Alabama Scoundrels by Kelly Kazek

Author:Kelly Kazek
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2014-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

A wooden gallows was erected outside the jail. Pitts, who had spent the intervening years recording Copeland’s memories, was to act as executioner. The day was beautiful, typical of a fall day in the Deep South. Pitts wrote, “The sky was blue and serene, all nature was clam and peaceful.”

The sheriff estimated ten thousand spectators attended. Copeland addressed the crowd. “He especially urged the young men present to take warning from his career and fate and to avoid bad company,” Pitts wrote.

With his hands tied and a hood pulled over his head, Copeland uttered: “Lord have mercy on me!”

Copeland was praying when the trapdoor fell and his neck was broken.

No one came to claim Copeland’s body, so he was buried in a steep bank, but his body disappeared after a few days, Pitts wrote.

A legend arose that a skeleton on display in a drugstore in Hattiesburg was Copeland’s remains, strung with wire. The gruesome artifact “finally disappeared and has never been seen again,” Pitts wrote.

J.R.S. Pitts published his account of Copeland’s memories of the gang’s “perfect reign of terror” in the 1858 book Life and Confessions of the Noted Outlaw James Copeland: Executed at Augusta, Perry County, Mississippi; Leader of the Notorious Copeland and Wages Clan Which Terrorized the Entire Southern States, Related by Himself in Prison after He Was Condemned to Death, Giving a List of All Members of the Clan.

In a “Sketch of the Author” in the front of an edition of the book released in 1909, Pitts was described as “courageous” for acting as Copeland’s jailer when, at any moment, members of the brutal gang might attempt to free him: “Few sheriffs ever served through such trying times, for during the entire time after Copeland became a prisoner under him there, there was not an hour that his life was not in danger and not a day that there was not a risk to be taken in the discharge of some duty which only a brave, courageous, conscientious officer would have dared to perform.”

The introduction says the sale of the book was “progressing wonderfully” until Pitts was sued in Mobile for libel because of the people named in the book.

However, Pitts had signed certificates from witnesses saying they heard Copeland give Pitts permission to reveal his story, including this one from T.C. Carter of Mobile, who wrote, “This is to certify that I was present at the execution of James Copeland, who was executed in Augusta, Perry County, Miss., the 30th day of October, 1857; and heard the Sheriff, JRS Pitts, ask him, the said James Copeland, if the detailed history and list of names given as members of the Wages and Copeland clan were correct, and he answered the Sheriff in the affirmative that they were.”

Pitts eventually won his case and, in the rerelease of the book, gave an account of the trial justifying publication of the book.

With the gang disbanded, Pitts hung up his sheriff’s badge, went to medical college and became a physician and later served as a Mississippi legislator, postmaster and county superintendent.

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