Johnson, blinded by his own men in a skirmish at Grubb’s Crossroads in the Cumberland River country, was captured and sent to Fort Warren in Boston Harbor. Later exchanged, he refused a discharge, insisting on joining his old command in Mississippi. He reached Macon, Mississippi, just as news of Lee’s surrender arrived at camp. He then returned to Texas, where he had settled before the war, and founded the town of Marble Falls, started a family, and also wrote a history of his war experiences, The Partisan Rangers of the Confederate States Army (1904). Born, like Patterson, in 1835, he died in 1922, aged eighty-eight.

  In 1883 or 1884 a middle-aged resident of Webster County was arraigned in United States Court in Louisville on a charge of selling beer without a license. The illegal sales were made in a little saloon at Sebree Springs in western Kentucky. Called on to stand and make his plea, the defendant was assisted to his feet by a friend. Placing his cane before him, the man rose slowly and faced the direction from which the judge’s voice had come. The prisoner’s eyes were missing from their sockets.

  “What is the matter with that man?” asked the Honorable John W. Barr, the judge presiding.

  “He is blind, sir,” answered the friend.

  “How did he lose his eyes?” the judge asked.

  “Had them shot out in the war.”

  “I don’t care to go on with this case,” said District Attorney George M. Thomas. “I cannot prosecute a man like that for a trivial offense like this.”

  And the prisoner, John L. Patterson, was released.

  After the war ended, One-Armed Berry was arrested, tried by a military commission, found guilty on February 10, 1866, of eleven separate murders, and condemned to be hanged on March 3. As a result of appeals for clemency by Berry’s relatives and friends, there came a siege of petitionary letters, including one from George D. Prentice, who described Berry as “the most humane and best of them all.” John Palmer, still milit
ary commander of Kentucky, commuted the sentence to ten years of hard labor at Sing Sing Penitentiary in New York, where Berry died after serving seven years. Before being incarcerated, he married and had a son. He complained that he was the fourth-longest-serving inmate in the prison and the only Confederate still serving time. He also complained that during his imprisonment he never saw the light of day.

  Thomas F. Berry was more fortunate. He survived his many war wounds, both real and imagined, and went on to fight as a mercenary in Mexico and in North Africa with the French army. Later, he set up a medical practice in Louisville and wrote an account of his wartime experiences, as much fiction as fact, Four Years in the Saddle with Morgan and Forrest (1914). He eventually moved west to Paul’s Valley, Oklahoma, where he died peacefully in the second decade of the new century.

  As mentioned, both of George D. Prentice’s sons joined the Confederate army. Courtland was mortally wounded by a minie ball, mistakenly fired by a friend, during Morgan’s fight at Augusta, Kentucky. After the death of Courtland in 1862, the father assuaged his grief by publicly professing his faith in the Divine Creator, being baptized December 7, 1862. In 1870, at the age of sixty-seven he quietly died of pneumonia, his last words being “I want to go. I want to go.” After a speech in 1833, he had stated his hope that he might pass “the remnant of my years and finally . . . be gathered to the dust of Kentucky.” And so it was. His surviving son, Clarence, ended the war with the rank of colonel. He was accused of murdering a fellow soldier. On the way to Richmond, Virginia, to attend his trial, editor Prentice stopped in Washington City for an interview with President Lincoln, who is supposed to have said, “Did you think I’d let them hang your boy? Sit down, Prentice, and tell me a good story.”

  There are two traditions about what became of Mollie Thomas. One is that, true to her sweetheart, she remained a spinster and was still living near Bloomfield, Kentucky, at the outbreak of World War I. The other is that she married a few years after Clarke’s execution and was still living near Bloomfield, Kentucky, at the outbreak of World War I.

  After the execution Jerome Clarke’s remains were taken to the old Western Cemetery to be sent in care of his aunt, Nancy Bradshaw, by early train south to Franklin, Kentucky. Souvenir seekers had stolen his black velvet cap and cut the buttons from his dark cavalry coat as well as locks of his curly black hair. In 1914, nearly fifty years after his death, the Simpson County Chapter of the United Veterans of the Confederacy had the remains exhumed and moved to Green Lawn Cemetery to be buried among the Confederate dead. The transfer, which cost ten dollars and fifteen cents, was performed by L. L. House Mortuary in Franklin. One of the charges was for furnishing a coach, horsedrawn and seating eight, for the “Old Soldiers” who accompanied the remains on their journey—a kind of honor guard. When the coffin was opened to identify the body, House said that the skeleton contained the remnants of a Confederate uniform. The skull was nested in tangles of long black hair. The neck bones were broken.