Bloody Breathitt

by T. R. C. Hutton

  Traffic on Jackson’s original conduit to the Bluegrass, the Kentucky River’s north fork, continued under new conditions. The river was no longer the freely accessed egalitarian watercourse it had once been. In 1876 Judge Edward Strong cofounded the Troublesome Creek Boom Company, a firm established to invest in a boom across the tributary for the acquisition and marketing of logs felled farther upstream. The charter allowed for the crossing of logs owned by those outside of the company, but it also provided an impediment to squatters’ rafting traffic by recognizing only the passage of legally owned timber.127 In 1882 Republican congressman John D. White had secured $75,000 of federal funding for a lock and dam farther downstream at Beattyville (White was a native of Clay County, where large-scale industrial development had first begun in eastern Kentucky). Opened in 1886, it was the most expansive river improvement to date, but a mixed blessing since the dam created artificial rapids that endangered flatboats.128 However, this did not deter venture capitalists. By the mid-1890s, timber companies (some leasing railroad land and others buying their own) monopolized river passage, constructing log booms to control the movement of timber and clogging the north fork with far more logs than it had ever floated before.129 What had once been the free domain of yeomen and squatters was becoming the possession of corporations and holding companies. For the first time, wage labor was imposed upon a large segment of Breathitt County’s male population. One journalist noted the organization of the new transportation system.

  Cheaper as the boom system is than the rafting, the cost seems a big item when put into figures. The construction of pockets, etc., for a two and one-half mile boom, in Breathitt County, for instance, came to eight thousand dollars recently.

  The work is sometimes fast and furious, as when logs are going by at the rate of from fifty to ninety a minute. Sometimes the men are obliged to work for two or three days and nights at a time, only the excitement of the work sustaining them. Their food during such an ordeal is taken by “jerks and snatches,” and lucky is the “sorter” who is excused for a cat nap.130

  The sorters who now worked for these corporations were probably the sons of men who had felled their own logs only a few years earlier.

  Occasional timber piracy on company-owned land showed that the old freebooting economy persisted to a small extent, but with little sympathy from the law-and-order, business-friendly Hustler.131 On the same pages the paper also printed the speeches of Henry George and his acolyte John W. Kramer condemning the evils of land speculation.132 Dickey may well have been oblivious to the irony of reprinting criticism of land speculation in a county that had been founded for that sole purpose—not to speak of his simultaneous defense of corporate property. By 1891 the county was no longer under the thrall of the men who had created it and, with Gilded Age policies in full swing, the old ideal of disinterested government they had once violated had become moot.

  Times had changed, and class lines between white Kentuckians had become more distinct than ever before. Soon after finally reaching the northern edge of Breathitt County, the KU fell months behind on paying track layers and local loggers who had sold it timber. In response, “ignorant mountaineers” tore up tracks, derailed cars, cut down telegraph poles, and destroyed bridges and culverts, inflicting up to $50,000 worth of damage less than a month after Dickey’s declaration of revolution.133 The wildcat strike was an astonishing collaboration between yeomen and wage laborers (though only one of many Kentucky railroad strikes in the last two decades of the nineteenth century), and it caught the attention of papers from Virginia to Texas and Kansas, while the Hustler and the Hazel Green Herald neglected to mention it.134 The mass sabotage preceded a broad agitation among mountain workers. Early the next month railroad men and lumberyard workers went on strike in Whitley and Rockcastle counties near the Tennessee line; within months a massive workingmen’s fight against convict labor in Kentucky and Tennessee had begun.135 Closer to home, however, the situation revealed more about the KU’s weakness than it did class antagonism. The railroad lost backing and fell into court-ordered receivership before it reached Jackson that summer.136 Even after it was reestablished as the Lexington & Eastern (L&E) in 1894, the railroad could not afford further extension.137 Although the wealth of bituminous and cannel coal was touted over and over again throughout the 1890s, even the ever-growing Louisville & Nashville (L&N) octopus did not eye the L&E and Breathitt County with any serious consideration until a few years into the twentieth century.138 Still, connection to the small metropolis of Lexington by any railway was indeed a welcomed “revolution.” Within two years of the railroad’s arrival, Jackson was considered (but eventually rejected) for the site of a new federal district court, a consideration that would have been unimaginable just a few years earlier.139 “Law is more rigidly enforced than at any time since the civil war,” boasted the Hustler at the end of 1891. “The completion of the railroad has brought us in contact with the outside world.”140 Within the next ten years Jackson’s population increased by 1,100 percent.141

  Breathitt County, especially Jackson, remained a disorderly place, but most agreed that the nature of local chaos had changed since the railroad’s arrival. Alcohol, a nationally popular scapegoat, was a popular replacement for primordial explanations of violence. In 1873 Breathitt became the first of many Kentucky counties to enact a “local option” ban on all sales of alcohol, an ordinance that proved ineffectual, as it did all over the state.142 Whiskey sales continued unabated, and political mass meetings were always the best settings for tippling. Dickey’s Hustler was as much a Methodist organ as it was a Democratic one, and the editor/preacher blamed both parties for turning conventions and rallies into debaucheries. “These meetings are usually more of a howling mob than of a dignified gathering of patriots. Liquor is king on these occasions and the candidates usually furnish the liquor. We look forward to the time when candidates will not dare use such vile means to secure nomination. We believe it is coming. Political meetings should be conducted with as much decorum as religious ones. The highest interests of the people are involved. May God hasten better times.”143 Local ordinance or not, eastern Kentucky remained a major producer of unbounded spirits, and the new arrival of miners, loggers, and railroad men gave nearby distillers an insatiable clientele.144 This gave the Hazel Green Herald a source of blame for violence that was increasingly popular among investment-minded flatlanders, while also having a reason to praise Jackson’s increasingly efficient law enforcement, after the town’s 1890 incorporation necessitated appointing a constable and a police judge.145 The Democratic paper was torn between defending political allies in the neighboring county and conceding that Breathitt County did indeed seem to be a repository for mayhem. But the ambitious townspeople of the less notorious Wolfe County saw that their fortunes would soon be connected to those of their rowdier neighbor, so ameliorating Breathitt County’s image was in everybody’s best commercial interest.

  It was a difficult task as, through the 1890s, Jackson and its county occasionally proved to be an untamable beast. As Jackson’s population soared, demand increased to reverse Breathitt’s local option and issue liquor licenses. In the pages of the Hustler Dickey remained adamantly in favor of continued prohibition until a Saturday night in May 1893 when saboteurs dynamited his office, destroying the printing press and “distributing type all over town.” A collection was taken and, by the end of the summer, the Hustler renewed printing, advocating convict labor and greater scrutiny of candidates for public office. Two men, one of them Jeremiah South III (a grandson of the “father of Breathitt County”), were indicted for the destruction.146 If licensure had any public following before, it was now associated with “that lawless element which once gave Breathitt County such unenviable notoriety.”147 Local option was vindicated, but “blind tigers” persisted.

  As the county’s population grew, so did juries’ willingness to punish homicides. For years reform-minded Kentuckians had blamed the timidity of the courts for
their state’s record of white intraracial homicide. Their dissatisfaction fed the white fervor for lynching, as it did elsewhere, but it also increased demand for the state-mandated death penalty; in 1892 an unprecedented ten men (six black, four white) were executed in six Kentucky counties.148 Breathitt’s citizens, many of them recently arrived from other parts of the state, also saw active law enforcement as the key to putting Bloody Breathitt to rest. The spring court term of 1895 produced an avalanche of guilty verdicts—including three murder convictions—evidence that “Breathitt” might “no longer be the synonym for crime.” It also gave lowland Kentuckians a chance to self-congratulate for the good influence railroad connections to the outside world had on the county. “The good citizens of Breathitt are determined that murder and lawlessness shall cease in that county,” one Bluegrass editor crowed after one of the sentences was passed down.149 “The county,” another agreed, “seems to be inclined to wipe out its black record of such long standing.”150

  This new fervor for justice led to the famed public execution of Thomas “Bad Tom” Smith, the only legal hanging in Breathitt County’s history. Branded a “feudist,” Smith could more accurately be termed a ne’er-do-well willing to kill for money. Smith had been Fulton French’s primary assassin in Perry County, and he exemplified a growing population that warlords like French could easily exploit: rootless, profligate men under forty, victimized by recent economic developments that pushed them away from yeomanry and toward drunkenness, gambling, and whoring.151 His first five admitted murders, all ending in acquittals or mistrials, had been at the wealthy French’s direction. When he shot Dr. John Rader during an argument over a shared paramour in the winter of 1895, he had no patron, and he was no longer shooting for a faction that much of Breathitt seemed to sympathize with (for that matter, the death of the recently arrived Rader meant the loss of a physician in a growing town with measly medical resources). No longer part of a “feud,” Smith was on his own, and he received a death sentence.152

  While incarcerated, Smith feigned illness and unsuccessfully planned escape as his attorney fruitlessly appealed his sentence.153 But when it came time for his execution in late June, his gallows performance was the essence of meekness and resignation, a model of the repentant condemned convict, and a personification of the roguish county that was now enacting a cleansing justice in the form of his death sentence.154 With an estimated four thousand men, women, and children swelling Jackson’s streets, Smith was baptized in the north fork a few hours before he ascended the scaffold (reporters noted the presence of Captain William Strong, John Aikman, Jerry Little, and other famed rogues). He tearfully embraced his sister, sang hymns to the crowd, confessed his life of murder and other sins, and implored all assembled to forgive their neighbors as Smith hoped to be forgiven.155 Confessing guilt, he also claimed victimhood to the archetypal Victorian rake’s progress.

  My last words on earth to you are to take warning from my fate. Bad whiskey and bad women have brought me where I am. I hope you ladies will take no umbrage at this, for I have told you the God’s truth. To you, little children, who were the first to be blessed by Jesus, I will give this warning: Don’t drink whiskey and don’t do as I have Done. I want everybody in this vast crowd who does not wish to do the things that I have done, and to put themselves in the place I now occupy, to hold their hands.156

  It was a presentation that mingled elements of the sacred and the profane, proclaiming Christian justice and redemption while also reaffirming the state’s moral authority (befittingly, a rail-delivered one hundred gallons of Lexington whiskey was immediately sent back, lest the solemn hanging’s wholesome atmosphere be spoiled).157 Of all Bloody Breathitt’s storied killings, this one had the most witnesses and, by virtue of state sanction, the greatest blessings of legitimacy. Even, perhaps, more so than most public hangings; defying tradition, Sheriff Breck Combs did not bother to conceal his identity when he pulled the lever that opened the trapdoor beneath Smith’s shackled feet.

  Breathitt County’s first (and it would turn out to be the last) legal hanging was cast as a triumph of state-sanctioned violence over feuds and all their antiquated connotations.158 It was the culmination of forces set in motion on Christmas Day in 1884, when an anonymous epistler requested assistance and investment in the Louisville Courier-Journal; next came missionaries and rail traffic and, finally, state-approved capital punishment. “In Breathitt county, which by many people is considered to be beyond the pale of civilization,” the Democratic Hartford Herald remarked a few days before Smith’s death, “the day of reckoning which will mark an era in the history of Eastern Kentucky is near at hand.”159 Or, as a Missouri newspaper interpreted it: “Jackson built a school house and a railroad reached the town recently, and the ringing of the school bell and the whistle of the locomotive were the signals that told the hill country that the murdering days were over.”160 By demonstrating that violence could be used to punish crime rather than commit it, Breathitt County ingratiated itself to the outside world. In the past, violent death had been a divider, but now it was a uniter. Bad Tom Smith had been a “feudist,” but as part of an affair in another county, and it was probably a relief to many that the crime of passion for which he was hanged was unconnected to past power struggles. Unlike so many killings before it, Bad Tom Smith’s execution was a civically consensual, apolitical killing. Almost no one questioned it as a legitimate form of violence.161 And, if it was to bring about an unprecedented peace accompanied by the riches of industrial growth, it reaffirmed the legitimacy of the local state (which, no doubt, many Kentuckians had come to doubt).

  The same could not be said for the double lynching eleven years past. It is little surprise that Smith’s hanging is a buoyant bit of Kentucky folklore, while Henderson Kilburn’s and Ben Strong’s are largely forgotten (the Louisville Courier-Journal erroneously called Smith “the first man ever hanged in Breathitt County”).162 One Kentucky Democrat inadvertently echoed the Reverend J. J. Dickey’s affirmation from eleven years past. “Whatever mistakes may have been made in the way of enforcing the law in the past, let us forget, and see to it that a healthy public sentiment is so openly expressed that it brings about a rigid enforcement of the law in the future.”163 For all of these reasons, paradoxical as they may have been, Smith made an exemplary sacrificial lamb, a final propitiation for Bloody Breathitt’s communal sins.

  For a short time it seemed as if the act of atonement had worked. Then, a little more than a year later, came the arrests of former Breathitt sheriff William Bryant and his mistress after they absconded to Arkansas with embezzled county funds.164 Crime in Breathitt County had graduated to a form less sanguinary and atrocious and more avaricious and scandalous. It could only mean progress.

  5

  DEATH OF A FEUDAL HERO

  Here beyond men’s judgments all covenants were brittle.

  —Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian; or,

  The Evening Redness in the West (1985)

  After Jeremiah South’s death in 1880, his family experienced a number of setbacks. Barry, his most enterprising son, replaced him as penitentiary executive but, like his father, ran afoul of the reformers who sought to humanize Kentucky’s appalling penal system.1 Barry South’s 1887 bid for state treasurer was trounced in the Democratic primary just months before he lost thousands of dollars of uninsured property in a Frankfort warehouse fire.2 His elder brother, Confederate congressional medal honoree Colonel Samuel South, died the next year, while their nephew Jerry South III fell into a life of crime and dissolution.3 One of the few adult Souths still living in Breathitt County by the 1890s, Jerry was involved with the French-Eversole feud, and the dynamiting of the Jackson Hustler office (it was later revealed that he wanted to destroy the Reverend J. J. Dickey’s paper because he was “strongly opposed to evangelists coming into Eastern Kentucky”). He was shot to death in 1896 while arguing over the spoils of a fish-poaching operation. His accused assailants were acquitted on a technicality.
4

  It was an ignoble decline for a family that had once been on the make. Any number of factors might be blamed for the Souths’ dwindling prosperity, and most of them related to land ownership in an industrial age.5 They had never been able to properly exploit the vast Breathitt County acreage that had appreciated in value since their patriarch first purchased the land and arranged for the county’s creation. Poor surveying kept farmers and speculators from making unimpeachable claims to ownership, especially when faced with well-lawyered timber and coal companies. As enormous parcels of Breathitt County land were sold in the 1890s, prices soared and state-recognized property demarcation became truly vital. The long-standing confusion of boundaries was no long tolerable.

  An acceleration of litigation ensued, as Barry South and others tried to defend their holdings. For years after his father’s death, other claimants challenged him for what was left of his inheritance as he tried to prevent unknown parties—the hunters and marginal drovers, Breathitt County’s “wood denizens”—from felling what he considered his timber. As those who aspired to legitimate land ownership came upon hard times, they thrived on absentee-owned land for indefinite years until they were discovered and driven off.6 In 1894 Barry South told a federal judge that he and his coheirs had not been able to “invade” their Breathitt County property for twenty years because of a “lawless and desperate” population of squatters who were hostile to surveyors and unwilling to provide depositions. What was left of the old Thomas Franklin Revolutionary grant was far more land than even a family of means could survey or surveil. So it remained the domain of men “who built houses and eked out a bare existence,” armed with superior knowledge of its landscape, its coal seams, and its phenomenally valuable hardwood.7 The landless never need worry about becoming land poor; railroads and large-scale extractors could also afford to bide their time. Barry South could not.