Appalachian Figures
In the spring of 1877, the brick jail at De Kalb, Mississippi became the stage for one of the most notorious Reconstruction lynchings in the South. A Republican judge, William Wallace Chisolm, sat behind its walls with his teenage son John, his daughter Cornelia, and political allies J. P. Gilmer and Angus McLellan. Outside, a crowd of armed white men gathered in the name of “home rule” and “Kemper County’s honor.” Within days the whole country was reading about what newspapers called the Chisolm Massacre.
Most modern readers meet the massacre through one controversial book. Its author, James Monroe Wells, was not a native of Kemper County at all but a Union cavalry veteran who arrived after the Civil War as a federal revenue officer. His The Chisolm Massacre: A Picture of “Home Rule” in Mississippi tried to convince Northern readers that the killings were not a local feud but organized white supremacist violence meant to crush Reconstruction.
Reading Wells alongside the opposing Democratic account, Kemper County Vindicated, and then setting both against family papers, census records, and new digital scholarship lets us see how a single small town in eastern Mississippi became a test case for the meaning of citizenship, justice, and memory in the postwar South.
From Erie County farm boy to “Bloody Kemper”
James Monroe Wells was born in 1837 in Erie County, New York, the son of Lucinda and Samuel Percival Wells. When he was two the family moved to Michigan, where he grew up on a farm, attended Kalamazoo College, and taught school.
During the Civil War, Wells joined the 8th Michigan Cavalry. In his later autobiographical works, Tunneling Out of Libby Prison and With Touch of Elbow; or, Death Before Dishonor, he recalled hard riding in Kentucky and Tennessee, two captures, and a dramatic escape through a hand-dug tunnel beneath Libby Prison in Richmond. Those books were part adventure story, part moral testimony. They also trained Wells to craft himself as a man of courage, honor, and keen observation who spoke directly to Northern readers.
After Appomattox he did not return quietly to farm life. In 1868 Wells accepted a position with the United States Internal Revenue Service in Mississippi, working out of Meridian and moving in the circles of Republican officeholders and Union League organizers in Kemper County. Local and scholarly accounts agree that white Democrats viewed him as a classic “carpetbagger” a Northern outsider whose presence symbolized the new Reconstruction order.
By the mid 1870s Kemper County had a population of roughly thirteen thousand people and a national reputation for feuds, racial killings, and political intimidation. One modern genealogical history notes that newspapers from the East Coast to the West “gravitated to the next tale of mayhem,” and that the Chisolm Gully conflict became the prime example of this “Bloody Kemper” image.
Kemper County on the brink of “home rule”
Reconstruction in Kemper County followed a pattern seen across much of the Deep South. Formerly enslaved people claimed new rights as voters, landholders, and office seekers. White Unionists and incoming Republicans like Wells allied with them. In response, white Democratic leaders organized secret Klan “dens,” rifle clubs, and courthouse factions that worked to restore exclusive white control under the banner of “home rule.”
Judge William Wallace Chisolm stood at the center of this local conflict. A Georgia born merchant who had settled in Kemper County before the war, Chisolm served as justice of the peace, probate judge, and then sheriff. After the war he became a Republican, testified against the Ku Klux Klan before a congressional committee, and drew repeated death threats from his enemies.
On April 26, 1877, Democratic sheriff John W. Gully was shot and killed near Chisolm’s home. Democratic newspapers quickly depicted Chisolm as the mastermind behind the murder. Contemporary accounts in the Union and Recorder of Milledgeville and other papers reported that rumors of Republican plots swept the countryside and that white residents were “wild with excitement.”
Chisolm, Gilmer, and another Republican ally were arrested and brought to the De Kalb jail. Chisolm’s wife Emily and their children accompanied him, hoping that staying together would offer some protection. Instead, they walked into a trap.
On April 29 a crowd estimated at roughly three hundred armed white men surrounded the jail. In Wells’s telling it was “a crowd of some three hundred white men, styling themselves the best citizens of Kemper County,” intent on carrying out their own verdict. He portrayed them as Ku Klux and “White-Liners” using respectability as a mask for political terrorism.
The mob stormed the jail. By the time the shooting stopped and the smoke cleared, Judge Chisolm, his son John, his daughter Cornelia, and their friend McLellan lay mortally wounded. Gilmer, a former state senator, was also killed. Modern summaries based on local papers and court records date Chisolm’s death to mid May, since he lingered for days after the attack.
Southern newspapers applauded the killings. The Yorkville Enquirer covered the “Tragedy in Mississippi” and, after recounting the mob violence, coldly concluded that “Other hangings will probably follow.” Federal and state officials did little to contradict that prediction. Mississippi’s Democratic governor John M. Stone refused to investigate, and President Rutherford B. Hayes stayed silent. No one was ever convicted.
Writing The Chisolm Massacre for a Northern audience
In the months after the lynching, Wells set to work on a book that would present the Kemper County killings as a national crisis rather than a local feud. The result, first published in Chicago in 1877 as The Chisolm Massacre: A Picture of “Home Rule” in Mississippi, went through at least three nineteenth century editions, including a second edition sponsored by the Chisolm Monument Association in Washington and a third issued under Wells’s own name as a federal revenue officer.
The book opens with a biographical sketch of Judge Chisolm and then moves steadily toward the siege of the jail, describing the crowd, the attempted defenses, and the agonizing deaths of Cornelia and John. It is not just a vivid narrative. Wells filled the back of the volume with affidavits from Kemper County residents, excerpts from local and national newspapers, and letters from Republican officials. Among them are reprints of New York Times coverage of the massacre, which framed the killings as part of a wider pattern of Reconstruction violence.
Wells also worked beyond the printed page. In February 1878 he wrote a letter to abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison from Chicago on striking stationery that read: “The Chisolm Massacre. By James M. Wells. Agency of the ‘Chilsolm Monumental Fund,’ Room 33, Metropolitan Block, Chicago.” The surviving manuscript shows him appealing directly to Garrison’s moral authority and antislavery network to help circulate his story of Chisolm’s martyrdom and to raise funds for a monument.
Taken together, the book and the Garrison letter show how Wells used his skills as a veteran, storyteller, and political organizer to turn local testimony into a national indictment. He linked the mob in De Kalb to larger questions about the federal government’s retreat from protecting Black citizens and white Republicans in the South.
“Kemper County Vindicated” and the white line counterattack
Wells’s book did not go unanswered. In 1879 James Daniel Lynch published Kemper County Vindicated, and a Peep at Radical Rule in Mississippi, a long rebuttal that blamed Radical Republicans and defended the honor of Kemper’s white elite. Lynch’s volume, now readily accessible through HathiTrust and Internet Archive, presented itself as the voice of “respectable” citizens abused by corrupt Reconstruction officials.
Like Wells, Lynch filled his book with affidavits, letters, and newspaper reprints. Where Wells saw a lawless Klan mob, Lynch painted a community pushed beyond endurance by alleged Republican crimes. He recast Chisolm not as a beleaguered sheriff but as a dangerous agitator and claimed that the jail killings were an understandable, if regrettable, outburst from outraged neighbors.
Bibliographic notes for Wells’s book in the Online Books Page explicitly direct readers to Lynch’s Kemper County Vindicated as the Democratic standpoint. Later scholars of the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi, such as Michael Newton, rely on both books in order to reconstruct how each side framed the murders and how those frames fed into the myth of “Bloody Kemper.”
Reading Wells and Lynch together makes clear that the battle over memory began almost as soon as the bodies were buried. Each author quoted witnesses who spoke from the same crossroads and churchyards but told utterly different stories about guilt, innocence, and the meaning of “home rule.”
Beyond the polemics: archives, geology reports, and family papers
For decades Wells’s book stood virtually alone on library shelves as the main printed source on the Chisolm Massacre. Twentieth century county histories and state bibliographies routinely listed it under Kemper County and Reconstruction. Mississippi State University’s genealogy guide, for example, places The Chisolm Massacre alongside Charles Ray Fulton’s county history and Kemper County: Sesquicentennial Celebration as foundational texts for understanding the county’s violent postwar politics.
Yet Kemper’s story also lives in manuscript collections and unexpected corners of printed reports. The Chisolm family papers, now forming the backbone of Brown University’s born digital project The Chisolm Massacre: Reconstruction and the Politics of Violence, preserve letters, local clippings, and family testimony that complicate both Wells and Lynch.
Government debates picked up the massacre as well. Late nineteenth century congressional and Senate documents on contested elections and the legitimacy of Mississippi’s “redeemed” governments referred to the “slaughter of Gilmer and McLellan and Judge Chisholm and his son John and his daughter Cornelia in Kemper County in 1877” as evidence of how white paramilitary groups enforced political outcomes.
Even technical works took notice. A Mississippi Geological Survey bulletin on the Meridian region quoted Wells’s lurid description of the attack when summarizing the county’s nineteenth century history, a reminder that the reputation of “Bloody Kemper” seeped into fields far removed from political history.
At the local level, church minutes, cemetery records, and genealogical projects such as the Johnson Family of Kemper County site help trace how families connected to the massacre navigated the generations that followed. Johnson descendants, for example, frame the Chisolm Gully murders as one episode in a long series of racial and political killings that shaped Black life from Reconstruction into the civil rights era.
Wells between war memoir and Reconstruction case study
Seen alongside his Civil War narratives, Wells’s Reconstruction writing looks less like a one time outburst and more like the culmination of a life spent memorializing conflict. In Tunneling Out of Libby Prison and With Touch of Elbow he presented war as a test of masculine honor, patriotism, and endurance. In The Chisolm Massacre he applied the same narrative tools to Kemper County, casting Chisolm’s family as heroic sufferers in a new struggle over the meaning of the Union’s victory.
His later move to Idaho, where he served in that state’s first legislature, shows that Wells carried Reconstruction politics westward. Western colleagues knew him less as a carpetbagger in “Bloody Kemper” and more as a Union officer, prison escapee, and author. Lives of Mississippi Authors, 1817 1967 and later reference works treat The Chisolm Massacre as his enduring claim to Southern historical memory.
Why the Chisolm Massacre still matters
In recent years scholars have returned to the Chisolm Massacre as a way to unpack how violence and politics intertwined at the end of Reconstruction. Brown University’s digital project describes the episode as a “hinge moment” in 1877, when a political mob in one small Mississippi town dramatized the nation’s retreat from its first attempt at racial justice.
Works on Reconstruction militias and the Ku Klux Klan, such as John S. Clawson’s study of Mississippi militias and Michael Newton’s The Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi, use Wells’s narrative as evidence for how white paramilitary groups targeted Republican officials and voters while claiming to represent law and order. Legal scholars have read his descriptions of Cornelia Chisolm’s death alongside later lynching accounts to trace how stories of racial and political violence shaped American ideas of due process and mob justice.
For readers in the Appalachian region, Kemper’s story may feel both distant and familiar. Like many upland counties in Kentucky, Tennessee, and southwestern Virginia, Kemper mixed small farms and larger plantations, fierce local loyalties, and sharply contested ideas of who counted as a citizen. Wells’s book reminds us that the end of Reconstruction did not arrive only through constitutional compromise in Washington. It also arrived through the sound of axes splintering a jail door in De Kalb and shots echoing across a courthouse square.
The argument over what those shots meant began the moment ink dried on Wells’s first page and has never fully stopped.
Sources & further reading
James Monroe Wells, The Chisolm Massacre: A Picture of “Home Rule” in Mississippi (Chicago: Agency Chisolm Monumental Fund, 1877; Washington, D.C.: Chisolm Monument Association, 1878). Multiple editions digitized via HathiTrust, Internet Archive, and Google Books; includes Wells’s narrative along with affidavits, letters, and reprinted newspaper coverage. Internet Archive+2Google Books+2
James Monroe Wells, Tunneling Out of Libby Prison: A Michigan Lieutenant’s Account of His Own Imprisonment and Daring Escape (Chicago: Louis Lloyd & Co., 1904). Civil War memoir describing his imprisonment and escape, useful for understanding his narrative style and sense of identity. Wikipedia+1
James Monroe Wells, With Touch of Elbow; or, Death Before Dishonor: A Thrilling Narrative of Adventure on Land and Sea (Philadelphia: J. C. Winston, 1909). Autobiographical work on his 8th Michigan Cavalry service and postwar adventures. Wikipedia+1
James M. Wells to William Lloyd Garrison, Chicago, February 1878, on letterhead reading “The Chisolm Massacre. By James M. Wells. Agency of the ‘Chilsolm Monumental Fund,’ Room 33, Metropolitan Block, Chicago.” Digitized via Boston Public Library and Internet Archive. Wikimedia Commons
James Daniel Lynch, Kemper County Vindicated, and a Peep at Radical Rule in Mississippi (New York: E. J. Hale & Son, 1879). Democratic rebuttal to Wells’s account, available via HathiTrust and Internet Archive. Wikipedia+1
“The Chisolm Massacre,” The New York Times, 27 June 1878. National coverage that framed the De Kalb killings as part of a broader pattern of Reconstruction violence in Mississippi. Wikipedia+1
“Tragedy in Mississippi,” Yorkville Enquirer (Yorkville, South Carolina), 10 May 1877, reprinted in Georgia and national papers with the closing line “Other hangings will probably follow.” Georgia Historic Newspapers+1
U.S. Congressional and Senate documents from the 1870s and 1890s that reference the “slaughter of Gilmer and McLellan and Judge Chisholm and his son John and his daughter Cornelia in Kemper County in 1877,” used in debates over Mississippi elections and federal authority. ODU Digital Commons+1
“Chisolm massacre” and “James Monroe Wells” entries, Wikipedia. Concise overviews of the massacre and Wells’s life, including his move to Mississippi as a federal revenue officer and later service in Idaho’s legislature. Wikipedia+1
Christopher Grasso, The Chisolm Massacre: Reconstruction and the Politics of Violence (Brown University Digital Publications, ongoing). Born digital monograph based partly on an extensive private archive of Chisolm family papers, with thematic document clusters for teaching and research. Brown University Library+2Brown University Library+2
Michael Brian Connolly, “Reconstruction in Kemper County, Mississippi” (M.A. thesis, Old Dominion University, 1989). Scholarly study of county level Reconstruction that treats Wells as a carpetbagger revenue officer and situates the Chisolm Gully conflict within wider patterns of racial and political violence. ODU Digital Commons
Michael Newton, The Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi: A History (McFarland, 2009). Includes a section on the Chisolm Massacre that relies on Wells and Lynch to trace Klan activity and political terror in Kemper County. Wikipedia
John S. Clawson, “Militias, Manhood, and Citizenship in Reconstruction Mississippi,” Journal of Mississippi History 76 (2014), and related dissertation Militias, Manhood, and Citizenship in Southern Reconstruction (Auburn University, 2019). Uses Wells’s book as evidence for the relationship between state militias, paramilitary clubs, and white supremacist violence. etd.auburn.edu
James B. Lloyd, Lives of Mississippi Authors, 1817–1967 (University Press of Mississippi, 1981). Biographical entry on Wells that situates him among Mississippi authors and notes The Chisolm Massacre as a key Reconstruction narrative. South Carolina Historical Society+1
Mississippi State University Libraries, Kemper County genealogy and history guides. List Wells’s book, Charles Ray Fulton’s A History of Kemper County, Mississippi, 1860–1910, and locally produced volumes like Kemper County: Sesquicentennial Celebration, 1833–1983 as core resources for understanding the county’s violent reputation. ODU Digital Commons+1
“Murder and Mayhem – The Johnson Family of Kemper County, Mississippi.” Genealogical essay that places the Chisolm Gully murders within a longer story of racial violence and family survival in Kemper and Neshoba Counties. johnsonfamilyofkemp