Nationality American Name John Murrell | Role Bandit | |
Full Name John Andrews Murrell Other names John A. Murrell, Murel, Murrel, Great Western Land Pirate Occupation bandit, horse thief, slave stealer, camp meeting preacher, counterfeiter, criminal gang leader, convict, carpenter, blacksmith Known for Alleged, criminal mastermind behind the 1835 Murrell Slave Insurrection Conspiracy or "Murrell Excitement" Movement Mystic Clan, Mystic Confederacy Died 1845, Pikeville, Tennessee, United States | ||
John Andrews Murrell (1806 – November 21, 1844), the "Great West 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.
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Life and death
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.
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
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 setence 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. The account was thought to be fictitious. The account 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. Some historians assert that Stewart's pamphlet was largely fictional and that Murrell (and his brothers) 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 this 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 this plot. The gamblers resisted, and as a result, 5 gamblers were hanged by the mob.
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 (as some newspaper reports claimed) 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 misdeeds, 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,[1] 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" (whether there were any hideouts or not) 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.