Youth, the past, and other incongruities

by Jack Neely

Last weekend I was folding some laundry and, even though I knew better, turned on the television. The only thing on TV on Saturday afternoon besides golf was one of those long commercials for a Time-Life collection of embarrassing '70s hits. "There was an innocence about the '70s," said the earnest voice-over, as they showed a super-8 film of a kid running around a backyard.

I was there. I got to know the '70s pretty well. But if there was a special measure of innocence then, it slipped right by me. I figured the commercial was probably aimed for people a little younger than I am who are already nostalgic about their lost youth. It also occurred to me that everybody, no matter how old, thinks of their childhood as an "innocent" time. We're proudest of our childhoods when we hear about horrible crimes today.

My childhood, for example, was a simple, peaceful time of watching bees in clover, saving up to buy a Superball at Woolworth's, reading Donald Duck comics, and drinking Coke out of little returnable glass bottles on my grandmother's front porch. My childhood was a time when people smiled at each other in the street and pondered the weather and never, ever killed each other.

I'll tell my grandchildren what it was like. But I've heard the 1960s weren't like that for everybody.

There were things my elders kept from me, things they stopped talking about when I ran into the room.

In the '70s, I remember people saying that the '50s was an innocent time, especially as portrayed in Happy Days. But in the real '50s, those old enough to remember were saying everything was better before World War II. However, pre-war Americans idealized the proprieties of the Victorian Age—and like people of the Victorian Age, they also idealized the antebellum South, that "civilization Gone with the Wind."

But the antebellum South didn't seem so perfect to most antebellum Southerners, even white ones, who romanticized a longer-ago past—singing songs like "The Old Oaken Bucket," about how innocent youth was back in the late 1700s.

So, mathematically, you'd figure the 1790s must have been the most innocent time of all, the days when our founding fathers worked on building a "more perfect Union" in this natural paradise.

Meanwhile, in France, the massive, indiscriminate slaughter was often in proportions that might remind us of Rwanda and Bosnia today. It was also the time of the Marquis de Sade, whose novels advocated sexual torture and murder as the ultimate expressions of manly freedom.

I don't know whether two West Knox Countians named Micajah and Wiley Harpe could read French. Some said the brothers came from Georgia; some say they came from North Carolina. Some doubted they were brothers; indeed, Micajah Harpe was much larger than Wiley. The called him Big Harpe.

You don't always hear the Harpes called "serial killers" or "sadists." When you read about the Harpes, they're often called "pirates" or "outlaws." They even appear in G-rated disguises in a Disney movie called Davy Crockett and the River Pirates.

I'd never mean to hurt any serial killer's feelings, but I'd put the Harpes up against any of today's mass murderers. They became infamous across the South, but two centuries ago they lived along Beaver Creek, near Campbell's Station according to some sources. (I'd bet it was somewhere along what's now Pellissippi Parkway.) And near here, they started killing.

They found one early victim, a man named Johnson, in Hughes Tavern, a "rough groggery" west of town. They disemboweled him and replaced his innards with stones to sink him. Nevertheless, we found Mr. Johnson floating in the river a couple miles downstream from downtown. Later, Isaac Coffee was murdered on Copper Ridge, and William Bullard.

With each murder—there were dozens, by most accounts—the Harpes' methods became more bizarre, their motives less comprehensible. It was said "they had become disgusted with all mankind, and agreed with each other to destroy as many persons as they could."

According to the stoically titled narrative Life As It Is, published in Knoxville in 1842 by J.W.M. Breazeale, the Harpes "slaughtered babes and matrons, youths and men, murdered in cold blood; not for spoil or plunder, but for the gratification of a hellish thirst for carnage, and a fiendish delight in human misery...."

(Breazeale commented that no one would speculate on the Harpes' career body count. Indeed, six or seven years after the publication of Life As It Is, picnickers ran across a cave on the Clinch River packed with hundreds of human bones; the Knoxville papers phlegmatically ascribed that opus to the late Harpes.)

The Harpes may have been the worst serial killers of their time, but they weren't unique. Some other sadistic killings in the area weren't even ascribed to the Harpes. One woman's especially bizarre mutilation and disemboweling occurred on the French Broad in 1799 and is described in greater detail in the Knoxville Impartal Observer than I suspect modern readers would care to know.

That year, by the way, a posse caught up with Big Harpe in Kentucky, then roughly beheaded him. They caught his little brother and executed him a few years later.

There was nothing special about crime in the 1790s. I'll wager that you can name any month in the 207 years we have on record in Knoxville and find accounts of contemporary crimes that would horrify us streetwise moderns. Based on body counts from newspapers of about a century ago, for example, the murder rate in Knoxville in the Victorian 1890s was several times higher than it is today.

Youth, at its best, is simple and innocent. The past is neither.