Michael J. Troy (MJT): Hello and thanks for joining this special edition of the American Revolution. We're here with our monthly roundtable and as is our norm, we have brought in a special guest, Katherine Grandjean, who is author of Kingdom of Devils: A Tale of Murder in the Shadow of the American Revolution. And I will admit that we're going a little outside the American Revolution. This book is set in the 1790s, but heck, our American Revolution podcast is in the 1790s now. So that's just fine. KG, welcome and thank you for joining the roundtable.
MJT: So Katherine and I caught up with each other at an American Revolution event in Philadelphia. She told me a little bit about the subject of her book and I was absolutely fascinated and I thought I've really got to learn more about this. She was kind enough to send me a copy of her book and I read it. It's really interesting. KG, why don't you just start by telling us a little bit about what the main premise of your book is in the setting?
KG: Yeah, happy to do that. So Kingdom of Devils is really two things. It's an investigation of a series of murders that happened mostly in Kentucky and Tennessee in the 1790s. But it is also a history of life in the wake of the American Revolution, especially in the West, especially in what became the trans-Appalachian West. Really at its heart, it tells the story of this string of murders. The main characters of the book are two brothers, Wiley and Micajah Harpe, who in 1798 and 1799 went on this sort of wild killing spree, cutting across East Tennessee and Kentucky and some of Cherokee country and eventually the story even spills over into the Mississippi River Valley. And they killed about two dozen people probably. That's about what I think the final tally is, although some estimates go even higher than that, and the sort of incredible thing about this story is that no one has ever really explained why they did it.
So at the most basic level, the book is sort of my investigation of that mystery. My attempt to turn over rocks and visit county courthouses and discover bits and pieces of evidence that are the clues they left behind that explain in some sense what these murders were all about. But I did realize at some point while working on this book that in order to make this story really legible to readers and to make the Harpes themselves understandable, I was going to have to paint a pretty wholesome picture of life in the early republic, especially in the Western territories.
And so, while the book follows the Harpe story very closely, it does also paint a very vivid portrait of the world around these characters and essentially the early republic in its sort of shaky and uncertain infancy in the years after the American Revolution. Imagine a time—probably not hard for this audience, right?—but imagine a time when nobody was really sure what the United States was going to be or what it would look like, and people were still kind of licking their wounds coming out of the Revolutionary War, and only two presidents had ever occupied the nation's highest office. For most of the book, we're in John Adams's presidency, and there's a lot of context that sort of makes the time period more digestible and sort of understandable to my readers. So, that's kind of the basic idea of the book. It's really a story that kind of moves you through my investigation of what this string of murders is all about.
MJT: For people who are up to date on the podcast, we're actually going through this era right now where Tennessee has just become a state. We've talked a lot about the roughness of the western frontier at this time and this really captures a lot of that. I had actually heard about the Harpe Brothers, just very little about them, but it's kind of a regional tale of "Big Harpe" and "Little Harpe", and they were kind of portrayed as these early scary monsters on the frontier. A lot of tall tales, and it's interesting to find that there is some truth behind all of it and there really is a history behind it. I don't know, are you familiar with the Doan Gang in Pennsylvania?
KG: Yeah, for sure. Not as deeply as I now know the Harpes, but yes, there are some parallels.
MJT: They reminded me a lot of that. My family is from the Quakertown area in Pennsylvania where the Doan Gang hung out. So, I was more familiar with that story growing up because it's part of the local lore there. And they of course were a Tory group of brothers who ended up turning to crime, although they mostly ended their spree during the Revolutionary War, whereas this one takes place later.
This is an interesting story in that we are trying to understand how these people came to be what they became and why maybe the society they grew up in helped push them in that direction. Both of these brothers were born before the American Revolution and were children during the war. So for anybody who's familiar with the war in the Carolinas during the American Revolution, we know that this was really a brutal time, a period of civil war where neighbor was fighting neighbor. There were often brutal actions being taken if you weren't on the right side compared to the other person who was confronting you. There was also a lot of brutality in the western parts of the area because they were battling with the Cherokee, and of course that was a particularly brutal form of fighting as well. So brutality and violence was kind of baked into their childhoods from the very beginning, and I guess their father was a Tory who abandoned them early. What do we know about the father?
KG: No, in fact, a lot of this is sort of hazy. I mean, first of all, I'm glad you were familiar with this story coming into my book because I think most people aren't. Though this story was once quite famous. The Harpes in their own time and in the generations that followed were really the stuff of tall tales and fireside oral history. This story lived and breathed in the American imagination, particularly in southern folklore, for many years. William Faulkner conjures them in some of his novels, and Herman Melville mentions them in The Confidence-Man. In the opening scene, he calls them thugs. So there was a time when they were much more famous, actually. But what that means is there is a lot of questionable embellishment in the folklore that once surrounded these two men, and they seem to have been larger-than-life characters in some ways.
Micajah is this sort of hulking, very intimidating, probably taller than most, really robust figure, and Wiley's a little smaller and slighter, but seems to have been the brains of the duo, the prime mover, and the main character in my book in many ways. But in any case, what do we know about their background? The question that really sucked me into this when I found this story—and I didn't know it either until I happened to stumble upon it accidentally—was why? Why did they do this?
Traditionally, there have been a couple of explanations batted around. Traditionally, people just said things like, "Well, they were bloodthirsty and they were evil and they were monsters," but that never really felt satisfying to me. That felt like it was foreclosing on the real possibilities of digging into what this episode might be able to tell us about the early United States.
One of the other things that has been suggested about them was what you just said: that perhaps they came from a loyalist family. Their father may have been a loyalist, and they as young men or even as young boys may have actually fought in the war themselves, although they would have been pretty young at that point. As you mentioned, they came from North Carolina. There is some suggestion in folk tradition that they lived through some of the brutalities of the war in the Carolinas. The partisan warfare in the southern backcountry, the absolute horror and trauma and ugliness of the civil war that was the Revolutionary War in the Carolinas and Georgia—for most Americans, that's still an unfamiliar story.
Most of the audiences I talk to, especially in places like Massachusetts and Connecticut, think of Lexington and Concord, Washington crossing the Delaware, or Bunker Hill; they're not as familiar with what the war looked like in the southern states. And so that's partly what initially got me interested in writing this book, because I hadn't been looking for this story. I did not set out to write this book, but I was teaching a course about early American violence and assigned an old roundup article from the 1960s that Richard Maxwell Brown wrote on violent episodes in American history. I just wanted to give my students a way of thinking about what they might want to do in their own research projects.
The Harpes happened to be mentioned in this piece in about two sentences, and I was just blown away that I had never heard about it. I could not believe that after years and years of writing, thinking, and researching early American history, I'd never encountered these figures or this story. But when I found it, I was primed in a certain way for a tale that would open up possibilities of thinking about life in the wake of the Revolutionary War. I had sensed for a long time that the years coming out of the Revolution were not as bright and tidy as public collective imagination sometimes likes to think.
For instance, if you think about the war itself in the South—people being pulled out of their houses, patriot and loyalist gangs, neighbors and vendettas, and men being lynched—I suspected that people took some of those bad feelings and scars into their later lives. It was not always an easy thing to move on from. There's been a lot of recent scholarship that has emphasized reconciliation in the wake of the war and forgiveness of former loyalists, which I think is very good. People like Rebecca Brannon have written at length about this, but I have argued that you have to separate what state legislators were doing in offering forgiveness to former Tories from what ordinary people were thinking in their own lives and how they felt about former loyalists coming out of the Revolution.
So all of that is to say that this suggestion that maybe the Harpes came from a loyalist family was one of the things that really attracted me to the story. Having said that, I was never able to 100% confirm that, but it is one of the things people said about them, and it's a plausible scenario. Many former loyalists came out of the Carolinas and drifted into what became Tennessee and Cherokee country to try to start over.
MJT: That may be the preamble of their early lives, right? And the violence that we saw between Tories and patriots during the war wasn't the only violence, even if that carried over. You had the violence around the attempt to form the State of Franklin, and there were a whole lot of other things going on—including the continuing fighting with the Indians who didn't want to give up their land. It's a brutal time, and living on the frontier was a brutal life where you had to be prepared to kill or be killed. That certainly has an impact on your psyche.
The other thing I want to get into is the issue of land. People kind of think that the Revolution ended, everybody settled down, became a yeoman farmer, and life was happy and peaceful. We've been going through on the podcast all the land speculators fighting over conflicting claims—the Blounts, the Seviers, senators and governors trying to get rich off land speculation. But the way you get rich off land speculation is selling that land to farmers, and when different people are selling the same land to different farmers with fraudsters involved, it becomes a huge mess. That seems like how Wiley Harpe got his start; he had settled and become a farmer on the frontier. Is that right?
KG: That's right. That's in fact the first thing I can see him doing in the historical record—buying land outside of Knoxville in Knox County, Tennessee, in its very early days. Property and land ownership is a big theme in this book. The wider backdrop is a time of Western land speculation, panics, and the Robert Morris house of cards coming crashing down.
The book opens in a hopeful place for the Harpes. We meet Wiley buying land in 1797 and recently married to a very pretty, respectable young woman named Sally who came from a fairly affluent family—somewhat of a coup for him. There's nothing up to this point to suggest the Harpes are going to be anything different than the thousands of anonymous young men pushing into the western hills. But as I built the world around Wiley and his brother, it became clear that it was actually quite difficult to get established in the Western territories.
Beyond the 17-year war Tennessee settlers fought with the Cherokees, huge land companies and wealthy speculators engrossed land quickly. In North Carolina's land offices, which sold off much of what became Tennessee, there were rampant amounts of fraud, forgeries, and military bounty warrants rife with corruption. By the late 1790s, you end up with dozens of confusing, overlapping land claims, lawsuits galore, people falling into debt, and sitting atop a rotten pile of fraudulent original deeds.
This chronic insecurity of property was an engine of volatility and violence in East Tennessee. It's a critical piece of the puzzle for the Harpe story specifically. There was a moment when Wiley fell into debt and signed a promissory note to a creditor—a wrinkle in the puzzle nobody else writing about the Harpes had ever mentioned. When I found it in the Knox County Archives, I instantly grasped that this was a critical piece of the story.
MJT: Wiley loses his farm as a result of a lawsuit?
KG: He was sued. If you filed a lawsuit to collect a debt in this period, debtors could dodge the sheriff across many cycles of county court and kick it to the next season. This debt hung over things for quite a while, but eventually, the sheriff came and seized his property. This was happening to them in the years just before the murders began.
MJT: And then I guess they turned to horse thieving for a while?
KG: Yes. They've been portrayed as thieves and brigands for many years. This attempt to steal a horse speaks to their struggles to stay afloat. Horse theft was a capital crime punishable by branding, ear-cropping, or hanging because horses were used as currency. In East Tennessee, right on the border of the Cherokee Nation, it was fairly easy to steal horses, drive them across the border, launder them, and resell them to someone in Georgia or South Carolina. Turning to horse theft was a profound decision.
MJT: After they lost the farm, did they have any legitimate source of income or job?
KG: Wiley bought his land and lived a fairly peaceful, unremarkable life for about a year. It's only in this final cascade of misfortunes that things unravel. When he has no recourse left, they take their wives, their horses, and flee into Kentucky. That's where things get underway on this killing spree in 1798 and 1799.
MJT: And this is where things really turn dark. It doesn't seem like they went on a killing spree to support themselves financially; it seems to be much more of an emotional anger, "get back at the world" motivation. What do we know about their actual decision to turn to a life of murder?
KG: This is my argument in the book. No, they don't seem to have turned to murder primarily for financial gain or plunder. Even when they robbed people, that was not what they were primarily after.
Some cryptic testimony has survived about how they viewed their project of violence: that they had declared war on fellow Americans, or really on all society, in retaliation for some "fancied injury". They were doing this not for pure love of bloodshed or material gain, but to make a statement—a protest in the face of a world they felt had wronged them.
In the 1790s, this was a novel thing. They were inaugurating a pattern of American violence that felt exotic and incomprehensible at the time, but by the light of the 21st century, looks recognizable as men staging spectacular episodes of violence out of grievance and anger.
MJT: It seems like you're saying in the book that they had a "type" of victim—establishment figures, war veterans, people succeeding in an unfair society where they had failed. But they didn't go after specific people who personally wronged them; it was more a general type. Is that fair?
KG: It's sort of both. Like modern rampage killers, it's a mix of people they knew and didn't know. Most of the people they killed were men and some boys. Many of the men targeted were Continental Army veterans, justices of the peace, and men of substantial property who had done well in the post-revolutionary years. Yet there were many other victims who were spontaneously chosen when met alone on the road. It was both random and selective.
MJT: Police forces as we know them didn't exist until the mid-1800s. How did law enforcement work on the frontier in the 1790s?
KG: Not very well. The state did not yet have a monopoly on enforcing the law. Locals were expected to raise a hue and cry, gather a posse, or call out a militia company. The dividing line between public and private law enforcement was hazy. In April 1799, the Kentucky governor issued a proclamation offering $300 for either brother or $600 for both, essentially admitting usual methods had failed.
Furthermore, law enforcement was local—a county sheriff's jurisdiction ended at the county line. There was no system or precedent for cooperation across county or state lines. The Harpes skipped county lines and covered hundreds of miles across Kentucky and Tennessee, which is why they got away with it for so long.
MJT: They actually got captured very early in their spree and were in jail for a time.
KG: A deputy sheriff in Danville, Kentucky, managed to track them down after one of their first murders—Thomas Langford at a Wilderness Road tavern. They were put in jail for the winter of 1799 with their wives, who were along for the ride.
MJT: Two men and three wives?
KG: Micajah had one legal wife and an unofficial second wife named Betsy. All of them spent the winter in jail. In March 1799, the jailer opened the jail to find Wiley and Micajah had escaped, leaving their wives—some of whom had delivered babies or were pregnant—behind.
The women were tried and acquitted. Under the doctrine of coverture, a married woman's legal identity was subsumed by her husband. Jurist William Blackstone noted that under "matrimonial subjection," if no independent will was involved, a woman might not be criminally culpable for acts like burglary or highway robbery committed under her husband's direction. Furthermore, 18th-century juries could not imagine young married mothers voluntarily participating in such heinous actions.
MJT: Once the husbands were out of the picture, all three women remarried or lived peaceful, respectable lives. So the jury got it right that these were decent women drawn in by their husbands.
KG: They were present and possibly complicit in ways I'm not always comfortable with, but once the brothers were gone, they lived quiet lives and put it all behind them. Under modern law, they certainly would have gone to prison as accomplices.
MJT: How did the brothers end up?
KG: In 1799, after a horrific cluster of murders in present-day Henderson County, Kentucky, a quasi-legal posse led by a victim's husband, Moses Steagall, hunted them down. Micajah "Big Harpe" was killed in an extralegal execution. In his dying moments, Micajah made statements about their agreement to kill as many people as possible.
Wiley escaped and disappeared for several years. He resurfaced under an alias in the lower Mississippi River Valley around the time of the Louisiana Purchase. The end of my book unmasks him as having joined the gang of famous river pirate Samuel Mason, preying on flatboat commerce heading down to New Orleans.
MJT: Why didn't more people turn to this level of criminality given the lawlessness on the frontier?
KG: There is a myth that people in the West reveled in lawlessness, but most wanted courts, sheriffs, and predictability. In researching hundreds of post-revolutionary murder cases, I found a common thread: the Revolution raised ordinary men's expectations of social mobility and respectability. When men faced failure, debt, and downward mobility, that frustration sometimes turned into extreme violence. The Harpes were an extreme case, but their underlying economic and social frustrations were rampant in the Early Republic.
Questions & Answers (Q&A) Session
MJT: I want to open it up for questions now. Does anybody have any questions for our guest?
Chris: Hello MJT, Chris from St. Paul, Minnesota. Hi KG. In your research, did you track down the families of the victims and the Harpes to hear about family lore?
KG: I have been in touch with some of the descendants of the victims, who have helped keep the story alive. They tend to have the most vivid memories, though some accounts are mixed with folklore. Harpe descendants are much harder to find because official paper trails went cold after the first generation.
Chris: Did they work in concert with any other outlaws or groups?
KG: The initial 1798–1799 murder spree was strictly the work of the two brothers. However, later in the Mississippi River Valley, Wiley joined the criminal gang of river pirate Samuel Mason, preying on flatboats shipping goods down the Mississippi River.
Participant: Were all of the murders committed using firearms?
KG: Mostly not. They were opportunists who used axes, knives, and blunt instruments for intimate, person-to-person violence. They frequently weighted victims' bodies with stones and submerged them in creeks to delay detection.
MJT: How did you get involved in history, and what led you to write this book?
KG: I grew up in New England and always wanted to be a writer. I initially trained as a historian of 17th-century New England colonial and Native relations. While teaching a university course on early American violence, I came across a two-sentence mention of the Harpe brothers in a 1960s article. Surprised that I had never encountered them before, I spent eight years visiting county courthouses to reconstruct their story and write Kingdom of Devils.
MJT: Kingdom of Devils is available wherever fine books are sold, and I'll put links in the show notes. KG, I really enjoyed speaking with you tonight.
KG: Thank you so much, Mike, and thank you all for your questions!
Buy the book: Kingdom of Devils.
Professor Grandjean's website: https://www.wellesley.edu/people/katherine-grandjean
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