Bloody Breathitt Read online

  Unable to fully explain the horrible acts that had taken place in the Kentucky mountains, other writers turned to a racial imagination. While the “hospitable, gentle-mannered” mountaineers who fought for the Union were of “English, Scotch-Irish and German origin,” the “guerrilla companies which infested the country during the war” were a “second class of which there are only a few in the Kentucky mountains . . . a sallow, gypsy-like people, of unknown origin; idle, vicious, thoroughly conscienceless, and ‘far more incorrigible’ than either the Indian or the negro.”178 This was a particularly extreme (and unfounded) view since it suggested that there was some strange, as yet unseen, mountain race different from the supposedly “pure” Anglo-Saxon or Celtic blood the mountains were known for. Still, the castigation of a fictional “sallow, gypsy-like people” was not terribly unusual in its ultimate result of making the southern mountains somehow different from the South. Most preferred to have it both ways, hewing to the article of faith that feud was an inherency “transplanted from Scotland with the immigration of the first settlers” while acknowledging that “many of the Kentucky feuds . . . were born in the Civil War”—by the turn of the century, Americans wanted both to be true.179 Finally, there was the view that the state’s guerrilla warfare was a natural condition born “where family feuds had prevailed ever since the days of Daniel Boone or Cassius M. Clay.”180 The inconsistencies did not seem to trouble either northerners or southerners.

  Breathitt County’s war history was mostly lost amid the accepted generalizations about eastern Kentucky, except to Kentuckians. In Breathitt County’s most detailed local history, Strong’s troops, men like Hiram Freeman and Henderson Kilburn, became political tabulae rasae enslaved to his evil exploitation. “These men, in the main, had no opinion of their own,” E. L. Noble wrote in the 1930s. “They were ignorant and savage, having no desires of their own; they desired only to be clothed and fed; thus they were fit subjects to execute what others desired done. They seemed void of conscience; knew nothing of the cause against which they fought.”181 Just as William Strong and his fellow Unionists refused to recognize Confederate Breathitt County’s legitimacy, his soldiers’ legitimacy was denied in turn.

  Nineteenth-century Kentucky’s most lauded academic, Nathaniel Shaler, concurred. Breathitt County’s “mob outrages” and “blood feuds,” said Shaler, were “the heritage of the Civil War.” Like the others, Shaler curtailed the importance of politics in these later incidents by suggesting that later disputes gave veterans of both sides of the Civil War a common, apolitical enemy that they could unite against. “On the one side are arrayed those who fought in the two armies and their descendants,” wrote Shaler, without providing an example. “On the other side, a clan of outlawish folk who belonged to neither side.”182 The war, it seemed, played a role in causing violence afterward, but Shaler did not accept anything other than the sort of apolitical white reunion that was taking place elsewhere between North and South, one in which “both sides were told that they were wrong and right.”183 In Shaler’s telling, feud hurried the reunion.

  Half-informed reports from the outside world were of little concern to the people who had been directly affected by the local war, especially while many of them were still dealing with the war’s aftermath. Although he lived to a ripe old age, William Strong was forced to contend with old enemies and their successors for the rest of his life, a situation that was complicated by his continuing role as “chieftain” and “special protector,” and his own irascible nature. He showed an unwillingness to accept anything other than the local regime change he had fought so hard for. While he managed to outlast the war by more than thirty years, his eventual death was not a peaceful one.

  Jeremiah South, however, did not suffer loss of power or property because of the war. While his sons paid the ultimate price, South was able to remain aloof from the war’s uglier side, remaining in the Bluegrass and commanding the actions of state government after the war.184 Strong and South each survived the war, but not with equal laurels.

  William Strong’s “chieftain” status among the county’s blacks and poor whites may have been what kept him safe from immediate reprisal after the war, but it was not without its own potential problems and was the cause of many tangible ones. Since this new “hidden” political arrangement was founded in war, codified through martial alliances, and did not benefit from peacetime state institutions, it continued to depend upon violence, or the threat of violence, for sustenance. However, as described in the following chapter, Strong and his former enemies made a frank effort to restore civil relations after the war. When he was once again involved in violence, it was because of the rift among Kentucky Unionists that formed during presidential Reconstruction—yet again, an exogenous conflict from the outside world.

  Whatever Jeremiah South, his family, and other Rebels had fought for during the war rested only upon institutions within their own community, not that of the state or the nation. Managing to maintain a modicum of control over local pro-Confederate government within very pro-Union surroundings contributed to Breathitt County’s political insularity, and perhaps made the stakes for control over its public institutions that much higher in the years after the war. And William Strong would continue to challenge that control. While the rest of the United States started a movement toward peaceful reconciliation between the sections, Bloody Breathitt had only concluded its first phase.

  3

  “THE WAR SPIRIT WAS HIGH”

  Scenes from an Un-Reconstructed County

  Even though we are in full possession of the enemy’s country, the conflict may break out again in the interior or through assistance from his allies. No doubt this may also happen after the peace, but this only shows that wars do not always contain the elements necessary for a complete decision and settlement.

  —Karl von Clausewitz, On War (1832)

  By the end of 1865 Breathitt County had been thoroughly chastened for rebelling against the United States. The harsh measures that Union captain William Strong used against his own neighbors, and the wellspring of support he had from Unionists in neighboring counties, ended what was probably already a lost cause: a firm county-sized stronghold of rebellion within the Kentucky mountains. Numerous defections to Union forces further indicted the pro-southern elite’s hold over the populace. The attempt to create a Confederate mountain outpost in a Union state was proven a failure.

  The war’s last twelve to eighteen months had been the bitterest, and Strong and most of the Three Forks Battalion’s companies remained in uniform until three months after war’s end. Throughout eastern Kentucky, intermittent fighting continued well into 1866.1 Still, by most accounts, sincere efforts to rebuild civil society by veterans of both armies proved their shared willingness to parse the personal from the political.

  Breathitt County’s war was over, but the county earned its reputation for inherent violence sometime later. In the 1860s and 1870s white Kentuckians revolted fiercely against the war’s results, namely, the transformation of slaves into citizens. The change hardly constituted a revolution in the white-majority border state, but the white reaction in Kentucky was still comparable to the riots, raids, and bloodbaths that occurred farther south. White-on-white intraracial attacks may have actually been more common there than in perhaps any other southern state. “By 1865 Kentucky was in a rage because she had not seceded in 1861,” one newspaperman recounted early in the twentieth century, “and she is scarcely in a good humor about it yet.”2 Decades later, C. Vann Woodward concurred: “Despite Kentucky’s failure to secede and join the Confederacy, no state below the Ohio River presented a more solidly Confederate-Democratic front in the decade after Appomattox.”3

  Despite its supposed insularity from the outside world, Breathitt County was affected by the absence of Reconstruction in Kentucky. The violence that gave it the name Bloody Breathitt was symptomatic of the crisis of legitimacy suffered by a state that could not reconcile itself to the war�
��s results, yet at the same time contained a minority insistent that Kentucky be remade with the Union’s renewal. Both sides resorted to types of violence replicated all over the South.

  Almost every “outrage” committed anywhere in the state was followed by the insistence of white Kentuckians (armed with their state’s tacit loyalty to the Union) that their state’s troubles had nothing to do with the obviously racial/political riots and massacres in places like Colfax, Louisiana, and Edgefield, South Carolina. The cultural South had a reputation for violence long before the political South rebelled, and white southerners often used the former as a smoke screen for the latter. Feud, a word for apolitical violence between equals, was useful for this purpose, especially when the victims of raids and lynchings happened to be white. In the end, the idea of Bloody Breathitt was only one manifestation of white Democrats’ need to depoliticize the violence that helped them maintain control over Kentucky. Breathitt County helped their case since, unlike in most Reconstruction trouble spots, the Unionists ultimately appeared to be just as malicious as the former Rebels.

  “These disturbances originated from private feuds”

  As with all wars, the American Civil War’s most dramatic political results became plain only after the fighting had stopped. This was particularly true in the most divided of border states. Although Kentucky remained officially loyal to the Union, many of its citizens felt that their loyalty to the United States had been poorly rewarded. The Federal government’s first and second Confiscation Acts, the presidential suspension of habeas corpus, and the Union army’s manumission and arming of African Americans disillusioned otherwise loyal white Kentuckians and hardened their pro-Confederate neighbors’ resolve (on the other hand, black Kentuckians were quick to claim new freedoms, especially through service in the U.S. Colored Troops; no other state save Louisiana contributed more recruits between 1863 and 1865).4 Soon after that, the end of slavery and the prospect of black citizenship tore the state’s Union Party asunder. Kentucky was the only southern state that did not revise its constitution to prohibit slavery (although the legislature passed a civil rights bill in 1866 that recognized the demise of the institution and repealed the state’s antebellum slave codes).5 Confederate veterans, reenfranchised almost immediately, combined with Southern Rights Democrats and moderate Unionists to form a dogged conservative majority that “clung to the decaying body of slavery” in the 1866 election.6

  The last three years of Andrew Johnson’s presidency were defined by an air of conservative remorse, and most white Kentuckians embraced him as their defender against congressional radicalism.7 His break with Congress, and the lingering resentment over the Union Party’s harsh measures against the former Rebels, turned Kentucky into a state of “belated Confederates.”8 Having refused to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, the General Assembly went on to reject the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments as well, making Kentucky the last former slave state with black citizenship.9 The death of aged Governor John Helm just five days after his September 1867 inauguration ushered Confederate-sympathizing John W. Stevenson into the office. “By a strange conjunction of circumstances,” lamented one Unionist newspaperman, “what the rebels failed to do [in 1861], they freely realized in the year 1867.”10 Kentucky had gone from conservative Unionism to neo-Confederate Democracy within one election cycle.11

  Even with Democratic/conservative dominance (or, as one Democrat put it, “three fourths of the wealth and all of the brains of the State”), Kentucky remained a two-party state.12 The Unconditional Unionists were determined to follow through with their ambitious war aims beneath what one Democrat called “the hypocritical cry of Union.”13 As they became Republicans, mostly congregated in the mountains and the Ohio River cities, few were willing to self-apply the name “Radical.”14 Unlike in West Virginia and Missouri, they were never able to form a legislative majority and their congressional delegation was hardly a civil rights crusade.15 In 1866 Unconditional Unionist congressman Lovell Rousseau punctuated his opposition to the Freedman’s Bureau by severely caning an Iowa Republican (by the time Rousseau returned to Congress he had become a Democrat).16 The bureau was removed from the state in 1869, three years before it disappeared elsewhere.17

  The state’s appointed positions were dispersed to Confederates soon after they gained elected offices. As a reward for keeping the Southern Rights faith since 1862, Jeremiah South was reinstated as penitentiary lessee in 1870. South’s return to one of the most powerful offices in the state of Kentucky came about through a measure of political triangulation. J. Stoddard Johnston, the editor of Frankfort’s anti-federal, anti-northern Kentucky Yeoman, was the only other contender for the post, and the General Assembly’s Republican minority reluctantly threw their support to South, allowing the aging speculator to become even more influential than before (when he was reappointed yet again in 1874 he beat out a Confederate general and a colonel). When South had last held the position his leased inmates’ gang labor had to compete with slavery. Upon his return South monopolized all compulsory labor in the state for road construction, river improvement, or anything at his discretion, and his new embarrassment of riches turned into scandalous abuses.18

  His political capital rose exponentially until “nearly one third of the assemblymen in 1877–1878 were under his control as absolutely as were the convicts.”19 As the decade progressed, Kentucky’s Grange and a number of workingmen’s organizations came out against South’s state-mandated catbird seat. Agrarian protest gave way to middle-class reform; the subject of free labor/convict labor competition was overshadowed by the penitentiary’s atrocious conditions, especially after a Republican gubernatorial candidate called it Kentucky’s “Black Hole of Calcutta.” By 1879 even the Democrats could no longer ignore the subject, and they elected Luke Blackburn, a humanitarian physician (and Confederate general Sterling Price’s onetime staff surgeon), as governor. Blackburn instituted a momentary zeal for reform that proved to be more than the sixty-nine-year-old Jeremiah South could bear, professionally or physically.20 Under scrutiny for the first time since the war (and this time from his own party), he fell dead from a stroke while pleading his case on the Senate floor in 1880.21 One of the largest funerals in Frankfort’s history punctuated the end of de jure (if not de facto) profiteering in Kentucky’s penal system.22

  Jeremiah South’s final years showed that public service in Kentucky could be an opportunist’s game just as it had been when, as a younger man, he became “the father of Breathitt County.” But Kentucky state government’s greatest failure during the Reconstruction years was not the “legitimate” state violence of imprisonment or cloakroom corruption but rather the maintenance of law and order. In various counties “regulators” replaced state-mandated authorities, usually to enforce something of a continuing Confederate order in some localities.23 “Skaggs’ Men” terrorized Unionists and freedpeople in the southern Bluegrass’s Marion and Boyle counties soon after the war, while “Rowzee’s Band” did the same nearby until the early 1870s.24 Their victims were of both colors, but black Kentuckians seemed to have taken the brunt. Between 1866 and 1870, sixty-seven black Kentuckians were lynched for alleged crimes (nineteen white Kentuckians were lynched during the same period)—and not only in racially diverse areas.25 Between 1866 and 1870, one-fifth of the state’s interracial lynchings were in the mountain counties, even though blacks made up less than 5 percent of most counties’ populations.26 Less than a year after the war’s end, men in contiguous Floyd, Morgan, and Wolfe counties, three Confederate bastions, forcibly expelled federal tax collectors.27 The Reverend John Fee’s reestablishment of Madison County’s biracial Berea College was impeded by midnight harassments in 1870. The “leading men” of Berea’s neighboring black community were “taken from their beds, cruelly whipped, dragged over the flinty road . . . to deter them and friends from any attempt at political effort or influence.”28

  “The anti-negro feeling,” remarked the Republican New York T
imes in 1870, “influences political action more in Kentucky than in Alabama,” and in the former more than the latter, “it inspires demands for a reversal of the results of the war.”29 With “rebels in Kentucky” running rampant, Massachusetts Radical Republican senator Charles Sumner advocated placing Kentucky under federal military authority.30 For reasons both political and constitutional, Sumner’s suggestion was never enacted, although white Kentuckians considered a federal occupation an ever-present threat. All northern deprecations, like Sumner’s, were dismissed as “radical falsehood.”31 When the Fifteenth Amendment brought black suffrage to Kentucky, white-on-black violence took on a more blatantly political motivation, especially in the Bluegrass, but even in sections where the black electorate was too small to challenge governmental white supremacy. At least thirty-six black Kentuckians were lynched in 1870 alone.32 White regulators of varying collective names roamed the state with impunity until 1880, when two hundred men collectively surrendered to state authorities in Louisville.33 By that point, their aims—the suppression of black citizenship and economic mobility, and the establishment of Confederate rule—had been well met.

  Whatever went on after the war, white Kentuckians could always use their official wartime loyalty as a bona fide, and with few witnesses to these crimes willing to speak, motive for violence was not always patently obvious. Democrats could depoliticize their state’s violence, reframe its reportage so that it did not seem so much resistance as it did undirected lawlessness. A month into his term in office, and then again two years later, Governor Stevenson dispatched the state militia to the southern Bluegrass, all the while disingenuously assuring the public that what were clearly paramilitary remnants of the late war was actually nothing more than apolitical vigilantism. “These disturbances originated from private feuds, or sprung from an impression in the minds of the ‘regulators’ that the laws were not sufficiently enforced; they do not owe their origin to any difference in political sentiment, and are wholly unconnected with antagonisms springing out of the late civil war.”34