Bloody Breathitt

by T. R. C. Hutton

  The three men who were assassinated were, it is true, in certain legal and business relationships to one another; but there was not among them any tie of blood so close as that subsisting between one of the victims of assassination and the man who according to the testimony of an eyewitness shot him deliberately from a well-selected hiding place. Personal feeling entered into the situation, as it must, but as will appear in the sequel political motives have been to all appearance at least as strong in their influence. And the so-called “other side” has not, so far as I am informed, fired a shot or attempted to fire a shot. If such a state of affairs constitutes a “feud,” it is, as regards active participation, a solitaire game.

  The author concluded that, instead of being part of a feud proper (if such a thing existed), the three men’s deaths were part of “a conspiracy on the part of those in official power to accomplish criminal ends.”273 This assessment was not rare or unprecedented; other observations on the deaths of Cox, Cockrell, and Marcum, especially those of the Lexington Leader, had expanded upon the political motivations surrounding their deaths and had tended to agree that the deaths on Jackson’s streets were indeed a nonhorizontal “solitary game” carried out by men in power and unanswered by those they wished to eliminate.

  The author fully acknowledged that the “family feud” was an existent social phenomenon and probably would not have denied that Breathitt County had experienced true feuds in the past. But the murders of 1902 and 1903, it seemed, were something different. The clear irrelevance of kinship and isolation in the affair removed the vital element of this form of institutionalized violence. Wise Hagins expanded on this argument four years later. “Our people are not feudists,” Hagins insisted. “If there had been any feudal blood in our people it surely would have cropped out during these four years struggles in the courts, but not a hand had been raised to violence” since Hargis and Callahan had first been put on trial.274 Hagins knew better than almost anyone that what went on in Jackson’s streets was scarcely a feud (in later years he often preceded the word with the phrase “so-called”).275 But even he was not prepared to believe that feuding was not an actual thing, and one endemic to Kentucky’s mountain whites.

  Perhaps most important, the newly vital commercial center was only “90 miles by rail from the center of the ‘Bluegrass,’ ” an observation of Breathitt County’s loss of isolation. Feuds were an antiquated occurrence with no place in thriving Jackson, a town “by no means wholly outside the pale of civilization and progress.”276 Indeed, it was difficult to blame isolation for crimes in such an unisolated place. This recent rash of killings, with clear political motivations, was a product of newer trends and a variety of violence that seemed more at home in such a progressive, modern setting. Assassination, it seemed, was a different animal than feuding.

  “It is rare indeed, that one of these assassins and anarchists is brought to punishment”

  In February 1900 William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal printed a prophetic quatrain by Ambrose Bierce alluding to William Goebel’s recent demise.

  The bullet that pierced Goebel’s breast

  Can not be found in all the West;

  Good reason, it is speeding here

  To stretch McKinley on his bier.”277

  Hearst was one of President William McKinley’s sharpest detractors and, when self-styled anarchist Leon Czolgosz fatally wounded McKinley nineteen months later, rumors flew that a clipping of Bierce’s poem had been found in the assassin’s pocket. Bierce swore that he had never meant for his stanzas to be taken as a veiled threat; his intent was to alert readers of the dangers posed by “foreign elements” who espoused Georges Sorel’s deadly “propaganda of the deed”; in Italy, France, and Spain the public deaths of a king, an empress, and two presidents between 1894 and 1898 (and in the United States, before long, McKinley) revealed the emergence of a new style of industrial age political violence.278 Bierce had placed William Goebel’s assassination within what he saw as a shock of the new, not as an outcome of inherent racial or cultural tendencies.

  His analogy was made in vain, especially after McKinley’s death; Kentucky Republicans, firmly entrenched within the two-party system, were legitimate, beyond the reproach reserved for anarchists, even when they apparently employed anarchist tactics.279 Accordingly, violence was granted with, or stripped of, legitimacy according to the politics of the groups or individuals that wielded it. “President McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist whose act had no political significance,” William Jennings Bryan remarked on his old opponent, while “the Goebel assassination was purely a political act.”280 Henry Watterson concurred: “Goebel was shot down for a purpose, for a price, while the noble life of McKinley was sacrificed to the wanton fury of a fiend.”281 As clouded as the Goebel assassination was by the narrative of feud, it still was rated as more politically legitimate than anarchism.

  When Kentuckians were alarmed by James Marcum’s murder in front of Jackson’s courthouse three years later, similarities with this new, insidiously foreign method of political violence were already widely recognized. Guerrilla warfare during the Civil War was carried out throughout the state with no measure of uniformity and often according to the whims of local military leaders with tenuous ties to the Union and Confederate causes. It was based upon material wartime goals: the weakening of the local state and the punishment of civilians with oppositional loyalties. The mass violence of the Reconstruction years were, with the exception of the symbolically charged act of lynching, without elaborate orchestration. Furthermore, these parochial acts of violence were generally aimed at victims whose political or social significance was, outside of their immediate communities, obscure. Like most violence during and after wars, it was among intimates.

  In contrast, assassinations in Frankfort and Breathitt County had broader implications. They replaced the deadly intimacy of the Civil War and Reconstruction years with violent anonymity. Goebel was killed in the morning while walking through Kentucky’s capitol grounds. While the assassin’s identity was never proven beyond doubt, it was widely known that the rifle shot came from the second-story window of the State House, a building “tenanted by Republicans exclusively.”282 Goebel’s end was meant to publicly demonstrate his illegitimacy as (had he ever had the chance to assume the office) governor-elect.283 It was orchestrated so as to seem the will of the state, even though it was evidently only that of one political party’s leaders. It was an undeniably political act loaded with symbolism.

  The murders of Braxton Cox, James Cockrell, and James Marcum took place under remarkably similar circumstances, particularly the latter two. Dr. Cox was killed in the dead of night with a close-range shotgun blast in an area of Jackson close to both the courthouse and James Hargis’s commercial property (some newspaper accounts erroneously said that Cox was leaving a church service when he was shot).284 Cockrell and Marcum were killed by gunshots aimed from the Breathitt County courthouse in broad daylight in front of numerous witnesses (Judge Hargis and Sheriff Callahan were in the general proximity, their presence sending a silent message).285 The town marshal and the lawyer were part of Breathitt’s fusionist uprising, so their eradication was more public and flamboyant than Cox’s; but all three men were killed within the physically small “assassination center of Jackson,” a patch of earth that was nearly as heavy with meaning as Frankfort’s capitol grounds.286

  When Marcum’s uncle William Strong attacked his neighbors during the Civil War he did so under the authority of the Union army, but he was at no more of an advantage than his Confederate enemies since so many locals had decided to renounce the Union’s local legitimacy—neither side saw fit to disguise themselves in any way. When he overtook the courthouse on the same street in 1874, or when he faced down former Confederates to defend the newly elected county judge in 1878, the “ownership” of this symbol and repository of the local state was still under dispute. But as political life in Breathitt County became more complex and less pa
rochialized, a greater measure of surreptitiousness was deemed necessary. Curtis Jett and other courthouse ring assassins carried out their appointments from hidden places within the building, sending an implicit message of whose will commissioned the slayings. Whereas once the courthouse had been the prize to be captured or destroyed, it was now a physical tool for counterrevolutionary violence. The new style of killing warranted a more contemporary vocabulary in Kentucky’s flagship paper. “It is rare indeed, that one of these assassins and anarchists is brought to punishment,” the Louisville Courier-Journal complained just days after Marcum’s death.287 The conspirators behind William Goebel’s death and the conspirators in Breathitt County’s assassinations were probably unaware of continental anarchism’s ideological underpinnings. But their deadly handiwork nevertheless utilized “the propaganda of the deed.” And it was a far cry from anything implied by feuds. As easy as it may have been to include the “Hargis and Cockrell feud” with Bloody Breathitt’s past, the differences in method outweighed the similarities.

  This new strategy reflected Judge Hargis’s political modus operandi. Since the Music Hall Convention, Hargis’s statewide political strength had been bolstered by a healthy measure of stealth, and Hargis tended to avoid public settings—even in Jackson—and decline interview requests (in 1902 Hargis had a Louisville reporter threatened by “toughs,” and a few years later threatened a visiting playwright who planned to write a dramatic account of Jackson’s assassinations).288 Before his first indictment in 1904 he had avoided newspaper photographers, and during one of the ensuing trials even entered the camera-free safety of the courtroom with a quilt over his head (he later reluctantly posed for a photographer).289 Being Bloody Breathitt’s mysterious faceless judge brought with it a measure of power, but that was coming to an end. It was not the use of directed violence itself that brought about Hargis’s downfall, but rather the unexpected publicity attracted by the deaths of Cox, Cockrell, and (to the greatest extent) Marcum.

  As these killings gained national attention, they overshadowed one of the most vicious acts of violence in Breathitt County’s history. During Abrelia Marcum’s lawsuit against Hargis and his co-conspirators a white man living in Frozen Creek (a community nine miles from Jackson) invited a group of Negroes to his home with the promise of free liquor. When they arrived the host opened fire in an apparent attempt to exterminate the lot, killing one of them.290 The crime was reported in two local papers, neither of which attempted to contextualize the racially motivated killing within a larger narrative of lawlessness or white supremacy—let alone feuding. A story of interracial mass murder did not support the larger description of a place defined by white intraracial violence. Worse, it challenged the delineation that Bluegrass elites, Democratic or Republican, preferred to have drawn between their own section and the mountains (white violence against black Kentuckians was still a common occurrence; between William Strong’s and James Marcum’s deaths at least twenty-nine Kentuckians were lynched).291 White-on-white assassination was easy to make strange, while white-on-black massacres were all too familiar in 1904 and they did fit into the narratives composed about Bloody Breathitt. It was the kind of violence that Kentuckians preferred go unspoken, and the story was unnoticed.

  Breathitt County’s assassinations and the ensuing trials of the accused were known to have broader implications when they took place. The political significance of violence in the county was emphasized most broadly by the Republicans who despised the island of mountain Democracy and its continuity with the hated Goebel legacy. But the Cox, Cockrell, and Marcum homicides were usually included within the older “Bloody Breathitt” narrative of violence, a cycle of convincingly inherent, communal violence devoid of politics. Feud endured as the dominant descriptor because of the influence of Democratic elites outside of the county, elites who, like their brethren farther south, profited from violence even as they distanced themselves from it.

  Breathitt County’s violence was depoliticized also by an American culture that legitimized or delegitimized violent acts according to parameters of race, class, geography, and history, parameters that could not easily include eastern Kentucky. Even with “mainstream” political violence a recent memory, the prevalence of the feud narrative in explaining white intraracial violence determined how Breathitt County was to be interpreted by its own citizens and by others from the outside world.

  7

  “THE FEUDAL WARS OF EASTERN KENTUCKY WILL NO DOUBT BE UTILIZED IN COMING YEARS BY WRITERS OF FICTION”

  Reading and Writing Bloody Breathitt

  “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

  —Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass,

  and What Alice Found There (1871)

  When the legend becomes fact, print the legend!

  —Maxwell Scott, character in the cinematic adaptation of

  The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)

  In 1898 the Reverend John J. Dickey interviewed Edward Callahan “Red Ned” Strong to find out what the elderly Breathitt County native knew (or had heard) about his grandfather’s role in the “Clay County Cattle War” between 1805 and 1807. The violent events that comprised the cattle war had begun and ended just over ninety years earlier, but Strong felt it had a much longer longevity. Not only, insisted the retired judge, had it somehow led to the Strong-Amis feud that involved his cousin William in the 1860s but, even at century’s end, “the effects of the [cattle] war have not ceased to this day.”1 Other interviews with Breathitt County’s older citizens corroborated his opinion, although none explained the continuity between the cattle war and more recent troubles. In local folklore, the Clay County Cattle War was the first salvo of Bloody Breathitt.

  The connection contains a measure of logic. The cattle war was the earliest known violent conflict since whites first settled the Three Forks region, and it involved family names—Strongs, Amises, Callahans—that later became notorious.2 Their descendants shed each other’s blood later on: How could the combination of family names and deadly violence be a coincidence? The premise that Breathitt County was an inherently violent place (and residents like Judge Strong seemed to have accepted this) required that violence have an antediluvian heritage—or, at least, Jeffersonian origins before any living person’s memory. The cattle war was an interpersonal, reciprocal dispute between equals in an isolated, semi-wilderness setting with no material implications beyond the direct experience of its participants; for all intents and purposes, it was a feud, albeit a short one. Strong was simply reapplying the most basic elements of the feud narrative to more recent events in his home county, a place already considered “the storm centre of the feud troubles of the State.”3 The old judge’s privileging of ancient continuity over historical and political contingencies may have just been an aged mountaineer’s desire for something unchanging in an otherwise rapidly shifting world. And Dickey may have encouraged him; many of the preacher’s oral histories were done “in an effort to determine why [people in Breathitt County] were always fighting each other.”4 It was a durable and satisfying idea; in 2002, when election-related violence reemerged in the “fabled Kentucky hills,” the New York Times traced “feuding” back to the cattle war’s “poisonous precedent.”5 A perfunctory scan of the historical record suggests this continuity.

  In a close examination, however, this does not hold up. Between 1807 and 1861 the territory that became Breathitt County did not experience any recorded local strife that resulted in multiple deaths or paramilitary factionalism (or, for that matter, familial “feuds”). When the Civil War started, Strongs and Amises found a common cause fighting Confederate forces (Edward Strong himself chose to fight for the Confederacy) even though their forefathers had opposed one another sixty years before. William Strong and Wiley Amis did not bear arms against each other until 1868, and then it was for the same political reasons that divided Kentucky Unionist
s during Reconstruction, not age-old kin hatred. The commonality of surnames in the respective conflicts spoke not to a continuity of conflict but instead to the paucity of new blood in a place with large families but small overall population.

  In any case, it was in Judge Strong’s interest to make this case. Men like Edward Strong, a Democrat, a Confederate veteran, and a longtime member of Breathitt’s commercial elite, wanted this—needed this—to be true because it was they who had caused most of the post-Civil War violence, directly or indirectly. Bearing a last name that he knew would always be associated with “feudalism” but possessed of a relatively unblemished personal reputation, he had good reason to portray “Bloody Breathitt” as a saga older than his own adulthood. His infamous cousin was now dead and, despite having himself once been identified as “a participant in the Breathitt war,” Judge Strong had always managed to stand apart from the events he had lived through (the murder of his younger cousin James Marcum was still five years in the future).6 By extending the provenance of Breathitt County’s troubles backward to a time long before the Civil War, Edward Strong and his peers remained blameless even if it meant portraying his home as a vessel for the alpine version of the southern “white savage.”7 It was a story not unlike the one President McKinley was using even as the Reverend Dickey conducted the 1898 interview: diminishing the politics of “sectional feeling” to bring northern and southern whites together in mutual support for the war against Spain.8 Edward Strong’s apolitical interpretation of his home county’s history was a political act, whether he meant it to be or not.

  It was an interpretation of Breathitt County’s history that already had a massive following. Conceptually, blood feuds predated Bloody Breathitt and even the Clay County Cattle War. A feud, as an actual event or a literary subject, was familiar to nineteenth-century Americans through their knowledge of European history and even more readily via their most beloved novels and dramas—products of the nineteenth century’s “culture industry.” Because of its rootedness in (semi)historical fiction rather than history, the feud had a tenuous, perhaps nonexistent, connection to the “sedimentary existence” of modernity.9 It did not ask to be taken seriously, and it stopped questions from being asked, questions such as “Who was the aggressor?” “Who was the victim?” “How were lives affected”? Moreover, like a fight started over so many free-ranging steers, feuds’ points of origin were always arcane, petty, and of no importance to anyone aside from the two involved parties. It suggested neutralization via reciprocation, and through neutralization came moral equivalency (how many people believe that the Capulets were right and the Montagues were wrong or vice versa?). It allowed audiences to view violence nonchalantly and refrain from asking questions about justice. Feud conveyed familiar but unspecific images representing something irrevocably rooted in the past and only accidentally thrust upon the present, not unlike Edward Strong’s interpretation of his county’s history. At some point in the nineteenth century, applying the concept of feud to real-life conflicts made these traits a sine qua non. Rather than face the internal problems that had caused political violence in Breathitt County, the rest of Kentucky, the South, and the United States, Americans relied upon the relatively easy answers provided by the idea of feuds. Eventually, so did the citizens of Breathitt County.