Bloody Breathitt Page 8
During the Civil War and for years afterward, John Aikman went to violent extremes for the Confederate cause. (Courtesy of Charles Hayes)
With the Three Forks region’s northern half under Confederate control, Humphrey Marshall and Andrew Jackson South led “a guerilla band from Breathitt County” southwest to assault Owsley and Jackson, Kentucky’s two most thoroughly Unionist counties, in the spring of 1863. Along the way they destroyed and ransacked more than forty “Union homesteads,” but they were unsuccessful in finding any actual aggressors like William Strong.145 Abijah Gilbert, a former state legislature who had helped prevent Kentucky’s secession two years earlier, catalogued their destruction on and around his property.146
Humphrey’s men with the guerrilla band from Breathitt county, commenced coming into Jackson county, taking horses, cattle, and everything they could get hold of; came to Booneville, burned the jail, destroying the records in the Clerk’s office, cut the books up, and scattered them through the streets; came to my house, took every horse and mule I had—numbering thirteen. . . . The Rebels then set fire to my house, burned everything I had, leaving my wife and children with nothing but the clothes they had on. Mine, I understand, was the seventeenth house they have burned on the route up as far as my place.
Gilbert was able to identify five of his attackers (he was unsure which of Jeremiah South’s sons he had seen but certain that he had seen one of them). Having represented one of the state’s most remote counties in the General Assembly, Gilbert understood the distance between his county’s losses and the more storied war going on elsewhere. His description of the Three Forks Unionists’ plight summarized the difficulty of choosing between the war’s “master cleavage” and defending their homes in the equally dangerous “intimate” war at home.
I have begged and plead hard with the [Union authorities] for help. One thing you know, and that is, the people here generally are so poor that they cannot get away, and if they could, how are they to subsist?
These counties that are suffering so much are the most loyal part of the state. Clay, Owesley [sic], and Jackson, which have furnished an average five hundred volunteers to the country, not one of whom is near enough to come to the rescue of their friends; they are all at Vicksburg, Murfreesboro [Tennessee], and other points out of the State.147
Civilian victimization by “[a] bunch of Democrats from Breathitt County” galvanized Owsley County, and it became the most Republican of Kentucky’s counties forever after.148 But, on a larger scale, raids of this sort damaged Kentuckians’ faith in the war’s larger goals by testing the resolve of Unionists with less dedication than Gilbert. At the same time the knowledge of their enemies’ identities as citizens of neighboring communities had to be intensely demoralizing.
William Strong’s style of combat was similar to the Breathitt Confederates’ except that he attacked, plundered, and captured within his home county rather than in neighboring ones. Strong understood that war required regulation over civilian behavior. In one common tactic, he and his men would surround the home of a suspected “rebel scout” and demand the surrender of anyone who formerly served with Confederate forces or provided them with support.149 Although many in Breathitt County saw nothing more than a human terror, one visiting Ohio Union officer wrote appreciably of Captain Strong’s decisive role in eastern Kentucky.
John Gose and I, with a number of men have just returned from Breathitt County, where according to a prearrangement, we held a conference with Capt. Bill Strong. He and his Company of State Guards have charge of police duty in that County and he is certainly doing a wonderful work there. I asked one of our friends in Breathitt how Strong was getting along and he laughingly remarked that “he was killing rebels about as fast as they could bury them.” I was much impressed with him as he seems to be a man of great determination and I predict that he will do a lot of good for the Union cause.150
The “rebels” that Strong killed for the Union cause were not always in uniform. Years after the war, a Democratic newspaper recorded the names of nineteen “private citizens” killed by Strong’s “Home Guard.”151 George Noble recalled that Strong had shot a soldier named Miles Spurlock in the back while the young Confederate was at his home on winter furlough. Soon after, David Barnett, “an innocent man,” in Noble’s opinion, was summarily shot in his own home.152 However, especially late in the war when the Federal army’s harsher “Home Guard” tactics were unleashed and total warfare deemed necessary, this had become a detail less important than it once was.
“Intimacy” apparently worked in paradoxical ways for William Strong and George Noble. While the aforementioned Owsley County partisan was willing to overlook friendship in favor of partisanship, encounters between Strong and the young infantryman suggest that the reverse could just as easily take place. When Strong captured him late in the war, Noble secured a quick parole since the older man held the Noble family in high regard despite their leanings (it is just as likely that Strong released Noble because he saw little threat in the boy).153 When Strong’s brother John was captured in Owsley County and taken back to Jackson, Wiley Amis and their cousins Edward Strong and Wilson Callahan (the latter a “secret rebel” serving in Union forces) negotiated his release.154 Months later, when John Strong was killed in ambush while on furlough (supposedly due to being mistaken for his brother), Noble regretted that his comrades had “killed the wrong man” instead of the terror of Breathitt County.155 Still, when William Strong was attacked in Jackson after the war, it was George Noble he came to for protection.156 “Intimate” war caused soldiers to perform unusual acts of cruelty or acts of kindness, and to trust their enemies in unguarded moments. After the war, veterans described their comrades and enemies in personal terms, belying the political reasons that had drawn them to choosing sides in the first place.
Young foot soldiers like George Noble were more likely to have mercy than Confederate commanders. The death of Jerry South Jr. at Strong’s hand in February 1864 was especially horrible. South had a broken leg and was in hiding with a friendly family who agreed to return him to his home on a hastily constructed sled. On the way, Strong apprehended the party and shot the recumbent Rebel multiple times in front of South’s wife.157 Eleven months later, Strong killed his brother Andrew Jackson South at another civilian’s home.158 With that, Strong eliminated the Three Forks region’s leading Rebel partisans, crippling the area’s organized resistance months before the war’s official end. The deaths of the sons of the “father of Breathitt County” decapitated Confederate Breathitt County.
And, for a time, it seriously crippled the Souths’ party. Strong’s bullying, and the absence of a large segment of the adult male population, provided Breathitt County’s only defections from the Democratic Party in the nineteenth century. In 1863 only forty-seven men were willing to vote for the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Charles Wickliffe, giving Union candidate Thomas Bramlette an overwhelming majority. Two years later the county polled a bizarre 212 to 17 majority in favor of the Union Party’s candidate for state treasurer. Results from the 1864 presidential race might have shown drastic changes had they been recorded; Breathitt was one of nine Kentucky counties—eight of them in the mountains—that produced no returns in that election.159 The dramatic sea change, unparalleled in any other surrounding county, could have been an indication of a Democratic electorate under the gun, or the “natural” results of elections with the South family’s heavy hand removed. It was probably a measure of both.
Union victories did not guarantee Unionists’ survival, nor did the official end of the war bring an end to fighting. John and Joseph Eversole were killed in the former’s Perry County home twenty-three days after Appomattox.160 Violence in southeastern Kentucky continued for months after that, even after the Three Forks Battalion disbanded in August. Strong’s neighbors were less than willing to accept him in the role he apparently saw for himself: a victor in a war they had lost. Even the Breathitt County Rebels who acquies
ced to U.S. citizenship after the war refused to grant Strong the legitimacy that came with being a soldier (his permanent title of “Captain Bill” notwithstanding); when Breathitt County citizens sued him after the war for the livestock he requisitioned, he always defended his actions as part of “suppressing the late rebellion.”161 As was true of many other white Unionist Kentuckians, especially the ones who went to the most violent extremes to fight secession and even to end slavery, Strong’s atrocities (and his alleged atrocities) were depoliticized by those who described them.162 Locally, he was often remembered as a Home Guard, a misnomer that was only technically untrue. He was also called a guerrilla, a term so subject to interpretation that it could have included almost every combatant in his home county. In the outside world he was better known as a “feudist.” Always controversial and always influential, “Captain Bill” lived the rest of his life in Breathitt County, his name interchangeable with “Bloody Breathitt.”
Guerrillaism turned out to be a double-edged sword for Breathitt County soldiers on both sides, just as it did for many other Kentuckians. It allowed men to fight for their flag of choice while remaining near their property, family, and their civilian life, the things that most southerners believed that they fought to defend in the first place. Yet it also heightened the likelihood that beloved civilians would be attacked in the process. Furthermore, men who fought as guerrillas, partisans, bushwhackers, or the like never had the chance to tell their story after the war. For one thing, their “small” wars were lost among the bipartisan din of triumphalism that defined the war memory’s construction.163 In fact, considering how many of them had attacked and killed people who knew them well, they had good reason to keep their mouths shut. Consequently, when their story was told, it was told by outside world observers who had little compunction against modifying the image according to the dictates of their “urban bias.”164
The intimacy between Strong and his Confederate enemies like George Noble belied their stated purposes in taking up arms: defeating the rebellion and defending the “Southern people” respectively. Years later, when Breathitt County became known as Bloody Breathitt, commentators often mentioned the war’s legacy in later violence there, but they scarcely considered the contingencies involved in a war fought between intimates.165 Instead, the horrors of guerrillaism were attached to the county’s supposedly inherent ferocity. “You mountaineers can’t help it; you were born to it,” a fictional soldier chided a cold-blooded “bushwhacker” in a 1900 Civil War novel. “What else could you expect from a man from Breathitt County, Kentucky?”166
“Previous to that time they knew nothing of pistols and bowie-knives”
After the Confederate surrender, Lieutenant General Nathan Bedford Forrest (who understood better than most the distinction between “regular” and “irregular” warfare) bid his troops farewell with a warning against “neighborhood feuds, personal animosities, and private differences” when they returned home.167 Forrest knew that his troops were going back to communities torn apart by the war. He did not consider the distinction between war (political) and feud (personal) arbitrary, but he could certainly see how the former might cause the latter and how, when fought intimately within small spaces, the distinction between violence in war and violence after war might become arbitrary.168 What Forrest did not acknowledge (if he realized it at all) was that, for many southerners, these supposedly small “private differences” back at the home front were the war itself. Although his CSA commission disqualified him from being a “guerrilla” per se (his performance was met with the approval of his general-in-chief, who notably disapproved of guerrillas), Forrest had pushed the envelope of “legitimate” violence more than almost any other general, Confederate or Federal.169 But feud meant something smaller, strictly local, and far less consequential than the struggle for white supremacy he had just concluded. However careful the general was with his words, he was drawing a partition between the political and the communal, the large and the small, the important and the trivial.
Forrest unwittingly previsioned the intermingling of feud with guerrilla in years to come. Feud was a fine tool for stifling serious discussions of guerrilla warfare for a generation after the war. Men who had directly experienced the Civil War in places like Breathitt County recognized the political significance of later feud violence as an obvious fact (and, for that matter, were less likely than nonlocals to use feud as a descriptor). But to those peering into these places from the outside world, this sort of communal combat was unacceptable in the war memory and had to be made something other, even if it meant warping the facts. Nowhere else, save Missouri, was the course of the war more determined by irregular warfare. These gruesome tactics had been of utmost political importance to both sides, and perhaps for that very reason the memory of Kentucky guerrillaism was swiftly depoliticized, especially by historians who cleaved to the Lost Cause. Guerrillas were typically said to have “the name and uniform of either army” as nothing more than a fig leaf to camouflage their plundering.170 “During 1864, there came upon Kentucky the scourge of guerrilla warfare, that constant accompaniment of war in all civilized lands,” wrote one historian. “These bands of marauders wore today the uniform of the southern soldiers; tomorrow that of the Union forces. They belonged to neither army and brought reproach upon both. Made up in most cases of deserters from either army, they recognized no flag as their own and plundered alike the friends of the Union and the south.”171 Guerrillas were not only depoliticized but also placed in a past distant from the war memory. In 1926 E. Merton Coulter called Kentucky’s guerrillas “mediaeval fighters” (echoing the associations with antiquity early twentieth-century writers made with Kentucky’s “feudists”) driven by “revenge and greed . . . motives that they, themselves, could torture into seeming honorable.” “That the Kentucky guerrillas were acting under the orders of the Confederates,” Coulter insisted, “is absurd.”172
These were charges and dismissals often made, but rarely with evidence. In the historical record, even “marauders” with the most feeble connection to the “legitimate” war effort(s) never swapped sides and always plundered their political enemies—even Missouri’s William Quantrill’s worst atrocities were committed for the sake of political expediency.173 Still, the apolitical guerrilla was a useful fiction after the war, and not only to Confederate sympathizers. With the United States bent upon postwar reunion, it was necessary that both causes, and their attendant gallant northern Virginia campaigns, overshadow the horrors that took place in the South’s darker corners. The spirit of national reunion depersonalized the war, separating the opposing causes from the individuals who had fought for them—a difficult, or impossible, prospect in Breathitt County. However, its veterans were not those asked to establish the narrative.
As guerrillaism was separated from the war’s history, so, too, was the mountain South. Eastern Kentucky’s war was sundered from the “legitimate” one early on, when many northerners convinced themselves that all mountaineers in “the Switzerland of the South” were loyal Unionists.174 The mountain South did indeed produce a large number of loyal dissenters. However, the myth of a solidly Unionist Appalachia, a myth that excluded Confederate Breathitt County and many other places, grossly oversimplified an intensely complex wartime situation. The roles of local elites like the South family and the function of counties during war were obscured by descriptions that favored a homogenous, unarticulated mountain population over considerations of economics and politics. It was a simplification that remained popular long after the war.175
Other distortions of the war in the mountains, especially in Kentucky, followed suit. Attempting to explain eastern Kentucky’s barbaric wartime record carried out by men like William Strong and John Aikman, journalists credited the wartime mountaineers with an ersatz combination of patriotism and primeval innocence. But they were rarely credited as legitimate soldiers.
I am told that this lawlessness has only existed since the war; that before
, the people, though ignorant of letters, were peaceful. . . . During the war the mountaineers were carrying on a civil war at home. The opposing parties were not soldiers, but bushwhackers. Some of the best citizens were run out of the country, and never returned. The majority were Unionists, and in all the mountain region of eastern Kentucky I passed through there are few to-day who are politically Democrats. In the war, home-guards were organized, and these were little better than vigilance committees for private revenge. Disorder began with this private and partly patriotic warfare. After the war, when the bushwhackers got back to their cabins, the animosities were kept up, though I fancy that politics was little or nothing to do with them now. The habit of reckless shooting, of taking justice into private hands, is no doubt a relic of the disorganization during the war.176
In a similar vein, another reported: “In the civil war this sturdy, honest people fought for the Union; previous to that time they knew nothing of pistols and bowie-knives. The local war between themselves and the guerrillas which raged at the time, first accustomed them to blood-shed; and the feuds then created by outrages perpetrated in the name of patriotism, endure even to the present day.”177 Their home state in political flux and their potential enemies so near, eastern Kentuckians made horrendously difficult decisions during the war. Their portrayal in postwar accounts utterly denied this.