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Wilkes

October 27, 2023

Alexander Moxley’s Demise

On August 21, 1865, Jane Moxley visited the home of Wesley Joines who was a Justice of the Peace in Traphill Township to report a serious crime. She said that on September 28 of the previous year, a group of local men came to her house and murdered her husband Alexander Moxley. She said that the crime was committed by Lewis Bauguess, A. J. Holloway, Reuben Sparks, Hardin Brown, James Bowman, and James Estep. All of these families lived within a mile or so of Stone Mountain State Park.

Alexander Moxley married Jane Hutchinson about 1861. He was 17 years old, and she was about 21. Their daughter Rose Ann was born in 1861, and daughter Matilda Ellen was born in 1863. They were both babies when their father was killed by the group of men in Traphill. I looked at several family trees online, and none of them list a death date for Alexander Moxley. His death was hidden among the criminal court papers for Wilkes County.

Front side of the order to arrest the six men, dated August 21, 1865.

Back side of the order to arrest.

Unfortunately, these pages don’t explain exactly what happened. They only call for the arrest of the six men in a preliminary hearing to determine if there was enough evidence to hold a trial. There was. They were found guilty in this indictment hearing, and “committed to the jail of Wilkes Borough” on August 24, 1865. Ruffin Kennedy was deputed to arrest them.

Jane Hutchinson Moxley, the 25-year-old widow, was a great-granddaughter of Capt. Robert Cleveland whose home is behind the Wilkes Heritage Museum. And coincidently, the jail where the guilty men were held is beside the Cleveland home. As part of the guided tour, you can visit both buildings. Jane’s brother John Hutchinson was the first in the family to live at the homestead at the foot of Stone Mountain.

As for the men who committed the crime, their names have shown up several times among the criminal court records I’ve seen. Lewis W. Bauguess was born in 1828, the son of Robert Bauguess. The Siamese Twins, Eng and Chang Bunker, rented a room in his father’s home in the 1830s when Lewis was a boy. Lewis was married with several children in the 1850 census. He’s missing in the 1860 census, and then in 1870 he is living with a new family in Nicholas Co, KY, near Lexington. I wonder if he escaped his capture, ran off to Kentucky, and never returned.

Another member of the gang, Andrew Jackson Holloway has his own peculiar situation. He was born in 1817 and had four children. After the death of his first wife about 1851, he married Matilda Pratt who had at least three children still living with her from her previous marriage. Together, they had three more children before the 1860 census. But the surprising part of the story is that Matilda was Andrew’s step-mother. Wait for that to sink in. She had recently been widowed after the death of Andrew’s father, and they soon married each other. The 1860 census lists them with 16 children in the household! By 1870, they were living in Union Co, Georgia.

1860s newspaper article about the Andrew Jackson Holloway family.

Moving down the list, the next name is Reuben Sparks. He’s tough to identify because there were five men named Reuben Sparks in the 1860 census between the ages of 17 and 61. All of them lived close together.

There’s only one Hardin Brown in the 1860 census, but he’s only 13 years old. He would have been 17 years old when the murder occurred. He was the son of Irishman John Brown who lived at Stone Mountain. Other men in the area might have had “Hardin” as their middle name.

James Bowman was born in 1833 and joined the 33^rd NC Infantry on October 4, 1861. He deserted the army in 1862, and returned in 1863. He was absent again on June 1, 1864. During his absence from the army, he must have returned home in time to participate in the murder on September 28. He had a wife and two young children in 1860. He was living in Lee Co, KY, in 1870.

Finally, James Estep is not listed in the 1860 Wilkes County census. There is someone by that name in Alleghany County, but he was born in 1849, the son of Berry Estep. He would have been only 15 years old when the murder occurred.

Returning to the victim, Alexander Moxley enlisted in the 3^rd Mounted Inf of the Union Army in Knoxville, TN, on June 1, 1864. Jane reported that he had been killed on September 28. An article in the Alleghany County Heritage book says that in 1849 the Moxley family moved from Ashe County to Wilkes near Stone Mountain. The article says that Alexander was in the war and came home. He refused to fight for the Confederacy, and the Home Guard shot him in the back. “The family made a casket out of a hollow log and buried Alexander in it. His mother Phoeba miscarried twins when he was killed.”**

While James Bowman is the only one that I’ve identified as having served in the Confederate Army, the other families – Bauguess, Holloway, Sparks, and Brown – had many relatives who did so. To them, Alexander Moxley was a traitor, fighting for the wrong side and killing their sons and brothers. The Home Guard was often a loosely-defined group of thugs made up of men who were too old to be drafted, too young to join the Army, or who had deserted their regiments. If they weren’t in the Confederate Army, men would sometimes claim that they were in the Home Guard as an excuse for not serving. There was little oversight of their actions, and they often terrorized their vulnerable neighbors.

I can imagine the gang hiding in the woods and spying on his house. One day, they spotted Alexander while he was secretly visiting his young family. They came to his home, gave him one last chance to switch sides, and when he refused, they killed him. His widow Jane likely waited nearly a year to report the murder because of the ongoing war. By August 1865, the Civil War had just ended, the Union had won, and she finally felt safe enough to report the loss of her husband.

We can only imagine how difficult life was during that time.

It's amazing how a story can be told by discovering one piece of paper. Of course we still don’t know all of the details, but there was a lot of violence away from the battlefield during the Civil War, and this is just one example of that.

**Thanks to Marlene Myers-Josephsohn on Facebook for pointing out article #523 in the Alleghany County Heritage book that tells the family story that was passed down about Alexander Moxley. [Updated 10/28/23.]

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