Kingdom of Devils: A Tale of Murder in the Shadow of the American Revolution

The chilling true story of a brutal string of deaths on the post-Revolutionary frontier that reveal the violence at the heart of the young United States

“In Cold Blood for the 1790s . . . Part true crime, part western, part ghost story, Kingdom of Devils plumbs the dark underbelly of the American West in the years following the Revolution.”—Jane Kamensky, president and CEO, Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello

Kentucky, 1798: A harrowing series of murders begins. The first body, discovered by cattle drovers, lies bloody at the bottom of a ridge. Then another—a dead boy staring up from a sinkhole. Bodies turn up along roadsides, stuffed into brush. They float to the surface of muddy brooks. For nine terrifying months, over hundreds of miles of Kentucky and Tennessee countryside, the terror unfolds. The killers—two men with hazy backgrounds—are brothers, named Wiley and Micajah Harp.

The Harps killed dozens, but why they did it has eluded folklorists and historians for generations. Almost every story imagines that their motive was pure bloodlust, but for historian Katherine Grandjean, that’s too simple. Instead, she uses the Harp murders to reveal the dark side of the young United States’ independence. These were uncertain and dangerous years—a time when the fledgling federal government could do little to protect its citizens. And if the American Revolution was liberating, it was also deeply destabilizing, politically and socially. Even as it built up some men, it stacked the deck against others, punishing them with volatile markets, lost safety nets, and shattered aspirations. Unspooling the mystery of what sent the Harps reeling exposes the hidden, violent legacies of the revolutionary era.

Bristling with tense, page-turning storytelling—and driven by a historian’s obsessive detective work—Kingdom of Devils recovers these long-forgotten murders as a haunting tale about the darkness at the heart of the American dream.

Katherine Grandjean is an associate professor of history at Wellesley College, where her research explores early American and Native American history, environmental history, and violence in American history. Her first book is American Passage: The Communications Frontier in Early New England. She has been the recipient of several major research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Antiquarian Society, and the American Council of Learned Societies, among others.