Bloody Breathitt

by T. R. C. Hutton

  60. Breathitt County native and historian E. L. Noble recollected a local fable from what he fancifully called “the medieval history of Eastern Kentucky” about a man who, sometime before the county’s partitioning, traded “an entire creek of land, some two to three thousand acres” for a rifle. The moral of the story, Noble explained, was that while “the man buying the gun today [the 1930s] is looked on as an imbecile . . . in fact [at that time in history] he made the best bargain.” While the deed to the land brought with it the potential for wealth, this was wealth that involved the application of arduous labor: the plowing of rough ground and fencing of crops, the tending of livestock, the hiring of possibly undependable help, not to mention the burden of paying property taxes. In contrast, ownership of the rifle, compounded with unfettered access to all the territory one was willing to traverse, made one “heir to all the game that roamed the woods in a thousand valleys, or on a thousand hills.” Noble added that “a fish hook in those days was more valuable than a common farm.” E. L. Noble, Bloody Breathitt, 1:13, 28–29.

  61. Tyrel G. Moore, “Economic Development in Appalachian Kentucky,” 222–34; Ellis, The Kentucky River, 56, 68, 73–74.

  62. Cannel is primarily a surface coal, and could be easily surface-mined without deep shaft digging, making early coal mining a simple winter vocation for farmers. The mining of cannel coal in the nineteenth century was statistically safer than bituminous mining due to a lessened need for blasting. Hower, “ ‘Uncertain and Treacherous,’ ” 312.

  63. Banks, “The Emergence of a Capitalistic Labor Market in Eastern Kentucky,” 191; Hoffman, A Winter in the West, 184–85; WPA, In the Land of Breathitt, 18–19; Verhoeff, Kentucky River Navigation, 171n.

  64. KSJ, 1835, 39 (appendix); Verhoeff, Kentucky River Navigation, 174–75.

  65. Lewis Collins, Historical Sketches of Kentucky, 210–11; Trimble, Recollections of Breathitt, 10. See also Ripley and Dana, The New American Cyclopaedia, 659; Verhoeff, Kentucky River Navigation, 141–42.

  66. Perrin, Battle, and Kniffin, Kentucky, 776; Trimble, Recollections of Breathitt, 10–11; Mathias, Incidents and Experiences, 22.

  67. WPA, In the Land of Breathitt, 29; “Report of Board of Internal Improvement,” KSJ, 1839, 38; Verhoeff, Kentucky River Navigation, 23–30; Trimble, Recollections of Breathitt, 1.

  68. Mathias, Incidents and Experiences, 22.

  69. Harry Watson, Jacksonian Politics and Community Conflict, 160–61; Robbins, “Preemption,” 343–45; McFaul, The Politics of Jacksonian Finance, 172–74.

  70. Trimble, Recollections of Breathitt, 1–2, 8.

  71. Lewis Collins, Historical Sketches of Kentucky, 95.

  72. The Thomas Franklin grant had been sold for taxes numerous times before South’s purchase. Stewart Kentucky Herald, August 13, 1799; Western Monitor, September 22, 1815; Morse v. South et al., Circuit Court D of Kentucky, April 15, 1897, in The Federal Reporter, 80:206–18; Jillson, The Kentucky Land Grants, 173; Old Kentucky Entries and Deeds, 101, 449; E. L. Noble, Bloody Breathitt, 2:51–52.

  73. Owen, Fourth Report of the Geological Survey in Kentucky, 94–96, 351, 357, 362, 367, 369, 372, 417, 419, 420; MacFarlane, Coal-Regions of America, 346.

  74. In 1888 the state geological survey listed Breathitt County with just under 389 square miles of forest land, one of the state’s largest acreages at a time in which forest reserves were said to be running drastically low. LCJ, June 17, 1889; Haskel and Smith, A Complete Descriptive and Statistical Gazetteer of the United States of America, 78; Davie, Kentucky, 273; Trimble, Recollections of Breathitt, 8 (quote).

  75. WPA, In the Land of Breathitt, 49; Ireland, Little Kingdoms, 2; Trimble, Recollections of Breathitt, 9.

  76. KHJ, 1839, 426; Trimble, Recollections of Breathitt, 9; Clements, History of the First Regiment of Infantry, 147.

  77. Trimble, Recollections of Breathitt, 11.

  78. AGACK, December, 1838 (Frankfort: A. G. Hodges, 1839), 144–45; and AGACK, December 1853–March, 1854 (Frankfort: A. G. Hodges, 1854), 2:527; Trimble, Recollections of Breathitt, 9–10; WPA, In the Land of Breathitt, 84; Conti, “The Cultural Role of Local Elites in the Kentucky Mountains,” 54; Ellis, The Kentucky River, 113.

  79. Quoted in Verhoeff, Kentucky River Navigation, 175.

  80. During his time on the General Assembly as representative from Madison County, Samuel South would have represented the sparsely populated area of the Three Forks region that his son later purchased. “Samuel South Letter, 1825,” microfilm roll 82-0026, Clift folder 884, KHS; Stewart Kentucky Herald, August 11, 1801; Western Monitor, August 9, 1817; Maysville Eagle, February 6, 1818; Lewis Collins and Collins, Collins’ Historical Sketches of Kentucky, 2:179; George Robertson, Scrap Book on Law and Politics, 2; John Frost, Heroes and Hunters of the West, 147; Wilder, Kentucky Soldiers of the War of 1812, 240; Hume, “The Hume Genealogy,” 110–11; James Rood Robertson, Petitions of the Early Inhabitants of Kentucky to the General Assembly of Virginia, 51; Quisenberry, Kentucky in the War of 1812, 29, 110; Belue, The Hunters of Kentucky, 292–93n.

  81. Dunaway, The First American Frontier, 311.

  82. Morse v. South et al., Circuit Court D of Kentucky, April 15, 1897, The Federal Reporter, 80:217; Trimble, Recollections of Breathitt, 9 (quote). After Owsley County was created in 1843, partially carved out of Breathitt County, South’s holdings amounted to more than 37 percent of land owned in Breathitt County and, by 1860, over a quarter of the county’s land mass. Annual Report of the Auditor of Public Accounts of the State of Kentucky, 47.

  83. KSJ, 1839, 377.

  84. Trimble, Recollections of Breathitt, 9; KSJ, 1839, 309, 320, 343, 377. The office of sheriff put one in charge of all county-level tax collection and bond execution, thereby placing the financial well-being of an entire county within the discretion of one individual; William B. Allen, Kentucky Officer’s Guide and Legal Hand-book, 201–3.

  85. KPD: Reports Communicated to Both Branches of the Legislature of Kentucky at the December Session, 1840 (Frankfort: A. G. Hodges, 1840), 154–55; KSJ, 1838, 377–78; Trimble, Recollections of Breathitt, 8.

  86. AGACK: December, 1838 (Frankfort: A. G. Hodges, 1839), 144; Trimble, Recollections of Breathitt, 10.

  87. AGACK: December Session, 1844 (Frankfort: A. G. Hodges, 1845), 197–98.

  88. Jeremiah Weldon South was referred to as the “father of Breathitt County” in his later years and especially after his death in 1880. LCJ, July 27, 1877, February 10, 1880; Trimble, Recollections of Breathitt, 9. For South’s influence in Kentucky government, see Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, 195; Lowell H. Harrison, Kentucky’s Governors, 65; Robert Gunn Crawford, “A History of the Kentucky Penitentiary System,” 29; Ireland, Little Kingdoms, 2.

  89. Mt. Sterling Sentinel-Democrat, April 14, 1880; Hume, “The Hume Genealogy,” 110.

  90. Robert Gunn Crawford, “A History of the Kentucky Penitentiary System,” 29; Mt. Sterling Sentinel-Democrat, April 14, 1880.

  91. FRA, April 17, 1880; Mathias, Incidents and Experiences, 31, 156; Hume, “The Hume Genealogy,” 110. For Kentucky support for the Mexican War, see Ramage and Watkins, Kentucky Rising, 170–86.

  92. Pudup, “Land before Coal,” 127. Pudup’s conception of class in nineteenth-century eastern Kentucky depends upon E. P. Thompson’s dictum that class is defined not only by economic relationships but is also formed according to the dictates of very specific historical contexts. Essentially, class relations in eastern Kentucky were defined according to the parameters of the immediate vicinity, involving factors such as land ownership, profession, and kinship that may not have corresponded directly to other parts of Kentucky, the Upper South, or the United States as a whole. E. P. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 11.

  The “Bluegrass System” was the forerunner of Henry Clay’s “American System” that favored a society led by planters and merchants. The creation of Breathitt County was one of many manifestations of the Bluegrass System transported to the mountains. Friend
, Kentucke’s Frontiers, 218–19; Aron, How the West Was Lost, 124–49.

  93. “List of Lawyers in Kentucky,” 416; interview with William L. Hurst, October 27, 1898, JJDD, 2453.

  94. Lewis Collins, Historical Sketches of Kentucky, 210–11.

  95. AGACK: November Session, 1851 (Frankfort: A. G. Hodges, 1852), 728.

  96. Discipline is the act Michel Foucault used to describe the treatment and manipulation of the body in the modern age. I use the term analogically since it is general yet not overly imprecise in describing the manipulation of bodies (or in this case a body of land and a body politic) in ways not limited to the physical, political, and economic but combining elements of all three. Breathitt County’s creation involved a holistic attempt to combine contractual ownership with the establishment of a corresponding political and administrative unit. The level of control involved in such an undertaking (made structurally possible by the freedom granted to individuals in nineteenth-century Kentucky to almost single-handedly “create” a county) can be well described as “an uninterrupted, constant coercion, supervising the processes of the activity rather than its result and it is exercised according to a codification that partitions as closely as possible time, space, movement.” Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 137. For analogous examples of the Foucauldian concept of discipline applied to a modern “managed nature,” see Oliver, “The Thames Embankment and the Disciplining of Nature in Modernity,” 227–38; Peluso and Vandergeest, “Genealogies of the Political Forest and Customary Rights in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand,” 761–812.

  97. It was the occasion of Kentucky’s 1890 constitutional convention where delegates resolved to make county making more difficult. The new rule was tested in 1904 when the legislature voted to form a new county, Beckham County (after the names “Hardscrabble” and “Goebel” were rejected), but a lawsuit charging that the county was too small for the parameters drawn out by the constitution prompted the new county to be dissolved. It was not until 1912 that another county, McCreary County, was formed, to become the state’s 120th, and last, county. Birchfield, “Beckham County,” 60–70; Official Report of the Proceedings and Debates in the Convention, 395 (quote). (I am grateful to John R. Burch for directing me to this quote.) For further convention debates on county government, also see 328–29, 333, 358, 368–69, 391, 399, 403–4. For a thorough analysis of the problems associated with Kentucky county government addressed at the 1890 convention, see Webster, “The Spatial Reorganization of the Local State,” 71–80; Ireland, Little Kingdoms, 143.

  98. Wallace B. Turner, “Kentucky Politics in the 1850’s,” 132; Mathias and Shannon, “Gubernatorial Politics in Kentucky,” 248. Those who gained their wealth from new roads and easy credit favored Clay’s American System, while poorer elements voted Whig in areas where Democratic slaveholders dominated elections. Kentuckians of many societal strata had thrown their support to the Whigs and, as was the case in most southern communities, they created relatively homogenous party loyalties in their respective communities (loyalties that usually extended to the county level). Harry Watson, Jacksonian Politics and Community Conflict, 220, 304; Volz, “Party, State and Nation,” 29–34; Ronald Lewis, Transforming the Appalachian Countryside, 65–68. Historians of the nineteenth-century American South who consider political parties to be tools of the elite, as well as historians who deem them true vehicles of mass opinion, all recognize the Whig Party’s special formidability in the upland South, particularly in eastern Kentucky. Billings and Blee, The Road to Poverty, 109; Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, 34–35, 116; Degler, The Other South, 109–10; James S. Brown, Beech Creek, 7–8.

  99. (Columbus) Ohio Statesman, December 2, 1840; Boston Daily Atlas, November 27, 1844; New York Herald, December 15, 1845, November 11, 1848. Until majorities began casting votes for Unionists during the Civil War (perhaps due to violent coercion), Breathitt County’s electorate produced majorities for the Democratic Party for all offices, legislative and executive, on the state and federal levels. TAPR, 1838, 28; 1840, 25–26; 1841, 23–24; 1843, 46; 1844, 56; 1845, 51; 1846, 48; 1848, 46; 1849, 55; 1850, 48; 1852, 47; 1853, 43; 1854, 47; 1856, 47; 1857, 52; 1858, 59; 1859, 56.

  Eastern Kentucky counties exhibit party loyalties that (if Whig, Know-Nothing, Opposition, and Republican tickets can be uneasily lumped together) span centuries. Breathitt County’s Democratic deviation from its Whig neighbors is especially significant considering the tendency of county electorates in the Three Forks region to follow the political lead of the counties out of which they were partitioned. Floyd and Morgan counties, older counties situated to Breathitt County’s north and east nineteenth-century boundaries, exhibited the same staunch loyalty to the Democratic Party throughout the nineteenth century and, like Breathitt, held pro-Confederate leanings during the Civil War. Intuitively, this might indicate that Breathitt County’s political socialization came from economic and social ties between these counties. However, the similarities may be misleading. Aside from the waterways that drained into the three forks of the Kentucky River, Breathitt County’s only other major transportation conduits across county boundaries was a state road that connected the county with Clay, Perry (counties that lost territory to the former’s formation), and Owsley (a newer county to which portions of Breathitt County were lost), counties that were all traditionally Whig. Before 1850, there were no mapped roads between Breathitt and its similarly Democratic neighbors, suggesting that such physical ties of socialization might have been relatively minimal and giving further credence to Jeremiah South’s personal influence on the electorate. Albany Argus, April 13, 1843; Statutes at Large and Treaties of the United States of America, 128; Tallant, Evil Necessity, 136–37; Conti, “Mountain Metamorphoses,” 186. Ernest Collins, “Political Behavior in Breathitt, Knott, Perry and Leslie Counties,” 41; Tyrel G. Moore, “Economic Development in Appalachian Kentucky,” 224; Copeland, “Where Were the Kentucky Unionists and Secessionists?” 350–51; Mathias and Shannon, “Gubernatorial Politics in Kentucky,” 263, 265, 267, 269; Tapp and Klotter, Kentucky, 7; Volz, “Party, State and Nation,” 19–26, 69–70; Wallace B. Turner, “Kentucky Politics in the 1850’s,” 123–24.

  100. G. W. Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds, 158.

  101. Trimble, Recollections of Breathitt, 10; William B. Allen, Kentucky Officer’s Guide and Legal Hand-book, 201–3; Ireland, Little Kingdoms, 45–46, 124–32.

  102. KSJ, 1838, 378; 1839, 377; 1843, 42.

  103. Shaffner, The Kentucky State Register for the Year 1847, 53. Apparently this sort of maneuver was common in Kentucky during the later Jacksonian years and used by both parties (although, according to Robert Ireland’s research on the subject, the majority of recorded county coups were instigated by Democrats). As Kentucky moved further away from the party of Jackson on a statewide level, local squires were attempting to maintain the duchies, and one-party “rump sessions” were frequent. Ireland, “Aristocrats All,” 375–77; Ireland, The County Courts in Antebellum Kentucky, 65–72.

  104. Papers of Governor William Owsley, box 4, folder 72, KDLA. Judging by the nature of letters sent to the governor’s office in 1846, Governor Owsley had his hands full with other matters. A year earlier a member of one of Clay County’s most prominent families had been jailed for murder and Owsley was obliged to send the state militia to Manchester to ensure that a mob did not attack the Clay County jail. Soon after this matter had abated, Owsley’s attention was taken up by popular rumblings of war against Mexico. Governor’s Letter Box, microfilm roll 993680, KDLA; Laver, Citizens More Than Soldiers, 54–56.

  105. Kentucky Library Commission Fourth Biennial Report, 56; Shackleford and Weinberg, Our Appalachia, 40–43; America at the Polls.

  106. KSJ, 1839, 377; G. W. Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds, 8; Trimble, Recollections of Breathitt, 18.

  107. Trimble, Recollections of Breathitt, 11.

  108. Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, KHS; Woodson, “My Recolle
ctions of Frankfort,” 204. South’s other sons may have kept a residence there as well but were not recorded as living in Breathitt County but rather in Madison County.

  109. South’s and Bohannon’s return to the Bluegrass is consistent with Wilma Dunaway’s assertion that absentee ownership was common in antebellum Appalachia (although it has traditionally been associated with Gilded Age corporate ownership). Dunaway, The First American Frontier, 56–57. For Sewell’s 1858 departure, see Perrin, Battle and Kniffin, Kentucky, 776.

  110. Quoted from Robert Gunn Crawford, “A History of the Kentucky Penitentiary System,” 29. See also Sneed, A Report on the History and Mode of Management of the Kentucky Penitentiary, 553–54; AGACK: January 17–April 5, 1861 (Frankfort: Jno. B. Major, 1861), 22; The National Almanac and Annual Record for the Year 1863, 463; KHJ, 1876, 630–31; Report of the Special Committee on the Penitentiary to the Senate of Kentucky, February 26, 1880, 3–82; KPD, 1881, 55–56; Fairbank, Rev. Calvin Fairbank during Slavery Times, 129; Wallace B. Turner, “Kentucky Politics in the 1850’s,” 139. Parenthetical quote from Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, 68.

  111. “Lessee” was a new state-mandated position when South took it (although the arrangement Kentucky’s state government made with another Bluegrass investor was different only in particular details) and one that exemplified the Whiggish complicity of private and public interests rampant in antebellum Kentucky government. By the 1850s Kentucky was one of five slave states that used a variation on this arrangement to utilize prisoner labor. As lessee, South received direct personal income from convict labor after his initial $12,000 investment after being appointed. Until the end of his term, South was “complete and authoritative ruler of the prisoners.” After emancipation, and the subsequently amplified dependence upon convict labor for public works, the position (which South retained except for a brief period during the war) was even more influential and supposedly carried with it more power than that of the governor in influencing state government. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, 195; Lowell H. Harrison, Kentucky’s Governors, 65. For an account of South using convict labor in his Frankfort home, see FRA, February 14, 1880; Robert Gunn Crawford, “A History of the Kentucky Penitentiary System,” 6–7, 19–23 (quote 7).