At the Dead Hours of Midnight: A Bloody Reign of Terror in the Great Smoky Mountains. Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.At the Dead Hours of Midnight: A Bloody Reign of Terror in the Great Smoky Mountains

They came at the dead hours of midnight.

Masked by darkness and sometimes cloaked beneath sheets, the White Caps of Sevier County, Tennessee, claimed to be guardians of morality. What emerged instead was an oath-bound secret society whose influence reached deep into the political and judicial life of a remote Appalachian county—and whose methods descended from intimidation and whipping into bloodshed and murder.

The story began innocently enough—or so the legends claimed. In the winter of 1891–92, women operating houses of prostitution in the mountains of Sevier County were warned to leave. Bundles of hickory switches appeared at their doors. When the warnings went unheeded, vigilantes returned and brutally whipped them. The women left, the perpetrators escaped punishment, and the White Caps learned a dangerous lesson: their methods worked. The manuscript traces several competing accounts of how the movement began, while showing how that early violence became the foundation for something far more dangerous.

Soon the White Caps were no longer simply self-appointed enforcers of Victorian morality. Merchants, politicians, prominent landowners—and criminals seeking protection—were drawn into an organization whose membership was estimated at 650 to 1,500 people in a county of only about 20,000. Secret meetings, signs, ritual garb and blood oaths bound members together, while sympathetic Justices of the Peace and local officials helped create an environment in which White Caps could act with frightening impunity.

Then Sevier County began fighting back.

Dr. James A. Henderson emerged as the driving force behind the Blue Bills, an opposing vigilante organization determined to obstruct the White Caps—even by armed force. Violence answered violence. Blood was spilled. Ordinary citizens found themselves trapped between rival secret societies and a compromised justice system, unsure which neighbors, officials or lawmen could be trusted.

But the most determined enemy of the White Caps would come from inside law enforcement.

Deputy Sheriff Thomas Houston Davis refused to accept that Sevier County belonged to the vigilantes. When county officials resisted purchasing bloodhounds to pursue White Cap killers, Davis publicly challenged them. He pursued fugitives far beyond Tennessee and helped set in motion the extraordinary legal and political campaign that would finally break the organization's grip on the county.

And then came the murders that changed everything.

At the Dead Hours of Midnight follows the White Caps from their murky beginnings through the Blue Bill conflict, ambushes, manhunts, political corruption, murder-for-hire, courtroom battles and executions that finally brought their reign of terror toward its bloody conclusion.

Drawing upon contemporary newspaper accounts, court records and historical sources, Richard Way and Stanford Johnson reconstruct one of the darkest—and least remembered—chapters in Tennessee history: a time when paranoia ruled the mountains, neighbors feared neighbors, and no one could be certain who might come riding after midnight.