Abstract and Table of Contents for Bad Boys on the Family Tree and the 1861 Courtroom Murder in Dover, Tennessee

 

Stewart County Courthouse, Dover, Tennessee (1900)

 ABSTRACT

On February 8, 1861, the day before Tennessee voters elected Secession Convention delegates, Will Daniel and his Sexton cousin gunned down a witness in the Stewart County Courthouse. Suspecting the alleged assassins fall on her family tree, Kansas-born CD Burr revisits family stories of violent Daniel-Sexton ancestors and investigates 19th century documents to determine the criminals’ identities. As a result, the author uncovers a compelling, nonfiction narrative set in a Tennessee village at the dawn of the Civil War.

 

Bad Boys on the Family Tree and the 1861 Courtroom Murder in Dover, Tennessee transports readers to an antebellum crime scene, explores court documents and local histories, and considers how 21st century stereotypes of antebellum Southerners affect research.

 

In the grand jury document, State of Tennessee v. W.C. Daniel (1861), more than twenty eyewitnesses disclose facts about the courtroom murder and unleash elements of a true-crime docuseries: complicated characters, plot twists, an escalating feud, and the curious disappearance of the criminals. In addition, grand jury testimonies resurrect distant voices of everyday people tending to local concerns of law and order amid exploding national divisiveness—voices that eventually underscore their humanity and dissolve the author’s stereotypes of and contempt for her violent, Southern ancestors.

TABLE of CONTENTS

Foreword

Cast of Characters Introduced in Chapters One Through Ten

Chapter One: “Bloodstains on the Courtroom Floor”

Chapter Two: "Large Enough to Kill a Man” 

Chapter Three: "A Fatal Difficulty”       

Chapter Four: “The Tools of Death”  

Chapter Five: “Escape and a Dungeon”

Chapter Six: “The Killing of Nathan Terry”

Chapter Seven: “The Feud”

Chapter Eight: “Honor and Indictment”

Chapter Nine: “When Roused, A Lion”

Chapter Ten:  “Civil War”

Chapter Eleven: “Who Were These People?”

Epilogue

Acknowledgments  

Appendices

Endnotes

Bibliography

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