Bloody Breathitt Page 3

  “These people lived here in seclusion for several years; not knowing [of ]what country or nation they were citizens”

  The story of early Breathitt County is one of in-state sectionalism, an upland county founded according to mostly lowland interests. The enormously luxuriant rolling hills of the Bluegrass in north-central Kentucky, a cultivator’s paradise where a facsimile of the Virginia plantation economy could be re-created, was the first section of any economic consequence for white settlers and their slaves.7 “The [non-Indian] population of Kentucky until the separation from Virginia,” wrote one early twentieth-century Kentucky historian, “was practically confined to the Bluegrass.”8 From there Kentuckians spread outward after 1792 statehood, south to the Green River Valley and westward to the tobacco-growing Pennyroyal and Jackson Purchase sections.

  The Cumberland Plateau, the mountain range that covers most of eastern Kentucky, was always defined in contradistinction to the rest of the state, and it was a subject of little curiosity in the early Republic. In 1751 explorer Christopher Gist and his party probably became the first white men to see Breathitt County’s future location when they passed through on their return from the Ohio Country.9 “None of any particular note” is the only comment given for Kentucky’s mountains in one 1815 atlas.10 With the exception of longhunters and trappers, most first-generation Kentuckians considered the plateau little more than an impediment.11 Settlers arrived only after lower-lying areas like the Bluegrass had become surveyed, taxed, and overcrowded beyond their satisfaction. Recognizing that theirs was a relatively new community, Kentucky mountaineers of the Civil War era still called the Bluegrass their state’s “old settlements.”12

  In 1889 New England writer Charles Dudley Warner described Kentucky as divided into three distinct regions, “like Gaul,” an oft-repeated allusion to Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War.13 The dramatic contrast between the highlands and the central Bluegrass (the western third was eventually overshadowed or conflated with the central Bluegrass) popularized a more simplistic geographical commentary asserting “two Kentuckys” in place of Warner’s three: one defined by the Bluegrass’s agrarian wealth and the other by the highlands’ hardscrabble deprivation.14 This geographic metaphor came to influence Kentuckians’ self-image. The patrician, commercially vigorous Bluegrass was obliged to share Kentucky’s (inter)national image with the plebian, underdeveloped uplands, “polished blue grass civilization” eternally saddled with “the semi-barbarism of the mountains.”15 Residents of both sections eventually took this exaggerated stark contrast to heart. Breathitt County native E. L. Noble (George Noble’s much younger cousin) portrayed his ancestors entering stateless “forest primeval worlds, rich in primeval glory and wealth of worlds now unknown to man. . . . These people lived here in seclusion for several years; not knowing [of] what country or nation they were citizens.”16

  Early travelers’ accounts suggest that this was an old assumption, and one quickly challenged. In 1834 New Yorker Charles Fenno Hoffman was surprised to find highland Kentuckians “sing[ing] the praises of ‘old Kain-tuck’ with as much fervor as the yeoman who rides over his thousand fat acres in the finest regions of Kentucky [that is, the Bluegrass]” despite their general “ignorance of the world.”17 Hoffman probably did not realize that his rustic hosts were likely themselves recent arrivals. Moreover, as unaware as eastern Kentuckians may have been of the “world” (which, to Knickerbocker Hoffman, was probably restricted to east of the Hudson River), they knew quite well who certified their contracts, counted their votes, and accepted their tax money. Early nineteenth-century eastern Kentucky was sparsely populated, but it was not the wilderness primeval “beyond the polis,” as it was often portrayed.18 As Durwood Dunn noted about Cades Cove, Tennessee, during the same period, “isolation was always relative.”19

  Isolation was relative, and also a problem partially solved by bringing government closer to home. For generations, Kentuckians who chose to settle in the mountains were forced to make a long trip westward to see or use any functions of government. Early state maps show tremendous counties covering vast amounts of land stretching far from their respective Bluegrass courthouse towns. In the Three Forks region extraordinary circumstances made it abundantly clear that a more available jurisprudence system was necessary. In 1805 conflict arose among cattlemen living between the middle and north forks. Steers belonging to the Strong and Callahan families strayed from a Virginia-bound cattle drive and destroyed crops belonging to one John Amis. Amis took revenge on his careless neighbors by somehow drowning a number of their cattle in the north fork. In retaliation, the Strongs and Callahans allegedly killed Amis’s own livestock and assaulted his wife. Amis and his confederates struck back days later by firing on the offending party and shots were returned, with no immediate resolution to the fracas. The shooting eventually died down, and word reached the state capital, Frankfort, of what had gone on, but prosecution of the accused would be difficult, with Madison County’s seat of government nearly a hundred miles from the Three Forks. The Kentucky General Assembly first formed Clay County out of Madison and two other counties in 1807, a landmass with fewer than six inhabitants per square mile.20 If the state government’s intention was to bring law and order to the area, it would seem that the effort was only partially successful; Amis was fatally shot while on the witness stand at Clay County’s first court session.21

  Typically, however, new mountain counties were founded because of everyday civic needs and desires. After a pioneer settlement turned into a multifamily village, those that saw a need for closer government—usually those with the most property—had only to gather a dozen or so signatures to form a new county. As tiny villages became county seats, petitioning “first families” gained tremendously, and enough of their new earnings trickled down to their neighbors to create a general agreement that county formation was an unalloyed good.22 In the spirit of pleasing voters, their requests were approved with alacrity. Drawing new county boundaries and the settling of subsequent border disputes became the Kentucky General Assembly’s primary functions during the “frenzy of county-making” between 1806 and 1822.23 Nor did it stop then; between 1822 and 1860 the number of counties in the state increased from 71 to 110, bringing courts closer to citizens while intensifying social and governmental parochialism. Nineteenth-century Kentuckians considered new counties a remedy for most, if not all, public ills.24

  The Three Forks region. (Richard Gilbreath, University of Kentucky Cartography Lab)

  In these newer counties’ infant years no immediate funds were available to build courthouses, so county and circuit court sessions had to be held in private homes. Clay, Perry, Breathitt, and perhaps most other counties in eastern Kentucky began this way, usually in the homes of the pioneer-descended “first families,” whose primacy of settlement and wealth of land suggested a measure of disinterestedness.25 Holding court in households was a seemingly innocuous arrangement that apparently attracted no complaints. However, as indebted Kentuckians came to realize after the Panic of 1819, patrician disinterestedness was fleeting—assuming it had ever existed at all.26

  As the number of Kentucky counties increased, so did the general prevalence of county government, almost to the point of individual sovereignty. The powers of Kentucky county government in relation to the state were virtually “semi-federal” analogues to the state’s balance of power with the federal government.27 Under the state’s second constitution (drafted in 1799), county courts had broad-reaching powers comprising not only the judicial but the legislative and executive branches as well, with few checks and balances between the three. Until Kentucky’s third constitutional convention in 1849, most county offices were appointed by justices of the peace rather than elected, and justice positions themselves were often passed down as inheritance. Judges, sheriffs, and court clerks were consequently under the control of familiopolitical cliques for generations.28 Justices and their clients could supervise election results, control local
patronage, and use county funds for personal gain.29 Since Kentucky state legislators often served simultaneously as justices back home, the oligarchic influence was felt in the General Assembly as well.30 This all led to an early stagnation of political competition and an oft-permanent identification between county and party; in either the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, Kentucky had few “swing counties.”31

  Kentucky’s incessant jurisdictional mitosis came with other unforeseen problems, particularly the decrease of county tax bases. County governments struggled to maintain revenue as land was chiseled away, often with little attendant legislative debate.32 By the end of the 1850s, many of Kentucky’s 110 counties no longer contained enough productivity to match their tax burdens. This “pauper county” problem, resulting in a state deficit of nearly $54 million, became a matter for comment in other states’ press.33 These pauper counties later became symbols of extreme parochialism, isolation, and poverty—as well as justification for conflating these three distinct problems.34 Progressive Era political scientists attacked the county as a regressive, problem-ridden form of government and sought to replace it with more enlightened institutions.35 But in the decades immediately before and after the Civil War, even the most reform minded had to accept what Thomas Jefferson had accepted decades before: counties produced poor government, but they were impossible to eliminate.36

  Kentucky in 1800, 1820, and 1840. (Richard Gilbreath, University of Kentucky Cartography Lab; based on a map created by Mark Lassagne of GoldBug.com)

  In 1948 historian Charles Sydnor saw all of this as part of a larger nineteenth-century trend through which a southerner “naturally came to regard the county as having much and perhaps paramount importance among the governments to which he was subject.”37 But legal historian Robert Ireland has since suggested that both the eager propagation of counties and their potential for internal authoritarianism were distinctively Kentuckian.38 More recently, John Alexander Williams concurred, saying that “no state carried the county government to greater extremes than Kentucky.”39 Cursory evidence bears this out, at least in terms of proliferation; the only two states with more counties are Georgia and Texas, two states far larger than Kentucky in land mass and population.

  “The county always went Democratic”

  The “Clay County Cattle War” was still spoken of in Breathitt County (and recited as a locally penned poem) at the nineteenth century’s end.40 But in comparison to Thomas Jefferson’s nephews’ slave murder in 1811 or the killing of Solomon Sharp fourteen years later, it never became a major chapter of Kentucky “dark and bloody ground” lore.41 It did, however, illustrate a long-standing theme in the South’s agrarian history: the conflicts of interest between cultivation and droving on land bereft of fences or definite ownership. Before the county frenzy the state had already become embroiled in a lengthy competition between settlers and speculators in which “almost every inch of Kentucky land was disputed.”42 After the Revolutionary War Virginia had doled out most of what became Kentucky as grants for Continental army veterans, a latter-day version of the colonial headright system. Most veterans either sold their titles or never claimed them, and by 1800 the reward system had turned into a market dominated by fewer than twenty men, even as countless settlers occupied the land.43 “The titles in Kentucky,” an observer presciently foretold in 1816, “w[ill] be Disputed for a Centry to Come yet when it [i]s an old Settled Country.”44

  From this conflict emerged a political culture that inadvertently favored squatting, the landless farmer’s only effective means of making a living without having to deal with the coercion of tenancy.45 Landless Kentuckians used universal manhood suffrage to elect legislators who supported them, placing Kentucky “on the vanguard in recognizing the rights of the squatter.”46 Squatting may have violated property relations, some legislators argued, but it did so without challenging “the de jure distribution of property rights.”47 Unlike the speculators, who often failed to pay their taxes, squatters “attend[ed] to their own business” without lobbying or otherwise meddling in statehouse affairs.48 In landowners’ estimation, landlessness was synonymous with sloth, and repugnant to their sense of republican virtue, but their moral superiority was limited to their often-handicapped ability to prove their own legitimacy.49

  This only lasted so long. Successful invocation of adverse possession turned squatters into landowners, while others migrated farther west. Under Henry Clay’s Whiggish guidance, Kentucky legislators and judges came to look upon squatting more as a trespass than as inexpensive improvement of fallow land.50 As Kentucky went from being the “first western state” with widespread landlessness to a southern state with widespread land ownership, “squatters’ rights” eventually lost favor.51

  In the mountains, however, squatting persisted longer than anywhere else in Kentucky.52 There the squatter’s presence was, if left otherwise unmolested, just as sustainable as “legitimate” land practices since landownership in preindustrial Appalachia often sowed the seeds of its own destruction.53 For years the Three Forks served as a haven for this unenclosed way of life, one that almost equalized the conditions of the landed and the landless. Due to steep conditions that made grazing and cultivation more difficult than in the flatlands, both depended upon “forest farming” (a technique that combined marginal cultivation, the hunting of large and small game, and open-range grazing of livestock on titled and untitled land) and access to a “commons,” unfenced and uncommodified open land.54 Free-range grazing and long livestock drives, like the one that precipitated the Clay County Cattle War, were common throughout the nineteenth century.55 Even the wealthiest farmer made a living in a manner very much like the landless who probably surreptitiously used his land. Simon Cockrell, a well-to-do slave-owning Three Forks farmer, was rich enough to act as his neighbors’ creditor and sell his cattle as far away as Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley in the 1840s. Though “worth an immense fortune” once its mineral riches were realized years after his death, his land “was regarded as of but little value” in his lifetime.56 “Wealthy and arrogant” as he was, Cockrell “had no grass” and was obliged to graze his cattle on “cane and other winter forage” far beyond his own property boundaries.57 That the ends of market-oriented farming like Cockrell’s and those of others who simply “subsisted” were separate was unclear, since both relied on the same means.58

  For the nineteenth century’s first three decades, both property owners and the propertyless farmed and extracted for Bluegrass markets made accessible by the north fork—open to anyone with a log raft and a modicum of skill, the rivers were also a “commons” of sorts. Flatboat traffic from the very headwaters of the forks, reportedly common since the 1790s, gave the lie to the myth of eastern Kentucky’s isolation from the outside world.59 Three Forks farmers turned to market-based mining and forest extraction soon after their arrival.60 Extraction may have surpassed agriculture as the Three Forks’ primary exports by the 1830s, especially in the southern headwaters, where slave-powered salt-mining operations began in the late eighteenth century.61 Cannel coal, a particularly valuable variety of the mineral, was common.62 “Shallow pits” and “farmers’ diggings” were sufficient for most early mining enterprises, although larger slave-labored enterprises were in operation at least as early as the 1830s.63 In the long run, timber was an even greater asset to those interested in supplementing their farming. In 1835 flatboat crews felled and floated at least three thousand logs from the Three Forks to Bluegrass markets.64 The other recorded products that Three Forks mountaineers shipped to the Bluegrass in the early nineteenth century—deer skins, furs, honey, and ginseng—demonstrate the way in which hunting and gathering contributed to the market economy (and reason to leave much of the common land “unimproved”).65

  The three tributaries were adequate for “frontier” transportation but, as the Three Forks region increased in population in the 1820s and 1830s, there came new demand for land transportation. In 1833 eastern Kentucky’s leading me
rchant, Thomas Sewell, financed a new twenty-mile-long wagon road from Perry County’s remote War Creek community north to the hamlet of Hazel Green.66 Two years later, the state began financing navigational improvements on the north fork, and in 1837 a new road connecting Floyd County to the Bluegrass was completed.67 With enterprises “prostrated” in other parts of the state by the Panic of 1837, farmers from the Bluegrass and other areas of eastern Kentucky were attracted to the area.68 The Three Forks region was being “discovered” by both settlers and a revived speculative frenzy unmatched in Kentucky since the 1790s.69 The area’s new interconnectedness with the outside world was flamboyantly demonstrated in 1838 when a traveling circus arrived, treating locals to the incongruous sight of an elephant tromping through the oaks and poplars.70

  Breathitt County became Kentucky’s eighty-ninth county a year after the elephant’s visit, thanks to other recent arrivals.71 After building a second home on the north fork of the Kentucky River, Simon Cockrell’s son-in-law, Madison County native Jeremiah Weldon South, procured the delinquent Thomas Franklin grant, a parcel spanning more than 116,000 acres (just over 182 square miles) of mostly forested land lying between the Kentucky’s north and middle forks.72