A former Confederate spy killed in the street…with a shovel…by a founding member of the Ku Klux Klan? It happened in Lawrenceburg on this day in 1876.

The Pulaski ‘Citizen’ tells us that on July 11, 1876, W.B. Chaffin was “drinking and creating a great disturbance” in Lawrenceburg. A constable attempted to arrest Chaffin, but was unable to complete the job alone, so Sheriff James K. Garner set out to bring Chaffin to justice. To aid in the task, Sheriff Garner summoned Circuit Court Clerk John B. Kennedy, pictured here.

Chaffin was the clerk and master of the chancery court during the Civil War. Despite taking the oath of allegiance to the Federal government and outwardly professing to be a Union man, Chaffin often harbored Confederate guerrillas in his home, and appeared around town to be quite familiar with their activities. During the Civil War, local Unionists suspected that he was a Confederate spy.

Kennedy was a native of Giles County, a veteran of the Confederate Army, and was one of the six original members of the Ku Klux Klan, which was founded in Pulaski in 1865. Some years after the war, he moved to Lawrenceburg, married the only daughter of Dr. Ephraim McClain, and settled in the house known as Monument Hill, just south of the Public Square.

When Garner and Kennedy approached Chaffin to take him to jail that day in 1876, Chaffin saw them coming, and drew his pistol on the sheriff. Acting fast, Kennedy took up a nearby spade and struck Chaffin in the head twice, the first blow with the flat side of the spade, and the second blow with the sharp edge.

The second blow fractured Chaffin’s skull. The paper tells us that Dr. Grant was summoned to the scene, but there was little he could do. Chaffin clung to life, and appeared to make a slow recovery until suffering a relapse of continual convulsions on November 30 of that year. He died on December 22.

The paper reports that Kennedy was to be tried for the action on July 19. Although it doesn’t give us the verdict, whatever punishment he faced must not have been too harsh; Kennedy is listed as among those who attended a reunion of the Third Tennessee Infantry in Lynnville the following October.