Alec Whitley

DESCRIPTION: "He murdered Bert Tucker in the west (x3), And knocked a widow out of rest." "So they carried Alex Whitley to Albemarle." "He stayed there three days and two nights, And they hung Alex Whitley to a red oak limb" on about the tenth of June
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1949 (Salisbury (NC) Post, according to David Almond)
KEYWORDS: homicide execution punishment
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
Jun 1892 - Lynching of Alec Whitley
FOUND IN: US(SE)
REFERENCES (4 citations):
NorthCarolinaFolkloreJournal, Heath Thomas, "Alex Whitley: The Man and the Ballad," Vol. VIII, No. 2 (Dec. 1960), pp. 16-21, "Alex Whitley" (1 text)
ADDITIONAL: Bruce E. Baker, "North Carolina Lynching Ballads," essay in W. Fitzhugh Brundage, _Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South_, University of North Carolina Press, 1997, p. 231, "Alex Whitley" (1 text)
M. Lynette Hartsell, _Stanly Has a Lynching: The Murder of Alexander Whitley: A Family Legacy Entangled in a Web of Fiction and Folklore_, Lulu Publishing Services, 2018, pp. 57-58, "(Alec Whitley)" (1 text)
Ivey L. Sharpe, _Stanly County USA: The Story of an Era and an Area (1841-1972)_, Piedmont Press, 1972, p. 253, "(no title)" (1 text)
NOTES [2790 words]: The NorthCarolinaFolkloreJournal article claims that this song, and the murderer it describes, is fairly well-known in the Stanly County, North Carolina area, but I find no sign of the song that doesn't seem to derive from the Journal's source, Heath Thomas. According to North Carolina legend, at least, Alec Whitley was not just lawless but sadistic. He was also apparently known as "Alex Whitley."
The major recent book on the topic is Hartsell's. Hartsell is Whitley's great-granddaughter, and her goal seems to be to give an alternate view of Whitley's death -- to argue that what most viewed as justice, if vigilante justice, was in fact just vigilanteism. But the book is so disorganized, illogical, and tendentious that I eventually was reduced to skipping large parts. I hope I have managed to extract the more useful parts for the essay that follows.
Older and shorter, but more reliable, is David Almond's The Lynching of Alec Whitley. I have corresponded with the author (a collateral relative of Whitley two of his great-grandparents were cousins of Whitley). He became interested in Whitley folklore as a boy in the mid-twentieth century, so the story was remembered for a long time. Almond also has a good selection of photographs of the Burris/Whitley family, including Judy Burris (p. 21), D. B. Tucker (p. 22), and Sheriff Isaiah Snuggs (p. 23), but not Alec Whitley himself (evidently none of Whitley has survived).
Baker, p. 226, says that "Whitley was the illegitimate son of Christian Burris [elsewhere spelled Burroughs] and Susanna Whitley, a member of a prominent local family. Alec grew up from a troubled boy into a troublesome man, drinking, fighting, and stealing." According to Almond, p. 1, family members made at least one attempt to force Burris and Whitley to legitimize their relationship and marry, but Burris managed to escape. Burris and Whitley had a long relationship, though; she bore him children in 1846 or so, in 1853, and in 1858. "The fourth child of Susanna Whitley and Christian Burris was a son, Alexander, born in 1861. It was Alexander, or Alec, as he came to be called, who was the most tragic product of this adulterous union and perhaps one of the most notorious figures in Stanly County history."
The genealogy preceding p. 1 of Almond says that his father's full name was Joshua Christian Burris (born 1819), and that Alec was born September 15, 1861.
(Sharpe, p. 228, seems at least to confirm that the Whitleys were important in Stanly County. In the 1850 census, the first to enumerate Stanly County as an independent county, there were 5279 residents; by 1890, it was up to 12,136. So even in 1890, just about everybody knew everyone else. Sharpe counts all the family names found in at least eight households in 1850. There were thirty such names, and all three involved in the Whitley story are among them: There were eight Burrises, ten Tuckers, and fourteen Whitleys.)
In both 1883 and 1885, Whitley was put on trial for stealing (apparently for the same crime, based on Almond, p. 3; he was convicted, then granted a new trial, which he skipped out on for many months). In the first trial, his brother-in-law Bud Cagle was also prosecuted -- and turned states' evidence, then disappeared. Cagle was no paragon of virtue; between 1883 and 1885, he was charged in various jurisdictions with fighting, "burning a house," and larceny (Almond, p. 4). His disappearance led to suggestions that Whitley had killed him or forced him to flee the state (Baker, p. 227). It appears that no one knows what became of Cagle, who disappeared around 1887; no identifiable body was ever found. The belief that Whitley had murdered him was apparently widespread -- but Almond, p. 5, believes that Cagle's testimony had not harmed Whitley, so there was no real reason for murder.
Whitley's wife Mary died some time after that, as did some of their children, and at some point Whitley went to Arkansas. (There was a rumor, probably false, that he helped along his wife's death; Almond, p. 9. There are a *lot* of rumors in this story!) He apparently traveled with his half-sister Judy Burris; they pretended to be husband and wife (Almond, p. 5; Baker, p. 227).
The man Whitley was accused of murdering in Arkansas was another Stanly County native, Daniel Burton Tucker (Hartsell, p. 5). Tucker was the husband of Sophia Morton (yet another of those Old Stanly Families), whom Hartsell, p. 22, says was Whitley's first cousin once removed (based on the genealogy on p. xi of Hartsell, which seems to have been designed to be incomprehensible, it looks as if Morton was the son of Sara Burris, daughter of Allen Burris, brother of Whitley's father J. C. Burris). Tucker went to Arkansas in 1890 (so Baker, p. 227; Hartsell dates his departure to 1891).
Hartsell reproduces an image of Tucker on p. 26. He was born in 1856, and was well enough educated (by the standards of the time) to have been a schoolteacher -- and, apparently, a good one (Hartsell, p. 28 -- though there wasn't much to compare him to; the schools in Stanly County were so bad that in 1893 they decided that even having a school superintendent was a too-expensive luxury; Sharpe, p. 71).
t's easy to see why Whitley went west; Stanly County was too hot for him. The reason Tucker went there is less clear. Romantic accounts suggest he was interested in Judy Burris (Almond, p. 6; the Arkansas Gazette account quoted on p. 29 of Almond, reported "It seems that Tucker and Burris [=Whitley] were both in love with the half sister, Judah [sic.] Burris"; similarly an account in the Aransas Democrat on p. 31 of Almond, although it uses the name "Juda Burris"). Perhaps a better explanation is that Tucker gambled (he had been expelled from college for gambling; Almond, p. 8), and was accused of various property crimes (Hartsell, pp. 28-29). It sounds to me as if he might have been a gambling addict who turned to crime to pay off his losses. And he perhaps went to Arkansas when he wore out his welcome in North Carolina. When he left North Carolina, he left behind debts and court cases -- and a pregnant wife who had already borne him four or five children; he wrote home about wanting cheaper land and finding nicer people (Hartsell, pp. 30-31).
Could his fight with Whitley have been because he had dishonored Whitley's cousin? Alternately, could it have been a quarrel between thieves?
There are multiple accounts of what happened next, which cannot be reconciled; Almond, pp. 6-8, summarizes the stories that were told. What is certain is that Whitley -- or someone -- killed Tucker in 1892 (precise date uncertain; probably between January and April; Almond, p. 8), dismembering and hiding the body. (Whitley himself, at the time of his lynching, claimed that someone named "Goodman" had killed Tucker, but if so, the man was never found; Almond, p. 13.) The mutilations were such that an Arkansas paper compared the job to the work of Jack the Ripper (Hartsell, p. 27). Whitley and Burris left the area before the body was discovered, but separated before Whitley made it back to North Carolina (Baker, p. 227). Both would end up in custody in the Tucker case.
Whitley apparently arrived in Stanly County around the beginning of June 1892. He was soon identified (Sharpe, p. 252) and was taken into custody on June 6, 1892 (Almond, p. 10). The sheriff was afraid of mob violence, and put a guard on Whitley and had people try to calm the crowd (Almond, p. 12), but before the Arkansas authorities could take him back for trial, a mob took him from the custody of the sheriff and lynched him (Baker, p. 227), burying him "in a crude box in the shadow of the same red oak tree" (Sharpe, p. 253).
At least, that's where tradition said he was buried. It is not clear that his body was ever there; when the grave was opened in 1931, "little was found" and the few bones that were there were not demonstrated to be human (Almond, p. 14), although the remnants were moved to another site.
In addition to the murder of Tucker and the disappearance of Cagle, Whitley was also suspected of murdering his wife and two children (Hartsell, p. 41). But there seems to be no surviving evidence on any of those cases. The connection with Tucker is stronger, because parts of it come from Judy Burris after she was captured and questioned (Hartsell, p. 40). Hartsell's account is extremely hard to follow, and Almond's account of it is brief, but it appears Burris says that Whitley, a few days before Tucker died, hit him with a stick. This was not immediately fatal, but Tucker was dead not long after. Hartsell thinks the fact that Tucker did not die at once acquits Whitley, but concussions and internal bleeding often take time to kill! Burris said that an otherwise-unknown "Wilson" dismembered Tucker's body (Hartsell, pp. 43-45, with the actual statement printed on pp. 46-47. Hartsell, p. 42, points out that none of Burris's testimony was ever corroborated -- and therefore therefore would have us think it is false -- but it's very nearly the only evidence we have. Burris claimed that Whitley threatened her to keep her silent, which seems strange, but Hartsell, p. 48, says Burris lived until 1957, when she was 85 years old, and Hartsell offers no evidence that Burris was ever in trouble again, so I see no inherent reason to doubt her testimony. Almond reports, p. 15, that she soon moved to South Carolina; hard to blame her!)
Hartsell, p. 40, thinks Whitley was lynched because of the murders he was suspected of in North Carolina, not for the death of Tucker. This seems not unlikely, since Whitley was apparently not facing justice for those suspected murders. To me, that hints that there are some missing verses at the beginning of this song.
The lynching itself is confirmed by newspaper reports; the Concord Standard reports that some 75 disguised men came to the jail and demanded that Sheriff I. W. Snuggs turn Whitley over to them. Snuggs refused to give them the keys, so they broke into the cell, took Whitley out, and hanged him. The newspaper reports that Whitley admitted to the mob that Tucker was killed in his house but denied that he was the killer. This newspaper account is on pp. 94-95 of Hartsell. I note, however, that she dates the issue June 9, 1892 -- which is hardly possible since that was the date of the lynching!
I find it interesting that Sheriff Snuggs was not elected to another term as sheriff after 1894 (Sharpe, p. 248), although that was not particularly exceptional; in this period, few Stanly County sheriffs served more than five years.
The killing of Whitley was said to be the first lynching in Stanly County (Hartsell, p. 6, whose book title is derived from the words heard at a time, "Stanly had a lynching"); indeed, Sharpe, p. 253, as late as 1972 regarded it as the only lynching. It is noteworthy that the first lynching in the county was of a white man. On the other hand, it wasn't a very populous county. And there certainly was racial violence there later; in the years prior to World War I, when an aluminum plant was being built in the county, many "'accidents' happened because some black man 'sassed' the foreman or otherwise disobeyed orders"; there was also a case where a clerk killed a "biggety" black man (Sharpe, p. 19). Segregation remained absolute until the Civil Rights era forced things to change -- and even in 1972, the churches remained entirely segregated (Sharpe, p. 40).
The date of Whitley's lynching seems to be a little uncertain. The song agrees with his tombstone in dating it to June 10, 1892 (You can see his gravestone at findagrave.com; it gives his birth date as September 15, 1861). Hartsell also has a photo of the gravestone, but says it is wrong (on which point everyone seems to agree); Whitley was actually killed June 9, 1892; this is also the date given on p. 227 of Baker. Possibly the confusion came because Whitley's body was dug up and properly reburied by Whitley's daughter, Hartsell's grandmother, Nelia Ann Whitley Barbee, who was illiterate and could not read the stone. But the lynching happened at night, so there might have been witnesses who gave different times, before and after midnight, and hence different dates. Or they might have forgotten the date, or not known -- this was not a highly-educated community.
Baker, p. 231, claims this song is based on "Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?" -- but the fit is not good. The verses of this repeat the first line three times then use a different fourth line. But "Were You There" repeats the first line twice, has a different third line, then repeats the first line again. I can't sing the Thomas text to the tune of "Were You There" that I know.
The fact that the song uses the date on the tombstone is interesting because, as mentioned above, the song was published by Heath Thomas (David Almond tells me he first published it in the Salisbury (NC) Post in 1949, whom Hartsell, p. 49, says revived the Alec Whitley story. Her clear implication is that it is a smear campaign conducted by Thomas (for no reason that I can see; on p. 49 she says he was a crime fiction writer who "mixed fragments of truth with elements of fantasy. melodrama, and imagination" to create the NorthCarolinaFolkloreJournal article). She insinuates that he made up the song (p. 56) -- which would explain why he might have taken the date from a tombstone. But Thomas had a recording of it by one Russell McIntire (Hartsell, p. 57).
Baker, pp. 227-228, and Almond, p. 226, have another piece about Whitley, "Lines Written on the Assassination of D. B. Tucker." They attributes this to Rev. Edmond P. Harrington. The form is based on "Edwin (Edmund, Edward) in the Lowlands Low" [Laws M34], which Baker falsely calls a Child Ballad. Baker's copy is a printed broadside. Baker, p. 229, thinks Harrington's piece was written to be sold when Whitley was legally executed; it doesn't mention the lynching (though it does mention Judy Burris as well as Whitley and Tucker). This strikes me as not unlikely, but I see no evidence that Harrington's song entered tradition. Hartsell, pp. 17-18, also prints the piece, but with comments that show she has no understanding whatsoever of broadsides, folk music, or oral tradition (or of square dances, where she claims it was sung!). She thinks Harrington wrote it *for the lynching* -- indeed, she thinks (p. 38) that his purpose in writing it was to induce the lynching. Which is all but impossible, chronologically -- there was no time to print it!
David Almond made an interesting comment about the history of this song: "I do *not* agree with Lynette Hartsell and Bruce Baker that a song ballad was written before and sung at the lynching. Over 50 years when I was doing my research I interviewed numerous elderly people whose parents were alive at the time of the lynching and knew many people kin to Alec Whitley and possibly involved in the lynching.  None of these people ever mention the singing of any songs during the lynching itself.  None of the original newspaper articles (reprinted in the back of my booklet) mention any singing of ballads at the lynching.  While I cannot say that the ballad was *not* written before the lynching, I simply doubt it for the reasons mentioned."
Of course, most songs are written after the event; Harrington's broadside is a (probable) exception, but it's not traditional. The question is about the song quoted by Heath Thomas. I could argue that one either way.
For those interested in the history behind this ballad, I must say that I found Hartsell extraordinarily disappointing; her sole goal seems to be to eliminate the stain on her ancestor's name even if she has no basis for it; her notion of "research" strikes me as utterly inadequate, and she jumps to conclusions and thereafter treats them as gospel. She certainly doesn't understand oral tradition, or folklore; she assumes that, if a legend has acquired one detail that is known to be false, then it is all fiction; and she assumes that if a crime has not been proved at law, then it did not happen. And she's incoherent. Frankly, the fact that she had to use such poor arguments in an attempt to defend Whitley makes me more inclined to believe him guilty. Almond's account is much better, but because it mostly sticks to what is known, it often leaves us frustrated that we don't know more. As he says on page 15, "Whether Alec was guilty of the cries charged against him is something that will most likely never be known for sure. The whole truth about Bud Cagle, Bert Tucker and the other alleged murders will probably never come to light. It has all been obscured by the lynching of Alec Whitley." - RBW
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