Bloody Breathitt

by T. R. C. Hutton

  Most of all, William Strong and his role in Bloody Breathitt were propelled into the past. In the interest of demonstrating that feud violence was not a product of Kentucky’s present, the recent killing (or its motivations) were placed as far back in time as possible by both Breathitt County natives and newspapers from the outside world. Fourteen months later, John Aikman insisted that Strong’s death was a very late retaliation for the late-1860s dispute between Strong and Wilson Callahan that involved the latter’s, and Wiley Amis’s, defections to the Democratic Party (Aikman, having no association with these former Unionists, told this story probably as a claim of innocence).51 Aikman took for granted that the younger Callahan would, as a matter of course, avenge his grandfather at this late date. He did not address the question of why, had this been purely a matter of familial revenge, Callahan had not killed Strong years earlier.

  Some spoke of Strong in language that sent him back even further. What may have been a misspelling on the part of the Courier-Journal is nonetheless telling: clan, a word Americans would have associated with extended families and Scottish warlords of past centuries (a decidedly parochial time and place) was used in place of klan, which, in contrast, referred directly to a recent crisis of legitimacy in the American South.52 Within six years, when violence in Breathitt County had yet again gained national interest, the events that had led to Strong’s shooting had become collectively known as the “Strong-Callahan feud.”53 Similarly, a history of Breathitt County produced by the Works Projects Administration’s Writers’ Project described Callahan’s source of authority as “a paternal rule, in the rustic style of a Scotch clan chieftain.”54 Granted, these were only analogies, but they were analogies repeated so often that they ultimately overshadowed the actual events and their attendant political implications. The aberrational late persistence of the Ku Klux Klan in Breathitt County, its Red String enemies, and the fact that these groups founded during the South’s internecine political wars in the 1860s and 1870s somehow remained in one isolated corner of Kentucky were all but forgotten. With the passing of a generation, the causes that men once killed and died for were becoming as distant and archaic as those of some ancestral Jacobite.

  Even if the Strong-Callahan feud was personal, it was also political by virtue of the respective past and present roles of the men who took part in it. Strategically, the “bushwhacking” of Strong in 1897 was little different than the double lynching of Henderson Kilburn and Ben Strong thirteen years earlier. By the time of his death, Democratic control over the county was in no electoral danger, and the old Republican patriarch had far less authority than he had in the 1870s. The county’s African American population had dwindled and his role as “special protector of the colored race in Breathitt” did not garner him even a small measure of local support.55 What little political legitimacy he might have once held was gone. Even if Strong had ceased his belligerence, he and the Red Strings represented the county’s past, a past that stood in the way of its continuing economic development. The pocket of guerrilla defiance he established during the Civil War could not be tolerated as Breathitt County became a more influential part of Kentucky and the New South.

  Moreover, William Strong was not to be remembered as a kind of political leader but rather a premodern curiosity. A feudal chieftain had to be a thing of distant history, in fact as well as name. With Strong dead, the use of mass violence as had been employed by the Red Strings and the Ku Klux Klan in past years was no longer necessary. After Breathitt’s grand jury indicted sixteen men for “ku-kluxing” in the summer of 1897, both groups apparently dissipated.56 Groups that openly went by the name were no longer heard from—at least until the 1910s and 1920s, when a new national version of the Klan emerged.57 The internal crisis of legitimacy that they represented had been resolved; political violence in Breathitt County had not come to an end, but it would no longer be dressed in emblems of the past.

  Strong had enough enemies for Edward Callahan to avoid being implicated. But, given their history of political differences and mutual antagonism, Callahan was believed to be the one who had dispatched the last remaining threat to Democratic rule in the county (at least among threats that drew their power from a gun barrel), and this reputation added to his political stock considerably.58 Callahan would go on to further damage his home county’s reputation while also becoming one of eastern Kentucky’s most invincible politicians.

  And even if Strong had not been so great a threat to Callahan in those later years, the former’s death had a symbolic significance, a demarcation between Breathitt County’s dark feudal past and its bright future that also worked in Callahan’s favor. When Strong’s nephew James B. Marcum later accused the ascendant Democrat of complicity in his uncle’s death, Callahan could have responded like a “feudist,” vowing personal vengeance for sullied honor and reputation. Instead, he upbraided Marcum for “keeping up the old trouble.”59

  But the county’s next political debacle, one that placed it under unprecedented national scrutiny, produced a new complex turn toward violence that could not be tucked so neatly into the past. Even after the death of Bloody Breathitt’s “feudal hero,” the county’s most famous killings were yet to come.

  6

  “THERE HAS ALWAYS BEEN THE BITTEREST POLITICAL FEELING IN THE COUNTY”

  A Courthouse Ring in the Age of Assassination

  So it should be noted that when he seizes a state the new ruler must determine all the injuries that he will need to inflict. He must inflict them once for all, and not have to renew them every day, and in that way he will be able to set men’s minds at rest and win them over to him when he confers his benefits. Whoever acts otherwise, either through timidity or misjudgment, is always forced to have the knife ready in his hand and he can never depend on his subjects because they, suffering fresh and continuous violence, can never feel secure with regard to him. Violence must be inflicted once and for all; people will then forget what it tastes like and so be less resentful. . . .

  And it is to be observed, men are either to be flattered and indulged or utterly destroyed—because for small offences they do usually revenge themselves, but for great ones they cannot—so that injury is to be done in such a manner as not to fear any revenge.

  —Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (1532)

  “Republicanism,” Henry Watterson envisioned in late 1888, “is simply an epidemic. Like Federalism, cholera, Know-Nothingism and yellow fever, when it has run its course, it will pass away.”1 It was an oddly sanguine appraisal of incumbent Grover Cleveland’s recent electoral defeat (Benjamin Harrison had narrowly lost the popular vote while winning the Electoral College) and Republican congressional gains. Marse Henry’s lifelong raison d’être was to rally his party, even in hard times. Nevertheless, it was a peculiar time to predict the Grand Old Party’s imminent demise, even from the northernmost edge of the Solid South.

  As far as Kentucky’s near future went, Watterson was not so much overly optimistic as he was absolutely wrong. The 1888 death of vive voce and the adoption of a secret ballot benefited Republicans all over the state as well as the western counties’ tobacco-belt Populist insurgency.2 Just as it had once been caught between North and South, Kentucky was again wedged between the state’s agrarian past and its industrial future—an advantageous position for Republicans. In 1895 (the first year the secret ballot was used statewide) they captured the state’s House of Representatives and elected William O. Bradley, “the Kentuckian who broke the ‘Solid South,’ ” its first Republican governor.3 As they watched the rest of the South circle the wagons of Jim Crow, Democrats were appalled by what they called Bradley’s “mongrel ideas of mixed schools and similar vicious principles.”4 His plea to repeal the state’s “separate coach law” was met with white jeers (and the aforementioned chaos of 1896), and his summoning of militia to Frankfort during a prolonged legislative conflict angered both factions.5 Even after such heavy-handedness, Bradley’s party slowly flourished as Democra
ts “left the party in its hour of need.”6 William McKinley’s razor-thin 142-vote advantage over William Jennings Bryan, and the appointment of the state’s first Republican U.S. senator, amounted to “a bitter morsel in the mouth of Kentucky Democracy.”7 “It’s goodbye solid South,” a western Kentucky Democrat lamented as Bryan’s defeat was confirmed.8

  Even with vigorous, honest, two-party competition, Democrats refused to accept Bradley’s legitimacy, especially given his vetoes of any and all regulation over the Louisville & Nashville (L&N) “Railway Emperor” and its ever-increasing freight prices.9 Distrust of Bradley and the L&N fueled the career of one of the South’s most unlikely firebrand politicians, Democrat William Goebel.10 The Pennsylvania-born Union army veteran’s son, a watchmaker’s apprentice turned lawyer, represented the urban minority of a rural state still electing Confederate veterans as governors (a wizened James McCreary returned to the office in 1911 after a thirty-two-year intermission).11 For a time, “control by the conservative well-to-do, aristocratic, ex-Confederates of the [Democratic] party was passing,” while politicians like Goebel, “more demagogic, more radical, more willing to please tenant farmers and labor were taking control” in many southern states.12 What set him apart from a Comer, Blease, Aycock, or Vardaman was his express openness to black voters (most of whom received him coolly).13 Goebel confronted not only the unwelcome Republicans but also the wing of his own party controlled by industrialized planters like the L&N’s chief lobbyist, Confederate doyen Basil Duke.14 Working from within their own party, Goebel became the first real threat to members of Kentucky’s Bourbonocracy since the days when they had counted people among their commodities.

  Would-be governor William Goebel. Goebel’s firebrand gubernatorial run in 1899 divided Kentucky’s Democratic Party and brought the state to the brink of civil war. His assassination in 1900 reunited his party and reinitiated the state’s status quo. (http://history.ky.gov/governors.php?pageid=27§ionid=8)

  William Goebel compounded his controversy by his embrace of violence. He mastered Kentucky’s vaunted art of killing in 1895, when an armed banker confronted him over an unflattering article Goebel had penned. Goebel responded with a bullet to the banker’s head and was later acquitted on grounds of self-defense. Many accounts mistakenly interpreted the shooting as a duel, although there was no previous planning for the encounter and the banker never pulled his own gun, a scenario that hardly qualified as the traditional (and, by this time, sharply declining) white southern ritual.15 When arsonists burned tollbooths to protest high turnpike fees, the young state senator expressed sympathy for their aims, giving conservative legislators further reason to associate him with lawlessness.16

  Nothing he did outside of the state capitol could surpass the controversy surrounding what became known as the Goebel election law. In 1898 Goebel (who was by this time senate pro tem) proposed a reform bill to centralize election management, a measure that would theoretically strengthen his party while simultaneously diminishing the power of county courts, most of which were Democratically controlled.17 Republicans considered it a disenfranchising “Force Bill,” while many prominent Democrats opposed it on principle, but it passed over Bradley’s veto in 1898.18

  Goebel’s nomination for governor the following year was widely attributed to the Democratic state convention chair, Breathitt County’s “ardent Democrat of the Jeffersonian school” Judge David B. Redwine.19 A dark horse of the mountains, Redwine had few binding relationships and was not a member of one of the state’s great dynastic political families like the Clays or the Breckinridges. His origins were relatively obscure even within his own impoverished, remote court circuit (where he had been accused of “boodle” and assisting in local election fixing since early in his judicial career).20 Perhaps most important, his residency in one of the only Democratic stalwarts in a heavily Republican section brought with it a certain pariah status; anyone outside of eastern Kentucky who had heard of it since 1878 associated it with nothing more than the irrational violence and depravity implied by feuds.21 As the political drama was recounted over the following years, particularly from Republican memory, the young judge (whose 1892 rout over H. C. Lilly surprised many mountaineers even after the latter’s embarrassment over Breathitt County) was better remembered as being from “ ‘bloody’ Breathitt.”22 For years it was suggested that only a “mountain henchman” was intrepid enough to stare down a hostile convention floor.23

  The Democrats’ infamously rowdy “Music Hall Convention” of June 1899 was nationally known as a meeting of Kentucky’s dregs brought to act as delegates. Riverfront roustabouts and gamblers mingled with policemen, firemen, and ward heelers as incessant brass band music, inebriated raucousness, and a constant threat of riot prevailed on the convention floor.24 Ignoring physical threats, Chairman Redwine insisted on a dizzying flurry of roll call votes and refused to adjourn until Goebel’s other conventioneers could negotiate a firm majority. He managed enough aplomb to remain onstage beating time with his walking stick to some angry delegates’ impromptu rendition of “We’ll Hang Jeff Davis from a Sour Apple Tree” with “Redwine” substituted for “Jeff Davis.”25 Throughout, Breathitt County’s James “Big Jim” Hargis was “one of the main manipulators,” cajoling delegates and supposedly threatening Redwine with bodily harm when he considered leaving the lectern for his own safety.26 Redwine “apparently desired the world to surrender on its knees,” recalled a disgruntled Republican memoirist. “Parliamentary usages formed no part of his code. He was not there for the convention to direct, but to direct the convention. There was but one man he obeyed, but one man he served, and that man was William Goebel. Him he served with all the fidelity with which a slave serves his master.”27 The twenty-sixth ballot produced a nomination for Goebel and nationwide outrage; Republicans saw correlations between Goebel and the specter of anarchy, while some Democrats reproved the Goebel election law as an attack on “home rule.”28 David B. Redwine’s reputation (and, to a lesser extent, James Hargis’s) was indelibly connected to Goebel’s contentious nomination, and for years Redwine was anathema among Republicans. Goebel himself coyly disregarded his role at the convention.29 “I want to know if Judge Redwine really was for me,” Goebel said at a whistle-stop in Jackson. “They say he was but I want to know.”30

  From the chaotic 1899 Democratic convention in Louisville to the murders on the streets of Jackson in 1902 and 1903, Judge David B. Redwine was always near the center of controversy while always managing to walk between the raindrops. (Courtesy of the University of Louisville Law Library Collection)

  Nomination in hand, candidate Goebel scarcely mentioned his Republican opponent, Attorney General William S. Taylor, by name. “There are only two candidates for governor of Kentucky,” he announced a month before the election. “There are more than that number who pretend to be candidates, but the only real candidates are the Louisville Company [the L&N] and the person who addresses you.”31 His election law, by far his most outrageous legacy, was repugnant to “Honest-election” Democrats who nominated former governor John Y. Brown as their candidate at a separate convention.32 Even with William Jennings Bryan’s support, and a reluctant late endorsement from Watterson’s Louisville Courier-Journal (Goebel’s meteoric rise coincided with an alarmingly rapid drop in subscriptions, apparently revealing some fairly disturbing writing on the wall), Goebel’s divisiveness led to his apparent narrow defeat.33 The new election review board—Goebel’s own notorious handiwork—found in William Taylor’s favor.34

  Goebel conceded shortly before Taylor’s December inauguration, but Democrats (including “Honest-election” men) accused Republicans of fraudulent ballots and poll intimidation.35 Invigorated by this newfound support, Goebel rescinded his concession and returned to Frankfort in January to question more than one-third of the state’s counties’ returns. The Democrat-controlled legislature selected a committee made up of nine fellow party members (including James Hargis), one Republican, and one Popu
list to review the evidence as armed Democrats patrolled Frankfort’s streets.36 The Republicans retaliated by summoning more than a thousand armed men from the eleventh congressional district, the district Democrats had gerrymandered around the upland “Whig Gibraltar” counties.37 The L&N volunteered its rolling stock to transport the Republican montagnards to Frankfort gratis except for (according to one horrified Democrat) each having a “pistol to get a free pass.”38 “The roughest crowd ever gotten together in the mountains” came mainly from three southeastern foothill counties, Knox, Laurel, and Whitley, but Democrats described their origins less specifically, the better to emphasize eastern Kentucky’s preexistent primitive image.39 One Democrat hoped the “invasion of hill billies from the Eleventh district” would disperse with the unusually cold January weather (most did depart, except for approximately 175 of the most dedicated), while the Louisville Courier-Journal warned, “If a single Democrat is harmed the guilt will be upon the Republican leaders and not the ignorant men” the party had “corralled in this little city.”40 Only a few Bluegrass Republicans defended the mountaineers gathered to “protect their liberties.”41