The Story of the Outlaw by Emerson Hough (read aloud .txt) 📕

"I have been going ever since from one place to another, directing and managing; but I have others now as good as myself to manage. This fellow, Phelps, that I was telling you of before, he is a noble chap among the negroes, and he wants them all free; he knows how to excite them as well as any person; but he will not do for a robber, as he cannot kill a man unless he has received an injury from him first. He is now in jail at Vicksburg, and I fear will hang. I went to see him not long since, but he is so strictly watched that nothing can be done. He has been in the habit of stopping men on the highway, and robbing them, and letting them go on; but that will never do for a robber; after I rob a man he will never give evidence against me, and there is but one safe plan in the business, and that is to kill—if I could not afford to kill a man, I would not rob.

"The great object that we have in contemplation is to excite a rebellion among the negroes throughout the slave-holding states. Our plan is to manage so as to have it commence everywhere at the same hour. We have set on the 25th of December, 1835, for the time to commence our operations. We design having our companies so stationed over the country, in the vicinity of the banks and large cities, that when the negroes commence their carnage and slaughter, we will have detachments to fire the towns and rob the banks while all is confusion and dismay. The rebellion taking place everywhere at the same time, every part of the country will be engaged in its own defence; and one part of the country can afford no relief to another, until many places will be entirely overrun by the negroes, and our pockets replenished from the banks and the desks of rich merchants' houses. It is true that in many places in the slave states the negro population is not strong, and would be easily overpowered; but, back them with a few resolute leaders from our clan, they will murder thousands, and huddle the remainder into large bodies of stationary defence for their own preservation; and then, in many other places, the black population is much the strongest, and under a leader would overrun the country before any steps could be taken to suppress them.

"We do not go to every negro we see and tell him that the negroes intend to rebel on the night of the 25th of December, 1835. We find the most vicious and wickedly disposed on large farms, and poison their minds by telling them how they are mistreated. When we are convinced that we have found a bloodthirsty devil, we swear him to secrecy and disclose to him the secret, and convince him that every other state and section of country where there are any negroes intend to rebel and slay all the whites they can on the night of the 25th of December, 1835, and assure him that there are thousands of white men engaged in trying to free them, who will die by their sides in battle. We have a long ceremony for the oath, which is administered in the presence of a terrific picture painted for that purpose, representing the monster who is to deal with him should he prove unfaithful in the engagements he has entered into. This picture is highly calculated to make a negro true to his trust, for he is disposed to be superstitious at best.

"Our black emissaries have the promise of a share in the spoils we may gain, and we promise to conduct them to Texas should we be defeated, where they will be free; but we never talk of being defeated. We always talk of victory and wealth to them. There is no danger in any man, if you can ever get him once implicated or engaged in a matter. That is the way we employ our strikers in all things; we have them implicated before we trust them from our sight.

"This may seem too bold, but that is what I glory in. All the crimes I have ever committed have been of the most daring; and I have been successful in all my attempts as yet; and I am confident that I will be victorious in this matter, as in the robberies which I have in contemplation; and I will have the pleasure and honor of seeing and knowing that by my management I have glutted the earth with more human gore, and destroyed more property, than any other robber who has ever lived in America, or the known world. I look on the American people as my common enemy. My clan is strong, brave, and experienced, and rapidly increasing in strength every day. I should not be surprised if we were to be two thousand strong by the 25th of December, 1835; and, in addition to this, I have the advantage of any other leader of banditti that has ever preceded me, for at least one-half of my Grand Council are men of high standing, and many of them in honorable and lucrative offices."

The number of men, more or less prominent, in the different states included: sixty-one from Tennessee, forty-seven from Mississippi, forty-six from Arkansas, twenty-five from Kentucky, twenty-seven from Missouri, twenty-eight from Alabama, thirty-three from Georgia, thirty-five from South Carolina, thirty-two from North Carolina, twenty-one from Virginia, twenty-seven from Maryland, sixteen from Florida, thirty-two from Louisiana. The transient members who made a habit of traveling from place to place numbered twenty-two; Murrell said that there was a total list of two thousand men in his band, including all classes.

To the foregoing sketch of Murrell's life Mr. Alexander Hynds, historian of Tennessee, adds some facts and comments which will enable the reader more fully to make his own estimate as to this singular man:

"The central meeting place of Murrell's band was near an enormous cottonwood tree in Mississippi county, Arkansas. It was standing in 1890, and is perhaps still standing in the wilderness shortly above Memphis. His widely scattered bands had a system of signs and passwords. Murrell himself was married to the sister of one of his gang. He bought a good farm near Denmark, Madison county, Tennessee, where he lived as a plain farmer, while he conducted the most fearful schemes of rapine and murder from New Orleans up to Memphis, St. Louis and Cincinnati.

"Nature had done much for Murrell. He had a quick mind, a fine natural address and great adaptability; and he was as much at ease among the refined and cultured as with his own gang. He made a special study of criminal law, and knew something of medicine. He often palmed himself off as a preacher, and preached in large camp-meetings—and some were converted under his ministry! He often used his clerical garb in passing counterfeit money. With a clear head, cool, fine judgment, and a nature utterly without fear, moral or physical, his power over his men never waned. To them he was just, fair and amiable. He was a kind husband and brother, and a faithful friend. He took great pride in his position and in the operations of his gang. This conceit was the only weak spot in his nature, and led to his downfall.

"Stewart, who purports to be Murrell's biographer, made Murrell's acquaintance, pretended to join his gang, and playing on his vanity, attended a meeting of the gang at the rendezvous at the Big Cottonwood, and saw the meeting of the Grand Council. He had Murrell arrested, and he was tried, convicted and sent to the Tennessee penitentiary in 1834 for ten years. There he worked in the blacksmith shops, but by the time he got out, was broken down in mind and body, emerging an imbecile and an invalid, to live less than a year.

"Stewart's account holds inconsistencies and inaccuracies, such as that many men high in social and official life belonged to Murrell's gang, which his published lists do not show. He had perhaps 440 to 450 men, scattered from New Orleans to Cincinnati, but his downfall spread fear and distrust among them.

"At Vicksburg, on July 4, 1835, a drunken member of the gang threatened to attack the authorities, and was tarred and feathered. Others of the gang, or at least several well-known gamblers, collected and defied the citizens, and killed the good and brave Dr. Bodley. Five men were hung, Hullams, Dutch Bill, North, Smith and McCall. The news swept like wildfire through the Mississippi Valley and gave heart to the lovers of law and order. At one or two other places some were shot, some were hanged, and now and then one or two were sent to prison, and thus an end was put to organized crime in the Southwest forever; and this closed out the reign of the river cutthroats, pirates and gamblers as well."

Thus, as in the case of Sturdevant, lynch law put an effectual end to outlawry that the law itself could not control.

The Vigilantes of California—The Greatest Vigilante Movement of the World—History of the California "Stranglers" and Their Methods.

The world will never see another California. Great gold stampedes there may be, but under conditions far different from those of 1849. Transportation has been so developed, travel has become so swift and easy, that no section can now long remain segregated from the rest of the world. There is no corner of the earth which may not now be reached with a celerity impossible in the days of the great rush to the Pacific Coast. The whole structure of civilization, itself based upon transportation, goes swiftly forward with that transportation, and the tent of the miner or adventurer finds immediately erected by its side the temple of the law.

It was not thus in those early days of our Western history. The law was left far behind by reason of the exigencies of geography and of wilderness travel. Thousands of honest men pressed on across the plains and mountains inflamed, it is true, by the madness of the lust for gold, but carrying at the outset no wish to escape from the watch-care of the law. With them went equal numbers of those eager to escape all restraints of society and law, men intending never to aid in the uprearing of the social system in new wild lands. Both these elements, the law-loving and the law-hating, as they advanced pari-passu farther and farther from the staid world which they had known, noticed the development of a strange phenomenon: that law, which they had left behind them, waned in importance with each passing day. The standards of the old home changed, even as customs changed. A week's journey from the settlements showed the argonaut a new world. A month hedged it about to itself, alone, apart, with ideas and values of its own and independent of all others. A year sufficed to leave that world as distinct as though it occupied a planet all its own. For that world the divine fire of the law must be re-discovered, evolved, nay, evoked fresh from chaos even as the savage calls forth fire