John Murrell (bandit)


John Andrews Murrell, the "Great Western Land Pirate" also known as John A. Murrell and commonly spelled as Murel and Murrel, was a bandit and criminal operating in the United States, along the Mississippi River, in the 19th century. Murrell had his first criminal conviction, for horse theft, as a teenager and was branded with an "HT", flogged, and sentenced to six years in prison. He was released in 1829. Murrell was convicted a second and final time, for the crime of slave stealing, in the Circuit Court of Madison County, Tennessee, and incarcerated in the Tennessee State Penitentiary in Nashville from 1834 to 1844.

Early life

According to Tennessee prison records, John Andrews Murrell was born in Lunenburg County, Virginia, and raised in Williamson County, Tennessee. Murrell was the son of Jeffrey Murrell and Zilpha Andrews and was the third born of eight children. While incarcerated, his mother, wife, and two children lived in the vicinity of Denmark, Tennessee.

Punishment and imprisonment

John A. Murrell had his first criminal conviction, for horse theft, as a teenager and was branded on the base of his thumb with an "HT" for horse thief, flogged, and sentenced to six years in prison. He was released in 1829. Murrell was convicted a second and final time, for the crime of slave stealing, in the Circuit Court of Madison County, Tennessee, and incarcerated in the Tennessee State Penitentiary in Nashville from 1834 to 1844.
While in the Tennessee State Penitentiary, Murrell, as part of his reform, was required to work as a blacksmith. A decade in prison under the Auburn penitentiary system, of mandatory convict regimentation, through prison uniforms, lockstep, silence, and occasional solitary confinement, broke Murrell mentally and supposedly left him an imbecile. He spent the last months of his life as a blacksmith in Pikeville, Tennessee. The Nashville Daily American newspaper mentioned a different account of his last year of life, that, upon his release from prison, at 38 years old, he became a reformed man, a Methodist in good standing, was a carpenter by trade, and lived at a boarding house in Pikeville

Death

In a deathbed confession, Murrell admitted to being guilty of most of the crimes charged against him except murder, to which he claimed to be "guiltless". John A. Murrell died on November 21, 1844, just nine months after leaving prison, having contracted "pulmonary consumption", now known as tuberculosis. Murrell was interred at Smyrna First United Methodist Church Cemetery, in Smyrna, Tennessee. After Murrell died, parts of him were dug up and stolen by grave robbers. Although the corpse had been half-eaten by scavenging hogs, the head was separated from the torso, pickled, and displayed at county fairs. His skull is missing, but one of his thumbs is in the possession of the Tennessee State Museum..

Accepted claims

Accepted facts about his life include stealing horses, for which he was branded. He was also caught with a freed slave living on his property. Murrell was known to kidnap slaves and sell them to other slave owners. He received his 10-year prison sentence for slave-stealing. Murrell would be considered a conductor on the Reverse Underground Railroad.

"The Murrell Excitement"

In 1835, Virgil Stewart wrote an account of a slave rebellion plot sponsored by highwaymen and Northern Abolitionists. On Christmas Day, 1835, Murrell and his "Mystic Clan" planned to incite an uprising in every slaveholding state by invoking the image of the Haitian Revolution, the most successful slave rebellion in history. In rising up against Southern whites, the slaves involved in Murrell's conspiracy would cause enough chaos to allow Murrell to take over the South, with New Orleans as the center of operations of his criminal empire. Stewart's account of his interactions with Murrell was published as a pamphlet, and Stewart wrote the pamphlet under the pseudonym of "Augustus Q. Walton, Esq.," for whom he invented a fictitious background and profession. The validity of the pamphlet has been debated since its publication. Some historians assert that Stewart's pamphlet was largely fictional and that Murrell were at best inept thieves, having bankrupted their father over the years for bail money.
However, many of the claims made in the pamphlet were believed at the time in some parts of the South, and led to the "Murrell Excitement". During this time, there was increased tension between the races and between locals and outsiders. On July 4, 1835, there were disturbances in the red-light districts of Nashville, Memphis, and Natchez, and twenty slaves and ten white men were hanged after confessing to complicity in Murrell's plot. On July 6 in Vicksburg, Mississippi, an angry mob decided to expel all professional gamblers from the town, based on a rumor that the gamblers were part of the plot. The gamblers resisted, and as a result, five gamblers were hanged by the mob. Similar panic surrounding Murrell and his conspiracy spread throughout the South long after his death, with cities from Huntsville, Alabama to New Orleans, Louisiana creating committees dedicated to identifying Murrell's conspirators and potential signs of slave rebellion.

Disputed claims

Murrell was known as a "land-pirate", using the Mississippi River as a base for his operations. He used a network of anywhere from 300 to 1,000, and even as much as 2,500 fellow bandits collectively known as the Mystic Clan to pull off his escapades. Many of these were members of cultural/ethnic groups such as the Melungeons and the Redbones. He was also known as a bushwhacker along the Natchez Trace. To cover up his deeds, he played the persona of a traveling preacher. Twain's work and others say he would preach to a congregation while his gang stole the horses outside. However, the accounts are unanimous that Murrell's horse was always left behind. The location of his hideout and operations base has been in question. Possibilities are Jackson County, Tennessee; Natchez, Mississippi, at Devil's Punch Bowl; Tunica County, Mississippi; the Neutral Ground in Louisiana; and even the tiny Island 37 on the Mississippi River. One record, a genealogical note, even places him as far east as Georgia; in fact Atlanta historian Franklin Garrett makes it clear there was a lawless district in that town named for him, "Murrell's Row," in the 1840s. Because Murrell has come to symbolize Natchez Trace lawlessness in the antebellum era, it is understandable that his "hideouts" have been said to have been located at most of the well-known areas of particular lawlessness along the Natchez Trace.
Just before he was apprehended, he was about to spearhead a slave revolt in New Orleans in an attempt to take over the city and install himself as a sort of potentate of Louisiana. Some say he began to plot his takeover of New Orleans in 1841, although he was in the sixth year of a ten-year sentence in the prison at Nashville at the time, and Stewart had already published his account of Murrell's plot in 1835. Others say he was in operation from 1835 to 1857; he was in prison for ten of those years and died of tuberculosis in 1844 shortly thereafter.
A stream in Chicot County, Arkansas, called Whiskey Chute is named for his raid on a whiskey-carrying steamboat that was sunk after it was pillaged. It was named such in 1855. We know from Record Group 25, "Prison Records for the Main Prison at Nashville, Tennessee, 1831-1922," that Murrell was born in 1806, most likely in Williamson County, Tennessee.

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