The Hanging and Shooting of Henry Worley, and Ridgeway Baptist Church

The

Hanging and

Shooting of

Henry Worley

BY CLAYTON H. RAMSEY

The nineteenth-century congregants of Ridgeway Baptist Church in Gilmer County were likely unaware of the origin of the ancient tradition of burial ad sanctos. Literally “towards the holy,” it reflected the belief that the closer one was buried to a sacred place or the tomb of a martyr, the more likely one would have access to the saint’s virtue and her intercession on Judgment Day. It was essentially righteousness by proximity. But even though these faithful Baptists might not have known the source of the practice, they still buried their dead near the log church where they had worshipped since 1865.

In their cemetery, bristling with markers, at least one grave holds the remains of a man most in need of the sanctification of hallowed ground. When Henry Worley sat on the sweaty haunches of a borrowed mule one dark night in April 1894, a noose around his neck and his wrists cinched behind his back, he was certainly not thinking anything theological. But he was in desperate need of salvation.

James Henry Worley was born in 1858 in Gilmer County, the eighth of eleven children born to Henry Hezekiah and Elmarie Mirah Teague Worley. The oldest was born in North Carolina; all others were delivered in Georgia, in the Alabama-Coosa-Tallapoosa River Basin, where they had lived since 1850. He was also a half-sibling to eleven other children his father had with his second wife, Louisa Elizabeth Parham Worley.

When he turned 21, the younger Henry married Eliza M. Tankersley, and they had three children, two living past infancy. At some point he moved his family to nearby Murray County, in northwest Georgia in the foothills of the Appalachians. There he scrabbled together a modest existence by farming and, like many of his neighbors, running a moonshine still.

Americans have always loved their spirits. President George Washington ran a distillery at Mount Vernon, and most colonists were quick to defend their rights to brew and drink. Problems emerged when the young federal government faced vast debts as a result of the War of Independence and chose to meet the short-fall with a tax on distilled liquor in 1791, the first levied by the government on a domestic product. The Whiskey Rebellion was the popular response and was only suppressed by threat of force by Washington in 1794. Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican administration repealed the tax in 1802, but it was revived as a reliable source of revenue to pay for the War of 1812.

The establishment of the office of Commissioner of Internal Revenue during the Civil War likewise led to the imposition of a tax on liquor and the requirement of a license for its distillation. This, too, was to pay for the cost of conflict, in what was becoming an American tradition.

In the ruins of an economy cratered by the War, poor Southern whites could hardly see taxation and regulation as anything other than another burden of Reconstruction. With a blasted infrastructure and a shattered monetary system, mostly-rural Southerners did what they did best; they grew corn, apples, peaches, and other fermentable crops.

And many used what was not sold at market to make moonshine.

To operate a registered still was not against the law. But refusing to pay taxes was. There were many who either by principle or poverty refused to pay the government for the liquor they had produced for generations to provide for their families. It was not only another assured income stream for the impoverished; it was a cherished way of life, part of the legacy of the Scots-Irish immigrants who had found their way to the colonies years before.

Worley was one of those farmer-moonshiners, doing his best to scratch out a living in the mountains of north Georgia. Whether by necessity or choice, he found himself on the wrong side of the law, a target of government agents, or “revenuers.”

Of course he was not alone in what amounted to his criminality. There were plenty of others like him in the area, and they formed groups to protect each other from the law. As they fought for the right to run stills and support their families by those means, they considered themselves to be on the frontlines in the battle for their economic and social wellbeing against officials who seemed to be against both as they upheld federal statutes.

The struggle between moonshiners and revenuers, beginning in the 1870s, was a fight for self-sufficiency, for local control, for personal financial stability, and for individual liberty. On the other side, it was a fight to uphold the law, to enforce the policies of the government, to collect legal revenue, and to maintain order. To the federal agents, the moonshiners were outlaws. To men like Worley, they were freedom fighters.

Much of the vigilantism in the mountains in the last quarter of the nineteenth century was in the form of “whitecap” gangs, secret societies of “night riders” that were modeled on the old Ku Klux Klan. In Murray County the night riders were known as the Distillers Union. In Gilmer County they were the Working Men’s Friend and Protective Organization. They stood against the intrusion of the government, especially as it related to moonshining, and for what they considered a strong moral code.

As part of the initiation into these groups, men swore a blood oath, with the understanding that betrayal meant death. They promised to provide alibis for members caught in violation of the law and swore, if participating in a case against a fellow member, to work for their acquittal. They chased off inform- ers, burned barns and houses to emphasize their message, and beat and killed witnesses.

In addition to serving as a fraternity of moonshiners that shielded each other from any threat to their illicit business, they also ironically considered themselves the protectors of the community’s moral order, disciplining those they considered deviant. “If any man in the community misbehaves in any way we will take him out and whip him. If he is not satisfied with that we will put him to a limb,” their oath stipulated.1

These were the men Worley protected and those who protected him. It was a safe and insular existence until he was indicted in Gilmer County for whipping a man named Hood Nailer for reasons now unknown.

Worley escaped conviction by fleeing to Texas. In the Lone Star State he must have had something of an epiphany. Perhaps he fell under the spell of a temperance league while on the lam or had a genuine pang of conscience and saw his life from a new moral perspective. Perhaps he felt himself betrayed by the men sworn to defend him or was disillusioned by their tactics. More likely, he fell from favor and was frustrated that he was no longer in a position of power in the group, losing his sense of allegiance as a result.2

Regardless of the motive, he chose to return to Georgia and, in an effort to escape prosecution and imprisonment and seek retribution against the gang, he did what he swore he never would: he turned informant. He broke the blood oath by spilling secrets of the society.

“I’m tired of being hunted over the country for what this kuklux gang is doing,” the Atlanta Constitution reported him saying. “I am going back to Judge Gober’s court and tell on every last d — n member of this crowd.”

When he returned to Gilmer County in March of 1894, Worley revealed the location of several stills. Then, when called before a commissioner named Hamilton in Dalton, he threatened the whitecaps publicly and promised to reveal the location of every still he saw, vowing to turn state’s evidence when called to superior court against the organization. Warned to leave the area, he told Deputy Marshal William Duncan he would personally deliver a list of 100 moonshiners to Governor William J. Northen in Atlanta. His betrayal was complete and unapologetic.

As expected, the response was dramatic. He had turned against his fellow whitecappers, and his confession was an affront to his family and community. While admittedly no saint, his actions against the code of the mountains prompted the worst slander. They claimed he killed his first wife and beat his second, that he was a scamp, a moral degenerate. The Atlanta Constitution recorded the rejection of his neighbors, his wife, and his brother. Even his own mother “refused to acknowledge him as her son, saying that in her veins there was not a drop of blood that did not resent the mention of his name, since he had been guilty of perfidy and treason to his comrades.”3

Bound by oath, his whitecap brothers retaliated. On the night of April 7, 1894, they converged on his home. Finding him absent, they returned a week later.

Fearing intruders, Worley had been barring his door, which his second wife, Addie Independence Clonts, quite possibly opened for the vigilantes that night. Worley was manhandled, dragged from his bedroom, and tied to a mule. At least thirty masked (“whitecapped”) men on horseback led him by torchlight into the darkness.

When they passed his mother’s house, they asked if she wanted to see him one last time. “I don’t want to see him,” she reportedly shouted. “I never want to lay eyes on a traitor. Take him along.” Such was the strength of moonshiners’ honor over the bond of blood and even maternal affection.

The grim entourage passed in silence through the woods, stars spangling the sky and torchlight glancing off the trees, the sounds of the forest and the clop of hooves the only noises. They took him to a place called Bloodtown, a convergence of two roads in the backwoods of south Murray County, four miles from his house. Here they picked a white oak tree with a sturdy limb at the right height. With Worley’s hands tied behind him and a rope around his neck, they tossed the other end over the branch as he sat on the mule that had carried him to the clearing.

Writer Samuel Johnson once waggishly commented of executions, “Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it con- centrates his mind wonderfully.”4 When it is an immediate reality, as it was for Worley, who can imagine his sharpened thoughts? Perhaps it was of his two wives. His children. The men who surrounded him. The events that led to his moment of doom. What he did right, what wrong. Perhaps it was the compression and dilation of time, the hopeful dream of the condemned, like Peyton Farquhar had in Ambrose Bierce’s story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.”

Maybe it was none of these distractions. In all likelihood, it was one thing alone that focused his thoughts: a plan to disrupt the inevitability of him dangling from the end of a rope in a matter of seconds. By all accounts he deserved to be there. He vigorously disagreed.

At this point, reports of the events are conflicting. One says the rope was tied off, the mule given a kick, and as Worley went swinging the men rode off, believing their job completed. His hands loosened by the fall, he reportedly wrapped his legs around the trunk to keep from strangling, pulled a knife from his pocket and cut himself down.5 Another account said that before the rope was fixed, an accomplice slipped him a knife that he used to free himself and disappear into the woods.6 A third account said another gang of whitecaps appeared while Worley was strung up, freeing him.7

Whatever the actual details, Worley somehow survived the lynching and escaped.

Remarkably, he returned home instead of fleeing the country, grateful for his life. He resumed activities as though nothing had happened in the nighttime woods. He must have known he was persona non grata in extremis. He must have realized that the whitecappers would not rest until their judgment on him was enacted successfully. He must have understood that there was no place for him in a family that had so resolutely rejected him and in a community that had so decidedly expelled him. The record is silent on how he could have been accepted back after the attempted hanging.

On April 19, twelve days after the first posse came for him, Worley was plowing in his cornfield, as he did every spring. On this bright morning, however, the night riders returned to finish the job.

According to newspaper reports, after spending the night near Worley’s farm, a group of whitecappers approached him in his field, claiming to be hunters.8 “Have you seen any wild turkey this morning?” one of them asked. “We are on a little hunting expedition and expect to kill something before we go back.” It was a tissue-thin ruse that must have chilled Worley.

He denied seeing any game, surely knowing he was the prey. The men sup- posedly left, spoke with a neighbor in his field, and waited for that man to approach Worley and ascertain whether he was armed. When assured that he wasn’t, the assassins returned and leveled their rifles at him. One account placed his daughter, Kemmie, with him in the field. To spare her the inevitable violence, he sent her to fetch a bolt for his plow.

“Damn you!” Worley screamed. “If you will only give me a chance, I’ll whip the last one of you. If you kill me, you will kill the bravest man in this county.” The papers had him defiant to the end.

And the end came quickly. The whitecappers blasted Worley, sending his untended mule charging through the furrows, dragging the bouncing plow. Worley was dead before his daughter reached the house. It was a brutal end to a rough life.

But it was also a harbinger of the end of the vigilante groups in the area. In June, a Murray County farmer named Will A. Roper testified against two moonshiners. As a result, he was shot and tossed in an old copper pit. He hovered there, between life and death, for five days until he was rescued and nursed back to health, at which point his testi- mony secured the convictions of his attackers. The court decision was considered “the most valuable verdict ever ren- dered in this district.”9 If this trial was the turning point in the destruction of the whitecaps in the area, then the legal action over Worley’s death was surely the sensational penultimate stage.

Between the fall of 1894 and the spring of 1895, the federal attorney secured indictments against 34 men in the hanging of Henry Worley, including Judge John L. Edmonson, a wealthy jurist and a public proponent of moonshining whose father had been one of the first settlers in the county, and Tom Wright, an ex-U.S. deputy marshal. Six of the seven original counts were thrown out, prompting a delay in the trials while more unassailable indictments were drawn up. (The hanging and the shooting were considered separate cases and the final indictments can be found in United States v. James McCutchen [1894] and United States v. Tobe Smith [1894], respectively.)

With the resumption of the prosecution, the decision was made to try two men, blacksmith John Quarles Sr. and farmer David Butler. The evidence against them was the strongest, prosecutors believed, so theirs would be a test case for the others.

At the heart of the strategy of defense attorney Colonel W.C. Glenn was to demonstrate that the case did not belong in federal court but rather in local courts that were presumably more open to influence by well-placed whitecaps. According to the statute on which the indictment was based, a charge of conspiracy “to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate” anyone who was exercising his constitutional rights, in this case Worley’s right to testify against the illegal distillers, would have landed the case within federal juris- diction.10 Therefore, defense argued that Worley was hung, not for reporting moonshiners, which was well within his rights as a citizen of the United States, but for being “a brute of a man,” a condition they hoped would not only bump the case out of the federal system but also elevate the role of the whitecaps as defenders of traditional morality. The defense claimed he was a heavy drinker, a wife beater, a murderer, and an oath breaker. It was hard to know where reality ended and legal strategy began.

The prosecution vehemently argued that Worley had been attacked solely because he was an informant against powerful moonshiners and not because of his character flaws. After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that federal courts did indeed have jurisdiction to try the whitecap cases, Quarles and Butler were found guilty and were sentenced to five years in the federal penitentiary in Columbus, Ohio. The judge reportedly reduced their sentences as an act of mercy because of their poverty and the size of their families. Quarles had four- teen children, and Butler had eight.11

Four men — Anse (Anderson) Black, John Carnes, Sam Peeples, and Chris Mitchell — pleaded guilty to conspiracy in the attempted hanging and were sen- tenced to two years in jail and $500 fines. After an initial denial of clemency in May of 1896, all four were pardoned by President Grover Cleveland and returned to their homes in September after two years in confinement.12

Of the eight men charged in the murder, only four were convicted in federal court, each sentenced to ten years hard labor.13 The Department of Justice did not support prosecution of the others in either case, and charges were dropped among those who had been indicted but not tried. The whitecaps had been all but eradicated by the spring of 1895, and the uncertainty of outcome and the expense of bringing the several dozen others to trial contributed to the decision. The effect was the same. The vigilantes’ power in the community, at least in this form, was broken.

James Henry Worley was buried the day after his murder in the graveyard at Ridgeway Baptist Church. Personal sanctity was evidently not a requirement for admission. Some no doubt hoped for peace, both theirs and his, in his eternal rest, while others must have quietly celebrated his passing. There were probably not many who mourned his loss. But the arms of the church received him.

He lies beside his first wife and infant daughter, both of whom predeceased him, and all three graves are at the crest of a hillock overlooking the log church, a pavilion with a long cement table for din- ner on the grounds, and a red brick structure across the road, built by the Ridgeway congregation in 1982 for services.

In addition to the Worleys, the cemetery is filled with the graves of Quarleses, likely related to one of the men convicted and sentenced in the attempted murder. In fact, Worley’s daughter, Kemmie, is buried a few feet from her parents, next to her husband, Henry Breckeridge Quarles. It was an astounding resolution to a spectacular drama, as they all lie forever in the church’s care, recipients of an unfathomable grace.

Clayton H. Ramsey is a freelance writer and former president of the Atlanta Writers Club. He lives in Decatur.

Sources

1. Atlanta Journal (Atlanta, GA), April 27, 1894, 1. Quoted in William F. Holmes, “Moonshining and Collective Violence: Georgia, 1889–1895,” The Journal of American History, 67(3), Dec. 1980, 596.

2. “Through the Heart,” Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), April 21, 1894, 8.

3. “Reign of the Kuklux in North Georgia,” Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), Jan. 13, 1895, 4.

4. James Boswell, “Friday, 19 September 1777,” Life of Johnson, R.W. Chapman, ed. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1980), 849.

5. “Reign,” 4.

6. George Gordon Ward, The Annals of Upper Georgia Centered in Gilmer County (Carrollton, GA: Thomasson Printing & Office Equipment Co., 1965), 644.

7. “How Worley Was Killed,” Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA) April 24, 1894, 3.

8. James McCutcheon’s confession (AC Feb. 15, 1895) and neighbor Bradley Thornton’s statement (AC April 24, 1894) provide two different versions of the events of Apr. 19, 1894. The nar- rative of January 13, 1895, is a third, arguably more accurate, account.

9. Holmes, “Moonshining,” 605.

10. “The Jury Still Out,” Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), April 13, 1895, 9.

11. “Evidence All In,” Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), April 12, 1895, 9.

12. “Back from Columbus, Ohio,” North Georgia Citizen (Dalton, Georgia), September 24, 1896, 6. Carnes is mistakenly called “Stern.” Cf. NGC Feb. 21, 1895.

13. “Parsons Is Free,” Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, GA), April 14, 1896, 5.

RIDGEWAY BAPTIST

ARTICLE BY CLAYTON H. RAMSEY

Churches dot these hills — Baptist and Seventh Day Adventist and Pentecostal — little pockets of faith hidden among the gaps of North Georgia. Among them is Ridgeway Baptist Church. The faithful who attended services one damp Sunday morning recently snaked along winding roads cut into the layered rock of the mountains. They drove due west of Ellijay, across U.S. Highway 76 from Fort Mountain State Park, through the mist that hung low among the pines after a late winter shower. It was a journey most had made for decades and one their ancestors traveled for generations. I came in search of history; they were acting out the ancient and ongoing story of redemption.

I parked beside the long concrete table, used for communal meals, or “dinner on the grounds,” covered with a pitched pavilion that ran from the front of the log church toward the cemetery hill, parallel to the road. Across the paved road was a brick sanctuary, topped by a stout steeple, and by ten a.m. members were trickling in, settling into familiar pews and opening the Bibles they brought with them to the passage they would study in Sunday School.

Today they would look at a text from St. Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians. No one had trouble locating it in their well-worn copies of the Scriptures. There was prayer, thanksgiving for blessings, earnest entreaty for resolution of the problems of life — a neighbor with cancer, a friend who needed the Lord — and then the rustle of pages as the reading was identified. Each one read a verse out loud, down one pew and up the next. Though there was a leader of the conversation, there was no heavy, pedagogical lecture. Members were asked what they thought of Paul’s inspired ideas of God using the weak to show God’s strength, the fractured to demonstrate God’s grace. Paul’s vision in these verses found echoes in Isaiah’s vision and Daniel’s and John’s. Scripture linked to Scripture and members shared what struck them as important, what resonated with their lives. After an hour of discussion, there was a break. Hugs and handshakes among members. How was your week? Good to see you!

I was the interloper but was welcomed sincerely and warmly. Then, almost on cue, they found their seats again. Raised a Baptist, I gravitated to the back pew by habit, but was invited forward. Padded pews were marked on the aisle end with small brass plaques, inscribed with the names of those who had donated to the building fund decades ago. The couple dozen worshippers sat where they usually did, I suspected.

The adult Sunday School teacher, Danny McArthur, was also the song leader, and we sang for half an hour as he picked and strummed a guitar in the style of these mountains. One member and then the next would stand and suggest a hymn, and we moved from song to song in the traditional shaped-notes hymnal that was in the pew racks, but not always consulted. The hymns were old friends: “Who at My Door Is Standing?” “I Am Blessed,” “Love Lifted Me,” “Sweet By and By.” The sound was fresh, but the music was timeless. Some warbling, some strong, the voices were the chorus of eternity in Sunday clothes, flashing with hints of glory among these housewives and laborers, mechanics and parents, younger and older. There was a solo, and a monthly collection for the pastor who relied on secular work to pay the bills.

And then it was time for the message. With an apology for a throat shredded by a spring cold, the Rev. Anthony Stonecipher stepped behind the pulpit, removed his suit jacket and hung it on a hook behind him, slipped his necktie off and folded it carefully, took a sip of water, and surrendered himself to the Spirit of God. The Prophet Jeremiah would supply the prompt for his message, the sealed and open documents of chapter 32. With an escalating volume that reflected a holy vigor, he challenged and reminded and comforted. He called names for confirmation; he shook hands for connection. He exhorted and quoted and, choking back the pain of a raw throat, he preached as if it were his best and last sermon.

And then the fire receded and he was talking again, whispering almost. “Who Is That Knocking?” was sung for what Baptists recognize as an “altar call,” a chance to publicly express their response to the message and settle their soul’s business with God. With that, the service was over. Smiles and handshakes followed. Farewells until the next gathering.

I discovered the Sunday School teacher and song leader was also treasurer, most senior deacon, and keeper of church records. He offered to meet me after lunch and share what historical documents he possessed. After a hamburger, I was back early. He had three cloth and leather-bound ledger books under his arm, the written records of the church since 1897. Everything before that had burned in a house fire. The stories and names of thirty year’s worth of church history disappeared in the flames, those who preserved the oral record long gone. We spread the books on a table in the fellowship hall, a room added later, perpendicular to the sanctuary. First built in 1990-91 and subdivided into smaller rooms for children’s Sunday School space, it was later converted to an open area for luncheons and informal gatherings.

We could see the old log church through the window. Built in 1865 when discharged Confederate veterans, led by Wiley Pankey, came back from the War, it was constructed with logs fit together on property that surely belonged to the Pankey family. For years it had a dirt floor. In 1954 there was an addition of planed lumber and not whole logs built for a pulpit platform at the front of the sanctuary, the same year the building was wired for electricity. Back then it was known as New Bethel Church, which it stayed until 1982, the year the brick sanctuary was built, and they changed the name to Ridgeway.

The inimitable Celestine Sibley related the story of Nancy Pankey in an August 27, 1959, article in the Atlanta Constitution (later reprinted on October 25, 1978). Nancy, then a delicate woman in a retirement home, was Wiley’s second wife, and Celestine told the tale of how she stared down a team of workmen that was preparing to demolish the old church. “As long as I live, them logs stand!” she reportedly shouted at the crew. The fact that it still stands today as one of the last log churches in the state, listing to the right under the weight of history, was her gift to those who worship across the street.

They still meet in the old log structure once every year, the fourth Sunday in September, for Old Timer’s Day, singing and praying and preaching in the building that’s stood for 154 years. But mostly it’s just a reminder of days past, of faithful ancestors and the survival of their community. When the con- gregation decided to move across the street, the Rev. Kimsey McVey shepherded the transition, as last pastor in the log building, first in the brick. Ernest Quarles gave $10,000 for the construction project and it was finally paid off in full three years later, in 1985. It is in this modern building where they meet every Wednesday evening, and every second, fourth, and fifth Sunday morning.

We sat in the fellowship hall, ladybugs on the ceiling and these three precious books of records spread out before us. Every second Saturday of the month the congregation holds church conference, a tradition that stretches back at least as far as the date of the first entry. At one time a member could actually be dismissed from the church for missing too many con- ferences, and it was in the notes of these gatherings that the stories were found, if you knew where to look.

There were Rules of Decorum and Statements of Faith. There were lists of male members and female members. There were records of those joining the church by “experience of grace,” or by letter from another Baptist Church, or by “watchcare” with the expectation of a letter. There were those who left to join other churches or passed into the cemetery. There were those who were dismissed for drunkenness, fornication, profane language, dealing in liquor, and disorderly conduct. Someone attempted murder and lost access to church fellowship, and another stole chickens the year of the Stock Market Crash of 1929 and was shown the door. The hands of dozens of church clerks recorded the business of the congregation for a full century, with illegible scribblings, spidery scratchings, and beautiful calligraphy, using grey pencil and black ink. Spellings varied. Format didn’t.

There were surprises: The Rev. J.C. Worley, presumably a relative of the murdered Henry Worley, victim in the famous “whitecap cases” of the 1890s who was buried in the graveyard, was the first pastor mentioned in the first ledger book. The indomitable Nancy Pankey was the first woman mentioned in the records to serve as church clerk in 1929. The concrete for the dinner tables was poured in 1972, with the exact amount expended on record. The purchase of a vacuum cleaner was important enough to note.

There are about forty members now. Fewer show up for services. Slightly more might come to Revival every August. Many more do on Homecoming Day every June, lining the serpentine road with their cars. Their ranks are small, but they are loyal.

Danny smiled when he read the names, made the connections, found tidbits of unfamiliar history. We spent more than an hour deciphering the ledgers, and then we went into the bright afternoon and up the hill to the cemetery. He identified the monuments of relatives, who was kin to whom, who was mean, who beloved. I shared the Worley history I had uncovered and the significance of the proximity of burial plots. He told stories that will stay between us, and others that helped me understand the history of this place.

The mist had burned off by then, but I felt a web of connection running from the morning worshippers to the voices from the ledgers to those in eternal repose on the hillside. All participated in a community of the living and the dead, the faithful present and the peaceful departed. After a final handshake, I left with his phone number and email address, pages of notes, and gratitude for having participated, if only for a few hours, in the kinship of Ridgeway Baptist Church.

Clayton H. Ramsey is a freelance writer and former president of the Atlanta Writers Club. He lives in Decatur. For more informa- tion about (and photography of ) Georgia’s historic rural churches, visit www.hrcga.org.