The Appalachian Mountains had always harbored their share of outlaws, men who defied the law and lived by the rules of the ridges. But among all those who left a trail of violence through those hills, none was more hated than Moses Harshoe. He was so despised that when he finally died, they planted a thorn bush over his grave and placed a headstone that read simply: “Died and gone to hell. ” This is his true story.
The story begins in 1794 in Burke County, North Carolina, on a bitterly cold winter night. Snow lay deep on the highlands, and temperatures had not risen above freezing for nearly two weeks. That night, a blood-red moon rose over Pine Mountain, and as midnight approached, winds from the heights rattled the shutters of a remote cabin. Inside, a young mother struggled through labor, and near midnight she gave birth to a son she named Moses.
It was said that when the midwife saw the child’s eyes, she refused payment for her services. The old folks claimed the flames in the fireplace turned blue the moment Moses took his first breath. Others said the fire went out entirely, as if sucked into a void. Whatever the truth, one fact was undisputed: the boy who opened his eyes that night grew into a man so cruel that the very earth seemed to hate him.
Little is known of Moses’s childhood, as the family moved constantly across the Carolina hills. Wherever they went, strange events began to occur. Because the mountain folk believed strongly in portents and superstitions, the elders of those communities would tell the family they were not welcome, and the Harshoes would load their wagons and move on. It can be said with certainty, however, that someone in that household ensured Moses received an education unusual for a backcountry child, because by his twenties he was practicing law.
The law became a weapon in Moses Harshoe’s hands. By 1814, Moses married a young woman named Nancy England, who was about seventeen years old. Any softness she might have hoped to find in her husband would soon evaporate. In 1822, sixty-one families left the highlands of North Carolina and began making their way toward Georgia.
Moses and Nancy were among the first arrivals. They left Burke County and crossed the mountains until they reached the Nacoochee Valley, once the heart of the Cherokee nation. The United States government had seized this land from the Cherokee in 1818, and Moses Harshoe was among the first white men to settle there before the ink on the treaty had even dried. There, Moses and Nancy raised seven children.
Moses built an impressive country home overlooking his kingdom of mountains, valleys, and streams that teemed with gold. But Moses never worked that land himself. Instead, he used twenty enslaved people to do it. He spent his days practicing law in Clarksville.
He was a ruthless businessman who owned property near the town square and had his hands in all kinds of enterprises. He was a surveyor, a prospector, a lawyer, and above all, a man who settled disputes with a knife, a pistol, or even his fists. For all his shady dealings, Moses was an even worse neighbor. Between 1829 and 1844, he appeared before the court seven times on charges of assault and battery, and even manslaughter.
Though he defended himself in court, he was convicted on six of the seven charges. On one occasion, he beat a neighbor so severely that the court ordered Moses to settle the matter by handing over a fine six-year-old horse. A month later, Moses beat the man again and took the horse back. The neighbor, wiser than to return to that court, accepted the beating and said nothing.
In a land lacking laws, Moses Harshoe was one of the few who knew how to bend the law to serve only himself. Then came the land lottery decisions. In 1832, the gold-rich mountains of northern Georgia were still under Cherokee control. In one of the most brazen thefts in American history, the government simply took the land.
They decided to hold a lottery on the steps of the state capitol and distribute the land by chance. Two large iron wheels shaped like cages were set up. In one wheel were placed thousands of paper slips bearing parcels of 160 acres and gold lots of 40 acres of stolen soil, as if it had no owner. The other wheel contained the names of white men eager to amass a fortune.
For a fee of eighteen dollars and a turn of the wheel, a man could walk away with title to a piece of that ancient land. Day after day, for months, the wheel turned, and the Cherokee nation shrank. By the time it was over, more than eighteen thousand land parcels and about thirty-five hundred gold lots had been distributed. Moses Harshoe came out of that drawing with title to even more land, expanding his holdings into a vast fifteen-hundred-acre plantation.
When he received that land and found indigenous families still living on it, he burned their huts and crops and slaughtered their livestock, then warned them that his next visit would not be so gentle. He was the kind of man who enriched himself by manipulating the law and other people. He had no friends, but he had plenty of enemies. Even his wife came to despise him.
In those days, however, a wife had no escape from a cruel marriage, because divorce was illegal. Whenever Moses needed to make the thirteen-mile trip to town for supplies, he took one of his enslaved workers along to do the loading and unloading. But Moses never allowed a Black man to ride in that wagon. Instead, he would tie a leather strap around the poor man’s neck, fasten the other end to the back of the wagon, and force him to run behind it all the way to town.
And when those workers grew too old to work his farm, it was said that Moses would take them to the top of a nearby mountain and force them at gunpoint to leap to their deaths. To this day, that mountain bears the name Lynch Mountain. But of all the things he did, the most atrocious act occurred in 1849, when an enslaved girl of fourteen who had been sick for weeks died on his farm. Moses’s wife took pity on the girl, went to town, and bought a simple white dress so she could be buried with dignity.
When Moses discovered it, he immediately ordered the grave dug up, the dress removed, and returned to the store for a full refund. There was no man more contemptible than Moses Harshoe. In 1850, when divorce finally became legal, his wife was the first woman in the state to apply for and be granted one. Eight years later, when Moses finally died, his former wife and their children inherited a large portion of his estate.
She ordered the undertaker to dig a hole and bury the scoundrel in the cheapest wooden coffin, then used Moses’s own money to engrave his headstone: “Moses Harash Shaw, 1794 to 1858. Died and gone to hell. ”
Today, Moses’s final resting place lies in the old Clarksville cemetery, where a thorn tree grows from the soil of his grave. His house still stands, now operating as a bed and breakfast.
For one hundred sixty-nine dollars a night, you can sleep in Moses’s own bedroom.