Bloody Breathitt

by T. R. C. Hutton

  “Negroes and mountaineers” were two populations that white lowland Kentuckians had come to see as inferior or dangerous. They were not maligned equally; Senator Blackburn apparently did not count 1904’s lynchings of at least two black men and one black woman within the confines of Kentucky’s “lawlessness.”75 The mountain white was defined by, if nothing else, whiteness, and his vote was not taken away. However, it could be contained; in 1880 Kentucky’s Democrat-controlled legislature gerrymandered a new congressional district circling most of the old Whig Gibraltar counties, effectively segregating most of the state’s Republican electorate.76 But they were both, nonetheless, maligned. Their shared membership in the hated Republican Party was a valuable weapon in the Democratic arsenal. The section’s membership in the Republican Party, any political party, proved it to be a decidedly modern “participatory” political culture, even if observers from the Bluegrass or other parts of the outside world wanted it to be a “parochial” or “tribal” one. No other part of the American Republic has had its elected officials described by historians as “feudal lords” and “chieftains.”77 At the battle of New Orleans, the “Hunters of Kentucky” had represented the American Republic’s “civic and archaic” backbone, “rustic citizen warriors” who mingled violence and egalitarianism to form a “virtuous militia” against imperial standing armies.78 Two-thirds of a century later, however, Kentuckians who seemed to most resemble their ancestors were no longer venerated in the same way. The difference was that in the War of 1812, unlike the more recent war, all Kentuckians had been on the same side.

  After southern conservatives introduced it as a tool of depoliticization during Reconstruction, feud became more specifically associated with the Kentucky mountains in the mid-1880s, largely because of various feud scenarios identified by the Louisville Courier-Journal and other newspapers. By the turn of the century, Kentucky’s Democratic newspapers, even those in the mountains, derisively referred to their state’s unfortunate “feud belt.”79 The feud belt’s fictive designation established Republican eastern Kentucky as a political culture distinct from the American norm—even when the southern Democracy still carried with it the taint of Confederate recalcitrance.80 Henry Watterson’s paper was liberal in its use of the word feud, applying it to isolated knife fights, brawls, and riots involving up to a dozen men, and to larger-scale affairs like the “Rowan County War.” The only common denominator was that they were all white-on-white intraracial attacks and killings (ergo horizontal violence between equals) at a time when white-on-black interracial attacks and deaths were still very common in the state; between 1884 and 1886 at least a dozen black Kentuckians were lynched.81

  Succinctly, the “feud belt” comprised a section of Kentucky that was supposedly homogenously Republican, a purposeful, long-lived oversimplification of mountain society.82 It was useful to Democratic state authorities faced with inveigling the public and maintaining law and order even as Kentucky bucked the prevailing southern trend in gradually becoming a two-party state. This task fell most heavily on Governor Simon Bolivar Buckner, a former Confederate lieutenant general whose administration marked the end of unchallenged Confederate control over Kentucky’s executive functions. Buckner’s election in 1887 was narrow, and his record number of vetoes showed a diminished Democratic dominance.83 Perhaps it is no coincidence that his administration played host to eastern Kentucky’s most pronounced series of “feud” violence, mostly in counties lacking one-party dominance.84 Early in his administration Buckner dealt with his state’s most storied “feud,” that of the Hatfield and McCoy families in Pike County, Kentucky, and Logan County, West Virginia. Buckner became embroiled in an extradition debacle with the neighboring state’s governor and reluctantly sent a segment of the state militia to Pike County. Of all the well-known “Kentucky feuds,” that of the Hatfields and McCoys had the least obvious ties to party politics. Still, Pike County lawyer and entrepreneur Perry Cline, who manipulated all parties involved without once firing a gun, was among Buckner’s most faithful mountain allies. Both wealthy Democrats reaped benefits from the feud’s outcome.85 Decades later, the same area along the Kentucky–West Virginia border experienced a completely separate series of conflicts combining local politics with the fight between capital and industrial labor, and culminating in the “Matewan Massacre.” Since it was an area already defined by the inherency suggested by “the feudin’ Hatfields and McCoys,” Americans in the outside world “turned a blind eye and a deaf ear” to the later events’ contingencies.86

  Not long after, unrest erupted in at least three contiguous counties in southeastern Kentucky. A conflict between a Three Forks Battalion officer’s son and a newcomer in Perry County, both of them wealthy merchants, arose sometime in the mid-1880s and increased in notoriety as their hired gunmen fell.87 Republican Joseph Eversole’s private war with Democratic rival Fulton French supposedly originated in the former’s efforts to protect local landowners from the machinations of land speculators.88 As Perry County’s poorer landowners’ aggressive advocate, Eversole had a bit of a numerical advantage among its male, fighting-age citizens. To counter it, French sought out “thugs” from Breathitt County.89 Jerry South III, the grandson of eastern Kentucky’s most ambitious land speculation schemer to date, was among French’s “lieutenants.”90 When he was finally brought to trial in 1895 for the various Perry County murders, French began a successful process toward acquittal by securing a change of venue to Breathitt in 1895.91 By then, he had already resided there for six years, amassing property and strengthening ties to Jackson’s Democratic elites. Less than a decade later, he was implicated—but never convicted—in more politically motivated homicides.92 But not before his war with the Eversole faction had spilled into Breathitt, Knott, and Harlan counties, perhaps creating a more chaotic state of affairs than what had started in Perry.93 The Hazel Green Herald disingenuously assured readers that “there are no politics involved, it being merely a personal feud that has extended until both parties have gathered up friends, who, previous to the quarrel, knew neither party.”94

  Around the same time, Harlan County’s “Howard-Turner feud” erupted between a Republican gang and members of a Democratic courthouse ring who (according to one of the former) “wanted to be the supreme rulers of the universe” behind the guise of “Law & Order.”95 By the county judge’s own admission, a seeming majority within the county either “openly espouse[d] their cause or quietly [lent] . . . aid, comfort or refuge” to the Republican outlaws Will Jennings and Wilson Howard (the judge attributed this to kinship—he did not address whatever grievances they had against him and his court).96 Once Governor Buckner was convinced that local coal and timber operations were being impeded, he sent state troops, just as he had in Perry County.97 The series of ambushes and skirmishes that comprised the 1889 conflict were roundly identified as actions within a “family feud,” despite the large number of surnames involved. Also, the fact that the preexistent tension had flared into violence just after Fulton French had begun recruiting gunmen in the county went unexplored.98 Eventually, most of the oral folklore regarding the events accepted the “trivial causes and tragic consequences” of the standard feud narrative without including exogenous details.99 The actions of individuals, and their intentions, were hidden behind surnames.

  Feud, as it was understood in the nineteenth-century lexicon, was a reciprocal form of controlled violence between equals, and all accounts of the early days of the “French-Eversole feud” seem to follow this model even if the “Howard-Turner feud” did not; it was something approximating gang warfare more than interpersonal revenge.100 However, by late 1888, the combination of the two led to a murderous crime wave in at least three of the six counties in Kentucky’s nineteenth judicial circuit. In the eighteen weeks between court sessions, circuit court judge H. C. Lilly reported to Governor Buckner, there had been five killings and eleven nonfatal shootings. Court could not be held until juries and attorneys were unafraid to atten
d court. Despite Lilly’s supplications to send a segment of the State Guard (a month earlier Buckner had dispatched seventy militiamen to Perry County), Buckner refused to believe Breathitt contained “any organized opposition to the civil authorities,” instead claming it suffered from “acts of individual lawlessness.”101

  It is needless for me to say to you that in a Republic the employment of the military arm in enforcing the law is of rare necessity, and the occasion for its use should not be doubtful propriety. The law invests the civil authorities with ample powers to enforce the observance of law, and expects those officers to exert their authority with reasonable diligence. When this is done there is seldom an occasion when the military force can be employed without detriment to the public interests and without bringing the civil authorities into discredit. When a people are taught that they are not themselves the most important factor in the conservation of order in society and that they must depend upon the exertion of extraneous force to preserve order amongst themselves, they have lost their title to self-government, and are fit subjects for a military despotism. I do not believe that any portion of this Commonwealth has reached that degree of political degradation.102

  Lilly’s petition was one of many. A state prosecutor and mountain lawyers (and at least one doctor) from all over the district, Democrats and Republicans, implored Buckner to send troops.103 However, Buckner shared only Lilly’s letters with the press, making it appear that the former Union colonel had lost his nerve. Democrats scourged the “worthless and cowardly” judge for his impotence in his circuit.104 “The court has not been held and the blame rests upon the shoulders of this Republican judge, who will neither perform his official duties nor exchange with a Democratic judge, who offers to travel his circuit unguarded and clear the docket for him,” the Louisville Courier-Journal intoned.105 The following August, the county failed to report election results for the first time since the 1860s.106 Even though Bloody Breathitt had received more attention in the past for disorders, in terms of sheer number of deaths and ensuing public disruption, the last few months of the 1880s constituted the county’s worst period since the Civil War.

  It was also the first time a governor rejected pleas for peacekeeping in the county. By the end of 1891 peace was restored, but only after Buckner had purposefully humiliated Judge Lilly. The judge’s criminal docket (said to cover “357 acres” of paper by December 1891), which included nine murders and fifteen malicious shooting indictments, was delayed for months.107 When Lilly ran for reelection in 1892 a young Democratic lawyer, David B. Redwine, soundly defeated him with the help of endorsements from the Jackson Hustler and the Hazel Green Herald (which had crossed party lines to endorse Lilly in 1886) and Lilly’s own wounded reputation in his district’s most Democratic county.108

  Americans who read of troubles in southeastern Kentucky were no strangers to violence on their own soil. Since the Civil War, the reading public had become aware of counterrevolutionary violence against black southerners, the Great Plains “Indian wars,” and the industrial class war escalating in various cities.109 Killing by various means for power-related reasons was commonplace. The eastern Kentucky feud phenomenon appeared strange to the outside world because this violence could not be legitimized in terms that late nineteenth-century Anglo-Americans could easily understand. White northerners and southerners devised ways of finding legitimacy in the preservation of the American nation and/or white supremacy when dealing with the recent memory of the war. Even northerners who despised white southerners’ defiance during Reconstruction understood that the latter were fighting for the preservation of a political status quo threatened by black citizenship.110 Skirmishes with the Great Plains Indian nations were an expanding nation’s culling of an obstinate, dying race; it was reasoned that, in such an immense struggle over power, killing was inevitable.111 These were struggles that made sense according to postbellum America’s understanding of political violence—they were the kinds of violence that were allowed in the Pax Americana, even if bereft of state sanction, because they forwarded Anglo-American projects.

  Factional fighting between white Americans for outwardly obscure reasons in obscure places could not be easily attached to the available legitimacies: furthering white supremacy, nationalism, and ever-expanding commerce. Outside of these contexts, violence could not be politically motivated but could only be defined as primordial, inexplicable, and senseless—and, most important, acted out between equals within a perfectly homogenous environment.112 Fighting among Anglo-Americans did not fit into this puzzle of legitimate violence. However, for those who benefited from this bloodshed, namely, Buckner and his Democratic Party mates, it was better not to address the particulars; “acts of individual lawlessness” could scarcely be traced to the ballot box. But, with or without Buckner, even the fisticuffs and knifings in many urban or rural communities were interpreted according to the dictates of feud when they happened in Breathitt County or nearby.113

  Nearby was key; overshadowed by the Hatfield-McCoy, Howard-Turner, and French-Eversole feuds, Bloody Breathitt was bereft of media attention during the Buckner administration, even though the latter two situations affected the county (feud violence crossing county boundaries complicated and called into question significant parts of the feud narrative—particularly insularity from the outside world). As Altina Waller has noted, there must be core reasons for the contemporaneous “wars” so close to each other in eastern Kentucky, an allusive “common denominator.” Waller pointed to a number of factors leading to mountain farmers’ mounting poverty—ineffective farming techniques, partible inheritance, and other late nineteenth-century developments (new state regulations on hunting and fishing, heightened enforcement of federal revenue laws, land amassment by railroads and speculators)—that damaged eastern Kentucky’s yeoman economy, bringing “forest farming” to a bitter, plodding end.114

  These were contributing factors, especially since this sort of poverty created a male population desensitized and inured to violence. However, they cannot fully explain the mass violence seen in southeastern Kentucky in the late 1880s since there were plenty of counties that did not have analogous “feuds” during this time, counties undergoing the same economic hardships. What Harlan and Perry counties did not have (and what more stable mountain counties did have by 1885 or earlier) was either Republican or Democratic one-party dominance, and they were in a part of the state where wartime rivalries remained even after more than two decades. Intense examinations of political conditions in either county during the 1880s would probably reveal preexistent civil disorder exacerbated by Buckner’s election (the relative calm in both counties after he left office suggests that something had changed).115 Indeed, even though feuding was first associated with the Kentucky mountains a few years earlier, the concurrence of factional wars roughly between 1887 and 1890 was when the phenomenon was cemented in the American psyche. It fell to public servants like Judge H. C. Lilly to confront the complexities involved. The vast majority of the reading public elsewhere in Kentucky and the United States preferred simpler, anti-introspective explanations with uncritical, Whiggish solutions, “relics of antiquity . . . Rapidly Dying Out Before Civilization’s Advance.”116

  “What a mighty revolution!”

  After being overshadowed by its neighbors for a few years, Bloody Breathitt caught media notice in May 1889 when Edward Strong’s teenaged granddaughter eloped with a Negro named Milton Richmond. A posse pursued the couple and Richmond was fatally riddled with bullets after he fired a shot at Strong, injuring the judge’s hand. When the girl was returned home, her father tried to kill her and then himself before he was restrained.117 What might otherwise have been only a local scandal in a community steeped in white supremacy (but, as described in previous chapters, also steeped in racial ambiguity) somehow reached the national wire service, most likely because “Judge Strong was a participant in the Breathitt war.”118

  After this scandal, the press renewed its interes
t in novel accounts of Breathitt’s primitiveness, isolation, or general strangeness. Often facts fell prey to expectations. In 1890 the Chicago Tribune selected a drunken shooting in a Jackson “blind tiger” (a common enough case of tavern manslaughter in an era of high alcohol consumption), whimsically predicting it would be the beginning of “a new feud.”119 Other papers across the country reported on the affray as well, except that in these other versions, it had happened at either a religious revival or a suicidal teenager’s funeral (the more detailed articles suggested the latter). Further violence did not ensue, prompting a Georgia editor to express disappointment.120 When, later that month, “a negro preacher named Pennington” was shot to death in Jackson’s streets over a stolen pair of trousers, the incident was not so widely disseminated.121

  The Reverend James Dickey and other Jackson nabobs refused to let the troubles of 1888–89 dim their booster spirit, especially as the KU came closer and closer. After nearly three years of track laying (an enterprise said to have employed more than two thousand men), a spur connected northern Breathitt County with Beattyville (Lee County’s booming county seat at the confluence of the Kentucky River’s three forks) in 1890.122 By this point the ambitious plan to connect the Bluegrass to Virginia had been forgotten. Still, the connection of Kentucky’s “darkest and most God forsaken” county to Lexington was considered an incredible transformation. “What a mighty revolution!” Reverend Dickey proclaimed in the Hustler. “Go to Beattyville by rail and steam boat in about two hours where formerly it required a day’s hard riding on horse back.”123 Despite local gripes over the requisite hike in property taxes, the Hustler insisted that the KU would save the county $40,000 per year.124 And fewer landowners had need to worry, anyway; as the rails approached, faraway firms purchased gigantic individual hardwood trees and vast expanses of forested land, in some cases at astounding prices of $10 an acre ($1 an acre having been a recent rate).125 The best was yet to come; in 1893 this new connection to the outside world was commemorated with another display of Breathitt County cannel coal at yet another international industrial fair, this time the Chicago’s World Exhibition.126