Once a year, the Tennessee State Museum takes out its strangest object and puts it on display for the day. Last Saturday was your annual chance to see the cute little coffin and the mummified thumb that resides within.
This, allegedly, is the thumb of John Murrell, the great leader of the Mystic Clan, a kind of occult criminal organization that terrorized the people of Tennessee and Mississippi in the 1830s, while planning a vast slave insurrection that would give the Clan control of New Orleans and, perhaps, the whole Southeast.
Said to be the son of a Methodist minister and a woman who ran a brothel while her husband was out riding the circuit, Murrell was bad from an early age. He often was said to have posed as a minister himself, preaching inside the church while his gang absconded with the congregation’s horses outside.
Eventually, he was caught, tried for stealing a slave, and sentenced to ten years in prison, here in Nashville. After dying in prison, his body was cut up by curious medical students and, eventually, his thumb made its way to the State Museum, where it resides today.
Almost none of this is true. Murrell was a horse thief and likely a slave-stealer. He did go to prison. He didn’t die in prison, though, so it’s likely both his thumbs are with the rest of his body, in a grave down by Chattanooga.
There was no Mystic Clan.
The truth is something stranger and more horrible. I can’t do it all justice here, because it’s just too weird and too complicated, but I highly recommend Flush Times & Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson by Joshua D. Rothman, which explains the whole sordid mess in detail.
The short version is that there was this guy, Virgil Stewart, who really wanted to be a well-respected Southern gentleman, either in Tennessee or Mississippi. Alas, he was kind of a wuss and a liar and a thief, so “well-respected” wasn’t in the cards for him. In one somewhat failed effort to earn people’s respect, he hunted down John Murrell, a sickly, down-on-his-luck horse thief suspected of slave stealing and helped capture him.
Stewart really wanted this to bring him the respect he thought he was due, but he hadn’t managed to track down the slaves Murrell was suspected of stealing, so people weren’t as impressed as he thought they should be. When he was called to testify against Murrell at the trial, he embellished the story somewhat, to make his deeds seem more heroic. People over in Jackson, where the trial was, were like, “Whatever, Stewart.”
Stewart then wrote a book under a pseudonym, in which he cast himself as the great hero in the daring capture of the great land pirate and head of the nefarious, wide-reaching Mystic Clan, John Murrell. Everyone in Tennessee, who had seen Murrell in real life, thought this was hilarious. Dude was ragtag, at best. He was no prince of the underworld.
But in Mississippi, the white people were all “Oh, damn, did you hear about this Mystic Clan and their great plot to incite our slaves to murder us?” And then, the white people of Mississippi spent the summer of 1835 killing the fuck out of each other and innocent black people on the off-chance they were secretly members of the Mystic Clan. Like, you thought the Salem Witch Trials were bad? That’s nothing compared to the Mystic Clan “trials.” People were hanged left and right. People were whipped. People were run out of the state, shot, beat with rods. Counties went to war with each other. All while a “committee” “presided” over the “trials” and “executions” in order to make sure that no innocent people were killed. Everyone killed was innocent, of course, because there was no Mystic Clan.
The whole rest of the country was going “Oh, hey, Governor of Mississippi, perhaps you want to stop all your slave owners from killing each other over this shitty book anyone with two brain cells can tell is just lies and more lies?”
The Governor answered: "¯\_(ツ)_/¯"
People in Mississippi wrote people in Nashville and were admonishing us to start killing each other. We tried to point out that Stewart was full of shit, but Mississippi was having none of it.
After a while, it became apparent that there was no slave insurrection in the works, the committee disbanded, and everyone pretended like they’d just saved themselves from doom, through the extrajudicial murders of a bunch of people.
So, whose thumb is in the State Museum? We may never know. It’s true enough that the story is that it’s John Murrell’s and the State Museum is very clear that the thumb is attributed to Murrell through legend.
When it comes to the legends of John Murrell, though, things have a way of getting out of hand.
