KINGDOM OF DEVILS

An investigation into the meaning of a brutal rampage in post-colonial Appalachia.

At the end of the 18th century, during the turbulent years of John Adams’ presidency, two brothers from a settlement near Knoxville, Tennessee, crossed into Kentucky and began a murderous rampage that ended in the deaths of 27 people, mostly men and boys from more prosperous families moving into what was then the young Republic’s western frontier. Wiley and Micajah Harp had escaped the local constabulary with stolen horses, their pregnant wives Sally and Susana, and Micajah’s pregnant mistress, Betsy. Grandjean, a Wellesley College historian, hypothesizes that they were bent on taking revenge for their desperate state on anyone unlucky enough to meet them. Their crimes became terrifying legends that spread by word of mouth and were reported in newspapers as far away as Boston and Philadelphia. Grandjean scoured archives in history museums, courthouses, and town offices in several states to research the truth behind the legends, conceding that many of the details will never be known. Still, she makes the era come alive with vivid descriptions of wilderness and towns, thumbnail sketches of colorful personalities, and stimulating tangents on post-revolutionary politics and popular culture. The Harps’ story is “an origins story,” Grandjean writes, finding in it “a kind of cipher for decoding why some Americans choose violence….As early as the founding, young American men, alienated from the nation and its values, began declaring their disaffection—their total disengagement from America’s social and political experiment—with violence. Even now, even in some of the murderous outbursts that mar our twenty-first-century news cycles, Wiley Harp lives.”

An engagingly juicy evocation of life and death in the early Republic.