Child of God

McCarthy incorporates the history of vigilantism in Sevier County in the 1890s into the plot and themes of his novel. The account of the White Caps and Blue Bills by Mr. Wade is historically accurate and illustrates the blurred lines between law enforcement, morality policing, and mob justice that reigned in the area at that time.

Historically, Sevier County was an isolated region in the Smoky Mountains of Eastern Tennessee. In nearby Knoxville, Sevier County residents were regarded as backward. The narrator John’s implied dislike of John Greer—who comes from Grainger County, bordering Knoxville—indicates this parochialism. Sevier County residents considered themselves self-sufficient people in the spirit of the American pioneer; however, their reliance on trade with the nearest cities belied this myth (Cummings, William Joseph. “Community, Violence, and the Nature of Change: Whitecapping in Sevier County, Tennessee, During the 1890’s.” 1988. University of Tennessee, Masters Theses. TRACE, p. 31). In Child of God, Lester tethers himself to this mythology of self-sufficiency.

The county’s vigilante justice was motivated by the elites’ desire to root out indecent behavior in the community, particularly among women, and to secure their economic status. Sevier County suffered an economic downturn during the Reconstruction era following the Civil War. However, with a small Black population and many veterans of the Union Army, this depression didn’t result in racial violence as it did elsewhere. Instead, Sevier County became economically stratified between the wealthy, who owned flat farmable land, and the poorer people who farmed the mountainous terrain. Worsening this stratification, many who inherited small farms lost them to unpaid taxes and had them sold at sheriff’s sales (31). In the novel, this is how Ballard loses his family’s farm. This economic stratification strained the sense of community in many parts of the county, resulting in a change in the nature of local vigilantism.

The main vigilante group that dominated the region was the White Caps, a secret society whose members wore white hoods and tacked notices to residents’ doors, warning them of the consequences of their alleged indecent behavior. Punishment involved public whipping, and victims often died. A rival group known as the Blue Bills arose to combat the White Caps, leading to a shootout known as the Battle of Henderson Springs in 1984 in which several individuals were killed. After a series of high-profile murders and conspiracies perpetrated by and against the White Caps, Sheriff Thomas Davis reformed the regional justice system and ended the group’s illegal activity.

McCarthy emphasizes the problem of mob justice in Child of God with the re-emergence of vigilantism following Lester’s murders. The gang that abducts Lester is prepared to lynch him, but their inept intervention backfires, reminiscent of the Blue Bills’ failures to stop the White Caps: In trying to force Lester into revealing his victims, they inadvertently free him.

In Child of God, McCarthy deconstructs the law-and-order resistance to vigilantism by portraying the court system as equally merciless. Wade’s account of the cruelty of the execution of Wynn and Tipton (real-life White Caps and murderers) illustrates that there was just as much desire for violence in state-sanctioned justice as there was in whitecapping, adding to the novel’s theme of The Violence Inherent to Humanity.