Bloody Breathitt

by T. R. C. Hutton

  BLOODY BREATHITT

  BLOODY

  BREATHITT

  Politics and Violence

  in the Appalachian South

  T. R. C. Hutton

  Copyright © 2013 by The University Press of Kentucky

  Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth,

  serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky,

  Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College,

  Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State

  University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania

  University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western

  Kentucky University.

  All rights reserved.

  Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky

  663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008

  www.kentuckypress.com

  17 16 15 14 13 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hutton, T. R. C.

  Bloody Breathitt : politics and violence in the Appalachian south / T. R. C. Hutton.

  pages cm. — (New directions in Southern history)

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-8131-3646-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-8131-4242-5 — ISBN 978-0-8131-4243-2

  1. Breathitt County (Ky.)—History. 2. Breathitt County (Ky.)—Politics and government. 3. Violence—Kentucky—Breathitt County—History. I. Title.

  F457.B85H87 2013

  976.9’19—dc23 2013010408

  This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

  Manufactured in the United States of America.

  Member of the Association of

  American University Presses

  To my parents,

  Bill and Cathy Hutton

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Introduction: “The darkest and bloodiest of all the dark and bloody feud counties”

  1. “To them, it was no-man’s land”: Before Breathitt Was Bloody

  2. “Suppressing the late rebellion”: Guerrilla Fighting in a Loyal State

  3. “The war spirit was high”: Scenes from an Un-Reconstructed County

  4. “The civilizing and Christianizing effects of material improvement and development”

  5. Death of a Feudal Hero

  6. “There has always been the bitterest political feeling in the county”: A Courthouse Ring in the Age of Assassination

  7. “The feudal wars of Eastern Kentucky will no doubt be utilized in coming years by writers of fiction”: Reading and Writing Bloody Breathitt

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  PREFACE

  When I first decided to write about Breathitt County, Kentucky, I expected I’d be writing a local study similar to most of the serious scholarship on Appalachia. What I discovered was a place where those in power needed violence in order to maintain their control, while those who refused to knuckle under to them saw violence as a tool themselves. These were flawed people, and even those who ended up on the “right side of history” got into that position by killing. Their stories were distorted by the language used to describe their actions without their verification. These are themes familiar to anyone who has studied Oliver Cromwell or Che Guevara.

  In the half century after the Civil War Breathitt County was a violent place, but no more so than many other places in a particularly violent time period in a very violent country. I also discovered that different kinds of killing were damned or praised or tolerated according to the needs and wishes of powerful men.

  Much of what went on in Breathitt County between the Civil War and World War I stands as an indictment of American exceptionalism. The United States of America maintains, at this writing, a republic with unparalleled longevity and stability. Americans should remember that this has required a tremendous amount of bloodshed. It also provides a commentary on how Americans separate past from present, here from there, and self from other. We like to admit our nation-state’s violence while pushing it further back into the past than it actually was, separating (in Hannah Arendt’s words) “heritage” from the “dead load” of atrocity. The history of the United States is full of atrocities and most of them Americans don’t mind acknowledging, but without considering that their own past draws parallels with corners of the globe they consider less fortunate. (On that note, I apologize for any lapses into the jargons of anthropologists, political scientists, and others, but they serve the purpose of demonstrating that there are common currents of human activity that can be described without lapsing into lazy assumptions about progress and not progress.) When it comes to brutality, the United States is hardly exceptional. The “savagery” of la Violencia in Colombia, or the Troubles in Northern Ireland, has happened in the United States, even if Americans consider themselves above such things. It’s no wonder that what went on in Breathitt County was dismissed as so many “feuds.”

  From the moment I began my research I depended upon the support of others, especially an extraordinary publisher. The University Press of Kentucky’s Anne Dean Watkins and Steve Wrinn are a skillful and patient editorial team. Their assistant Bailey Johnson helped me with technical details during the latter stages of my revising. Ashley Runyon and Mack McCormick helped me immensely during the early stages of promotion. Thanks also to Robin DuBlanc, an intricately perceptive copy editor. Bill Link, the New Directions in Southern History series coeditor, put me in contact with the press when my ideas for this book were in earliest bloom, and I still take that as a magnificent compliment. Finally, I appreciate Andy Slap and Bruce Stewart including my research in their anthologies published under the University Press of Kentucky banner.

  Breathitt County, Kentucky, has its own dedicated native historians. Charles Hayes’s kind permission to reproduce photos from his collection for this book is greatly appreciated. Stephen Bowling and Janie Griffith run the county’s two public historical institutions, its library and its museum, respectively. They each provided me with matchless perspectives on how their county’s citizens interpret their past. Sherry Lynn Baker is a thorough researcher and she shared some valuable materials with me while also helping confirm a number of vital factual details. Thanks also to Jerry Buck Deaton for doing the same. John Robertson, the webmaster for Historical County Lines (http://his.jrshelby.com/hcl/), helped me with the surprisingly formidable task of tracking down usable maps.

  It is hard to imagine a state archive friendlier to a historian’s needs than the Kentucky Department of Libraries and Archives in Frankfort. In nearly a dozen visits I always received help and advice from its staff. The state capital’s Thomas D. Clark Center for Kentucky History was also useful. The staff at Berea College’s library was especially attentive and a credit to the school’s tradition of a student-run campus. Lastly, Dean Williams of Appalachian State University’s William Leonard Eury Appalachian Collection has always supported my research immensely.

  Bloody Breathitt began as a doctoral dissertation, and I owe much to those who supported me in its completion. David Carlton is a ready adviser, a meticulous reviewer, a constant resource for southern lore, and a friend. Richard Blackett, once he read part of my beginning chapters, was an early source of encouragement, and his dissertation seminars had a huge impact on later chapters. He and his wife, Cheryl, have welcomed me into their home many times. Dennis Dickerson, Larry Isaac, and Rowena Olegario are challenging intellects that provided important criticism. Although he w
as not on my committee, my MA adviser John A. Williams might as well have been since he set me on a certain path years earlier. The Vanderbilt University Department of History provided a young southernist with bed and board, and a generous amount of funding. The department’s administrators, Jane Anderson, Brenda Hummel, and Heidi Welch, always helped me when I was in need.

  I benefited from being surrounded by other young scholars who pushed me to excel. Tim Boyd shared with me an expatriated Briton’s interest in the American South and its politics, and provided very important suggestions and criticisms. Countless conversations with Steven P. Miller deepened my thoughts on political culture and the importance of our work being relevant to the present though written about the past. Pete Kuryla provided an intellectual historian’s perspective that motivated me to think beyond this book’s most rudimentary purposes. I hope I was able to repay him, at least partially, by introducing him to the work of Christopher Lasch. Finally, Patrick Jackson was a knowledgeable sounding board while I was revising Bloody Breathitt. and, as my weight room partner, he never let a barbell fall on me and crush my face.

  A historian’s true home is the library, and Vanderbilt’s Central Library provided me with a top-notch environment for reading, writing, and dawdling. Peter Brush is an excellent resource for history students, and Yolanda Campbell and Daisy Whitten were always helpful. The interlibrary loan staff, most notably Rachel Adams, tracked down the most obscure requests with what seemed like no effort. I could not have completed my revisions without help from Anne Bridges, the humanities librarian at the University of Tennessee’s Hodges Library.

  One of the best aspects of graduate-level research is becoming part of an international community of scholars. Professors Aaron Astor, Bruce Baker, John Burch, Bill Link, Sam McSeveney, Rob Weise, and Jason Yeatts have all been good enough to read chapters or portions of chapters and offer their ideas. Aaron Akey helped me track down a rare photograph. Robert Ireland, one of Kentucky’s most important state historians, offered kind advice and clarification when it was asked of him. Jim Klotter and Altina Waller offered me encouragement when I told them I was following in their footsteps. The late George Graham was an intellectual inspirer nearly a decade ago when my research was at its very beginning. A special thanks goes to Steve Ash, Ernie Freeberg, and Bruce Wheeler for their advice on writing.

  My parents, Bill and Cathy Hutton, provided decades of encouragement balanced with intellectual freedom. Childhood trips to museums fostered an early interest in American history and, growing up in the Hutton household, the past was never past. My grandparents Jim and Martha Clendenen were also especially supportive of all my goals.

  This book is a product of my own work, but it is also a product of opportunity and infrastructure. Like other writers, I benefit from the leisure time provided by other peoples’ labor. The chance to deal in ideas for a living came about because of the hard physical work of people, some still living and others passed, who worked for my family many years before I began higher education. George Cato, the Doss family, the Gentry family, the Ray family, Arch Skeens, the Surber family, the Thomas family, and the Wolfe family provided me with an education. I stand on the shoulders of the people who do the real work in this world, often without acknowledgment from the people who profit from it.

  Introduction

  “THE DARKEST AND BLOODIEST OF ALL THE DARK AND BLOODY FEUD COUNTIES”

  The means used to achieve political goals are more often than not of greater relevance to the future world than the intended goals.

  —Hannah Arendt, On Violence (1970)

  This is a history of Breathitt County, Kentucky, in its first seven or so decades of existence, before and after it became known as Bloody Breathitt. I consider the county and its nickname two separate entities; Breathitt (pronounced “breath-it”) County is a political unit, founded in 1839 in eastern Kentucky. “Bloody Breathitt,” as I use it here, is a collection of factual and fanciful explanations for the county’s history of violence, with broader implications for Kentucky, the South, and the United States. Breathitt County is a place that earned a singular reputation for killing between the Civil War and World War I; Bloody Breathitt is the accumulation of information and misinformation this reputation was made from.

  In the early twentieth century Breathitt County was called “the darkest and bloodiest of all the dark and bloody feud counties,” the first—and the last—Kentucky county associated with prolonged, reciprocal, vengeance-based personal or familial conflicts.1 With that in mind, this book is also an attempt at explaining feud, a word Americans associate with history even though it has been used to defy and deny history in places like Breathitt County. This book is not about blood feuds. It is about acts of violence that were called blood feuds, and why this labeling is deceptive. I consider feud a vague expression, an element of what Wayne Lee calls “clouds of rhetoric” applied to various sorts of violent events in order to make their particulars less knowable.2 It was one word, among many in the English language, used as an unclear or false description of homicide.3 Above all, this book is about what one county’s history reveals about how Americans think about killing.

  Chapter Overview

  Chapter 1 details Breathitt County’s formation in sparsely populated eastern Kentucky, one of the last sections of the Appalachia Mountains to be permanently inhabited by whites.4 The earliest settlers thrived raising unfenced livestock and hunting wild game until slaveholders and speculation-minded recent arrivals lobbied for the creation of a new county.5 They then pared a Democratic county out of three consistently Whig (and later Republican) counties, establishing something very close to one-party rule. They named their new county for Kentucky’s recently deceased Democratic governor, John Breathitt, and its county seat for Andrew Jackson, a president who despised the sort of rapacious capital/government connivances the new county represented.6 The circumstances of Breathitt’s very existence were a precondition for a crisis of legitimacy, a legitimacy questioned by its citizens and, eventually, by Americans looking in from the outside world (a phrase many observers used to intimate the supposed insularity of the county).7

  It was a quiet affront to democracy, one that presaged the much larger crisis of legitimacy created by southern secession a little over two decades later.8 Decades later, the Progressive Era’s reformist nabobs could not believe that the banal mechanics of county government might inspire armed conflict, even as they criticized counties as a retrograde form of government.9 What they failed to understand was the importance of local government, especially when larger institutions fell apart, as they did throughout Kentucky in 1861. After that, the question of legitimacy was applied to the diverse forms of violence witnessed in the county; some were found wanting (in the eyes of locals, the outside world, or both), while others, if carried out according to the wishes of white Kentuckians, were deemed legitimate.

  When the Civil War began (as shown in chapter 2) Breathitt County was a Confederate beacon amid pro-Union counties. Poor mountaineers, both black and white, who had gained little from the county’s formation, formed a long-lasting Unionist “stateless zone” within the county.10 Thus began a narrative familiar to many parts of the border states, a “war between neighbors” in which personal relationships mingled with sectional politics. Whatever legitimacy the county’s combatants claimed came from their blue or gray uniforms. Long after these uniforms became moth-eaten relics, the war’s political rupture remained, as did the blurred lines between soldier and civilian.

  Breathitt County in modern-day eastern Kentucky. (Richard Gilbreath, University of Kentucky Cartography Lab; based on a map created by Lindell Ormsbee)

  The county’s circumstances in the 1860s and 1870s, as shown in chapter 3, reflected the rest of Kentucky, a non-Confederate state on the Solid South’s fringes.11 The state was not subject to presidential or congressional Reconstruction, and Confederate veterans were unhindered in maintaining a forceful counterrevolutionary control.12 Breathitt
County’s biracial Unionist/Republican minority fought back, creating the illusion of a contest between diametrically opposed equals. Considering the reunited American Republic’s readiness to forget wartime politics, it was easy for Kentuckians to construe public violence as if it had strictly private meanings.13 It was not happenstance that a southern Democrat coined the doleful sobriquet “Bloody Breathitt” in one of the bloodiest years of Reconstruction.14

  Chapters 4 and 5 explain how the 1880s and 1890s were even bloodier than the Reconstruction years. As railroad tracks and corporate capital made their way to Breathitt County, there were plenty of exogenous sources of violence common to an entire region or nation-state. But the political nature of white intraracial (“white-on-white”) conflicts was obscured by repeated references to endogenous causes: isolation from the outside world, poverty, lack of education, mania for revenge, obsession with kinship and racial vestigiality (Anglo-Saxon or Celtic “blood”) in eastern Kentucky’s “feud belt.”15 Kentuckians, in the mountains and beyond, maintained the flawed premise that economic advancement would bring an end to disorder. In these interpretations, violence simply “came natural.”

  These alleged endogenous traits had become the primary explanations for white intraracial violence by the time a political agitator named William Goebel was assassinated near the state capitol in 1900 (see chapter 6), leading to a similar public death in Jackson.16 From the Civil War to the Progressive Era, all of Kentucky’s convulsions were manifest in Bloody Breathitt. For that matter, it also embodied the decades of white-on-black bloodletting in other parts of the post-Reconstruction South even though most (but not all) victims there were white (as shown in later chapters, the subject of race reappeared in Bloody Breathitt countless times).