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Updated: May 20, 2025
If the claimant in this mysterious case was really Jesse Bunkley, it may be said of him that his sins had found him out. The wit and humor of Georgia stand by themselves. They have no counterpart in any other section of the country. Many attempts have been made to imitate them, but there is always something lacking. The flavor, the "bouquet," the aroma, is gone.
Some of the witnesses who had known Jesse from his boyhood testified that they recognized the claimant as Bunkley on sight. Bunkley had various scars on his face, neck, and body. The claimant exhibited all these to the jury. One of the witnesses remembered that Bunkley bore the marks of a snake bite on one of his legs. The claimant immediately showed these marks.
Lowther, his mother, received a letter from a person claiming to be her son Jesse. The letter was dated at the New Orleans prison. It appears from this letter that the family of Bunkley had already taken steps to disown the person who had written to Major Smith, and who claimed to be Jesse Bunkley. The letter to Mrs. Lowther was very awkwardly written.
She was satisfied, she said, that the letter was not in her son's handwriting. The person claiming to be Jesse L. Bunkley reached Jones County some time afterwards. His case, in the nature of things, excited great public interest. Hundreds of people who had known Jesse recognized him in this claimant.
This verdict and sentence settled the case in law, but it remained as unsettled as ever in the public mind. The writer of this has heard it discussed on more than one occasion among old ladies and gentlemen who knew Bunkley, and who saw the claimant; and, without exception, they declared that the verdict of the jury was cruelly unjust.
On the other hand, hundreds who had also known Bunkley when a boy failed to recognize him in the claimant. Meanwhile those who had charge of the Bunkley property took prompt action. They went before the grand jury, and had the claimant indicted for cheating and swindling; and thus began the celebrated case of the State against Elijah Barber, alias Jesse L. Bunkley.
More than forty disinterested persons declared under oath that they believed the claimant to be Jesse L. Bunkley, and the majority of these last witnesses had known Bunkley long and intimately.
Those who survived him were more than willing to take the care and trouble of managing the estate which young Bunkley would have inherited had he returned and claimed it. But in 1833, Major Smith of Jones County received a letter purporting to be from Jesse L. Bunkley, and it related to matters that both Smith and Bunkley were familiar with. In December, 1833, Mrs.
It has had no parallel in Georgia before or since, and had none in any other country, so far as the present writer is aware, until the celebrated Tichborne case was brought to trial in England a few years ago. The Bunkley case created quite as much excitement, and caused quite as much division in public opinion in Georgia, as the Tichborne case did in England.
In his twentieth year, 1825, being well supplied with money, he left his home for the purpose of traveling. He went to the Southwest, and in that year wrote to his mother from New Orleans. No other letter was received from him during that year or the next, and in 1827 word was brought to Jones County that Jesse Bunkley was dead.
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