Bloody Breathitt

by T. R. C. Hutton

  51. Mamdani, “Making Sense of Political Violence in Postcolonial Africa,” 72.

  52. In this sense I concur with David Nirenburg’s attempt to “find sense in horrors” despite criticisms that attempts to do so “trivialize or minimize the violence that is its subject matter.” I believe that a close examination of violence performs the opposite function. Nirenburg, Communities of Violence, 16–17.

  53. Blok, Honour and Violence, 112–13.

  54. Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil, 45.

  55. Warren, King Came Preaching, 196.

  1. “To them, it was no-man’s land”

  1. George Washington Noble (hereafter G. W. Noble), Behold He Cometh in the Clouds, 5. The “Tessy Boy” fights were only one version of a Court Day custom in many southern localities. Franklin, The Militant South, 37.

  2. Simple fisticuffs, a less drastic form of combat than armed dueling, nevertheless served a similar purpose in that the ordered undertaking of a “battle” ensured that disputes were settled in the public eye and according to community parameters; Gorn, “ ‘Gouge and Bite,’ ” 18–43; William Barney, The Road to Secession, 157; Ireland, “Homicide in Nineteenth Century Kentucky,” 142–43. For the fatal knife fight between Arch Augh and J. B. Combs in Breathitt County, see Daily Ohio Statesman, April 25, 1857.

  3. Quoted from Waldstreicher, “Rites of Rebellion, Rites of Assent,” 41.

  4. Noble’s description of the Tessy Boy fights suggests an exhibition somewhat more regulated and sedate than some others on record. For descriptions of Court Day violence in Kentucky, directed and undirected, see Ireland, Little Kingdoms, 90–100.

  5. Tapp and Klotter, Kentucky, 110.

  6. The “Three Forks region” refers to the area of land draining into the Kentucky River’s north, middle, and south forks within the following counties (in order of formation): Clay, Estill, Perry, Breathitt, Owsley, Letcher, Powell, Wolfe, with parts of Knott and Rockcastle included. Verhoeff, The Kentucky Mountains, 6; Nineteenth Biennial Report of the Bureau of Agriculture Labor and Statistics, 43; Billings and Blee, The Road to Poverty, 28; Kleber, Clark, and Harrison, The Kentucky Encyclopedia, 204.

  7. Wall, “ ‘A richer land never seen yet,’ ” 139–40; Verhoeff, Kentucky River Navigation, 131n.

  8. Ibid., 42.

  9. Johnston, First Explorations of Kentucky, 154n.

  10. G. A. Thompson, The Geographical and Historical Dictionary of America and the West Indies, 12.

  11. Verhoeff, Kentucky River Navigation, 141; Salstrom, “The Agricultural Origins of Economic Dependency,” xvii (quote).

  12. William Davis and Swentnor, Bluegrass Confederate, 251 (quote); Friend, Kentucke’s Frontiers, 223–25.

  13. Warner, Studies in the South and West, 359.

  14. James Lane Allen, “Through Cumberland Gap on Horseback,” 50; Henry Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind, 26–29.

  15. Philadelphia Inquirer, September 18, 1889. The Bluegrass’s productive superiority to all other parts of the state remained a constant throughout Kentucky’s agrarian history. The gross disparity between sections impeded the state’s ability to make commonly beneficial state policies. See Clark, Agrarian Kentucky.

  16. E. L. Noble, Bloody Breathitt, 1:40, 81; Samuel Wilson Collection, KLSCA.

  17. Charles Fenno Hoffman, A Winter in the West, 199–200.

  18. Keane, Violence and Democracy, 38–39.

  19. Dunn, Cades Cove, 145.

  20. Verhoeff, Kentucky River Navigation, 133. The territory that Clay County covered in 1807 became most of what is, at this writing, nine other counties.

  21. Interviews with Sarah Baker, Preston Campbell, Mrs. Candell, Andrew Combs, Harry Eversole, William Eversole, T. T. Garrard, William L. Hurst, Matilda Duff Lewis, James L. Moore, and E. C. Strong, JJDD, reel 3, pp. 2126–27, 2182, 2271–72, 2322, 2365–66, 2406–10, 2419–25, 2430–32, 2436, 2444, 2460–63, 2544; Strong Family Papers, 86, Breathitt County Public Library; Jess D. Wilson, A Latter Day Look at Kentucky Feuds, 44–48; Rolff, Strong Family of Virginia and Other Southern States, 86–87; DenBoer and Long, Kentucky, 117; Owings, The Amis Family, 79; Billings and Blee, The Road to Poverty, 107–8.

  22. Wheeling Register, March 9, 1897; KSJ, 1839, 377; Billings and Blee, The Road to Poverty, 110; Trimble, Recollections of Breathitt, 8.

  23. Scalf, Kentucky’s Last Frontier, 194 (quote); Ireland, Little Kingdoms, 1–2, 6–7; Webster, “The Spatial Reorganization of the Local State,” 66–67.

  24. The trend continued after the war as well; between 1865 and the early twentieth century ten more counties were added. At this writing, Kentucky has the third most counties of any state. Shannon and McQuown, Presidential Politics in Kentucky, 2; James Rood Robertson (ed.), Petitions of the Early Inhabitants of Kentucky to the General Assembly of Virginia, 84, 89, 107–8, 114, 117, 130, 141. For the profligacy with which nineteenth-century Kentucky expanded its number of counties, see Ireland, Little Kingdoms, 2.

  25. Interview with Judge Dickerson, March 9, 1898, JJDD, reel 2, pp. 2170–71; Pudup, “Land before Coal,” 5, 161; Jess D. Wilson, The Sugar Pond and the Fritter Tree, 48; Trimble, Recollections of Breathitt, 8. For the significance of disinterestedness in republican ideology and practice, see Gordon Wood, “Interests and Disinterestedness in the Making of the Constitution,” 69–109.

  26. In the first half of the 1820s, Kentucky’s General Assembly’s attempts to prevent foreclosures were blocked by a conservative court of appeals that sided with voracious creditors. The legislature bit off more than it could chew when it attempted to establish a debtor-friendly “New Court,” rending the electorate between it and the “Old Court,” thereby creating a dire constitutional crisis. In the elections of 1825 and 1826, the Old Court faction retook control, but only after many future Jacksonians had become disillusioned by the judiciary’s siding with lucre. Friend, Along the Maysville Road, 235–36. For a different take on the Old Court/ New Court battle, see Ramage and Watkins, Kentucky Rising, 86–88; KSJ, 1839, 377; Billings and Blee, The Road to Poverty, 109–10; Trimble, Recollections of Breathitt, 8.

  27. Sydnor, The Development of Southern Sectionalism, 39–40.

  28. Billings and Blee, The Road to Poverty; Pudup, “Land before Coal”; Burch, Owsley County; Wiese, Grasping at Independence; Preston, The Civil War in the Big Sandy Valley of Kentucky.

  29. Ireland, “Aristocrats All,” 368–69, 382–83.

  30. Ireland, “The Place of the Justice of the Peace in the Legislature and Party System of Kentucky,” 206–7.

  31. Ireland, The County Courts in Antebellum Kentucky, 7–10, 12–15, 74–76.

  32. Ireland, Little Kingdoms, 5–6, 124–32, 152.

  33. Charleston Mercury, December 5, 1859.

  34. “Assassination in Kentucky,” 778.

  35. Progressives considered county government antiquated and corrupt, in contrast to the ongoing contemporary civic reform and centralized planning on local and national levels. If county government was not banal, it was, even worse, antiquated and corrupt in contrast to the contemporary civic reform and centralized planning ongoing on local and national levels during the Progressive Era. “County government is the most backward of all our political units,” the National Municipal League announced in the early 1920s, “the most neglected by the public, the most boss-ridden, the least efficiently organized and most corrupt and incompetent, and, by reason of constitutional complications, the most difficult to reform.” Quoted in Ogg and Ray, Introduction to American Government, 732. See also Beard, Readings in American Government and Politics, 556–66; Forman, Advanced Civics, 195–202; “Lobbyists and Legislatures,” 197. For a secondary assessment of the Progressive attack on the county (and its long-lasting scholarly legacy), see Menzel, introduction, 4–10.

  36. Sydnor, The Development of Southern Sectionalism, 42, 285.

  37. Ibid., 38. Robert C. McMath Jr. concurs with Sydnor: “For most nineteenth century southerners, ‘The Government’ and ‘The County’
were almost synonymous terms. The seat of the county court also became a center of trade and, to a lesser extent, of organized social life.” However, McMath modifies the thesis in saying that, aside from being communities, nineteenth-century southern counties also “contained communities.” “Community, Region, and Hegemony in the Nineteenth-Century South,” 285.

  38. Ireland, Little Kingdoms, 1, 33.

  39. Williams, Appalachia, 136.

  40. JJDD, reel 3, pp. 2272, 2322, 2419–25.

  41. “Dark and bloody ground” was an appropriation from Cherokee chief Dragging Canoe’s description of a sanguinary history since his nation had contended with the Shawnee for mastery of the region long before white settlement. The phrase was popularized by John Filson’s The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke (1784) and reapplied to various violent events in Kentucky’s subsequent history. The phrase’s intimation is of a territory inherently violent regardless of who occupied it. Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, 268–312.

  42. Quote from Watlington, The Partisan Spirit, 16. Aron, “Pioneers and Profiteers,” 181.

  43. Dunaway, “Speculators and Settler Capitalists,” 54; Coulter, “Early Frontier Democracy in the First Kentucky Constitution,” 665; Perkins, Border Life, 126, 147; Gates, “Tenants of the Log Cabin,” 5; Verhoeff, Kentucky River Navigation, 130, 130–31n.

  44. Dunaway, “Speculators and Settler Capitalists,” 61.

  45. Aron, “Pioneers and Profiteers,” 181.

  46. Kentucky’s 1792 constitution was the second state constitution (after Vermont) to have no property requirements for voting or running for public office. Other states followed suit early in the next century. Wooster, Politicians, Planters and Plain Folk, 13. In the 1820s and 1830s, state legislation consistently favored occupiers’ rights to the disadvantage of Virginia grant claimants. While one pro-squatter Kentucky law was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1823, it upheld a similar law nine years later; Ireland, The Kentucky State Constitution, 211. For other preemption legislation, see Kulikoff, The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism, 81–83; Ramage, “The Green River Pioneers,” 184 (quote), 190.

  47. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak, 32. See also Aron, How the West Was Lost, 150–52; Dupre, “Ambivalent Capitalists on the Cotton Frontier,” 225–26; S. Bolton, Territorial Ambition, 72–76; Kulikoff, The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism, 77–90.

  48. Ramage, “The Green River Pioneers,” 184, 190.

  49. “Without legal claim to land and often without permission to live where they did, the very poor seemed the greatest threat to the ideal of ‘work & be rich.’ Their alleged avoidance of work fundamentally clashed with the industry of persons determined to carve a profitable existence out of the West.” Friend, Along the Maysville Road, 110–11. This sentiment was shared by planters farther south for decades, especially after preemption laws came to be viewed as a threat to southern land values. In describing class differences in the antebellum South, Alabaman Robert Hundley described squatters as “useless to themselves and the rest of mankind.” D. R. Hundley, Social Relations in Our Southern States, 119.

  50. Although Clay had begun his career with firm support from landless Kentuckians, his “American System” looked askance at the rights of the unpropertied and he tended to support speculator interests, especially as they came under attack from Andrew Jackson. By the mid-1800s, Kentuckians followed suit with other southern states in opposing federal homestead acts. Register of Debates in Congress, 24th Cong., 1st sess., March 31, 1836, 1029. During the later years of Clay’s congressional ascendancy, federal land policy, which ostensibly granted the right of preemption in 1841, favored only settlers who were able to purchase lands they were to occupy in the near future. Aron, How the West Was Lost, 199; Picht, “The American Squatter and Federal Land Policy,” 72–83; Feller, The Public Lands in Jacksonian Politics, 77–79.

  51. The availability of land west of the Mississippi River could only threaten the value of southern real estate. When the last antebellum federal preemption bill was struck down by Congress in 1859, southeastern Kentucky’s U.S. House representative, John Elliott, joined most other southern congressmen in opposing it. Congressmen representing New Appalachia realized (apparently correctly) that the opening of western lands would lead to the decrease of already marginal land values in their districts. TAPR, 1859, 23, 58; Salstrom, Appalachia’s Path to Dependency, 22–23.

  52. Although it is difficult to trace accurately because of its inherent invisibility among public records, the continuation of squatting can be demonstrated somewhat accurately by identifying specific surnames registered as landless over the course of multiple decades. One survey of antebellum Appalachia suggests that landlessness was often intergenerational, with families that had arrived west of the Alleghenies without land in 1800 still without land in 1860. Dunaway, “Speculators and Settler Capitalists,” 83. Dunaway insists that “there was no such thing as ‘free’ land or ‘squatters” rights” in antebellum Appalachia (86). This statement pertains only to the contractual ownership of land and not the “ownership” brought about by occupation and applied labor that was the original legal and moral basis of preemption. While there may have been nothing resembling squatters’ rights in most of the southern states by the eve of the Civil War, that does not mean that many people did not enjoy access to open land and perhaps profit from it as much as a farmer with “legitimate” ownership. Anecdotal accounts show that in Breathitt County farmers without documentation of land ownership operated with relative impunity until the early twentieth century.

  53. Families of the nineteenth-century Cumberland Plateau were forced to deal with two factors that turned land inheritance into a process of increasing poverty: a dearth of arable land coupled with one of the highest birth rates in the United States. This condition was exacerbated by the practice of “partible inheritance” in which land was equally distributed to all eligible heirs (or all male heirs). As a result, familial landholdings became smaller over the course of generations. While landless farmers would have suffered from the increase in population along with their landed neighbors, partible inheritance had little impact on people with no land to inherit. In fact, the shrinking of individual landholdings may have made squatting seem more attractive. Salstrom, Appalachia’s Path to Dependency, xxv, 22–23, 53–55; Wiese, Grasping at Independence, 261–80; Waller, Feud, 21–22, 58–59; Williams, Appalachia, 153–54; John Sherwood Lewis, “Becoming Appalachia,” 115–19.

  54. Ronald Lewis, Transforming the Appalachian Countryside, 27–28. For the inherent condition of inequality involved in land commodification in Appalachia, see Billings and Blee, The Road to Poverty, 36–39. Billings and Blee suggest that Kentucky mountaineers saw little problem in accepting land as a saleable commodity. For an opposing viewpoint on this subject (pointing out the cultural barriers to land com-modification), see Batteau, “Mosbys and Broomsedge,” 457–63. Both of these explanations of land commodification in New Appalachia take into account only land “known” by its owner and the legal and social implications of that knowledge. While this was the case for many landowners, the prevalence of absentee ownership had the effect of giving unauthorized land users greater knowledge of the land than its official owners. This chapter submits that direct knowledge of and engagement with land were indirect forms of “ownership” that, while not legally recognized, nevertheless served squatters’ economic and perhaps moral purposes.

  The portrayal of “peasant” societies as communities that perpetually work toward common goals has been criticized as a situation in which “scholars tended to idealize and homogenize the peasant community, constructing it as a seamless universe in which all agreed on how to define the moral economy and on what parts of the old world they sought to regain. Internal dissension, exploitation, or violence, no matter how important to the operation or definition of the community, tended to disappear from view.” In his “post-revisionist” study of the political econ
omy of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Floyd County, Kentucky, Robert Wiese calls this tendency “household localism” and contends that mountain yeomen of practically all possible financial situations were careful not to enter into arrangements that benefited anyone outside their immediate families. There is little reason to believe that eastern Kentucky’s landless would have behaved much differently from their landed neighbors in this respect. Wiese, Grasping at Independence, 11–13, 59–60. For a recent critique of the drawing of a stark distinction between “nonmarket and market-based societies” (using water rights in the American West as its case study), see Arnold, “Rethinking Moral Economy,” 85–95; Mallon, Peasant and Nation, 64.

  55. The raising of free-range livestock presented a challenge to private property just as it did in other parts of America. Sources that address the conflict between cultivation and droving in other parts of the South are Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism, 239–68; R. Ben Brown, “Free Men and Free Pigs,” 117–37; Walpole, “The Closing of the Open Range in Watauga County, N.C.,” 320–35; Verhoeff, Kentucky River Navigation, 146.

  56. Trimble, Recollections of Breathitt, 5.

  57. Quotes from Scalf, Kentucky’s Last Frontier, 158, and Trimble, Recollections of Breathitt, 17; LCJ, June 3, 1904.

  58. The distinction between the two has been of special importance to historians of Appalachia who disagree as to what degree the region’s economy was based upon a larger market before the Civil War. Market relations are perhaps more difficult to trace in such terrain than would be the case in, for instance, the contemporary lowland South; however, this does not convince all historians that Appalachia was not the “target” of capitalistic enterprises from very early on after white occupation. For descriptions of the two “extremes” of this argument (and others that fall in between), see Blethen and Wood, “The Appalachian Frontier and the Southern Frontier,” 36–47.

  59. Flat-bottomed “push boats” were the primary vehicle of eastern Kentucky’s logging industry before the arrival of railroads and did not immediately disappear afterward, remaining common well into the twentieth century. Ellis, The Kentucky River, 53–80; Trimble, Recollections of Breathitt, 11.