At the Dead Hours of Midnight: A Bloody Reign of Terror in the Great Smoky Mountains

A vigilante group called The White Caps of Sevier County organized in Sevier County, Tennessee, in the early 1890s. Their original mission was an expression of community consensus, meant to enforce community standards of conduct and behavior when a group of prostitutes arrived in a rural, mountainous community in that county - Emert's Cove/Copeland Creek. The original White Caps were believed to have been a group of wives and a couple of men, who threatened the prostitutes with a whipping if they didn't leave. The prostitutes didn't leave, and the White Caps made good on their promise. It is believed the postmaster of Emert's Cove, John Sam Springs, organized another vigilante group, The Blue Bills, to counter the White Caps. Springs was evidently successful in eradicating the White Caps in Emert's Cove, but they soon metastasized throughout the rest of the county's civil districts.

A group of rogue Justices of the Peace aligned with the wealthiest, most prominent landowners in Sevier County, and they soon organized White Cap gangs. As a result, "crimes, feuds, and vendettas raged on unchecked in Sevier County in the name of a non-existent consensus that circumvented justice and destroyed the 'fragile social equilibrium' that insured honor within the community."

Justices of the Peace dismissed minor cases against White Caps, then because they made up Sevier County's County Court, the body responsible for empaneling Grand Juries, they placed White Caps on Grand Juries and Petit Juries when White Caps were defendants.

The White Caps, organized by the Justices of the Peace and financially supported by wealthy landowners, were the tool the wealthy landowners used to maintain and exercise power in their civil districts.

Eventually one of the county's wealthiest citizens, William Robert "Bob" Catlett, hired two men, James Catlett Tipton and Pleasant D. Wynn, to kill Bill and Laura Whaley because they testified against him at a Grand Jury. Tipton and Wynn killed the Whaleys on December 28, 1896, were eventually convicted and hanged on July 5, 1899. Catlett was tried five times and was ultimately acquitted of the charges.