A portrait of bandit John Murrell made while he was incarcerated in Nashville's Tennessee State Penitentiary
Karl Marx wrote that history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce. This is how you know that Marx never lived in the South — where it’s always both funny and sad, every time it happens, whatever it might be.
I’ve been watching this army of evil, silly busybodies spout their elaborate conspiracy theories and wondering if they even hear themselves. Liberals in this state can’t win an election to save our lives. In most counties in Tennessee, “Democrat” is a word you can’t say in public without risking your own life if you are a Democrat, or someone else's if you’re accusing them of being one.
And yet, according to some Republicans, in spite of not being able to organize our way out of our own tangled curtains, liberals in Tennessee are powerful and sneaky enough to take up jobs as teachers and librarians in order to insert pornography into public schools so that we can groom children for molestation and the liberal agenda? Like, across the whole damn state? And the only way to defeat us is to open up a bunch of charter schools run by Hillsdale College, a group that stands opposed to the civil rights movement?
Republicans have run this state for 20 years. If it took them until now to discover a secret network of child-grooming geniuses who can operate undetected for so long, but also so stupid that they’re buying pornography and putting it in school libraries instead of just getting it off the internet for free like everyone else, who is the biggest idiot in this scenario? I can’t decide.
This whole mess got me thinking of John Murrell. Back in the day, John Murrell was a horse thief. How much of his life story is true is hard to say, but it seems pretty certain that he was indeed a horse thief here in Middle Tennessee. Everything else is some mix of speculation and legend, probably made up by dime novelists and pamphleteers in order to make some money.
The legend that they came up with was that this common horse thief was actually the head of a secret organization known as the Mystic Clan. And this organization was well-connected and entrenched with the powerful in Tennessee. Judges, lawyers and politicians were all supposedly members of the Mystic Clan, and they had all sworn loyalty to each other and — again, let me remind you — a common horse thief. Supposedly, Murrell’s headquarters was in a swamp in Arkansas. Which, again, means all these powerful men from all over Middle Tennessee supposedly sneaked away to a swamp in Arkansas to meet with Murrell, who also lived in Middle Tennessee.
To do what? Before I tell you, let me remind you that there was no such thing as “rich and powerful” that wasn’t followed by “slave owner” back then. These rich men who all belonged to this secret society were — had to be — involved in the slave trade in some fashion. But the rumor was that the Mystic Clan’s plan was to encourage a giant slave insurrection throughout the South and use this army of enslaved people to take over New Orleans and set up a kingdom ruled by John Murrell.
So, to be clear, people got themselves all worked up believing that a bunch of rich enslavers were standing around in a swamp getting orders from a common criminal about how to start a slave insurrection ... where? On their own farms? In order to leave them without any enslaved people so that John Murrell could have them all in New Orleans? Why would these rich men — the class most heavily invested in slavery — be willing to give all their slaves to John Murrell as some kind of army that would kill slave owners in order to take over New Orleans?
Again, you’d think that the second anyone said this plot out loud, they’d hesitate for a moment and then say, “Oh, wait — that doesn’t make any sense. That can’t be right.” But no! Instead, the conspiracy theory spread throughout the South. And in 1835, Mississippi towns started killing over it. I wrote about it a few years back.
But the part that sticks with me is that people in Mississippi wrote to people in Nashville and were all, “Hey, you’d better start killing your Mystic Clan members or there’s going to be a slave insurrection,” and people in Nashville tried to tell Mississippi the truth. Nashvillians told them that Murrell was in prison here. We told them that the Mystic Clan wasn’t a thing. We told them they were destroying innocent lives. Two counties basically went to war over this. It was bananas.
And all Nashville's efforts to snap Mississippi out of it did no good. The madness just had to burn itself out. And it was tragic. People were killed. And yet, it’s also really funny that these folks thought this super-secret, all-powerful group was cross-class and cross-racial, as if that was a thing that could exist in the South in the 1830s.
Here we are again. The rumor even feels similar — in broad strokes, anyway. Some group of people who, for all intents and purposes, seem like our regular old friends and neighbors, are actually members of a super-secret group determined to expose the members of your household with the fewest rights to ideas that will cause them to turn against you. Very similar to the agenda of the Mystic Clan.
We know that when Americans get caught up in these conspiracy theories, people’s lives get destroyed. And yet here we are, saying again, “The thing you think is happening makes no sense,” and here we are, yet again, destroying each other anyway over it.
It is terrible. And it's funny too, which somehow makes it worse — just a bunch of fools impervious to the truth certain that they’re the only ones who see it.
