Bloody Breathitt

by T. R. C. Hutton

  “What tyranny or what injury in any way has the State of Kentucky committed against you?”

  Home Guards were stationed all over Kentucky, although some parts of the state required more enforced loyalty than did others. Western Kentucky had the most Confederate support, and an ersatz “rump” state capital was established in Russellville.35 Mountainous eastern Kentucky was remembered, with some exaggeration, as the paragon of Union loyalty.36 Between these areas, in the Bluegrass, Unionists and disunionists were “closely mixed,” and wartime differences had to be treated as political bickering rather than martial opposition.37 Leavening their support for the South with deference to their state’s apparent majority, the Bluegrass’s southern sympathizers held their tongues or resorted to a Fabian promotion of secession.38

  Such was the case with state penitentiary supervisor and “strong southern rights man” Jeremiah W. South.39 “Upon the inauguration of the Rebellion,” recalled his then prisoner Calvin Fairbank, South was “in full sympathy with it” and made no effort to hide it.40 For sixteen months after neutrality’s end, he remained in one of the state’s most powerful unelected offices. And South profited considerably since he monopolized prisoner labor, a commodity that became more and more dear as the war eroded slavery. In October 1861 the General Assembly granted him an emergency $5,000 loan “because of the troubles with which the country is now afflicted” that disrupted the penitentiary’s exportation of hemp sackcloth.41

  South may have continued to profit thus had he not worn his political heart so openly on his sleeve, even as the state government grew more resolutely Unionist. In March 1862 that body deemed South’s associations and opinions liabilities and voted ninety to four to replace him with “a former Whig, Know-Nothing, and Union man” the following month.42 South’s expulsion deprived him of a large income and gratis labor, but it freed him to display his southern colors more publicly. Eleven months after his dismissal, South and other “active ‘secesh,’ and sympathizers with the rebellion” held a wildcat Democratic convention.43 Federal soldiers dispelled the meeting, and even the most loyal of Kentucky Democrats were enraged by the disruption of peaceful assembly.44 It was one of the first indications of Bluegrass Kentuckians’ growing disillusionment with the war effort. Jeremiah South apparently played the rest of the war safe.

  When he departed Breathitt County in the 1850s, Jeremiah South left behind him four adult sons, at least nine slaves, a coal mine, and one of the largest landholdings in Kentucky.45 He also left behind a political apparatus prepared to lead his county toward secession and rebellion.46 Secessionist handbills had circulated in the area since the 1860 elections, and early the next year, both of the county’s attending legislators joined most Confederate sympathizers in voting against neutrality.47 He also had a network of wealthy Democratic allies who controlled the county court. John Hargis’s son Thomas was among the county’s earliest Confederate recruits (his commission as captain in the Fifth Kentucky Infantry facilitated his eventual rise to become one of Kentucky’s most respected Democratic jurists).48 South’s brother Richard and four of his eight sons—Jerry, Barry, James, and Samuel (as well as three of his sons-in-law)—enlisted in the Confederate army. After he was wounded at the battle of Chickamauga, Samuel was field-promoted from private to colonel and awarded the Confederate Congress’s medal of honor.49 In November 1861 a Breathitt company arrived in Tennessee to muster into the Confederate First Kentucky Infantry.50 The same month “groups of threes, fives and sevens, chiefly mounted, but many afoot” from Breathitt and other mountain counties descended upon Prestonsburg (Floyd County’s county seat), eastern Kentucky’s first “rallying point for the secessionists.”51 There the Confederacy’s Fifth Kentucky was organized, one of the most poorly armed and outfitted infantry units in the southern military.52

  The next year, in the summer of 1861, Jackson became the second such rallying point. Democratic county judge Edward Callahan “Red Ned” Strong, a descendant of some of the earliest Three Forks settlers and a slave owner of considerable means, joined Barry South in recruiting Confederate volunteers.53 Over the following months at least 126 young men from Breathitt and surrounding counties were recruited to the Thirteenth Kentucky Cavalry, a hearty number for an area with ready opportunities to “lay out.”54 It seemed that most of Breathitt County’s male citizenry, or at least those who left imprints on the public record, initially followed their county’s “father.”

  After neutrality ended, Confederate Breathitt County stood out like the proverbial sore thumb in the otherwise heavily Unionist Three Forks. In November 1861 Colonel Leonidas Metcalfe came to the county to bring it back into the fold—though his expected arrival was interpreted as coercion and actually accelerated Confederate recruitment.55 When he reached Jackson he found that the Rebels—at least the ones in uniform—had departed. Before leaving, he produced a proclamation imploring its citizens not to “take up arms against [their] fellow Kentuckians” and offering $100 to anyone who could explain “what right he had that the United States had taken from him.”56

  Pause and reflect on such a course [supporting the rebellion], and ask yourselves why you must take up arms against your fellow Kentuckians—against your kin and the laws of your State. What law has Congress or the Legislature passed that oppresses you? What right did you ever have that has been taken away from you? What tyranny or what injury in any way has the State of Kentucky committed against you? What law has curtailed or even threatened your right to your slaves or all the rights you ever had in the Territories? Can any of you answer these simple questions? No, you cannot.57

  Judge Edward Callahan “Red Ned” Strong, never a “feudist” but a long-lived member of Breathitt County’s moneyed elite who helped define his home county for the outside world. (http://www.breathittcounty.com/RedNedStrong.html)

  The colonel couched his appeal in terms of civic kinship and state loyalty, with no mention of the Union or the Lincoln administration. It further addressed grievances many white Kentuckians shared while suggesting that the rest of the state had chosen to overlook them in the interest of unity. Clearly, concerns other than state fidelity had surpassed their interest in their home state.

  Leonidas Metcalfe’s wording suggests that he and many other border state loyalists did not fully understand their rebellious neighbors’ motivations. Unionists and Rebels in the North and the South all used declarations of loyalty, either to the Union or to their respective states, to justify their actions even when those actions were really determined by political concerns like slavery. On the other hand, Confederate nationalism had a limited foothold in Kentucky, George Noble’s sentimental remembrances of his southern grandfather notwithstanding.58 And if Breathitt County answered the call out of a sense of white southerners’ communitas, the same appeal was ignored by neighboring counties, Estill, Clay, Perry (the three counties from which Breathitt was formed twenty-two years before), and Owsley—let alone the vast majority of Kentuckians. There had to have been other factors at work. This was not a matter of loyalty to Kentucky or the United States or the South, but rather one of power.59

  Slavery was “neither simple nor obvious” as the basis for most white southerners’ wartime decisions, especially in the highlands where, one historian recently declared, it “exercised minimal influence over the decision of the mountaineers” who joined the “Southern cause.”60 A glance at eastern Kentucky demographics seems to bear this out; solidly Unionist Clay County’s fortune-making salt mines used eastern Kentucky’s largest slave population, while pro-Confederate Floyd and Morgan each had very few slaves.61 In Breathitt County less than 2 percent of the white population lived in slave-owning households in 1860, while most of the county’s forty-seven slave owners owned fewer than five slaves (roughly the average throughout Kentucky).62

  Nevertheless, as was the case elsewhere in the mountain South, Breathitt County’s “prominent landowners . . . owners of much live stock and fertile bottoms,” tended to be the str
ongest Confederate sympathizers and supporters, and their ever-growing slave population (by 1850 Breathitt had a higher enslaved percentage of its population than any of its contiguous neighbors) was one of their chief sources of wealth.63 It is possible that Jeremiah South et al. were even more eager to defend slavery than their planter brethren in the Bluegrass—the latter, having grown queasy about being surrounded by a large population of potential insurrectionists, hastened slave exportation to the Deep South.64 Wealthy from the fruits of human bondage but not frightened, mountain slave owners might have been less likely “to give up [their] slaves without a battle.”65 Moreover, many Breathitt County yeomen probably felt a common interest with their slaveholding neighbors, while even those with no aspirations to own slaves did not happily envision a future without slavery or were swayed through client-patron influence.66 John Aikman, the South family’s tenant who acted as their enforcer against squatter intrusions, went on to become Breathitt County’s most fervent defender of the local Confederate cause at his patrons’ behest.67 It is likely that many others who answered the Confederate call were nudged in that direction because of economic arrangements with the Souths, the Hargises, and other slave owners, and Leonidas Metcalfe probably understood this.68 As E. L. Noble noted, among those who “held to the Confederate wing” in Breathitt County, “slavery was asserting itself in a degree.”69

  Colonel Leonidas Metcalfe, the son of a former governor and the commander of the Unionist Seventh Kentucky Cavalry, believed that he could dissuade Breathitt County’s rebels from revolting against their home state. His arrival in Jackson near the end of 1861 may have actually increased Confederate recruitment in eastern Kentucky. (Courtesy of Kalawakua Mayer)

  Table 6. Slavery in Breathitt and surrounding counties, 1850

  Table 7. Slavery in Breathitt and surrounding counties, 1860

  Political party membership was probably an even greater enticement to rebellion than slavery was, especially since Kentucky was practically the last slave state with a modicum of two-party competition by 1861.70 Even Democratic counties with few slaves like Breathitt, Floyd, and Morgan were categorically more likely to support the Confederacy, while Whig/opposition counties like Clay and the remainder of the Three Forks counties provided the most Federal volunteers (in terms of percentage).71 In a postwar congressional hearing, a former Unionist testified that “the democratic party, in the State of Kentucky, and in the South, were much more rebellious in their notions and feelings than [their party’s] platform would indicate.”72 But of course this was postwar assessment; Southern Rights Democrat John Breckinridge was a scion of old Kaintuck peerage, and so managed to win a large number of traditionally Whiggish counties in the 1860 presidential election (even though he narrowly lost the state to Tennessee neo-Whig John Bell). The number of Breckinridge votes was not necessarily proportionate to Confederate support (Breckinridge himself did not embrace the Confederacy until late in 1861).73

  Slavery and party affiliation were only contributing factors to something almost approaching class consciousness.74 In Breathitt County, tacit or active support for the Confederacy involved slavery, but was based more broadly upon support for the county itself—its Democratic regime but also, more important, its commercial significance. It was based upon how much one had benefited from the county’s existence, the founding of Jackson, and the development Jeremiah South and his landed fellows had promised two decades earlier. Some families had benefited more than others, but in the instances in which kin were divided, economics trumped blood.75 Land and slaves were property and, at least in Breathitt County, the Democratic Party was the party of the propertied—this in a county where nearly 40 percent of the population was, according one missionary’s 1860 report, “destitute.”76 A sense of common goals and interests “happened” because of the opportunity of secession and the challenge of war.77 Breathitt County’s economically determined Confederatism was consistent with Kentucky war memory. In the minds of Kentucky’s southern apologists, Unionism was nothing more than an envious means to the end of tearing down men like Edward Strong and the South family. After the war, one regretful Bluegrass Union veteran remarked that “the Kentucky troops in the Confederate Army, being fewer in number and from the richer and more educated part of the state, were as a whole a finer body of men than the federal troops of the Commonwealth.”78 In Breathitt County and elsewhere, this “finer body” of propertied men held a remarkable degree of influence over most of their county’s citizenry.

  Table 8. Names found on both Confederate or Union military rolls and in 1861 Breathitt County Tax Books

  Table 9. Combs family members’ names found on both Confederate or Union military rolls and in 1861 Breathitt County Tax Books

  Table 10. Jett family members’ names found on both Confederate or Union military rolls and in 1861 Breathitt County Tax Books

  Table 11. Little family members’ names found on both Confederate or Union military rolls and in 1861 Breathitt County Tax Books

  Although he was the son of Kentucky’s first anti-Jacksonian (that is, elected just before the controversial president’s opposition coalesced into the Whig Party) governor, Colonel Metcalfe did not account for the influence of men like Jeremiah South and his Democratic cohort, although Brigadier General James Garfield discovered it for himself a few months later.79 Describing a population he considered “very ignorant” (ignorant of what he did not say), the future president saw a mountain population “completely under the control of their party leaders” but failed to consider the possibility that mountaineers followed the leaders who best suited their interests.80 Breathitt Confederates were those who shared the most with Jeremiah South: slavery, land wealth, and Democratic Party affiliation. The process that established the Three Forks region’s only pro-Confederate county had begun in 1839.81

  “Their policy is to organize these mountain counties against us”

  In 1839 or in 1861, South’s project had never been absolutely completed, and the substantial minority of Breathitt’s Union loyalists reflected this. While some of this poorer segment of the population followed their more prosperous relatives in supporting the South, the very poorest men were the ones statistically most likely to favor Union loyalty. They found a leader in Edward Strong’s cousin, Captain William Strong, the man who later personified everything “Bloody Breathitt” entailed. After he joined the Federal Sixth Kentucky Cavalry in September 1862, William Strong was transferred (under orders from General William Rosencrans) to the Fourteenth Kentucky Cavalry, a regiment recruited from the ultra-Unionist Whig Gibraltar counties and commanded by Estill County’s Colonel Henry Clay Lilly.82

  While his richer cousin embraced newer trends, William Strong’s Unionism was based upon relationships that predated Breathitt County’s existence. William Strong’s home was near Crockettsville, a community near the Kentucky River’s middle fork with greater social and commercial contact with heavily Unionist Perry County than with Jackson on the north fork (in fact, it had been part of Perry when Strong was born in 1825). It was, consequently, home to Breathitt County’s only Union mustering grounds.83 Perry County was home to two Unionist families with deep roots in the Three Forks region, William, Joseph, and John Eversole and Wiley and Thomas Amis, all officers in the Fourteenth Cavalry (in December 1861 the Eversole brothers and forty-five other Union soldiers defended the Eversole farm against a Rebel force nearly three times their number in what may have been the Three Forks region’s first skirmish).84 Before they all joined the Federal army, the Strongs, Amises, and Eversoles shared a sense of community decades older than Breathitt County’s apportionment from Perry.85 Strong and the Amises’ grandfathers had fought in the Clay County Cattle War six decades previous, while the Eversoles were sons of Perry County’s “richest and strongest family.”86 As a testament to his family’s persistence amid winds of change, Wiley Amis’s farm lay atop the confluence of Breathitt, Perry, and (the most intensely Unionist of the three) Owsley counties by 1845
.87 To these children of the Three Forks’ “first families,” Confederate Breathitt County was an unwelcome aberration.

  Captain William Strong, Breathitt County’s leading Unionist and a constant enemy of the county’s power structure. This photograph was made sometime during the Civil War. (Courtesy of Charles Hayes)

  After Confederate forces were repelled at Perryville in October 1862, the Fourteenth Kentucky Cavalry was organized in preparation for future southern invasions. Within a year it had become abundantly clear that emergent Kentucky Confederatism was a far greater danger.88 From then, the “Greasy Fourteenth” gained a reputation for crimes against Kentuckians of diminishing loyalties.89 In March 1864 the Fourteenth was dismissed and Strong was commissioned as a company commander in the Three Forks Battalion—later nicknamed the Last Chance Battalion—one of thirteen State Guard units, an arrangement that signaled a change from “policing” the state to barefaced counterinsurgency (William and James Eversole were also company captains in the new unit, but the Amis brothers apparently were not).90 With eight companies (most with more than eighty men each) under the command of Mexican War veteran Colonel Elisha Treadway, the Three Forks was the largest of these state battalions even though it patrolled one of Kentucky’s most underpopulated areas.91