Whitecaps?

Murdered by Whitecaps: Henry Worley of Murray County Killed While Plowing from The Macon Telegraph  1894 Apr 21.

Atlanta, Ga., Apr. 20--Henry Worley, a prominent Murray county farmer, was shot and killed in his field yesterday by whitecaps.  He was plowing.  No one saw the murder, but there is no doubt they are members of the Murray county whitecap gang.  Worley was formerly a member of the band, most of whose leading members are moonshiners.  They suspected him of treachery, and last week took him out at night and strung him up.  One of the gang slipped back, gave him a knife, and Worley cut himself down.  He was fired on as he ran away.  He declared that he was coming to Atlanta to give Governor Northen the names of 100 members of the gang.  Before Worley could carry out his threat, he was murdered.  There are 70 member in this league, divided in clans and sub-clans.  Their principle object is to protect their illicit stills, which abound in the mountains.  Several other outrages have been reported.  Six deputy marshals left here tonight to arrest the ring leaders of the gang.  The band will certainly be broken up.

I came across this while doing some genealogical work.  I have a couple of Henry Worleys in my family tree but they are from the early 1700s, not 1894.  No known connection to this Henry Worley.

Murray County is one of those far northern Georgia Counties historically constituted of small-holder farmers. The population was basically old American families coming down from Virginia and North Carolina after the Revolution and after the Cherokee clearances supplemented by the Scots-Irish immigrations.  There were no plantations to speak of and hardly any slaves.  Economically it was a very meager county.  Most these Appalachian counties voted against secession during the Civil War but fought for the Confederacy once secession occurred.  Even today, the African American population is only 0.6%.  

So what is going on with the news report?  It is a reminder that history is far more nuanced than we sometimes, in our modern ignorance and arrogance, grant.  

Whitecaps are the Ku Klux Klan.  Why were they operating in Murray County, a virtually entirely white county?  Because the KKK was more multidimensional than we account for today.  In this instance, it was essentially a moonshine guild, looking out for the economic interests of its members as a collective of moonshiners.  Here, they are not lynching blacks out of racial animosity but attempting to lynch a former leader out of political and economic self-interest.  

It also illustrates just how emaciated could be the structure of government.  Murray County was in some ways an interior frontier as late as the turn of the 20th century with but a slender structure of government.  A shadow county force probably working in uneasy parallel with the county government to establish a rule by illicit economic interests.  In fact a prominent local judge and a former marshal were members of the gang.

Eventually, when bad actions become too obvious, the State had to send in a force to return to the rule of law.  Ultimately, the case had to be prosecuted by the Federal government owing to local influence.

Calls to mind those lines from Louis MacNeice's Gloomy Academic:

And how one can imagine oneself among them
I do not know;
It was all so unimaginably different
And all so long ago.

Contemporary news accounts. 

An historical account.