Bloody Breathitt

by T. R. C. Hutton

  Strong and the Red Strings had relinquished control of the town and the courthouse before the militia arrived, and they subsequently disarmed without any recorded protest.135 Beside the fact that they were far outnumbered by the militia, Strong and the Freemans were less reluctant to give up their arms knowing that the court was to be handed over to Judge Randall. Strong was not indicted for his attempted insurrection, and the Freemans, although indicted by a county magistrate in Crockettsville for delinquent murder accusations, were dismissed from trial due to a lack of witnesses for the prosecution.136 Randall’s early arrival may well have been Strong’s actual goal.

  Still, Strong’s rebellion did not affect lasting change in Breathitt County. Judge Randall’s leniency to the Red Strings may have been reported because, shortly after the beginning of the special court session, Governor Leslie instructed Randall to turn the court over to Breathitt County’s Democratic county judge, James Back. In November Back indicted Strong and the Freemans for carrying concealed weapons, but all four men were found not guilty.137 But Back did not attempt to reverse any of Randall’s rulings, nor did he further pursue Strong and the Freemans for their earlier crimes. Randall’s dismissal altered Leslie’s original plans for the special court session. After Back was given control of the court, both criminal and civil cases were carried over to future court sessions, against Leslie’s instructions.138 No one was ever indicted for William Hargis’s murder.

  Judge William H. Randall’s impressive record as a Reconstruction-era champion of civil rights did not help him bring peace to Breathitt County. (E. Polk Johnson, A History of Kentucky and Kentuckians)

  Strong’s courthouse capture was motivated by Hargis’s unpunished death, but there were other complicating factors that probably encouraged more farmers to support or join the Red Strings. It came amid Breathitt County’s worst economic straits since the war, repercussions from the Panic of 1873 and a bizarre blight or storm that caused a localized corn famine.139 Whatever his strategy, Strong’s tactic in 1874 imitated an ongoing trend in the Reconstruction South. Court building usurpations were common in the 1870s although, unlike Strong’s, the majority of recorded instances were carried out for counterrevolutionary purposes by groups like the Ku Klux Klan to prevent black participation in elections or jurisprudence. The Colfax Massacre in Grant Parish, Louisiana, in 1873, one of the single bloodiest events in southern history, began with a similar confrontation over a courthouse’s physical custody.140 Strong’s forced occupation was quixotic and perhaps little more than symbolic but, like that of his political opposites in Colfax the previous year, it represented his refusal to accept what had become of his home county.

  Strong’s attempt at insurrection and the ensuing militia occupation and trials made national news, and the first public association between Breathitt County and feuds. The Republican New York Times lambasted Kentucky as a place where political disputes continued to slow the state’s postwar development. Continuing political scuffles, the Times argued, were a natural outgrowth of the creation of “pauper counties,” the result of partitioning counties into smaller and smaller units for electoral purposes while simultaneously creating smaller, poorer tax bases, “a Democratic luxury for which the remainder of the state must pay.” The correspondent blamed the county’s inhabitants for their troubles, not in the context of their being mountaineers but rather in their identity as white Kentuckians. “Too much attention to politics and not enough to corn,” said the Times reporter, “has brought want to many households, even in this corn-producing region.”141

  A Republican newspaper in Cincinnati reacted to the governor’s dispatch of the state militia by speculating that he did so only for fear that “frequent outbreaks in the South, especially at this time, will injure the prospects of Democratic candidates in the North at the approaching elections,” or that this and other contemporary outbreaks would result in federal involvement. “This modern activity of Governor Leslie, after hesitating so long with the Ku Klux raiding within sight of his residence, it is said, is the result of his fear that Uncle Sam will suppress the lawlessness in the State if the governor is unable or unwilling to do such work.”142 Military Reconstruction was dwindling throughout the South, but the fear of its expansion to Kentucky was still tangible.

  As they had since the 1860s, Kentucky Democrats used the concept of feud to parry these attacks. “The troubles in the county of Breathitt have been much exaggerated, especially by the radical press of Louisville and Cincinnati,” said J. Stoddard Johnston’s Kentucky Yeoman.143 The courthouse capture was simply the “outgrowth of an old feud between two families of the county.”144 The Yeoman’s hated adversary, the Republican Louisville Commercial, also used familial language, but to implicate Breathitt County in an attack on Kentucky’s planter elite. “Men who carry on a controversy of open violence for years always involve others in their difficulties, especially if they belong to the so-called ‘respectable families,’ families of ‘high social position.’ There is no more dangerous or delusive influence exercised in society than that of ungentlemanly gentlemen and families of mythical respectability, who strut about with a package of penitentiary morals hidden under silk and broadcloth.”145

  Of course neither of these explanations had the faintest association with Captain Strong’s courthouse capture. Brushing Flinchum and Hargis aside, the Yeoman and other papers conflated the insurrection with a series of assaults, deadly and otherwise, leading up to July 1874. Although Strong was said to have taken part in this “Jett-Little feud,” there is no proof of his participation as either aggressor or victim. Strong was not even subpoenaed as a witness in the resultant personal injury lawsuit.146 It was better, however, for Strong’s nakedly political crime to be cast within a contemporaneous apolitical conflict, one that played out (supposedly) in the fashion of an antebellum conte of southern intrigue. Bloody Breathitt was a plainly violent place in 1874, but distinguishing between different motivations and types of violence was to be discouraged.

  Both of these Bluegrass newspapers’ accounts demonstrated the strength that the language of the familial, and the intimation of there being some antebellum feud condition at work, held for their own antagonistic purposes. While the Yeoman used family to dissociate the incident from contemporary Ku Kluxing and such, the Commercial used the language of kinship to denounce what it saw as the harmful remnants of the South’s ancien régime. Feuds, as they were understood in a nineteenth-century context, were a family-based phenomenon associated with the southern aristocracy.147 The fact that the courthouse raid was not acted out by a family group, of the planter class or otherwise, was immaterial to either account; both served the papers’ public agendas. In further coverage, the Commercial scolded the Yeoman for failing to compete with smaller “stiff Democratic paper[s]” in its coverage, implying that the Yeoman was insensitive to the state’s problems with civil unrest.148 Regardless of the actual details, Kentucky’s most partisan members of the fourth estate saw Breathitt County as a foil for larger political purposes.

  It became the task of Henry Watterson’s Louisville Courier-Journal to diminish Breathitt County’s political significance altogether. No newspaper dedicated more ink to Breathitt County in 1874, and no newspaper, consequently, ended up with a more varied, and puzzling, record of the year’s events. The paper entitled one of its earliest articles on the incident “White and Negro Rioters in Breathitt,” a headline that acknowledged the incident’s similarity to contemporary, more blatantly race-based, crimes in other parts of the state.149 However, in weeks to come the Courier-Journal became more intent on distancing Breathitt County from the rest of the state and, as was customary in its and other papers’ treatment of their state during Reconstruction, depoliticizing violence. Rather than placing the county’s disorder within a larger regional or statewide political context, the Courier-Journal highlighted the isolation of the “beautiful, wild semi-barbarian county.”150 The racially amorphous Freemans were first identified as “
the terror of this county” since the Civil War but were scarcely given any other specific mention in the interest of diminishing the story’s potential for racial significance.151 After the state militia’s arrival, the paper’s coverage of Breathitt County dwindled until the only subject of interest was the militia’s incidental day-to-day activities; the paper’s final story dealt mainly with a baseball game, complete with box scores, played between two companies.152 The seventy state troops remained another six weeks, apparently without incident, until the first week of December.153

  As always, the Courier-Journal tried to maintain a middle ground between Kentucky’s left and right flanks, befitting Henry Watterson’s philosophy of North/South rapprochement. Other than placing implicit blame on the small number of people of color involved in the courthouse incident, Watterson’s paper was less willing to make hay out of it than Republican newspapers but still willing to address the story to a greater extent than the Yeoman. Throughout the Reconstruction years, Henry Watterson’s chief goal was to maintain his role as a leader among white southerners while simultaneously raising his state above the South’s madding crowd (a balancing act he perfected), and by brushing Kentucky’s violence under the rug and belittling black Kentuckians’ role in their state without blatantly attacking them like other editors might choose to do (after all, race was the politically divisive issue of the day and—excepting his moment of anti-Hayes saber rattling in the winter of 1876–77—political divisiveness was to be avoided).154 Explaining away troubles in an obscure, overwhelmingly white county far from the Bluegrass was hardly among his most daunting challenges, even following the ominous significance of white and black men cooperatively seizing a public building. Four years later, the paper misremembered the whole affair as “originat[ing] from family quarrels and feuds.”155

  “Neither the state nor the United States have done anything for Breathitt, and, in turn, Breathitt has ‘done nothing for nobody’ ”

  In the end, the Red Strings’ 1874 show of force did not deter the county’s Democrats and may well have hardened many voters’ resolve against the former Unionists. In the 1876 presidential election, Breathitt County had its largest Democratic turnout in its history, no doubt encouraged by the continuance of local Klan activity.156 But William Strong was given a new opportunity in 1878, when a newcomer challenged the local Democratic cabal. In 1875 a young Virginia lawyer named John Wesley Burnett moved to the county, joined the county bar, and made friends with then sheriff James Hagins and others in and around Jackson. Even though Burnett had a reputation for brashness (he was rumored to have come to Breathitt County to escape the repercussions of a duel he had won in Virginia), in the first three years after his arrival, he managed to remain aloof from Breathitt’s internecine conflicts—until he decided on a bid for county judge.157 Burnett was a Democrat; but as a political neophyte with no preexistent ties to the county, he was an interloper on the post-Confederate political scene. The Democratic committee nominated veteran jurist Edward Strong, and one prominent Democrat, county treasurer John Seldon Hargis, swore to spend $1,000 to prevent Burnett’s election.158 The weeks leading up to the August election were fraught with threats of violence, causing former county judge David Butler to withdraw from contention.159 Though considered “lawless” by Democrats, William Strong influenced an angry Republican minority, particularly those provoked a few years earlier by Edward Strong’s land sale. A brush fire that singed at least fourteen square miles of pasture in the northern part of the county the previous spring made the “wildlands” that the former judge wished to sell that much more vital to drovers.160 Edward Strong sought out his cousin’s endorsement through a third party, but William Strong instead endorsed Burnett and promised “to help protect him, no matter who molested him.”161 The young newcomer, the first electoral challenge to Breathitt County’s Democratic rule in ten years, won the August election by eight votes.162

  Before his election, Hagins had deputized Burnett to arrest Jerry Little (quite possibly the same Jerry Little involved in the “Jett-Little feud”). Burnett was said to have acted with particular brutality in carrying out the arrest, and after Little’s subsequent acquittal, Little’s family remained angry. When Little’s uncle, Jason Little, was arrested for murdering his wife, newly elected Judge Burnett had him transferred more than one hundred miles away to Lexington.163 Local Democrats interpreted the arrest and removal as politically motivated affronts or, just as likely, used the controversy as a stalking horse against Burnett.

  Jason Little’s return for trial during late November’s circuit court session turned into a referendum on John Burnett’s legitimacy as an elected judge. A confrontation between Civil War factions developed on Jackson’s main thoroughfare before he could be removed from the jailhouse. On one side, a mob led by Confederate veterans John Aikman and Alfred Gambrel amassed, threatening to release Little. On the other, William Strong, Henderson Kilburn, Hiram Freeman, and Freeman’s sons Daniel and William as well as a dozen other Red Strings who had come to town, according to Strong, to see that Burnett’s (and circuit court judge William Randall’s) court authority was respected.164 As Randall instructed the grand jury, the two groups faced off down the street from the courthouse.

  Verifiable stories of encounters between Aikman and Strong are scant, but many accounts of Bloody Breathitt said that they had been personal enemies since the war.165 In 1873 Strong and seven other Union veterans testified against John Aikman in a murder trial. Five former Confederates testified in Aikman’s defense and Aikman was subsequently acquitted.166 While their enmity over the years may have been exaggerated, Aikman can be seen as Strong’s opposite number in 1878: a feared Confederate veteran who did not consider the Civil War a closed matter and never showed particular concern for diktat or morality in demonstrating his displeasure. His connections to the Little family are unclear (most of the Littles had been Unionists), and it is likely that Aikman and others simply saw an opportunity to draw the Red Strings into the open.

  After both groups had assembled near the courthouse, Daniel Freeman approached Aikman and demanded to know his intentions. Declaring he would “take a dead nigger,” Aikman shot him. When William Freeman ran into the street to retrieve his brother Aikman shot him as well. Daniel died soon thereafter but William survived, even after lying in the street for a number of hours before any of the Red Strings were able to rescue him (William Strong later said he eventually died from his injuries).167 At some point later in the day, a Red String named Wallace Maguire killed Tom Little, Jason Little’s cousin who had joined with Aikman (William Strong later said that Tom Little had threatened to lead “two hundred Kuklux” from nearby Wolfe County).168 With Aikman’s group unable to free Jason Little, the day ended in Pyrrhic victory for the Red Strings.

  Calm was temporarily restored after both groups retreated behind whatever cover was available. However, as Burnett was walking to the courthouse to convene court with Judge Randall the following day, Gambrel fatally shot him, prompting Randall to flee the county, only later sending word to Frankfort.169 Even during the most horrible days of Reconstruction’s crumbling into “Redemption,” judges were rarely gunned down. Burnett’s death represented a condition of local civil unrest far worse than anything reported in Kentucky at least since 1874. It was certainly a far greater emergency than that year’s apparently bloodless courthouse coup that had prompted state intervention.

  Yet a return of the militia was not an obvious proposition. Governor Leslie had run on a reform platform with an emphasis on bringing peace to Kentucky even while the rest of the South burned. During his term nearly $58,000 of state expenditures went into dispatching the State Guard to Breathitt and at least four other troubled counties.170 His successor, Confederate veteran James McCreary, was of a more conservative bent, preferring that Kentucky’s counties utilize their generous measures of allowed local sovereignty to take care of themselves.171 When word of trouble drifted westward to Frankfort during the last wee
k of November, McCreary initially dismissed the reports of rioting in Jackson as exaggerations. A county judge’s homicide was not enough to persuade Governor McCreary to take action in Jackson, despite Judge Randall’s constitutionally mandated request.

  Executive complacency was not all that was at work. In 1877 Louisville hosted one manifestation of the Great Railroad Strike, the largest labor strike in American history, bringing commerce to a halt and causing massive property damage. City fathers were especially disturbed by a new cooperation the riot engendered between white and black workers. A few months later, emboldened immigrant laborers founded Louisville’s first Workingmen’s Party.172 Fearful of future uprisings, the General Assembly revised Kentucky’s militia law later in the year. In April 1878 the Louisville Legion, an urban militia unit not mustered since the close of the Mexican War, was revived and captained by both Confederate and Union veterans (although the former outnumbered the latter four to one).173 The new sense of class antagonism provided an excellent opportunity for cheerful agreement between upwardly mobile Rebels and Yankees, and a grand step toward depoliticizing the war memory.174