Bloody Breathitt Read online

  During official war or official peace, these were premeditated acts of political violence between Unionists and Rebels (and, subsequently, militarized Republicans and Democrats) in the most prosaic sense of the word and in a more far-reaching one; known acts of violence in Breathitt usually accompanied elections, and, when they did not, they still directly affected power relations in the body politic.17 Breathitt County was subject to the contingencies of regionwide and nationwide trends—not least of these a civil war and the crisis of legitimacy that followed. However, “Bloody Breathitt” described an inherently violent place, defined by “irrationality generated by lack of information, randomness and unpredictability.”18 Violence “that arises in a modern context but will not fit the story of progress” is written off as a product of a “pre-modern culture” that conveniently casts no harsh light on the activities of powerful men.19 And all of them men; women were not part of Kentucky’s official political process until the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, and were therefore neither victims nor assailants in violence centered on electoral politics. In fact, a few of the women who played significant roles in Bloody Breathitt were able to do so only because of their separation from the exclusively male realm(s) of politics and violence (including an enslaved woman who used gastronomical sabotage against Confederate soldiers, as told in chapter 2).

  Inherency trumped contingency in most discussions of Bloody Breathitt, just as it usually has in most studies of violence in the American South. Wilbur J. Cash’s inherent “savage ideal” has long competed with (among others) C. Vann Woodward’s portrayal of a South undergoing changing contingencies of fortune and leadership. Neither interpretation has fully satisfied historians since places like South Carolina’s “Bloody Edgefield” have produced an exceptional number of murders while still reflecting the South’s regionwide contingencies.20 Readers still seem to prefer sweeping explanations based upon inherency; one recent neomodernist global study of homicide attributed the American South’s violent history to an absence of “the civilizing mission of government.”21 Perhaps the South has somehow preserved an “exceptional” culture given to pique and rapine. On the other hand, painstaking examinations of places like Breathitt County reveal a contested space where violence was deliberate, calculated, and connected with struggles for power; not, perhaps, unlike so many “trouble spots” all over the globe where political scientists, anthropologists, and historians have chosen to set aside Eurocentric, colonial assumptions about inherent violence and apply critical examination to the reasons people kill and die.

  Nothing demonstrates this better than Breathitt County’s typology of violence. Violence is not an inert substance. It has many different manifestations depending upon circumstances—a mugging and a carpet-bombing might both be deadly, but they are two very different events. In terms of quantities of injuries and deaths, Breathitt County was consistently violent, even by postbellum America’s bloody standard. However, qualitatively, Bloody Breathitt contained “model-based” varieties of violence used all over the world.22 First, during the antebellum decades, there was the violence endemic to a society with slaves. The county was a locus for guerrilla warfare during the Civil War (especially during the war’s last two years), as were other slaveholding states. When southern communities were rent apart during Congressional Reconstruction, election-related rioting and insurrection were reproduced there as well. In the 1880s and 1890s Kentuckians reacted to the disorders of rapid economic change with lynching, legal capital punishment, and mass vigilantism.23 Finally, when public assassination (like William Goebel’s) became an international recurrence, it was employed in the streets of Jackson as well. From a broad comparative perspective, Bloody Breathitt represented nothing new under the sun.

  Counterrevolutionary violence works best when the connection between means and ends is unclear, its motivations depoliticized, if not also its outcomes.24 This was the role played by feud, a word (explored in depth in chapter 7) light in definition but heavy with implications—implications of things Americans consider familiar but foreign to their republic and its politics. The feud was a popular topic in the semihistorical fiction (William Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott, Honoré de Balzac) that Victorian readers adored.25 Anthropologists consider the feud an institutional conflict within “simple societies” where individuals, factions, families, or “clans” of equal standing supposedly engage in a relatively orchestrated exchange of fights or killings based on past enmities or injustices—a mutually recognized “pact of violence.”26 No state oversight is needed since horizontal reciprocity between peers suggests moral equivalency and eliminates victimhood (Prince Escalus in Romeo and Juliet steps in only when teenagers from the two feuding families commit suicide).27

  In an American context the feud’s intimations were far more important than any of its meanings. Perhaps its most important intimation involved time, the distinction between “now” and “then.” It suggested a communal setting, the “pre-political realm of the oikos [the family] and the extra-political ‘barbarian’ world beyond the polis.”28 As popular as it was to say a century later, Victorian Americans did not believe that the personal was political; they also believed that the familial realm was to be kept apart from the public one. But they did acknowledge that their forbears believed otherwise, as did some unfortunate contemporaries they believed remained at the bottom of what Johannes Fabian has called a “temporal hierarchy”: advanced societies often find it convenient to place their less-advanced neighbors in the past.29 With white intraracial violence rampant in the decades after the Civil War (though never as widespread or politically significant as interracial white attacks on black southerners), the feud provided a grand device for tucking the violence of the present safely away in a fictive past. Southern conservatives used it to misdirect northern critics from the political nature of postwar chaos, convincing them that most—if not all—murders in isolated rural places were sui generis “ideology-free conflict[s].”30 By Reconstruction’s end many northerners had replaced their righteous anger with an acceptance of the South’s “naturally” violent predisposition; the appearance of “racial instinct,” according to historian Stephen Kantrowitz, trumped the reality of “counterrevolutionary conspiracy.”31 The feud helped Americans—northerners and southerners—write off, excuse, and forget atrocities, and helped preserve racial and economic inequality—even in a seemingly homogenous place like Breathitt County. It was always metaphorical but, if repeated enough times, metaphor often became illusory hyperbole. Its eventual indelible association with eastern Kentucky was a combination of political design, cultural happenstance, and deliberate obfuscation. By then, feud was a local description for one violent corner of a remarkably violent section of the United States. The fact that most victims were white was all that differentiated it from the rest of the South.

  This is not to suggest that feud gained currency only in America. It was a very old concept in the Western world, albeit with premodern meanings that are almost as irresolute as its modern ones. As it was understood from Icelandic sagas or the sixteenth-century Mediterranean, the feud simply did not exist in the United States. As one anthropologist has noted, “Travelers, administrators and anthropologists . . . have in the main studiously avoided formulating an exact definition of what they mean by the word feud.”32 One medievalist has even expressed doubt as to whether it was ever a “particular mental category of dispute.”33 Perhaps “feud” has always been nothing more than narrative form applied to violence after the fact, hiding bloody political expediency behind themes of vengeance, kinship, and honor.

  In the twenty-first-century Anglophone vernacular, feud has transited—like Hayden White’s “trope”—from metaphor to irony; it now whimsically suggests killing that is beyond modern America’s understanding or caring, violence that can be smirked at and “reserved for ironic treatment” in written accounts.34 It suggests that the victims and perpetrators of violence are so distant in space or time (actually or virtua
lly) or that their reasons for using violence are too arcane to investigate. For instance, isolationist congressman Hamilton Fish III spent five decades decrying Franklin Roosevelt’s involvement in “ancient blood feuds” (that is, what most Americans knew as U.S. victory in World War II).35 More recently, the feud is occasionally referenced in television dialogue when a shorthand for the brutal, antiquated, and/ or primeval is needed (most notably on The West Wing and 30 Rock, two programs known for their supercilious “blue state” viewer demographics).36

  More than anything else, the feud represents an act of segregation, a segregation of violence from its purposes. Removing the politics from political violence is something states and nonstate actors practice as a matter of course; the feud was simply a means to that end. Even now, it performs roughly the same function, though with more implied derision. Whether in the past or the present, using simplistic, disdainful language for violent death is harmful.

  Why Does Bloody Breathitt Matter?

  Thanks to journalism, popular fiction, and theatrical adaptations, the feud in a southern/Appalachian/Kentucky milieu remains a familiar subject, encapsulating historical events that underwent a “transformation from history to folklore.”37 This misappropriation was partly due to an omission by consensus historians like Richard Hofstadter, who saw “a nation placidly evolving without serious disagreements,” acknowledging only “legitimate” state violence.38 At the end of the 1960s it was becoming clear that “legitimacy is in the eye of the beholder,” and Hofstadter conceded that historians could no longer ignore political violence in their homeland even if it was “hard to cope with.”39 His Nixon-era admission coincided with a wealth of theoretical approaches to explaining political violence in a democracy.40

  This new turn also coincided with the rise in the 1970s of Appalachian studies and the first serious attempts at examining the region’s association with the feud.41 Appalachian historians attached this association to themes of economic exploitation and underdevelopment brought on by the forced transition from agriculture to industrialization.42 Feud violence, they found, was falsely attributed to “primordial explanations” for violence—definitively “illegitimate” within a wealthy nation-state (the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy uses “a feud on the order of the Hatfields versus the McCoys” as a counterexample for its definition of “war”), the better to justify exploitation by a “dominant culture.”43 Most of Appalachian historiography has been defined by its preoccupation with dismantling (in the parlance of postcolonial studies) “hierarchies of place.”44

  I, too, try to set straight issues regarding Appalachia, most notably its place in southern political history. Nothing controverts Horace Kephart’s spurious contention that preindustrial southern mountaineers “recognize[d] no social compact” better than their well-documented passion for the two-party system.45 With this in mind, I share my forbears’ interest in dispelling misconceptions about the region. However, I wish to do more than, as E. P. Thompson put it, rescue a population “from the enormous condescension of posterity” (a condescension that even the most multicultural-minded academics still cling to for some reason).46 I see a portion of the mountain landscape where a “dominant culture” was present before corporations arrived, one that gained its power from the same confluence of class and race that defined southern politics.47 I do not think that variations of the “internal colony” model effectively explain political violence. Kentucky mountaineers, at least the white male ones, were voting citizens of the American Republic (although many briefly cleaved to the Confederacy); in peace or in fighting, their citizenship motivated their political participation.

  I also think that Bloody Breathitt, the feud, and all they entail are important for reasons that extend far beyond any one region. They are important because the language we use to talk about violence is important. The concept of the feud is only one euphemistic chimera, one palatable and familiar to nineteenth-century American tastes. Since then there have been others, such as the 1950s invention of “police action” in lieu of “war.” Purposefully confusing language about killing, such as George Orwell identified in his essay “Politics and the English Language,” continues to this day. My interest in Breathitt County began during Operation: Iraqi Freedom, when “terrorist,” “militant,” and “insurgent” were bandied about interchangeably, while mercenaries became “contractors,” placing gunmen among the ranks of carpenters and electricians. Torture and imprisonment without trial were hidden behind perplexing phrases like “enhanced interrogation” and “extraordinary rendition.”48 All of that took place far from Kentucky. However, just like the word feud, this was language used to obscure, conceal, and lie in the service of, as Orwell put it, “the defense of the indefensible.”49 Violence is hegemonic, and so, too, are the words used to describe it.

  There is political violence, and then there is the politics of interpreting violence. The school shooting phenomenon, especially Columbine High School in 1999 and Virginia Tech in 2007, along with a deranged gunman’s near-fatal shooting of an Arizona congresswoman in 2011 and mass shootings in Colorado, Wisconsin, New York, and Connecticut in 2012, contributed to heated political arguments over “gun control” (a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009 was related to the “war on terror” and subsequently discussed in terms more related to geopolitics than to domestic policy) and reawakened debates over interpretation. While most of these crimes were not acts of “political violence” in the simplest sense of the phrase, they did spur political debate over the issue of “gun control.” The common theme heard from the antiregulation side suggests that we live in social science’s equivalent of a pre-Ptolemaic cosmos: acts that are “senseless,” “tragic,” or “irrational” cannot be counteracted because they passeth all understanding.50 This reductionist “senseless violence” argument, used all over the world, is itself politically motivated and disingenuous but, since most people prefer not to contemplate carnage and mayhem, it is also believable and attractive.51 What I show in later chapters is that these misleading lines of discourse have deep historical roots; it is how Breathitt County became Bloody Breathitt and it is how many homicides have gone unprevented or unpunished.

  Firearm regulation aside, we cannot deny ourselves the ability to understand the most egregious acts of cruelty or the contexts that surround them.52 Violence can be condemned without discouraging scholars from “exploring meaning, interpreting symbolic action and mapping the historical and social context of activities defined as violent.”53 Humans can understand human actions, and homicide is no exception. “[If] violence is whitewashed,” wrote Jean Baudrillard, “history is whitewashed.”54 In the interest of preventing this whitewashing, lessons must be learned from violence: the more uncomfortable these lessons make us, the more likely they are to be valuable. In 1968 Martin Luther King Jr. called urban riots “the language of the unheard.”55 Perhaps other forms of violence can also be translated and read in the interest of understanding how a country that deems itself the greatest nation on earth continues to pose so many lethal threats to its citizenry.

  1

  “TO THEM, IT WAS NO-MAN’S LAND”

  Before Breathitt Was Bloody

  Without hazarding any thing, I think, Sir, I may say, more of the happiness of this Commonwealth, depends upon the County Government under which we live, than upon the State or the United States’ Government.

  —Alexander Campbell, delegate to Virginia’s

  Second Constitutional Convention (1829)

  As an old man, George Washington Noble recalled watching a “pitched battle” when he was a child in Breathitt County, Kentucky, in the 1850s. It was a semiofficial Court Day event, a hand-to-hand tussle for money and prestige between various communities’ “champion fighters,” referred to locally as “Tessy Boys.”1 As in a duel, the fights employed seconds to prevent foul play and to give a potential deadly free-for-all a measure of ritualized order; it was, after all, around the same time that another fight wit
h no public supervision had ended in a fatal stabbing.2 In Jackson, Breathitt’s county seat, this display of fisticuffs added entertainment, and an aura of masculine brio, to a staid political and legal event, augmenting the more formal proceedings going on inside the courthouse. It was an inclusive activity, establishing democratic homosocial interactions between men from disparate neighborhoods across a very large county, gathering “high and low into deeply charged, face-to-face, ritualized encounters.”3 A rough, unruly, violent spectacle occurring during a public event that ensured civic order, the Tessy Boys’ fight serves as an allegory for Breathitt County’s social and political existence in the two decades before the Civil War. The incorporation of fighting into a state-ordained ritual like Court Day (an always-boisterous event in the antebellum South) mirrored the state’s marginally successful attempt to bring stability to a chaotic environment.4

  Antebellum Breathitt County was just another representation of southern society re-created in the Kentucky mountains. The Tessy Boys may have had a peculiar local name, but they were a pretty close facsimile to the semiorganized Court Day tussles that were then de rigueur throughout Kentucky and the other slave states.5 Reading about Bloody Breathitt in 1905, one would have been falsely led to believe that it had always been a wooded preserve for antediluvian chaos. Once it had been named “Bloody Breathitt” in the 1870s this relatively peaceful stage of its history, Tessy Boys and all, was mostly forgotten.

  Long before the homicides and mayhem for which it would later be known, antebellum Breathitt County did contain the potential for turmoil. The 1839 formation of Breathitt County in eastern Kentucky’s Three Forks region (the drainage area of the Kentucky River’s three tributaries) happened out of desire to bring a governmental and commercial order to an inert, untapped wilderness.6 Well to the east of the old Wilderness Road (the main road between Virginia and central Kentucky that provided access to both for portions of southeastern Kentucky’s mountains), it was one of the last areas of Kentucky with a permanent population. Breathitt County’s creation was brought about by landowners who saw the area as a commodity rather than just a living space. It was a governmental entity, like other counties, but it was also a business venture carried out for personal, not public, gain. Moreover, it was a venture that ran counter to the interests of many of the preexistent population. This was meant to be a profitable order and, like many other such schemes of the nineteenth century, it had unforeseen outcomes.