Bloody Breathitt

by T. R. C. Hutton

  Beckham echoed the Courier-Journal’s tone in portraying Breathitt County after the 1878 riot. Against the threat of northern/Republican censure it was to be carefully defended. But when addressing the issue to an audience within the state, it was more advantageous to rhetorically place the mountains outside of Kentucky and outside of the present. Implicitly, this suggested that these feuds were hardly political at all, but rather primeval products of their mountain environment and far into “the past,” which was better “forgotten.” “Purely local” “feudal outbreak[s]” could be easily dismissed, especially when individuals with direct connections to the governor’s office were left unmentioned.

  Beckham’s November victory indicated that sacrificing the reputation of eastern Kentucky (at least when done to a Kentucky audience) was an effective Democratic tool. Safely back in office, Beckham repeated these claims in his annual address the following January. This time he did not try to excise Kentucky’s highlands from the rest of the state but did repeat his critique of urban crime up north. “Irresponsible romances” had inflated Breathitt County’s conditions. “It is not an exaggeration to say that there was not a day during the past year that human life was not safe in Kentucky, even in Breathitt County, than it is any night upon the streets of Chicago or New York, from the sanguinary columns of whose voracious journals the people have been told day after day of the awful condition of lawlessness and crime in Kentucky.”180 Of course this was easy to say long after the assassinations had ended.

  By the time of Jett’s and White’s convictions the county had received more critical inspection “than any other section of the world,” revealing a small chink in the courthouse ring’s armor.181 Henry Watterson’s Courier-Journal declared what many already believed, that the two young deputies were simply “pawns” under the sway of higher authorities, and that Hargis, Callahan, and Redwine would be implicated in the future (although, at the time, Watterson refrained from naming names).182 The sheriff and judges did not fire back but, sensitive to complaints about their operating behind closed doors, they began making more public appearances like Jackson’s Salvation Army street performances.183 J. Wise Hagins, now almost alone in his concerted effort to fight the courthouse ring, felt safe enough to publish an anti-Hargis paper, the Breathitt County News, that fall. He endorsed a Republican for sheriff over Hargis and Callahan’s “Midnight Ticket,” so named because the Democrats’ six-man nomination committee met “in a lonely hall, long after honest yeomanry of the county had retired . . . in the company of the bats, owls and midnight marauders.”184 In November Edward Callahan won reelection over the Republicans’ “Law and Order Ticket” despite Hagins’s continuing attacks (Hagins later impotently blamed the state militia for fixing the election in Callahan’s favor).185 By the end of 1903 it appeared that the Marcum murder had far less of an impact on Breathitt County’s political status quo than many had suspected months earlier. The Hargis-Cockrell feud that spawned it was all but forgotten for the time being. The Hargis-Callahan courthouse ring was popular among Bluegrass Democrats and, in Breathitt, it still inspired enough public fear that popularity was becoming unnecessary. Still, it is notable that public assassinations had apparently come to an end.

  James Hargis’s role in one of the most expansive pieces of Jim Crow legislation in American history proved how well regarded he remained among the Democratic patriciate. In January 1904, Carl B. Day, newly elected state representative for Breathitt and two other counties (and Hargis’s nephew), introduced a bill to prohibit integrated educational facilities in all private institutions (Kentucky’s public education system was already constitutionally segregated).186 The bill’s sole target was Berea College, the only integrated school in the former slave states, which Kentucky Democrats wanted to “send to Ohio or some other Negro equality State.”187 Day’s inspiration, so the story went, was his disgust at seeing two different-complexioned female Berea students exchange a sisterly kiss at a train station.188 He was also hitching his star to the white southern outcry over Theodore Roosevelt’s White House luncheon with Booker T. Washington.189 Perhaps “in the absence of any other,” Kentucky Democrats wished to “make negro equality . . . the issue” to defeat “Rooseveltism” in 1904.190 Day conjured the specters of social equality and miscegenation, and averred that “co education . . . would ultimately lead to a downfall of the nation.”191 He produced a petition signed by Kentuckians living near Berea who considered the school “an open defiance of the organic law.”192 He also implied the bill was a platform of reunion for a party that had become dispersed and dissolute. “The Democratic party in our State stands almost as a unit on the race question, and I do not believe there is a Democrat in either branch of the legislature who would be willing to go back to his white constituents and say: ‘I voted against a bill which prohibited white and negro children from going to school together.’ ”193

  Those constituents’ approval of Day’s House Bill No. 25 was confirmed, not only by its seventy-three to five passage in the House but also by its five dissenters’ (all from eastern Kentucky districts) electoral defeats the following November. The bill became law the following summer when the Senate passed it.194 Although Hargis’s name had become synonymous with “feudism” during the past year, he and Redwine attended the closed session of the statehouse’s educational committee (representatives from Berea College were excluded) to express their support as well as that of their “section.” The press did not portray Judge Hargis’s presence at the capitol as peculiar or deleterious to the bill’s potential passage. In fact, many attributed its popularity to his endorsement.195

  Indignant liberals blamed the “Day Law” on the whole South; others accused the state of Kentucky or Breathitt County for producing it. One unversed author, ignorant of Carl Day’s mountain roots, decried “the other two thirds of the State” for imposing upon eastern Kentucky a needless inoculation against race mixing, and even favorably compared Berea to Breathitt County’s own Jackson Academy.196 In good Progressive fashion, other critics conflated iniquity with backwardness. One member of Berea’s board of trustees blamed the “notorious” Breathitt County itself while another attacked Day as “that polished and cultured statesman from Breathitt County—Bloody Breathitt—who is not sure whether Shakespeare was the discoverer of America or the inventor of a new kind of breakfast food.”197 The imprecise attribution of the county’s violence to “ignorance” worked equally well for its apparent production of state-mandated race hatred but failed to acknowledge the Day Law’s overwhelming popularity among other white Kentuckians. For that matter, it also failed to acknowledge Bloody Breathitt’s authoritative position in Kentucky’s Democratic Party.

  Many black Kentuckians blamed Berea’s president William Frost more than they did the state’s Democrats since his interest in educating “mountain whites” overshadowed his interest in teaching co-racial classrooms. For his part, Frost was careful not to blame personally any Kentucky legislators “compelled . . . to satisfy the rougher element among their supporters.”198 One had told him that he had put aside misgivings and voted yea or else be obliged to “discuss the Nigger question in every political speech as long as I live.”199 Rather, Frost spread the blame broadly across the “Bourbon movement which had extended over the whole South.” “To understand the South,” he wrote to northern benefactors, “we must remember that the Southern States have never had a really democratic government and that the majority of the people of the South have no comprehension of what fairness, equality, and republican institutions really are.”200

  In the years after the Day Law’s June 1904 passage, various commentators blamed its unprecedented enforcement of segregation on Carl Day’s egregious personal racism or his personal vendetta toward Berea College.201 Day’s proposal to prevent “the contamination of the white children of Kentucky,” and Hargis’s and Redwine’s endorsement thereof, was undoubtedly a product of an enduring popular belief in white supremacy, even in a place with few bla
cks.202 Their espousal of forced segregation reflected a local party apparatus as dedicated to white supremacy as any other Democratic courthouse clique in Kentucky. Hardly anyone questioned why a representative from the overwhelmingly white Three Forks region took such a great interest in segregation. Also, no one commented on Day’s other bill, one that allowed timberland owners to deny others “rights of way over adjoining lands, for the purpose of securing an outlet to water or to market.”203 It was meant to be the final nail in the coffin for the past century’s free-ranging mountain economy, and it came as little surprise from the pen of a lawmaker from “one of the wealthiest and most prominent [families] socially and in business in the mountain section” who was “prominently identified with the commercial and timber interests of Breathitt County.”204 As was typical of New South ordinances, racial concerns cast a haze over economic ones. The complex relationship between the seemingly all-white county and the maligned statute was also saved from widespread scrutiny. Most observers with close knowledge of the college and the state considered the Day Law more a cynical political maneuver than a sincere attack on integration. One defender of co-racial education avowed that, aside from its being “evidence of the negrophobia which is sweeping over the South,” it was just as likely “a political move [by Hargis and Day] to win the favor of those who desire to keep the colored people in subjection, and also of those who dislike Berea’s work for the education of mountain Republicans.”205 An unnamed writer associated with Berea concurred, blaming Day, “Judge Hargis, Redwine, and other notorious characters” from the “bloody county” for trying to “win notoriety and favor with the masses by doing something which would be understood as an attack on the colored man.”206 The Day Law represented Breathitt County’s continuing importance as a Democratic bulwark within the Republican mountains, a function that was perhaps not as damaged by the Marcum assassination as some may have assumed. Although Hargis had been the source of violent scandal, it showed that he and the Breathitt Democrats were their party’s exemplars. While it may have redeemed him in the eyes of his fellow party members, it may have instead demonstrated that he was never in need of atonement. “Whether it be just or not,” the Lexington Herald charged, “those members of the Legislature who vote for this bill will be held to approve of what has occurred in Breathitt during the past six years.”207

  Embittered by the wound its hometown institution had sustained, the Republican Berea Citizen groused that the formation of a new judicial district “for the sake of enthroning the famous Judge Hargis” was next on the General Assembly’s agenda (Redwine had said that a new gerrymandered district would “eliminate feudal warfare”).208 The redistricting passed four days later, ensuring absolute Democratic control over the circuit courts of Breathitt and two other counties.209 Carl Day, already ailing when he introduced his bill, died from inflammatory rheumatism in April 1904, just shy of his twenty-ninth birthday.210 Since he had served as a legislator so briefly, the ban on co-racial education was his only legacy. After Berea was found guilty of violating the Day Law a few months later, its student body remained all white for the next forty-six years.211 Though Day did not live to see it in action, his bill had at least some of its intended effects a month beforehand: an expansion of power for the Hargis courthouse.

  “Every Goebel Democrat in this county is hot for us”

  Soon after Hargis’s Frankfort appearance, Abrelia Marcum brought suit against him, his brother Alexander Hargis, Edward Callahan, and B. F. French for $100,000.212 By attacking Hargis et al. in a civil case outside of Breathitt County, Marcum hoped to avoid the politically concerned juries Hargis and Callahan had manipulated in the past. Hargis used his party affiliation in his defense, delaying proceedings by branding the trial judge a biased political enemy. “As leader of the Democratic forces of Breathitt County,” Hargis had denounced the judge’s bid for the state court of appeals bench years earlier. “Existing and continued state of hostile feeling,” he said, was grounds for dismissal.213 Hargis’s motion was denied, and he and Callahan were eventually found to be culpable for James Marcum’s death, but the plaintiff was unable to connect French and Alexander Hargis to the crime (although both were charged with contempt of court for arranging to bribe witnesses for the prosecution and to spirit at least one out of state). Mrs. Marcum’s tort strategy was only a partial success, barely damaging her targets’ power and awarding her only $8,000 (with interest accrued, the award eventually amounted to $11,000).214 During the trial Breathitt’s Democratic central committee saluted Edward Callahan’s “executive ability and services to the party” by unanimously reappointing him its chairman.215

  Nevertheless, it was the beginning of the end for the Hargis courthouse. The civil suit broadcast the details of the killings of 1902 and 1903 as never before. The next month a Lexington grand jury indicted Hargis, Callahan, and a number of confederates for Jim Cockrell’s murder (although shot in Jackson, he had died in Lexington’s jurisdiction).216 The indictment represented an unraveling of Hargis’s earlier framing of Cockrell’s death within a feud story. In 1902 many Lexingtonians had volunteered for “arbitration in the Breathitt county feud,” but by 1905 the suggestion of mutual reciprocity between two families was seeming false; what they now saw was a series of unsolved murders. Fayette County’s circuit court judge proclaimed that a trial of Hargis and the others was based upon “the serious charges made against the civil government of Breathitt county” rather than the accused individuals.217 Wise Hagins’s Republican/Fusionist Breathitt County News lauded the indictment as “a revelation to the outside world” of what residents of Jackson had known for years.218

  There were revelations to come, but the criminal trials that followed over the next two years produced more embarrassment than justice. Hargis, Callahan, and their associates were tried for involvement in three homicides, producing no convictions. With a massive number of testimonies against him, Hargis managed a hung jury, and then an acquittal, for Cockrell’s murder by challenging the Fayette County court’s right to try him for a crime committed in another county (a defense based upon Kentucky’s age-old belief in county sovereignty).219 His trial in Lee County for James Marcum’s murder was an even greater prosecutorial disaster the following year. After he signed an affidavit implicating Hargis and Callahan, Curtis Jett refused to testify that he had been hired to kill Marcum, instead attributing his actions to his own drunkenness (this he did while apparently inebriated on the witness stand). He swore to the jury (said to be packed with Democrats) that Marcum had been his personal “bitter enemy,” approximating classic feud behavior.220 Hargis and Callahan were again acquitted in less than a week, this time by a Beckham-appointed judge known for his “unwavering allegiance to the Democratic Party.”221 Finally, the trial for the murder of Braxton Cox, held in northeast Kentucky’s “inaccessible and surrounded by wilderness” (and heavily Democratic) Elliott County in 1907, was dismissed before it had even commenced after the prosecution’s key witnesses never materialized.222 In the meantime, Judge Hargis was allowed to await trial shooting marbles in the grass outside the jailhouse.223

  Most spectators agreed that justice was being miscarried. The “uncrowned Czars of Eastern Kentucky” said a New York Times correspondent, were able to “maintain an army of retainers and dependents, as did the great feudal lords of the middle ages,” so avoiding a murder conviction was a simple task.224 But the reporter’s medieval metaphor belied the real force at work: Kentucky’s Democratic Party. Nowhere was this more openly exhibited than the Lexington trials. “Men . . . no more loyal Democrats than I,” lamented the prosecutor, “whose friend I have been all my life, have turned their backs upon me, because, in my capacity as an officer of the law, I have dared to prosecute James Hargis.”225 Wise Hagins detected “something rotten in the execution of the laws of Kentucky” and traced it to the Democratic “State House gang.”226 While Edward Callahan was incarcerated, a Lexington merchant treated him to “50 quarts of whisky and about
50 boxes of cigars a two bushel tub of apples and case of beer all free,” to serve “at least 3000” well-wishers who visited his cell. Callahan assured one of his tenants of the local support he, Hargis, and the others enjoyed while on trial in Lexington. “The Fayette County Democrats are Red hot for us they want to fight for us too. Every Goebel Democrat in this county is hot for us.”227

  Breathitt County’s old status as “the best exemplification of the horrors of Goebelism” was well remembered.228 For years before he was elected its sheriff, Callahan displayed a willingness to employ violence for Democratic victories. More than five years after Goebel’s death, Bluegrass Democrats still recognized Callahan’s forceful role in their most difficult campaign. With William Goebel’s “bloody shirt” still on display in Kentucky politics, the hospitality shown to the imprisoned Callahan vindicated his actions and placed him on a higher pedestal than “mountain feudist.” Indeed, however Bloody Breathitt was framed within the imprecise parameters of feuding, it all came back to William Goebel.

  Despite Callahan’s popularity among Bluegrass Democrats, the murder trials proved to be the beginning of the end for his and Hargis’s political careers. During their trials Wise Hagins had time to revitalize the Breathitt County fusionists, supporting only one Republican and a raft of anti-Hargis Democrats, lest “the Hargis followers . . . slegmatize it as a republican measure.”229 While Hargis awaited trial for the Cox murder, he was defeated by more than seven hundred votes, even as Democrats gained in local and district elections all over the state (Callahan was not on the ballot, although his proxy entrant for sheriff was also soundly defeated).230 Hargis unsuccessfully contested the election before falling ill.231 “No longer can [Hargis] claim to represent the State administration,” announced one Democrat. “No longer can his adherents boast that they control the pardoning power; no longer can he and Callahan prostitute the offices of County Judge and Sheriff for the protection of assassins and the persecution of their enemies.”232 Absent intimidation and violence, the Breathitt courthouse ring’s foundation was brittle.